Language & Communication 30 (2010) 1–6

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Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Editorial

Intertextuality and misunderstanding

This special issue investigates the interplay of intertextuality and misunderstanding in the mediation of social realities.
The notion of intertextuality, that any given text is accorded meaning through its relations to other texts, draws our analytic
attention to semiotic configurations (words, reported speech, sayings, stories, television shows, etc.) that extend with some
attributed interpretive and formal coherence across successive contexts of use. Our concern with misunderstanding, on the
other hand, brings to the foreground the heterogeneity of social identities, competencies, institutions and communities that
both inform and result from acts of communication. Bringing together misunderstanding and intertextuality allows the con-
tributors to this volume to highlight an apparent paradox concerning texts in their use as ostensibly common reference
points by heterogeneous actors. On the one hand, texts are attributed with coherent and implicitly shared meaning. On
the other hand, any given text is also necessarily variable through successive uses. Their paradoxical, double-faced status
allows texts to play a key role in mediating divergent subject positions, social identities and communities. By considering
misunderstanding in relation to textuality we draw attention to the underlying relativity of any textual meaning and the
heteroglossia of successive voicings of ostensibly repeated or recirculated texts (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). What emerges from
the articles in this volume is a look at the variable and negotiated quality of textual meaning and form at the juncture of
social identities, institutions and communities; and conversely, the uses made of textuality in coordinating and articulating
social difference.

1. Ethnographic approach to intertextuality

All of the contributions to this volume draw upon a body of work within linguistic anthropology that locates textuality in
the discursive practices of communities and as an important consideration in the play of language in semiosis and social life.
Hanks (1989, p. 95), for example, defines text in the following fashion: ‘‘...text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any
configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users”. He goes on to define textuality as ‘‘...the
quality of coherence or connectivity that characterizes text.” In this definition, the constitution of a text is located in the
coherence attributed to it by a community of users. By subordinating specific requirements of form to ongoing interpretive
concerns among communities of users, Hanks opens the textual unit of analysis to a wide range of symbolic phenomena:
oral texts, written texts, mass mediated texts, visual texts, texts ranging in length and formal complexity from novels to slo-
gans and single lexemes.
Situating textuality in the discursive practices of communities refocuses analytic attention from texts as achieved sta-
tuses to processes of entextualization. Texts, as bounded, replicable, ostensibly stable objects, must be created and deployed
in the flux and flow of ongoing discourse. Entextualization is a process through which stretches of discourse are marked off
as separable (decontextualizable) from their discursive surround, and thus recontextualizable in a new event or utterance
(Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Bauman and Briggs, 1990). The entextualized semiotic form can be as apparently simple as
a single word or gesture or as complex as a television serial or the Bible, because the field of analysis necessarily includes
not only the textual form (however this is defined) but also the social field in which it is produced and charged with
meaning.
Processes of entextualization produce the double-faced quality of texts. In order for a text to operate as such, to be uti-
lized and recognized as in some sense ‘‘the same” as previous instances; it must be accorded some degree of continuous
meaning across instances of use. However, in order to be recontextualizable, a text must also be amenable to alterations
in meaning, to appropriations by new people for new purposes. Texts must be both full enough of specific meaning to be
recognizable and distinctive, but empty and flexible enough to be amenable to new contextualizations.
The texts treated by the contributors to this volume include a broad range of text types and semiotic forms. Trix ad-
dresses a national Turkish television serial responded to and reinterpreted among different publics in Istanbul. M.E. Nevins
treats divergent ways the Christian Bible, as text and as a charged textual symbol, is taken up among competing Evangelical
and Traditionalist religious identities on the Fort Apache reservation as they orient to local precedents on the one hand, and

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2 Editorial / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 1–6

engage with more extended publics on the other. Howard and Lipinoga address their analysis to parent–teacher conferences
involving recent Mexican immigrant parents in a kindergarten classroom in the United States. They treat these interviews as
text-trajectories: institutionally scripted, repeated sequences of spoken and written actions. Urciuoli treats institutionally
entextualized terms such as ‘‘diversity” that circulate across administrative, faculty and student contexts at a liberal arts col-
lege. And T. Nevins describes textual strategies in the production of knowledge of persons (including the ethnographer) fig-
ured as ‘‘other,” and in the interrogation of his research purpose, deployed by his consultants during fieldwork encounters.

2. Textuality and misunderstanding

Textuality, as a marked off, replicable, reflected upon mode of language provides points of focus for social coordination
and affiliation, but also disaffiliation, contestation and differentiation. So, rather than serving as the agreed upon content of
intersubjective understanding, texts are perhaps better described as pivots through which different subjectivities, social
identities and communities enact, negotiate or invent their relationships, often with considerable gaps in respective inter-
pretive outcomes.
Working definitions of misunderstanding vary through the articles in this volume. On the one hand, misunderstanding is
treated as a metadiscursive attribution specific to Western-style contractual models of communication (e.g. Rosaldo, 1982).
Misunderstanding as such is defined contrastively against another metadiscursive attribution specific to that semiotic ide-
ology: the notion of intersubjective ‘‘understanding” (problematized by Bailey (2004), T. Nevins (this issue), and recently
through ethnographic contrast by Robbins and Rumsey (2008)). Attributions of understanding and misunderstanding com-
prise part of the ideological backdrop to the institutional discourse treated by Urciuoli and Howard and Lipinoga, respec-
tively, and in the public discourse treated by Trix. By contrast, misunderstanding and understanding in this sense serves
as an epistemological foil in T. Nevins’ treatment of ethnographic encounters. He notes that misunderstanding and under-
standing as figured in Western-style contractual notions of social relationship were not the predominant framing concern of
his closest consultants. Rather, disjunctures from conventional communicative expectations were figured in terms of local
idioms of sociality, including different models of what constitutes knowledge of other persons, and different entailments for
the deployment of texts in acts of ‘‘repair.”
Many of the papers in this volume also make use of a more generic notion of misunderstanding, as an implication of het-
erogeneity. Underlying heterogeneity of subject positions, social identities, institutional domains, communicative compe-
tencies and communities implies diversity of interpretations for any act of communication that extends across such
differences. Text, as semiotic form that circulates beyond a given contextualization, is a mode of language deployed across
such divides. So, just as conversational strategies play a role in coordinating direct interpersonal interactions; entextualiza-
tions, as circulating public words (Urban, 2001), play a role in the coordination of communities. There are intrinsic ambigu-
ities in the creation and reception of texts—and these serve as a constant unmarked backdrop against which entextualization
and recontextualization take place. The metadiscursive attribution of intrinsic textual identity (against the necessary heter-
ogeneity of actual recontextualizations) is achieved through coordinating the production and the interpretation of texts
through fairly stable, institutionalized social conventions. The contributors to this volume ground their discussion of how
textual coordination is conventionalized in terms of work on discourse genres (Bauman, 2004; Bauman and Briggs, 1990;
Hanks, 1987), register (Agha, 2007), and pretexuality (Maryns and Blommaert, 2002). Conventionalization is not the only
process at work, however, and some of our contributors point to metaphor and innovation (Wagner, 1981; Ricoeur,
2003) as equally important aspects of entextualization and contextualization.

3. The individual contributions

Mass media texts, in the form of print media, television, movies, music, etc. are one means by which smaller scale
communities coordinate within larger scale communities. Through consuming and recirculating media forms associated
with national or international scale contexts, people orient to imagined communities (Anderson, 1991). Mass media texts,
to the extent that they form a stock of recognizable semiotic forms that people ostensibly hold in common, provide the
means through which people perform relationships to larger communities in everyday talk. This role is particularly com-
plex at junctures between minority communities and the majority publics that they are simultaneously incorporated and
differentiated within. Two of the papers in this volume are addressed to the circulation and recontextualization of mass
media texts at the juncture of minority identified communities (Silverstein, 1998) and encompassing social and political
formations.
Frances Trix describes the responses of members of a Balkan immigrant association in Istanbul to the use of their stig-
matized dialect and portrayal as villagers in a popular Turkish television serial. The immigrants responded critically not only
to the way their history, dialect and identity were portrayed in the series, but also to the way idioms from their dialect as
portrayed in the series were taken up and recirculated in face to face interactions between strangers on the street in Istanbul.
What is interesting about this is, first, how a national television broadcast appropriates the history and dialect of Balkan
immigrants in order to tell a story of national belonging through the projection of a shared orientation to a nostalgic past.
A second point of interest is how the larger public seized upon the greeting and leave-taking idioms portrayed in the show
and recirculated them in face to face everyday interactions (Spitulnik, 1993, 1997). Trix explains that the selection of these
texts for recirculation is not at all random, but motivated by the implication of other contemporary greetings and leave-tak-
 Editorial / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 1–6 3

ing formula in a polarizing politics of religious identity. A third point of interest is in the complex responses to the series
from members of an immigrant association. Within the community a wide range of objections were raised to the show’s
portrayal of immigrant identity and to the manner in which their formally stigmatized dialect was being circulated by mem-
bers of the general public in everyday conversation. Of these objections, a subset strategically addressed to issues of authen-
ticity and accuracy were aired in public forums addressed to wider audiences such as the associated website, and at
televised performance events. And this brings us to the fourth point of interest, which is the uptake in mainstream media
outlets of the immigrant association’s attempts to recontextualize the television show for the general public.
Trix builds upon previous work in the linguistic ethnography of mass media (Spitulnik, 1997) in that her analysis is di-
rected not only to direct consumption of mass mediated texts, but also the recirculation and recontextualization of media
discourse in everyday talk. Both are treated as central to the process of constituting larger scale communities, including na-
tional publics. She also draws on work in linguistic anthropology to understand why particular texts are selected for recon-
textualization in everyday talk (M.E. Nevins, 2008). What she adds, by taking misunderstanding as a point of departure, is
attention to the differential reception of mass media texts in heterogeneous communities, and the limits and possibilities for
dialectically negotiating the terms in which larger scale communities are constituted. Different opportunities are afforded by
minority community members’ assessment of what kinds of claims to authority and legitimacy are likely to be recognized
within the mainstream public (another complex set of intertextual relations) and by the use of mass media outlets in which
members of minority communities are in a position to author the terms of their self-representation. In particular, Trix shows
how the minority community built on their already established media outlets and calendar of public events from which to
launch and publicize their public interaction with the television series.
M.E. Nevins treatment of entextualizations of the Bible across conflicting religious identities on the White Mountain
Apache reservation offers another examination of the uses made of mass mediated texts at the juncture of minority and
more encompassing communities. However, in this case analytic focus is upon divergent entextualizations of the Bible
across competing identities within that minority community. As in the case of the Rumeli immigrants described by Trix,
a minority identified language variety, Western Apache, and issues associated with it, are in play. Nevins describes contem-
porary Apache Traditionalism and Apache Independent Christian Churches as two indigenous, but mutually antagonistic,
grassroots religious movements. Both identify as Christian, and lay claim to the global authority of Bible, but each disputes
the other’s claims. Both utilize Apache language, including religious and moral idioms and locally developed discourse gen-
res, to entextualize the Bible. However, each selects different elements of a loosely shared common repertoire for that
purpose.
A key point of contention between the two movements is the relationship drawn by each between the memorized oral
texts of Traditionalist ceremonies and the Bible. Traditionalists assert equivalences and identities between the two. For
them, the Bible is entextualized in Traditionalist ceremony. Apache Independent Christians, on the other hand, regard Tra-
ditionalist ceremony as incompatible with the Bible, and historically superceded by it. They locate authority in written cop-
ies of the Bible circulated through their churches and homes from more extended (protestant evangelical) communities.
However, in everyday talk among church members, and in church services, they make extensive use of Apache language idi-
oms to re-entextualize quotes from the print Bible with their own voices and make use of contrastive allusions to Tradition-
alist ceremony to recontextualize that quoted speech to local meanings and concerns.
M.E. Nevins study builds on previous work on the recirculation and recontextualization of mass media, and upon studies
of the complex intertextuality of religious discourse in colonial and post-colonial discursive configurations (Keane, 2007;
Hanks, 1987, 2000; Cruikshank, 1998). The focus on misunderstanding and conflict brings attention to the internal hetero-
geneity and dynamism of minority indigenous communities. Perhaps ironically, it is arguably the effects of textuality that
often obscure heterogeneity – as people seem to be claiming the same kind of affiliation with the ‘‘same” symbolically
authoritative text, in the case of the Bible, or textual buzz-word in the case of loaded terms like ‘‘Heritage” or ‘‘Language.”
The intense Apache language discursive innovation evident in the two religious movements, in contrast with the rather tepid
and ambivalent response garnered by Apache language education in the schools (M.E. Nevins, 2004), points to the produc-
tivity of oppositions among local leadership, and of competing claims to sources of textual authority with global reach, to the
ongoing relevance of indigenous-identified languages.
Howard and Lipinoga also address the role of textuality in mediating the juncture between minority communities and
encompassing socio-political orders, but from a different standpoint. Howard and Lipinoga describe an institutional encoun-
ter which is ostensibly about sharing information, but which is really a prescripted interaction in which one party has much
greater knowledge and control over the progression and outcome of events than their counterpart. The institutional events
they describe are annual parent–teacher conferences between English language speaking kindergarten teachers and recent
Mexican immigrant parents in an elementary school in the United States. They explore the role of textual procedures in the
reproduction of inequality that are articulated in these meetings, despite intentions to the contrary. Textuality comes into
play in two senses. First, one party, the kindergarten teacher, approaches the event as a text to be enacted. That is, she treats
it as a prescripted succession of obligatory steps that it is her responsibility to walk parents through. The other party, the
immigrant parents, are not privy to the details of the teacher’s agenda and often bring different expectations, some of which
come from their previous experience with Mexican schools, to the encounter. Misunderstanding and missed opportunities to
learn from one another are often the result. Howard and Lipinoga draw upon Maryns and Blommaert’s (2002) notion of ‘‘pre-
textuality” and ‘‘pretextual gaps” to describe the differential effectiveness of the communicative resources that each party
brings to the encounter.
4 Editorial / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 1–6

Howard and Lipinoga show that because parents and teachers are likely to misread the teacher’s invitations for their in-
put, and because teachers are likely to misread parents’ attempts to shape the interaction, parents have few opportunities to
have meaningful input into how they and their child are evaluated and understood by the agents of the institution. Howard
and Lipinoga stress that these pretextual inequalities are largely invisible and out of awareness. Parents, school administra-
tors and teachers were observed to make efforts, such as employing bilingual translators, to accommodate what all per-
ceived as special needs of Spanish-dominant immigrant families. Howard and Lipinoga argue that bringing attention to
unintentional sources of miscommunication allows for the possibility of overcoming them. However, aspects of their anal-
ysis point to the fact that pretextual inequalities between parents and teachers are built into the structure of educational
institutions but pose particular, usually unexamined, challenges for recent immigrants.
One of the pretextual factors Howard and Lipinoga identify as posing problems for immigrant parents was the use by
teachers of a professional register. This introduced terms that to the parents were of uncertain reference, and an air of imper-
sonal authority that discouraged parents from offering up their opinion, in part because they could not couch it in terms that
sounded similarly impersonal and authoritative. If the interview is a sort of prescripted entextualized discursive form, then
the teacher’s professional register comprises the preferred style for composing that text. In the case of the immigrant par-
ents, the unfamiliarity of the linguistic forms and usage patterns chosen by the teacher constrained their participation. The
alignment of the teacher’s professional register with the institutional structures all around them in the classroom made it
difficult for parents, or for the bilingual translators when they are present, to transform that scripted sequence into a con-
versation with teachers couched in other terms.
Register also figures importantly in Urciuoli’s nuanced analysis of the manner in which the term ‘‘diversity” circulates and
is strategically deployed across institutional domains in a northeastern liberal arts college. Urciuoli demonstrates that
‘‘diversity” is circulated, not as a coherent idea, but as an entextualized semantic form whose referent is dynamically unsta-
ble. The term’s use is differently enregistered, with different indexical associations, in each particular institutional domain in
which it is employed. Institutional domains of use range from academic administration, non-academic administration,
across individual academic departments, and across student organizations.
She finds that enregisterments of ‘‘diversity” are fairly coherent across the various administrative discourses, and that
these uses (especially those of non-academic administrative discourse of the college) are coherent with parallel uses of
the term in corporate business administration discourse, in that all are informed by what she terms a ‘‘neoliberal” concept
of the person. By contrast diversity is more elaborately and consistently defined in relation to other concepts within a given
academic discipline; but enregistered incongruently across disciplines, and between academic discourses and administrative
discourses.
The relative coherence of ‘‘diversity” across administrative discourses and its relative incongruity across academic dis-
courses has a number of consequences. First, the referential ambiguity and incongruity of the term across domains of use
conditions its deployment as a ‘‘shifter”, an expression of relations between participants in a communication, rather than
a referring term with stable meaning everyone shares. Everyone can be ‘‘for” diversity, even when it is not at all clear that
everyone attaches the same meanings and entailments to the term. Second, administrators promulgating discourses of insti-
tutional advancement have an interest in foregrounding neoliberal definitions of diversity, i.e. as a countable attribute of
individuals and institutions and as a marketing strategy to potential students. However, diversity as defined in some social
science disciplines in relation to ongoing processes of social inequality is a less congenial and coherent match.
And third, because ‘‘diversity” is enregistered more coherently across administrative discourses than across academic dis-
ciplines, and because administrators are in the position of issuing directives promoting diversity, and faculty chairs are often
in the position of receiving and carrying out these directives, faculty have fewer opportunities than administrators to shape
how diversity is defined and promoted in the college. In this way entextualization of terms circulated with incongruent
meanings across institutional domains is part of a larger process of discursive change and the growing hegemony of neolib-
eral discourses in higher education.
In the final contribution, Thomas Nevins addresses the terms in which his presence and purpose in the Fort Apache res-
ervation community was interrogated, and his otherness figured and negotiated, by his closest consultants. He traces the
dissonant semiotic practices and attendant socialities that framed the dialogues constitutive of his ethnography. It is a staple
of ethnographic representation to describe the productivity of misunderstandings to the emergence of ‘‘knowledge of cul-
ture” for the ethnographer, allowing her to become aware of conventional differences between herself and her subjects, a
first step in describing the latter’s conventions. He argues that miscommunication is indeed a productive aspect of ethno-
graphic encounters, but for different reasons. Rather than focusing on communicative gaps as providing the first step in
the ethnographer’s construction of a facsimile representation of the conventional knowledge, or competence (Hymes,
1972; Briggs, 1984; Moore, 2009), held by the ethnographic subject, he shifts focus to dissonance in ethnographic encoun-
ters as opening a space of innovation in which the otherness of the ethnographer, as well as the nature of his or her research
purpose, is figured and negotiated by consultants.
T. Nevins draws attention to the creation of knowledge of the ethnographer by consultants, occasioned by ruptures posed
by the ethnographer’s presence to consultants’ conventional communicative expectations. In such cases, difference was
commented upon, marked and encapsulated in a short statement, which he terms a ‘‘micro-text” (‘‘Hello Pilgrims” this issue,
comes to mind). These initially emerge in the course of events as ad hoc comments upon experiences with others, and be-
come progressively entextualized and recirculated in successive conversations, weeks, months and years later, often provok-
ing laughter and indexing a track record of past disjunctures that comprise emerging terms of context-specific sociality with
 Editorial / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 1–6 5

persons otherwise figured in more broadly conventional terms. He argues that micro-texts serve as a sort of ‘‘annotation” to
the conventional orienting texts of social life, in this case ndah, or ‘white people,’ altering their meaning in contextually spe-
cific terms.
He also discusses aspects of the Na’íees, or Sunrise ceremony, arguing that it mobilized many of the same textual practices
applied to encounters with himself. Apache bidak’éh describes relations between persons claiming affiliation with contrast-
ing clans and acting as parties to a ceremonial exchange between them. Here knowing is located, not in accurately estab-
lishing shared reference (they may disagree on what is true or proper in their choice of food, singers, speakers, etc.), but
on becoming familiar with one another through engaging in a common activity, in this case an exchange of feasting, oratory
and dance between members of different clans. Here the larger, macro-text of the ceremonial exchange sets the terms of
common activity; but the smaller, micro-texts that emerge and are circulated in conversation for days, weeks, months
and years, address ruptures and differences (‘‘he didn’t know how to give a speech,” ‘‘too much salt in the stew”) not as facts,
but as experiences constitutive of an emergent sociality between persons holding opposed family, or clan, identities. This
way of using inventive micro-texts to create knowledge of others differs from the fundamental framing concerns of ethnog-
raphy in that such texts are not meant to be ‘about’ the people they index, or even factually accurate. Rather, they are de-
ployed between people, as is a way of enacting their relationship.
Nevins extends his examination to conversations with his closest consultant addressed his purpose as an anthropologist.
Here his consultant poses metaphors to probe for ways that their respective interests and concerns might coincide. His con-
sultant asks if it is possible to equate what an anthropologist means by ‘‘culture” with what he and others in the reservation
community mean by ‘‘love.” In this case ‘‘love” is pragmatically grounded in a set of local idioms anchored in the Apache
language term gozhó ß ßó. It describes a model of relatedness and mutual knowledge characteristic of Apache families that is
not predicated on projections of shared intersubjective understanding (or attributions of common knowledge, or thought),
but on acts of awareness, sharing of sustenance, and participation. Posing the question defines a sociality between ethnog-
rapher and consultant in which the equation is not projected as intersubjectively ‘‘the same” for both parties; but posed
experimentally to mark the disjuncture between their respective viewpoints even as it sets terms and relevancies for ongo-
ing dialogues.
Whereas most of the other papers in this volume treat contrasting ways in which ostensibly ‘‘the same” texts are con-
ventionalized across heterogeneous domains, this contribution treats metaphoric (Ricoeur, 2003) and inventive (Wagner,
1981) textual strategies deployed by his consultants as they transform the terms of their encounters with others. He also
makes the point that understanding and misunderstanding, and their analogues in other semiotic regimes (Robbins and
Rumsey, 2008), are discursively constructed, and entail different kinds of ‘‘repair.” By attending to his consultant’s inventive
deployment of textuality to mark moments of disjuncture and to interrogate and refigure his purpose as researcher, T. Nev-
ins attempts to frame his ethnographic writing not so much as a representation of an independent truth about his consul-
tants; but to index the agency and creativity they exercised throughout the discursive track record of their relationship, and
the multi-vocal character of ethnographic fieldwork.

4. Conclusion

A common theme throughout all the papers collected here is that the terms in which textual production and reception are
conventionalized and innovated upon are also the terms in which power is exercised and in some cases refigured or con-
tested within and across communities. The studies presented here point to the importance of paying attention not only
to texts, but also to the heterogeneous ways in which differently positioned actors in a given setting contextualize them.
In analyses of language use, failure to pay attention to intertextual misunderstanding and heterogeneity risks taking texts
at face value, as if they are what they appear to be: coherent, agreed upon and continuous across instances and domains of
use. Attending to divergent entextualizations can illuminate forms of agency as well as forms of inequality that would other-
wise remain obscure. Further, such studies lend insight into the role of textual disjuncture and differentiation in the nature
of language use and in the mediation of communities.

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M. Eleanor Nevins
Anthropology Department,
University of Nevada Reno,
1664 No. Virginia MS0096, Reno,
NV 89557-0096, United States
E-mail address: mnevins@unr.edu