Social Science Research Council

Among the many manifestations of an intensified and multi-directional global cultural traffic are powerful “words in motion.” As global discourses of democracy, governance, civil society, human rights, environmental protection, anti-corruption, and the rule of law became embedded within moments and movements of change from above and below, some words appear to have incantatory power to change societies – almost by themselves, as fetish -- while others are deployed as analogies, metaphors, and images speaking of and invoking transformation. Still other words mark the limits of change and politics, but all share the characteristic of being drawn from one setting, context and genealogy and transported elsewhere.

At this particular juncture, understanding, tracing and identifying semantic vectors of power raise new analytic and practical questions. What happens when words travel? How are traveling words captured within situated social dynamics even as they spark realignments and refusals, accommodation and stalemate, consent and quiescence? And do these powerful words in motion actually do the work imagined for them?

The Words in Motion project explores the transnational movement of terms connected to governance and society, across languages and cultures. The processes we are interested in became most visible during the 1990s but include much longer histories of global connection. This is not a project of translation, philology or intellectual history in a narrow sense, but rather a collective exploration into the social practices and cultural encounters produced by words in motion. Our interest is in trans-boundary social and political practices, around words that carry traces of located conversations into different contexts, that create new and unexpected effects, that create debate and change realities, and that reproduce, extend and mitigate relations of power.

Project organizers are Carol Gluck (Columbia University) and Anna Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz)

The project began with a planning meeting in December 2000, attended by Professor Talal Asad (CUNY), Carol Gluck, Fred Schaffer (MIT), Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Columbia), Maria Todorova (Illinois) and Anna Tsing.

The next step in the project was a comparative discussion of the word “tradition,” held in New York, June 3-4, 2001. Participants included Mona Abaza (American University of Cairo), Mamadou Diouf (Michigan), Susan Gal (Chicago), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (New York University), Hyung-il Pai (University of California, Santa Barbara), M.S.S. Pandian (MIDS) and the organizers.

Following this workshop, which helped sharpen analytic approaches as well as generate new questions for consideration, two “regional” workshops were held. In order to isolate patterns that might be more typical of particular areas of the world, workshops were held exploring the regional dynamics of words in motion in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

The Southeast Asia workshop was held at the Australian National University, Canberra, October 11-12, 2002. Participants included Penny Edwards (ANU), Ariel Heryanto (Melbourne), Resil Mojares (San Carlos, Cebu), Craig Reynolds (ANU), Kasian Tejapira (Thammasat) and Anna Tsing.

The Middle East workshop was held in Montecatini, Italy on March 27-28, 2004. Participants included Mona Abaza (AUC), Aziz Al-Azmeh (Central European University in Budapest), Walid Hamarneh (University of Western Ohio), Driss Maghraoui (Yale University), Reem Saad (AUC), and Fawwaz Traboulsi (LAU).

The final workshop in this series was held in Fez, Morocco June 1-3, 2004. Participants included Mona Abaza (adat/tradition), Itty Abraham (national security/segurança nacional), Partha Chatterjee (terrorist/anthankvadi), Carol Gluck (sekkinin/accountability), Hurichihan Islamoglu (commission-board/komisyon- kurul), Claudia Koonz (head covering/hijab), Lydia Liu (injury/injuria), Driss Maghraoui (secularism/al-ilmanya), Vicente Rafael (conspiracy/conjuracion), Craig Reynolds (community/chumchon), Seteney Shami (minority/aqaliyya), Alan Tansman (sublime/saburaimu), Kasian Tejapira (good governance/thammarat), and Anna Tsing (indigeneity/masyarakat adat).

The project organizers are now editing the conference papers, in preparation for submitting them to a university press for publication.

SSRC Staff