>
Martin writes:
>The European Economic
>Community has 51 groups of autochthonous peoples whose linguistic history
>does not conform to their state language. Speakers of about 10 of these
>languages are in a postion where there is an economic imperative for the
>assertion of linguistic rights.
>
and also writes:
>Organisations like Udrhas na Gealtacht exist
>to support the struggle of people who chose to continue their life in the
>Irish language and participate fully in the twenty-first century from
>their homes in the Gaeltacht.
i think that the multiple trajectories of peoples - especially linguistic
histories is far more complicated - and in fact raise the questions about
how do people learn to live with irreducible tensions - irresolvable
tensions.
to place this into an experiential context, i tell the following story.
this morning i read an article by a latvian writer - Benita Veisberga -
who notes that at present, due to forty-five years of russian occupation
and sovietization, Latvians as an ethnicity, Latvian as a language, and
the local ecology of the Latvian countryside are at extreme risk because
one third of the population of Latvia is russian. Veisberga views russian
imperialism as an on-going threat to the small 1,300,000 Latvian
population. One of her conclusions is that foreign aid should be used to
help russian in Latvia return back to Russia, or to emigrate to the West.
This position is not dissimilar to one i've read about regarding Tibet -
that the chinese occupation of Tibet is resulting in the destruction of
Tibetan culture, religion, language, etc.
i cannot imagine that any dominant culture / peoples / ethnic group
will ever willingly abandon their privileges and powers - only one
american bureau of Indian affairs commissioner over the last two hundred
years ever considered that Native Americans should be taught in their
native language, rather than american english.
my quandry is exactly what sort of daily decisions do i make so that i'm
not unwittingly replicating american hegemony.
reading leigh-star's article of apartheid was a jolt to me, noting that
practices of power and repressions are carried out daily by the individual
clerks, teachers, bureaucrats, functionaries of any goverment, no matter
how insignificant is their job - or seemingly removed from the sites of
power.
phillip
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