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12 Critical debates

Discourse, boundaries, and social change

Sari Pietikäinen

1. Introduction: shifting boundaries, transforming critique

Language boundaries and categories are a classical sociolinguistic issue in
accounts of linguistic diversity and change. However, the status of boundaries
and categories is called into question in the complex and shifting terrain of
theoretical and political debates (cf. Blommaert, this volume, Chapter 11).
How should such boundaries and categories be best understood and defined?
One important perspective, adopted in this chapter, is that the construction of
sociolinguistic boundaries always involves questions of power. That is, we
need to ask when, how, on what grounds, and by whom they are defined and
operationalized. These questions have consequences for many key issues of
interest in sociolinguistics, including identity and social inequalities. This
perspective is often taken as a form of critical language research, although
we also need to question what is actually meant by the concept of ‘criticality’.
As a heterogeneous and debated project in itself, the concept of the critical is
frequently used in different strands of research into language, power, and
social change (see, e.g., Fairclough 1992; Pennycook 2001; 2012; Mesthrie
2009; Heller 2011; Duchêne et al. 2013). Often, theorization of the complex
relationships between language, power, and social change, as developed by
Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Voloshinov, forms the baseline of critical
perspectives, but there are obviously different historical developments and
emphases within language research interested in these issues (see, e.g.,
Woolard 1985; Blommaert 2005; Heller 2011; Wodak 2011). For instance,
we can trace back uses of the term ‘critical’ to Critical Linguistics, a perspec-
tive developed by linguists and literary theorists at the University of East
Anglia in the United Kingdom (Fowler et al. 1979; Kress and Hodge 1979)
during the 1970s, aiming to explore relationships between language use and
ideologies, basing their work on Halliday´s systemic functional linguistics.
This work continued in the 1980s under the label of Critical Discourse
Analysis, a heterogeneous approach to the study of language use as part of
social practice, with a focus of reproduction of social and political hegemony
and power relations (see, e.g., Fairclough 1992; van Dijk 1993; Wodak 1996).

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264 Power, mediation, and critique

In other fields of language research too, for example in critical applied

linguistics (Pennycook 2001), the term ‘critical’ marks a focus on the ways
in which power and inequality figure in the arenas of language teaching,
language policy, and language testing. In sociolinguistics, we can trace the
roots of critical research in the works by Hymes (1974) and Gumperz (1982) in
emphasizing an understanding of language as embedded in larger social
systems and in the structuration of social difference, as well as reflecting the
impact of Bourdieu’s work in exploring the role language plays in the political
field and in processes of social (re)production (see, e.g., Hanks 2005; Heller
2011). Contemporary critical stances in sociolinguistics often evolve around
questions of social difference and inequality in relation to linguistic diversity,
particularly under the new, shifting conditions of mobility, globalization, and
new economy, often accompanied by the argument that we need research that
is aligned to a more ethnographic approach (cf. Blommaert 2010; Heller 2011;
Duchêne et al. 2013). What these various ways of using the term ‘critical’
seem to have in common is that they mark a step away – or perhaps a step
forward – from “merely” descriptive approaches to language research and that
they challenge the idea of objectivist sociolinguistic research. Rather, a starting
point is found in the idea that power always matters in sociolinguistic affairs
and that research needs to investigate how language figures and is figured in
changing relationships of power.
The prevalence of the term ‘critical’ nowadays is hardly surprising, as the
term evokes important questions that relate to power, inequality, resistance,
and change. Also the growing demands of various research funding and
assessment enterprises, insisting that research must have demonstrable social
relevance, give renewed currency to critical work (cf. Curry and Lillis 2013).
At the same time, research done under the critical label has itself been critiqued
for its arguably deterministic and biased views of social change and of the
directions it should take, for its a priori assumptions about relationships
between language and power, and for losing its groundings and relevance
under new conditions (e.g. Hammersley 1997; Toolan 1997; Breeze 2011).
Yet many researchers continue to use the term ‘critical’, albeit with an attempt
to renew its meaning and scope, at times indexed by newly coined termin-
ology, such as “postcritical”, by emphasizing transdisciplinary work (such as
multi-sited ethnography, nexus analysis, and discourse ethnography), or
through foregrounding the work’s time–space aspects (in using concepts such
as circulation and trajectories).
‘Critical’ has become a problematic term under current circumstances, if we
agree that societies are suffering crises of authority and legitimation of any
knowledge or of any political action (Phillips 2000: 14). The critical tag is not
alone in these crises, as many other concepts that were conceived in the
modernist frame – such as language, nation, and citizen – have also become
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 265

problematic concepts (Pennycook 2010). What ‘critical’ meant thirty or sixty

years ago may not map onto the concerns and interests of current research,
being undertaken in a context where the understanding of centres and margins
is shifting and where power bases are tending to become polycentric. Also,
various disciplinary developments around critical research have created differ-
ent ontologies and epistemologies, not all of which are compatible. Criticality
comes in different shapes and forms, and what the term means in sociolinguis-
tics may or may not be synonymous with the sense(s) invoked in critical
approaches in discourse studies, applied linguistics, sociology, and so forth.
These problems associated with the term ‘critical’ do not mean that questions
related to language, power, or social change are currently less important or
pressing, but rather that what critical means now is partly ambiguous and is
certainly changing.
Starting from a core interest in language, power, and social change, critical
language research has become a complex enterprise with rhizomatic connec-
tions to a wide range of theories, methods, and questions. While much of
critical language research seems to continue to question and reflect on what is
taken for granted – especially in terms of ideological critique (cf. Thomas
1993; Määttä and Pietikäinen 2014) – we seem to be at a point of ontological
and epistemological transition as regards understanding what ‘critical’ means.
Criticality is not alone in this transition, as similar kinds of ontological and
epistemological questioning can be found in other fields researching language
in society. For example, Reyes (2014: 267) discusses what she calls the
“Super-New-Big” trend in examining large-scale changes in the contemporary
moment. Otsuji and Pennycook (2010, and see Pennycook, this volume,
Chapter 9) reflect on the various prefixes (metro/trans/poly) now being
attached to ‘language’ or ‘lingualism’ as ways of exploring multilingual
language use without necessarily endorsing established disciplinary assump-
tions. These transitions are part of the development of theories and concepts.
As Foucault ([1969] 1972: 3) reminds us, discussing disciplinary changes,
beneath apparent continuity and development there are always interruptions,
displacements, and transformations of traditions and concepts. The concept of
‘critical’ is no different. Similarly to the three waves of feminist studies
(Eckert, this volume, Chapter 3) or to the several ‘turns’ in sociology and
cultural studies, critical language research has also gone through various
phases (see, e.g., Pennycook 2001).
In the remainder of this chapter,1 I explore some more specific ways in
which the term ‘critical’ has been employed in language research regarding

1
This chapter has benefited from discussions on critical language research in the Jyväskylä
Discourse Think Tank (2013), and I wish warmly to thank all the participants. Nikolas Coup-
land, Alexandre Duchêne, Monica Heller, and Helen Kelly-Holmes have provided very helpful
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266 Power, mediation, and critique

language, power, and social change. To exemplify these developments,

I locate the discussions around debates regarding sociolinguistic boundaries
in a context of the multilingual indigenous Sámi community in Finland.
Similarly to many other indigenous and minority language communities, the
Sámi community continues to undergo intersecting linguistic, political, and
economic changes related to, for example, indigenous language rights and
revitalization, political and cultural sovereignty, contested legal definitions of
the category of Sámi, and an economic change from primarily production to
service industries, mainly tourism (Lehtola 2012; Pietikäinen 2013). All these
changes disturb boundaries and create debates about the “right” course of
action on Sámi identity and language politics, economic development, and
other issues (Pietikäinen 2013; 2014; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013).
Various appropriations and applications of the concept of criticality appear to
be in circulation, and further reflections upon how the term may help or hinder
research into language and social change is needed.
In the following, I treat the various approaches to criticality as themselves
forming a discourse contingent upon particular historical conditions, claims for
“the truth”, actors, and possibilities (cf. Luke 2002: 97) in the changing Sámi
context. Foucault (as quoted in Weedon 1987: 108) argues that discourses are
ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of
subjectivity, and power relations that inhere in such knowledges and relations
between them. This conceptualization includes the very idea that discourses
have a material power and systematically form, shape, and change the defin-
itions of objects circulating within them (Pennycook 2010; Määttä and Pieti-
käinen 2014). I focus on three concurring and intersecting discourses about the
critical, stemming from previous critical language research and operating in
the indigenous Sámi context. In an attempt to highlight the logics of each
discourse, I call these (1) emancipatory critique, (2) ethnographic critique, and
(3) carnivalesque critique. I end with a discussion of criticality as an unfinished
project and on the concept of rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as a way
forward.

2. Emancipatory critique
One broad, influential approach to examining language, power, and social
change has been through the work known as critical theory, a tradition of
work associated with the Frankfurt school, a group of German philosophers
and social theorists from the latter part of the twentieth century who worked

comments on the various versions of this chapter and I am grateful for them. The chapter is
produced in the context of the Peripheral Multilingualism research project, funded by the
Academy of Finland.
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 267

within a Western European Marxist tradition (cf. Agar 1991; Bronner 1994;
Pennycook 2001). Agar (1991: 107) describes how a “critical” theory may be
distinguished from a “traditional” theory, according to a specific practical
purpose: A theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation,
“to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”
(Horkheimer 1982: 244).
This version of critical work, with its normative dimension, has been
popular in various social and political movements, including those supporting
minority and indigenous language rights. This is no wonder, as this version of
the critical seems to provide a clear criterion and direction for both social
change and political action. Within the field of language research, a discourse
of emancipatory critique of this kind became popular towards the end of the
twentieth century, especially (as noted above) in research carried out under the
umbrella term Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (cf. Blommaert 2005; Pen-
nycook 2010; Forchtner 2011). While in itself a heterogeneous enterprise that
incorporates various strands and foci, the CDA approach is characterized by a
concern for language, power, and emancipation that is largely inherited from
the critical theory tradition (Forchtner 2011; Zhang et al. 2011). For example,
one of the grounding scholars of CDA, Norman Fairclough (1995: 132),
suggests that CDA is about investigating how “practices, events and texts
arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles
over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between
discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony” (see also
Kelly-Holmes, this volume, Chapter 7). Luke (2002: 106) argues that the
prevailing project of CDA is that of the critique of ideology, which it shares
with most forms of textual analysis and the presupposition of normative
orders. As the pioneering CDA scholar Ruth Wodak concludes (2011: 52),
CDA aims at “producing enlightenment and emancipation”.
CDA has been acknowledged to have been successful in putting questions
of language, power, and domination in the foreground; in presenting an
explicit agenda for change; and in bringing linguistic and textual analysis into
a dialogue with (critical) sociological theories. At the same time, it has also
inherited many of the same objections as critical theory in general. These relate
to CDA’s lack of reflexivity on its own philosophical foundations, its readiness
to take some key categories unproblematically for granted, and its tendency to
orient itself towards unproblematized and static assumptions about power
relations (oppressors/oppressed, majority/minority), as well as its belief in
the awareness of inequality as a step towards emancipation (see, e.g., Ham-
mersley 1997; Schegloff 1997; Slembrouck 2001; Verschueren 2001; Luke
2002; Blommaert 2005; Heller and Pujolar 2009; Pennycook 2010; also Heller
and Duchêne, this volume, Chapter 6). Pennycook (2012: 129–130) points out
how the unproblematized and nonlocalized use of some key concepts creates
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268 Power, mediation, and critique

new kinds of problems: “reaffirm[ing] concepts such as emancipation, aware-

ness, rationality, objectivity, quality, democracy and transformation which,
from another perspective, may be viewed as products by the same system that
gives rise to those very problems that this framework aims to critique. Thus, it
both critiques and reproduces at the same time”. This kind of reproduction of
problematic boundaries, particularly between centres and margins, as well as
internal hierarchies, can be found in many minority and indigenous language
contexts (Heller 2011; Pietikäinen 2014), as a kind of a recursive echo of
nation–state logics.
These typical strengths and problems of emancipatory critique materialize in
the Sámi context, where this kind of critique operates with a particular long-
standing view of the power imbalance between what is considered to be the
centre (the nation–state, the ethnic and linguistic majority) and the periphery or
minority (the Sámi community, Sámiland), and, moreover, with a default set of
strategies for overcoming this power imbalance. These include promoting
equal status, access, and rights for Sámi people and for their cultural, political,
linguistic, and economic practices. In some cases these strategies translate into
the active promotion of particular rights for the Sámi, applicable in their
domicile area or when interacting with authorities. Importantly, for emancipa-
tory critique to work, sociolinguistic boundaries need to be fixed: There need
to be clear criteria, or at least a consensus, as to what counts as Sámi, indigen-
ous, endangered, and minority, and how these can be identified, accounted,
maintained, or developed. This rather fixed view of power relations, of who is
Sámi and who is Finn, and of the objects and tools for critiquing and ultimately
changing these relationships, continues to be the dominant frame informing
much political mobilization in the Sámi context. It has been successfully
employed in promoting indigenous legal, political, and linguistics rights; in
implementing the cultural sovereignty of the Sámi people; and in informing
many Sámi language and cultural revitalization projects. It plays a crucial role
in various enumerative practices (of the number of Sámi language speakers, of
the number of Sámi living in the Sámi domicile area, etc.), feeding into the
logics of emancipatory discourse: The relatively small or large numbers of
Sámi language speakers, for example, have been used as indicators of how
necessary (in the case of small or decreasing numbers) or effective (in the case
of large or increasing numbers) language revitalization projects are.
At the same time, emancipatory critique is problematic in the Sámi context.
It reproduces its own centres and margins, in fact in ways that are quite similar
to how the modernist nation–state system that it sets out to critique does, by
endorsing fixed boundaries around the category of Sáminess. In the process, it
includes some bodies, histories, and practices and excludes others. At the same
time, there is an increasing need to account for the multiplicity, complexity,
and ambiguity around being and becoming Sámi. There are more and more
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 269

bodies, repertoires, experiences, and trajectories that do not fit comfortably

into these official categories. This situation generates increasing critique
“from the ground up”, directed at this fixedness of categories and at the
policing of linguistic and ethnic boundaries. For example, new speakers of
the endangered Sámi languages (cf. O’Rourke et al. 2015) – those who have
learnt the Sámi languages outside the family context, typically later in the
life, and especially those learners who do not have a Sámi heritage – disturb
the category of “Sámi speaker”, which has so far mainly referred to people
with Sámi heritage. This is also a political and legal question, as competence
in Sámi languages and the ways it has been acquired are part of a legal
dispute around who counts as Sámi, what criteria are used, and who gets to
decide (Valkonen 2009; Joona 2013). In this moment of transition, the
current official legal definition of the category of “Sámi”, provided by the
Finnish Sámi Parliament, the highest legal authority in Finnish Sámi issues,
has been criticized as being too narrow and exclusive, and the counter-
critique to this critique has been described as interference in the internal
issues of Sámi community and as an attempt to colonialize the Sámi commu-
nity from the inside (Sarivaara 2012).
The Sámi example illustrates how emancipatory critique may not be as
straightforward on the ground as it first seems. It may have both intended as
well as unintended impacts. It can be a powerful strategy for engaging with
various legal and educational institutions operating with similar kinds of
normative frameworks. At the same time, it tends to create local tensions
between what is now perceived as the “elite Sámi”, with acknowledged
statuses and legally granted rights, on one hand, and those with far more
hybrid and complex genealogies, on the other. In this sense, the emancipatory
critique is simultaneously both part of the solution and part of the problem.
The example also illustrates how sociolinguistic boundaries result from the
discursive processes and objectives of social contests: What becomes fixed – at
least for a while – as denoting “being Sámi” is the result of discourse work and
a precarious yet strategic use of essentialism (Spivak 1988; cf. Wee, this
volume, Chapter 15).
The changing conditions of globalization, as well as novel spaces, modes,
and understandings of activism and social change, have all created theoretical
and empirical challenges for emancipatory critical research (cf. Luke 2002;
Zhang et al. 2011). Investment in one view of power relations and in one way
to change them may limit the possibilities for emancipatory critical work to
engage locally and to think of alternative strategies for social change and
related political projects. At times, this makes emancipatory work mistrustful
of approaches which start with the premises of locally embedded, decentred,
and networked views on language, power, and social change. Next, I turn to
look at this kind of critical work, which I refer to as ethnographic critique.
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270 Power, mediation, and critique

3. Ethnographic critique
If emancipatory critique starts with a set view of what seems to be the problem
and with a set of strategies to solve it, ethnographic critique begins from the
other end. It rejects the totalizing tendency of the emancipatory critical view to
create a single universal knowledge or truth and simple dualisms (powerful/
powerless, just/unjust, etc.) that go with it. Instead, it locates knowledge
production in multiple positions, in changing local conditions, and in individ-
ual stories. Ethnographic critique is in an alliance with postmodern thinking
insofar as it explicitly rejects totalizing perspectives on history and society –
grand narratives – and attempts to explain the world in terms of patterned
interrelationships (Agar 1991: 116). What becomes the focus of interest, then,
is the ways in which different social experiences, conditions, and conse-
quences of (say) being a Sámi are framed by various discourses at a given
historical moment, how people make sense of them, and, importantly for the
critical dimension, how they map upwards or are linked to wider social,
historical, and economic structurations. The attempt here is to explore particu-
lar event- and process-based configurations of power and knowledge that
emerge at a particular time and place within encounters that are historically
conditioned (Patton 2006: 268). When discussing critical sociolinguistics and
ethnography, Heller (2011: 34) describes ‘critical’ to mean “describing, under-
standing and explaining the relations of social difference and social inequality
that shape our world”. The critical stance manifests itself in ethnographic work
with research foci related to social issues and power relations as they emerge in
local or individual practices and experiences, as part of wider patterning of
social organization. To research “small” things is simultaneously to examine
“big” things (cf., e.g., Heller 2011; Madison 2012).
Ethnographic critique emphasizes material and historical dimensions – that
is, how social relations came to be the way they are (Pennycook 2001: 6; Cook
2013: 966) – and what becomes fixed under what kind of conditions, and with
what consequences (Heller 2011). Here we can see a link between ethnography
and the Foucauldian idea that power and knowledge are the same thing (cf.
Ball 1994). Foucault ([1969] 1972) insists that knowledge must be traced to
different discourses that frame the knowledge formulated within them, and
which are constituted historically. In much critical language research, this
position of Foucault’s has been interpreted as a call for an ethnographic
approach – an examination of what counts as knowledge in a particular time
and place, according to what criteria, and decided by whom. This includes
reflections of the position of the researcher as a knowledge producer and the
ways in which knowledge is obtained and constructed (Madison 2012).
A story told by a Sámi man that I call here Antero, in the context of
ethnographic research on language biographies, is a story of boundary work
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 271

related to language-ideological debates over who owns the Sámi languages,

and on what grounds. Antero is a senior Sámi with a multilingual repertoire,
including Inari Sámi, one of the least common Sámi languages, which has
about 400 speakers (Kulonen et al. 2005). The story illustrates how power and
knowledge are intertwined with real, material consequences on the construc-
tion of sociolinguistic boundaries, and impacting on individuals’ legitimacy as
Sámi language speakers. In terms of language biography, Antero is a typical
example of his generation of Sámi. In his childhood, before the Second World
War in preindustrialized Finnish Lapland, Antero learnt and used Inari Sámi at
home and in his village, hearing other Sámi languages and Finnish occasion-
ally being used by travellers and by relatives. Entering the Finnish school
system at the age of seven changed his linguistic practices drastically. At
boarding school, a strict Finnish-only language policy was applied, and Antero
learnt to read and write in Finnish only. Because of the long distances, Antero
was able to visit home only during a few holidays in the school year, and
gradually his language practices shifted from Inari Sámi to mainly Finnish.
Over the next decades, Finnish became his main language for everyday
activities, relating to work opportunities and a family life with non-Inari Sámi
speakers. Only later in life, when Antero decided to establish a tourism
business as a part of the ongoing economic development of the area, the Inari
Sámi language acquired new value as an index of authenticity. At this time in
his life, at least partly prompted by the example set by his grandchildren who
were taking part in Inari Sámi-medium education, Antero decided to take part
in an Inari Sámi language course designed for speakers lacking literacy skills.
But in the end he stayed there only few days, as he got into a language-
ideological argument with the teachers over the correct pronunciation of one
particular word.
The story of Antero illustrates local conditions and complexities related to
sociolinguistic boundaries: how the criterion for being a Sámi speaker can
change over time and space, how it is possible to be a legitimate Sámi speaker
“here” but not “there”. The story also shows how the aims of language
revitalization, typically framed by emancipatory goals, are actually a highly
complex issue “on the ground”, in the everyday life of the people and
community. Using Inari Sámi as a language of education turns out to work
well for some people in certain situations, and not so well for others in other
situations (cf. Heller 2011). Being classified as a Sámi speaker (or as a new
speaker, or as not being a Sámi speaker) may have both desirable and
undesirable consequences for the same people (Sarivaara 2012), as this kind
of boundary work has to do with the construction of social stratification and
differentiation (Heller 2001: 117; 2011: 34–35; Blackledge and Creese 2010: 5).
As Antero’s story illustrates, sociolinguistic boundaries are not natural objects
but discursive constructions, or what Heller (2011: 36) describes as “ideas that
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272 Power, mediation, and critique

people struggle over, sometimes working hard to make them real . . . and
sometimes trying to redefine or even destroy them”. A similar kind of discursive
work can be found in the language-ideological tensions that exist between the
categories of dialect and language (cf. Duchêne 2008: 10).
The typical limitation associated with ethnographic critique relates to its lack
of universality, and consequently its difficulties in connecting small, local
practices with the big picture (cf. Heller 2001: 118). Further, in critical (minor-
ity) language research, ethnographic critique is at times seen to be too relativistic
and postmodernist, which can be interpreted as unhelpful, and even harmful, to
social and political action. For example, recent sociolinguistic discussions about
what a “mother tongue” or a “first language” is and where boundaries around
particular languages are positioned can be interpreted as relativistic and giving in
too much to a postmodernist deconstruction, undermining and disregarding
attempts by many minority and indigenous language communities to strengthen
their languages (see, e.g., Olthuis et al. 2013: 177–184). At the same time, Heller
(2011: 10) emphasizes that ethnography is a powerful way to examine how what
happens locally is not distinct from wider patters of social organization or from
the ways in which categorization is used to reproduce or challenge social
inequality. Ethnographic critique may thus help in understanding processes
underlying the ways in which categories and boundaries, such as “Inari Sámi
speaker” or “mother tongue”, became what they are at a particular moment and
place, and the local conditions under which they operate (cf. Blackledge and
Creese 2010; Heller 2011). It also sheds light on various particular debates about
boundaries, the consequences of particular categories, and the ways in which
people cope and strategize with them. While ethnographic critique helps in
problematizing boundaries, the next version of the critique sheds light on ways
in which they can be transgressed.

4. Carnivalesque critique
Perhaps more than the two previous versions of critique, carnivalesque critique
has a flavour of counterculture, grass-roots, perhaps even lightness and mar-
ginality to it. Rather than being part of more “established” versions of critique,
that is, part of a political movement or a social project, carnivalesque critique is
typically found in a fleeting moments of popular culture, such as graffiti,
political parodies, and various media “mash-ups”. In these contexts, playful
and ironic carnivalesque critique is used to poke fun at and disturb fixed
categories and boundaries with humor. It is used to shed light on the absurdity
of fixed relations between language, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and geog-
raphy and to explore how such relations are resisted, defied, or rearranged with
appropriations of hybridity, exaggeration, and unfinishedness (Bakhtin 1986;
Pennycook 2010).
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 273

In this version of criticality, ambivalence, fleeting temporality, and humor

become the method of critique (Clifford 2013; Pietikäinen 2013). In the Sámi
context, carnivalesque critique seems to be linked to emerging imaginations
and practices of being and becoming Sámi – to be found, for example, in
hybrid comedy shows, tourism performances, and progressive arts. In the field
of critical language research, interest in carnivalesque critique, as both a
research topic and a mode of critique of language boundaries and categories,
is relatively recent, as it has perhaps so far been seen as too ephemeral and
light to be taken seriously (see, however, Pennycook 2007; Lamarre 2014;
Pietikäinen 2014).
Despite its apparent lightness, carnivalesque critique is serious about lan-
guage, power, and social change. In the current era of multiple transitions,
cross-sections and mobilities, it has become a promising concept for examin-
ing the dynamics of power in multidirectional and intersecting social and
political changes. It engages with critical discussions and activism by troubling
essentializing notions of identity and by recognizing that identities shift and
change over time and space, just as the institutions and structures that delineate
them shift and change (Wilson 2013: 3). Carnivalesque strategies are used to
challenge hegemonic social orders through grotesque realism and inversion of
hierarchies and exaggeration, inviting audiences to critically reflect upon the
constructed nature of the social world (Martin and Renegar 2007). This
multiplicity with a critical edge has made carnivalesque critique popular
among many current political identity projects related to gender, sexuality,
race, ethnicity, and others, which aim to start with multiplicity and intersec-
tionality rather than dichotomic categorization. For critical language research-
ers, it provides a nexus point, a conjuncture to explore overlapping practices of
politics, popular culture, and social change in a moment of transition and
multiplicity (cf. Pietikäinen 2014; Pietikäinen et al. forthcoming).
Here again, the works of Michel Foucault have been used to unravel the
transgressive potential of carnival and what it might offer in terms of critique.
Foucault (1997 [1963]) argues that “transgression is an action which involves
the limits . . . limit and transgression depend on each other” (p. 33). He
continues, “[T]ransgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent
disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes or to be more exact to
recognize itself for the first time” (p. 34). Transgression therefore does not
deny limits or boundaries but rather exceeds them, thus completing them while
disclosing a reflexive act of denial and affirmation. This understanding of
transgression opens up alternative ways of thinking critically about what is
perceived as normative, standard, or taboo (sacred) and what is perceived as
counternormative, opposite, or deviant (profane), and, importantly, how these
boundaries can be problematized and changed. Going back to our earlier
discussion about languages and boundaries, the idealized models of bounded
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274 Power, mediation, and critique

and autonomous languages that are used in many projects framed by emanci-
patory critique tend to conflict with the hybrid, mixed, and changing multilin-
gual practices and identities that characterize the lived reality of many minority
language speakers, highlighted by ethnographic critique. Transgressive, carni-
valesque critique, then, starts from the status quo and aims to go beyond
prevailing boundaries by problematizing existing fixed ontologies of sociolin-
guistic boundaries, while also providing alternative ways to move forward that
capture both fluidity and fixedness – the dynamics of power (cf. Pennycook
2007). It also challenges us to rethink the very notion of critique itself, as well
as the social change it promises to bring.
These alternative imaginations of being and becoming Sámi seem to fore-
ground heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1986; see also Blackledge and Creese 2014) as
a starting point and push for novel ways to account for and to validate change,
multiplicity, and ambiguity. Bakhtin argues (1968: 10) that “carnival can be
seen as a temporal liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established
order”. Carnival is transgressive in its very nature – a “genuine transgression”,
Bakhtin (1968) suggests. Carnival is transgressive because it stirs up and
shakes thought that is based on the logics of identity categories and boundaries
(Lechte 1990: 109). The attempt – or at least the spirit – of carnival is to
dislocate, counterbalance, and disturb normalizing and totalizing categories
and boundaries and to show that they too are products of a system of dis-
courses and practices, and as such are subject to change. Thus, one possible
way to bring critical reflection into this system is through “carnivalization”.
In the Sámi context, with ongoing debates around categories and boundar-
ies, carnivalesque critique can be found in some particular shifts and moments
related to ways of understanding, using, and talking about Sámi resources. An
example of this is a highly popular, albeit somewhat controversial Sámi TV
comedy show called Märät Säpikkäät/Njuoska Bittut. A key element of the
program is performing and trying out alternative Sámi identities and intersect-
ing various linguistic, ethnic, and gender boundaries. The show portrays and
makes jokes about iconic and easily recognized characters visiting Sámiland,
including ignorant tourists, “wanna-be-Sámis”, “fake-Sámis”, and Helsinki
people (people from the capital of Finland, in the country’s southern centre),
as well as iconic Sámi figures such as “Super-Sámis” (Sámi activists) and
“city-Sámis”. The show seems to escape from – or at least to laugh at – some
of the traditional, fixed boundaries, including the Sámi/Finnish, minority/
majority, North/South, centre/periphery, and female/male distinctions, and
their absurdity in everyday life, which is characterized by an intersection of
various simultaneous identities and complex ways of belonging (Pietikäinen
2014). The show is about critiquing and transgressing these boundaries:
Laughter is a way to make stereotypes and fixed categories visible, perhaps
to shake them, and potentially to open a space for reflection. It allows people in
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 275

the show to perform “taboo” or “profane” things behind the protective shield
of humor (again see Pietikäinen et al. forthcoming). The viewer may see the
show as just humor, political critique, or simply as being offensive and in bad
taste, and the reception of the Märät Säpikäät/Njuoska Bittut show seems to
include all these options (cf. Aikio et al. 2013).
The comedy show marks a point in history where carnivalization and
laughter in the context of Sámi identity have become possible. In the Bakhti-
nian sense of the carnival world, laughter shakes up the authoritative notion of
boundaries, making room for a multiplicity of voices and meanings. The
pregiven, regular categories and conventions are broken, reversed, and sub-
verted through mockery, parody, and humor. The show is a playful, though
carefully planned, strategic (and economically viable) performance. It purpose-
fully moulds together the requirement of ownership and appropriation of Sámi
languages, as well as the need for entertainment, into a TV show that licenses
laughing and play as well as temporal crossings between categories and
positions, with potential for more serious, political implications. Carnivalesque
critique simultaneously plays with and against these norms. It can be simul-
taneously reflective, banal, critical, and humorous, allowing ambivalent voices
to address diverse audiences and trying to articulate the ongoing, ever-shifting,
multidimensional, heterogeneous, and ambiguous aspects that constitute the
current local Sámi predicament and its diverse realities. Given its humorous
character, carnivalesque critique may be disregarded, because it fails the test of
amounting to “proper” critique. It has indeed been criticized as not presenting
any way forward, only “turning everything into a big joke”. Also its ephem-
erality has been thought to make it irrelevant to the deeper and more extensive
temporality of projects oriented towards social change.
At the same time, it can, I suggest, be seen as an alternative model of
critique, celebrating as it does processes of becoming, change, and renewal,
while being hostile to all that is static or complete. In the Sámi context
carnivalesque critique seems to provide a way to address multiple, shifting
norms and diverse realities by creating practices and performances that are
important for emerging ways of being and doing Sáminess. Such performances
and practices critique the prevailing categories and norms. They employ both
fixity and fluidity to create a polyphony that plays with previous orders and
norms. The dissolution of the division between the sacred (norm) and the
profane (its opposite) invites us to reflect on what boundaries are sanctioned,
what novel boundaries and crossings are allowed, which identities are uplifted,
and which boundaries are saved. These performances and practices make sense
locally and are meaningful in relation to the constantly changing social, spatial,
and symbolic environments in which they are enacted and interpreted. For
example, the character portrayals of the “wanna-be Sámi” and the “Super-
Sámi” are recognizable types within the community, and the question of who
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276 Power, mediation, and critique

would best fit these characterizations is subject to discussion. Finally, the Sámi

version of carnivalesque critique has managed to involve new participants in
the discussion about sociolinguistic boundaries, people who are typically
absent from more emancipatory critique: young people, the non-Sámi-
language speakers, and others from the margins of dominant ways of doing
critique in the Sámi context.

5. Unfinished critique: roots and rhizomes

When discussing critique and sociolinguistics, Heller (2001: 117) talks about
“the project of critique” when dealing with various ongoing developments and
shortcomings in different disciplines’ engagement with the construction of
relations of social difference and inequality. To me this underlines the fact
that any kind of critique is an ongoing and unfinished process, embedded in a
particular time and space, and that rather than trying to find “the truth” or “the
best version” of a critical stance, where the alternative is to abandon the whole
project, it makes more sense to try to understand the conditions and conse-
quences of meanings and usages of criticality in a given time and space – how
critique is understood, developed, and applied; by whom; and in whose name.
In this chapter, I have tried to show what kinds of lens are offered by three
versions of critique – emancipatory, ethnographic, and carnivalesque – to
provide insight into shifting and complex sorts of boundary work in shifting
multilingual, indigenous Sámi contexts. Each of these modes of critique
obviously has its pros and cons. Emancipatory critique seems to work when
there is a consensus on the goals and on the means to achieve them, but falls
short when it encounters disagreement, complexities, or multiplicities. The
strength of the ethnographic critique is in problematizing categories found “on
the ground” and in bringing local practices into view in relation to wider social
and cultural processes, but it faces challenges in terms of its grounding for
political projects, and it potentially struggles to escape the dangers of excessive
relativism (Pennycook 2012). Carnivalesque critique seems to provide alterna-
tive spaces, audiences, and practices for political identity projects, but raises
doubts through its fleeting and apparently noncommittal attitude towards
social, political, and economic structures and their long-term development.
However, all three take language as a key focus of critique, and discourse as a
resource for constructing that critique.
This in turn points towards the centrality of discourse in any critical project.
If we take as our starting point the Foucauldian view of discourse as socially
constructed and constitutive to our ways of knowing and talking about that
knowledge, then the conditions, trajectories, and consequences of circulating
discourses about the issue under scrutiny become directly relevant for critical
sociolinguistic research. Such a view is neither just a description of abstract
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Discourse, boundaries, and change 277

processes and structures nor merely a bland theory of language in society or

discourse as social action; it in fact amounts to a politics of social organization
(cf. Pennycook 1990; Heller 2001). In this view, “reality” and “construction”
are not opposite; rather, this dichotomy dissolves. Critical questions concern
the workings of discourses: their logics, their genealogy and anatomy, and
their ecology.
One possible way forward in developing the project of critique can be found
in the rhizomatic ontology developed by French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari (1987); this is a provocative critique of modernity’s discourses and
institutions and provides a promising starting point for thinking about critique
in terms of its complexity, connectivity, and intersectionality of discourses.
The rhizome can be seen as a theoretical metaphor of an interconnected and
irreducible multiplicity of ongoing processes. It is a metaphorical representa-
tion of knowledge that could account for interconnectivity and multiplicity
among the nodes in a network. It resists tree-like knowledge charting causality
along chronological lines, and instead favours a nomadic system of movement
(Heckman 2002; Walling 2010).
I would like to argue this kind of rhizomatic thinking can be useful in
describing the complex dynamics and manifold interrelationships between
discourse and economics, between shifting sociopolitical forces and language
practices, between environment, culture, and identity. It can help in finding
new ways forward beyond fixed, a priori categorizations of people, languages,
and places, in situations where static categories are no longer sufficient to
account for current complexities and multiplicities. In this sense a rhizomatic
approach provides a critique of the dichotomous representations of fixed
boundaries, unchanging categories, and totalizing politics which were typical
of modernist thinking, and which now prove to be inadequate to the task of
explaining what is happening on the ground. It enables us to envision a system
of dynamic changes that are never complete. The risks with a rhizomatic
approach relate to a danger of depoliticizing practices that are crucial for many
identity struggles or to the risk of a certain kind of romanticization of proces-
sual rhizomatic approach, which may lack deep engagement with the powers
of orders and taxonomies (Wallin 2010). Also Deleuze and Guattari them-
selves caution against celebration of rhizomatics in writing that “there exist
tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division
may begin to burgeon into a rhizome” (p. 15). Taking up these potentials and
limitations with a rhizomatic approach, one way of moving forward could be
to start with the assumption that neither the rhizome (the potential for things to
deterritorialize and enter into new assemblages) nor the root tree (the stratifi-
cation of things into orders, taxonomies, or structures) is primary. Sometimes
more stability is what is required; at other times more fluidity is needed to
overcome overtly rigid system or open up new innovations.
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278 Power, mediation, and critique

Consequently, a rhizomatic discourse approach to boundary work at a

particular time and space is not a closed or unchanging perspective, but rather
an open system that emerges and transforms in the course of interaction. The
relationships between language practices and their networked characteristics
are implied and are seen in connection with historical, social, economic, and
political practices and processes. They are neither linear nor separate, but
instead any text, sign, or speech act potentially includes several interlinked
discourses, which are connected to and across each other. Thus discourse can
be seen as a historically embedded practice of knowledge construction, with
material consequences and with rhizomatic connections to other spaces, times,
and practices. What becomes crucial, then, is to understand which processes,
actors, and resources are brought together under the logics of a particular
discourse, and what the conditions and consequences of the discourse are.
Using a rhizomatic discourse approach, it is possible to trace, map, and
connect the historicities and the emergence of discourses across spaces and
practices, while shifting away from fixed, ahistorical, static meanings. As
discourses are productive as well as reflective of social relations, the focus is
on “becoming” rather than on “being”.
These intersecting discourses on criticality offer lenses into the questions of
language, power, and social change. The tensions and developments around
them imply differences in the organization of social and political actions and
become an important terrain of debates and dialogues. The issue to me is not
whether or not to be critical, but to oppose dogmatic unities, singular truths,
and unidirectional courses of action. Perhaps the project of criticality is a case
of recognizing the ways in which all critique rests within a rhizome of
relationships with other processes.

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