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The National Anthem in Warao: Semiotic Ground and Performative Affordances of Indigenous Language Texts in Venezuela
Author(s) -
Rodriguez Juan Luis
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12129
Subject(s) - anthem , performative utterance , indigenous , foregrounding , semiotics , freak , interpretation (philosophy) , affordance , lyrics , parade , media studies , sociology , history , linguistics , aesthetics , art , literature , art history , computer science , philosophy , world wide web , ecology , human–computer interaction , biology
This paper analyzes how the translated text of the Venezuelan national anthem from Spanish to Warao has been put to new uses in Venezuela. It focuses on publicly available videos and written versions of the lyrics to understand how indigenous leaders and nonindigenous Spanish speakers use the anthem for new purposes. By analyzing the anthem as a text‐artifact, I argue that translation produced a change on the semiotic ground of interpretation for the anthem that also resulted in a break between types and tokens of the oral and written versions of the text. This break gave the anthem new performative affordances making possible new and sometimes contradictory ways of using it.