Resistance,Symbolism and the Language of Stateness in Timor‐Leste

On gaining independence in 2002 after a protracted struggle against Indonesian occupation, the sovereign Timor‐Leste state began to assert its sovereignty in a range of discursive and expressive media. These assertions developed a distinct ‘language of stateness’ that is the focus of this article. This East Timorese expression of state sovereignty draws heavily on the legacy of the Timorese resistance struggle and on a variety of other sources of symbolic power such as flags, buildings, logos, and uniforms. Yet these efforts have been contested by a range of non‐state actors in Timor‐Leste and the shape that this language of stateness has taken now evokes complaints from martial arts groups (MAGs), ritual arts groups (RAGs), and veterans' organisations that seek to ‘become like the state’ themselves, and who also employ a ‘national language of stateness’ in the form of flags, graffiti, and official buildings. While not challenging the idea of an independent East Timorese state per se, these groups question the prerogative of the state to use and define the language of stateness. In this article I explore the way the state and its challengers use ‘languages of stateness’ and how this shapes their ambivalent stance vis‐à‐vis each other, with both sides often drawing upon a discourse of the fulfilment of the millenarian promises that have for a long time been tied to the achievement of independence.     

On Language, Culture, and Social Action

This article outlines the theoretical developments experienced in historical studies over the last two decades. As a consequence of the growing critical reconsideration of some of the main theoretical assumptions underlying historical explanation of individuals' meaningful actions, a new theory of society has taken shape among historians during this time. By emphasizing the empirical and analytical distinction between language as a pattern of meanings and language as a means of communication, a significant group of historians has thoroughly recast the conventional notions of society, experience, interests, culture, and identity, and has developed a new concept of social action. Thus, historiographical debate seems to have started to transcend, for the first time, the longstanding and increasingly futile contest or dilemma between objectivism and subjectivism, between materialism and culturalism, between social and intentional explanation, or between social constraints and human agency. The groundwork has now been laid for an alternative to the declining paradigm of social history that does not entail a revisionist return (be it partial or complete) to idealist history but opens a quite different path.     

A Linguistic Survey of Khorasan: Implications for Language Isolation,Language Change,and Contact Linguistics

This paper describes and analyzes data from a number of Modern Iranian dialects spoken in Khorasan in the east of Iran which are unusual among the other Western Iranian languages in that they have grammaticalized a split tense-sensitive alignment in indexation, compared to other Iranian languages whose indexation splitness is sensitive to both tense and transitivity. These dialects are the former dialect of Birjand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the present-day dialect of Ferdows, Khanik, and Se-Ghal’e. The findings are put in the context of the available data from the Classical Persian texts to show that the tense-sensitive splitness mentioned above is traceable in those texts. A number of external factors are discussed which seem to have been influential in the restructuring of the split-alignment of the former dialect of Birjand into a uniformly nominative-accusative alignment in terms of indexation as observed in the present-day dialect of Birjand. It is proposed that this restructuring is an instance of simplification. The three other dialects cited above are endangered in the sense that they can undergo the same kind of restructuring as happened to the dialect of Birjand.