Talking/Not Talking about Race: The Enregisterments of Culture in Higher Education Discourses

Abstract

In higher education “diversity” discourses, culture routinely stands in for race, but its use is unevenly enregistered. Examination of three web pages at one college shows contrasting entextualizations of culture: in promotional discourse, culture is loosely associated with diversity; in describing student organizations, culture is variously associated with race, ethnicity, nationality, language, and gender; for multicultural programs, culture is most tightly associated with racial markedness. Culture is most complexly enregistered in spoken discourse among students of color, indexing racial markedness experienced as subjectivity, family, class, and location. Framing all these usages is a neoliberalization of racial markedness, as in the idea of “educating the community.” [enregisterment, indexicality, higher education, culture, diversity]

In higher education, discourses about cultural diversity have become institutionally entrenched since the 1990s. While participants in such discourses see as their primary goal the promotion of inclusiveness and equality, those discourses can function to reinforce preexisting assumptions about racialization. Participants rarely question presuppositions about cultural diversity: that black, Asian and Latino are marked with respect to white, that these classifications correlate with culture such that diverse individuals possess culture in some inherent way, that individuals embodying these classifications can be counted in some meaningful way, that all this benefits institutions. Participants do sometimes comment on the terminological limitations of such discourses, but what tends to remain obscure is the larger pragmatic process of enregisterment and indexical ordering by which culture as a newer usage takes on much of the indexical quality of the older usage, race. Also obscure is the fact that a single term such as culture or diversity can be enregistered differently in different discourses. The indexical deployment of cultural diversity differs among web-based, entextualized college discourses, and differs even more in its use by racially marked students.

This article examines enregisterments of culture in different diversity discourses in a liberal arts college. I compare entextualized usages on three web pages to each other and to spoken discourse among racially marked students talking about culture and self-identity. In each usage, culture is linked to some notion of institutional benefit, such as “educating the community”: culture is assumed to be a defining aspect of diversity, and diversity is assumed to be beneficial to the college. Categories of cultural diversity are assumed to be essentialized categories of origin, quasi-natural properties possessed by individuals such that they embody their category. At the same time, as concrete knowledge and practices that provides educational benefit, they neatly fit a neoliberal conceptualization of “diverse students” as individuals who, by “bringing” cultural diversity, enhance the quality of the institution.

The college was established two centuries ago in the rural northeastern United States. The student body demography is 95% U.S. citizen or permanent resident. This 95% includes 75% of the student body self-identifying as white or Caucasian on the application form, and not quite 20% self-identifying as Black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander or Native American, and/or other or mixed.¹ The latter categories have customarily been accounted (by the Admissions Office) as multicultural (i.e. non-white/Caucasian U.S. citizen or resident). The remaining 5% of the student body is accounted as international, and while they might also have self-identified as Black, Latino, or Asian/Pacific Islander they are not accounted as multicultural, so statistics on their self-identity as white or otherwise is not provided. The multicultural and international numbers are cumulatively accounted as diversity, an accounting which is central to recruitment and media strategies, especially since many schools in this comparison group are closer to urban centers and more readily draw larger numbers of multicultural applicants. As is generally the case in U.S. colleges and universities, diversity discourses are generated by the offices administering admissions, public relations, fund-raising, and student life. As is true in the United States generally, diversity accounting is organized by the five U.S. Affirmative Action categories: White (or Caucasian), Black (or African American), Hispanic (or Latino), Asian-American/Pacific Islander, and Native American/Native Alaskan; the “ethnic groups” specified on the common application form (see endnote 1) elaborate on but do not depart from these categories. Higher education promotional practices depend heavily on the deployment of such categories, most directly in the advertisement of diversity numbers. These categories are also deployed in the construction of images of student life within and outside the classroom, reflected visually on college websites and publications. Student life is also subdivided by these identity categories, in the organization of student multicultural (or just cultural) organizations and in the ways in which much of the school's diversity programming is, in effect, outsourced to these organizations.²

Registers and Enregisterment

Agha (2007:80ff) distinguishes registers as language formations—“products (or precipitates) of human activity”—from enregisterment, the ongoing sociohistorical process through which registers form: “To speak of ‘a register’ . . . is to speak of a sociohistorical phase” in that process. Thus, a register at any given moment is a language variety organized by the discursive field in which it takes place and the pragmatic functions shaping its use. Register formation thus indexes relations among those semiotically engaged. Each point of register formation is indexically ordered, as Silverstein (2003a) puts it, with respect to existing patterns of use: as a usage moves into an existing register, it takes on interpretations that are indexically compatible with other usages in that register. Each new usage comes to co-occur with existing usages, often with considerable (and measurable) frequency. Indexical compatibility among new and previous usages emerges in the ways in which co-occurring usages align users' interests, provide rhetorical force, provide a sense of being “on the same page,” and so on. In this way, register does not reduce to only form.

As elements of discourse, such as referring expressions, circulate across social fields, and to the extent that discursive processes across those fields are indexically comparable, registers will be to some degree interdiscursive in the sense described by Silverstein (2005:6–7). As analysis of college web pages and student discourse indicates, that degree can be limited. People see themselves “talking about the same thing” across those fields insofar as they are using the same referring expressions, but the indexical orderings of those expressions is subject to considerable variation. Thus, as readers are surely aware, the term culture in semiotic anthropological discourses is enregistered quite differently than in higher education or corporate or government diversity discourses. Semiotic anthropologists, focusing on interpretive processes rather than neatly bounded, countable entities, are more likely to use culture as a mass noun than as a count noun, or if a count noun, singular more likely than plural. They are likely to use the adjective cultural with nouns other than diversity. Institutional (educational, corporate, and government) spokespersons focus on countable entities so culture occurs most frequently as a count noun, often in the plural, or as the adjective form preceding (usually) diversity. In these usages, culture is indexically ordered with diversity to the extent that it usually co-occurs with diversity (except in references to organizational culture, which is a different notion of culture.) The full story of this semiotic split is beyond the scope of this article, but it did develop as usages diverged over decades, congruent with institution-specific goals, projects and as social actors in each came to refer to culture in ways that made sense in terms of actors' intentions, presuppositions, and of course, other usages. The “same” word has thus participated in different processes of enregisterment.

Sameness of form, however, is what catches participants' attention. The sense of “sameness” across different discursive fields is reinforced by the ways in which elements of discourses are, as explained by Silverstein and Urban (1996), entextualized: discursive elements come to be seen as autonomously embedded, separable as a unit from the social processes through which they were produced so as to appear as “texts,” that is, free-floating encapsulations of shared, transmittable meaning. Entextualized bits of discourse emerge in the opposing dynamics of contextualization and decontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990:72–73): on the one hand, all forms are tied to socially-specific functions; on the other hand, the very functions through which discourse is produced can enhance the sense of textual bits as autonomous. Entextualized forms (such as culture and cultural diversity) thus appear fixed and transferable, but as they are used, they become indexically ordered, invested with interpretive residues from prior usages, and shaping and classifying succeeding usages in ways coherent with previous usage. As these bits circulate across different discursive fields, participants regard them as “the same.”

First College Web Page: Promotional Discourse

While culture (in relation to diversity) does not occur frequently in the college's promotional discourse, it does occur on this admissions-linked web page:

A diversity of cultures, ideas and activities permeates every aspect of the . . . community. The College encourages respect for intellectual and cultural diversity because such respect promotes free and open inquiry, independent thought and mutual understanding.³

The web page continues: “The College makes many committed efforts to increase the diverse nature of the campus community” followed by a list of these efforts: areas of study including Africana, Asian, and Latin American Studies; organizations for Black, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, International, Native American and Caribbean students, and gay and lesbian students and women; visiting speakers (15 individuals and groups are listed, 12 of them African American or African); opportunities to study off campus and abroad; annual conferences on Asian, African American, Latino and gender issues; opportunities for workshops on race and gender/sexuality issues; and career connections to alumni of color networks.

Two semiotic aspects of this web page are worth observing. First, the opening paragraph emphasizes association by feeling and imagery rather than referential specificity. In the first sentence, culture is loosely associated with diversity as a positive aspect of the institution. The loose association of (pluralized) cultures, ideas, and activities with diversity suggests a general condition made up of objectified (if underspecified) elements of difference in background and ways of thinking and acting that cumulatively enhance the institution's educational mission. This presupposition informs the oft-expressed belief of admissions professionals that high diversity numbers draw “good students,” and it is reflected in U.S. News and World Report's ranking of “campus diversity” in U.S. liberal arts colleges.⁴ This association of culture with diversity strongly indexes assumptions about the market value of a given college or university. Second, the list of diverse organizations, people, and experiences affiliates markedness with productivity, with usefulness in the world. When examples are provided, they are almost but not quite all racially or ethnically marked: the one nongeographically specific area of study is International Relations; the one ethnically/racially unmarked visiting speaker is a former U.S. president famous for a postpresidential career of international humanitarian work. This reinforces the idea that markedness associated with education, art or good works equals diversity.

The ordering of culture with diversity, and diversity with notions of productive activity, positive contributions to a larger social order, and a competitive edge⁵ are coherent with presuppositions about diversity in corporate promotional discourses, as shown in this example of the Ford Motor Company's distinctly neoliberal take:

At Ford Motor Company we recognize that diversity is not only a reality of our global nature, it's a distinct advantage, and one that we value and embrace. . . . Reflected in our products, diversity is a competitive advantage in a global economy.⁶

Harvey (2005:2) describes neoliberalism as “. . . a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” In this entrepreneurial frame, individuals possess and deploy practices and ways of being (such as communication or leadership) as learnable, transferable, assessable skill sets that can bring productive outcomes (Urciuoli 2008). This mode of thinking applies to culture as well. Gershon (n.d.) describes this way of imagining selves as “neoliberal agency,” the idea that individuals own themselves (and their cultures) like businesses. This neoliberalized notion of culture as a possessable, marketable set of skills has become globalized: Gershon (2008) locates it in New Zealand political discourses about Maori culture; Comaroff and Comaroff (forthcoming) describe corporate deployments of ethnic identity in South Africa. And as I discuss later, culture as skill set gives it a place in the world of the (otherwise acultural) modern.

The notion of culture as useful is reinforced by the branding function of college promotional discourse (though the actual nature of that usefulness is somewhat vague). Since the goal of promotional discourse is the attraction of people, resources and symbolic capital, it relies on rhetorically persuasive associations, unlike technical discourses which rely on definable, referentially specific associations. In promotional discourse, referential or metalinguistic functions may be selectively deployed to reinforce the persuasive potential of selected associations, but reference and metalanguage are not the primary functions. Expression, suggestion, and persuasion are. (In this way, promotional discourse reminds one of Urban's 1991:10–18 discussion of mythic process, in which associations of familiarity, feeling, and imagery play the key role.) In his description of the interdiscursivity of advertising and George W. Bush's political speech, Silverstein (2005:16–17) nicely captures the register elements that do persuasive work and the nature of their association: free-floating discourse, thin on propositional content for which a speaker can be held responsible, thick with injunctions, slogans, desemanticized combinations, a Vygotskian chain-complex with lots of “tropic leaps” that make it work, use of “identity-structuring emblems” and lots of “ready-mades” (formula). What such association can accomplish is explained by Stamats, Inc., a marketing agency for higher education, which brands higher education by setting up associations invoking a sense of place:

A brand is more than a look or a logo—it's a collection of words, images, ideas, and emotions that comes immediately to mind when someone thinks about your institution. In short, your brand is the promise you make to stakeholders (and prospective stakeholders) that expresses your school's core values. A promise that, if applied effectively, can help increase enrollment, boost giving, create awareness, and deliver relevance to the people who matter most to your school. [New paragraph] The key to brand marketing—the ultimate litmus test—is what pops into a student's or donor's head upon hearing your institution's name.⁷

Though no one at the school studied here talks about branding, the practices by which the school is presented to the world fit the process described by Stamats, Inc. Culture, diversity, ideas, and activities are associated in ways meant to invoke an image and express core values. Moore (2003:334) describes the branding process as “partly a thing and partly language,” language used so as to “heightens its own ‘thinginess.’ ” Such “thinginess” emerges from the labor of brand production, the development of the associations behind its promise (339–342) which relies on and reinforces the entextualization of those words, images and so on. Something like that happens as culture and diversity become part of the school's promise (though I don't know if it involves focus group labor), and culture and diversity work insofar as they seem possessable and useful. They may be semantically non-specific but they are all about imagining oneself engaged in the experience of the school.

Second College Web Page: Student Organizations

While no web discourse is entirely without a promotional angle (promotional register even threads throughout academic department web pages), the promotional use of culture is much less noticeable in student life discourses. This does not mean it is particularly coherent referentially, as we see when we examine the use of these terms on the Student Activities page. Here, culture is ordered with other classificatory terms for student organizations as follows: sports, student media, student government, non-specific clubs and associations, cultural organizations, Greek letter organizations, performance groups, public affairs organizations, religious organizations, and volunteer organizations.⁸ The student activities administrator explained to me that there is no one systematic way to classify organizations, and that classifications do change from year to year depending on how the students submitting the information classify their organization, if they classify it at all. As of 2007–08, the support groups for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) students and men of color are listed under nonspecific clubs and associations. The women's group is a public affairs organizations; the Latino dance and African American step and dance groups are performance groups; the Muslim student group is a religious organization; the Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and West Indian-African student groups are listed as cultural organizations; and the Black student group and the support group for women of color are not listed at all although until last year the Black student group was listed as a cultural organization. Cultural organizations include the Spanish, French, and German language clubs as well as the Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and West Indian-African student groups. The cultural organization web page describes these as “groups that serve to educate the campus about a diversity of experience, including, but not limited to languages, countries, regions and ethnicity.”⁹ As is often the case with web language, this phrasing was probably borrowed from other college usage. Here, culture co-occurs with languages, countries, regions and ethnicities. There is also an international student group listed under clubs and associations, which “serves the interest” of international students “while promoting awareness of different cultures on campus through interactive and exciting events.”¹⁰ Here, culture co-occurs with (inter)nationality.

The student organizations listed under student activities have a range of bases: recreational interests, social or religious commitment, academic or artistic pursuits. The Greek letter organizations (fraternities and sororities) are private societies rather than college organizations strictly speaking, but student life administrators keep a sharp eye on their activities, bringing them as much as possible into the sphere of administrative supervision, and the Greek societies formed most recently are rather less selective than the older ones. There are two recently formed Greek societies primarily for students of color but neither count as college cultural or multicultural organizations. The cultural organizations consist of two very different types of organizations: three language clubs, whose memberships consist largely of language majors, and four multicultural organizations whose memberships are based on some form of social markedness vis-à-vis the largely white middle-class school. While markedness as Black, Latino, or Asian is most readily seen as racial/ethnic, it is for most students who so self-identify very much about class. The students who are mainstays of the Latino, Asian, and African American organizations are from predominantly working-class families, often of immigrant backgrounds. They are also the students most involved in multicultural programming.

Third College Web Page: Multicultural Programs

On the Multicultural Programs page, culture(al) is most specifically enregistered with multicultural(ism) and diverse(ity), with the Affirmative Action ethnic/racial categories (African American or Black, Latino or Hispanic, and Asian or Asian-American), and with references to cultural promotion and community education. While the LGBT society and women's organization are listed as multicultural organizations (see below), culture(al), multicultural(ism) and diverse(ity) rarely co-occur otherwise with references to gender, or with references to disability.¹¹ Multicultural Programs are administered by the office of the Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Accessibility, which, as the web site states, “supports students from diverse backgrounds” by assisting their transition to college, “providing leadership in the development of educational, cultural, and social programs and activities,”“serving as an advocate for students from diverse racial, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations” and building coalitions throughout the college.¹² The office also oversees and co-hosts events by the Multicultural Student Organizations including Martin Luther King Day programming, leadership training, diversity training, interfaith dinners, and a culture festival

which gives individuals and student organizations an opportunity to showcase their culture to the members of the . . . community. The festival usually includes dancing, singing, poetry, drama, and other forms of creative expression, followed by an after party and a variety of ethnic foods.¹³

Listed as multicultural organizations are the Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, and West Indian-African student clubs, the Black student organization, the Muslim student society, the Latino dance society, the African American step and dance society, the LGBT society, the women's organization, and support groups for male and female students of color. In the descriptive language for the Black, Latino, West Indian and African, Asian, Latin Dance and Middle Eastern organizations, culture is enregistered with references to history, education and promotion of social awareness: “promote the culture and history of Black students,”“broaden the community's awareness of issues related to Latino culture,”“promote the history and culture of West Indian and African students,”“promote the history and culture of Asian students,”“promote the history and culture of Latin dance,”“educate the College community about Middle Eastern culture.”¹⁴ By contrast, the women's organization page refers to personal growth and raising awareness of women's issues, and the LGBT page refers to providing support; neither mentions culture. Thus, culture and diverse are most often associated with racial markedness, and culture with the possession of positive qualities reflecting those backgrounds.

The Entextualization and Circulation of Culture Reference

The college's web pages are not produced as a single undifferentiated discourse. The tightest control over discursive production is exercised by the offices of admissions and of communication, i.e. the offices producing promotional language.¹⁵ The loosest control is exercised by academic departments or student organizations providing the media office with information for the web: the media office may pursue incomplete information by e-mail or phone calls to department or organization contact people, who don't always respond, or who may provide responses that the media office might tweak or edit. In doing so, the media office is likely to draw on circulating bits of entextualization, which tends to reinforce a sense of reference to “the same thing” across different fields. In addition, the reification of cultural diversity is positivistically reinforced by the use of statistics which themselves rest on a history of legally inscribed identity categories: Latino, Asian, African American.¹⁶ These categories are especially suited to statistical entextualization in that they exist as “boxes” to be “checked” on college application forms in ways that being lesbian or gay does not; hence a college's LGBT group does not correspond to a countable campus population as Latino, Asian, and African American do. And while women can be counted as a population, when colleges are 50% or more female, women are less likely to be characterized as a “group.” The percentage of African American, Latino, and Asian students can be posted as “facts about the student body” to mark the college's place in the diversity-as-symbolic-capital market, and sent to U.S. News and World Report for their “Best Colleges” profiles and diversity rankings. Such processes obscure differences in indexical ordering across the three web pages examined.¹⁷ In promotional register, culture, ideas and activities are associated as kinds of diversity without any definite classification or explanation. In student organizations, culture and diversity characterize an inconsistent classification system. For multicultural programs, multiculturalism is consistently associated with culture, a consistency that derives from the professional concerns of the office's administrators, i.e. their concern with students from historically under-represented groups.

Culture is most extensively enregistered on the multicultural programs site. Culture emerges as a positive quality possessed by students whose identities are racially marked. The association is reinforced by the work of student life administrative professionals whose job it is to facilitate the creation of at least some non-white social space for the students under their charge, especially since the wall of whiteness faced by those students is reinforced by the middle-classness of many (though hardly all) white students. In this work, culture affords a way to talk about creating that space, which can be a tricky business.¹⁸ Some years ago, an African American student life professional spoke to me about Multicultural Weekend, an annual admissions recruiting event in which Latino, Black and Asian prospective students were invited to campus for a weekend. He said “. . . you don't plan too many cultural events but you plan events for them. Because number one, that's not how it is up here. Why have this big extravagant weekend with all these cultural events when you don't do that consistently throughout the year? So what you're doing is, you're deceiving the kid.”Culture can also afford a way to talk about opening up student experience, as I heard from another African American student life administrator. Describing a return visit by some alumni of color, he quoted one of them as saying “ ‘I would have opened up more to different cultures, different races instead of staying in my own box, and I would have had a much better experience.’ ”

On the multicultural program page, culture and diversity are linked to student support and institutional instruction. The page lists as “Guiding Principles for Multicultural Programs”: “to celebrate diversity; to promote respect and civility; to challenge students to grow in their understanding of themselves and others; to encourage the free expression of widely varying views.”¹⁹ The pages for the Black, Latino and Asian student multicultural organizations specify their missions as: “. . . to promote the culture and history of Black students at (The) College;”“. . . to broaden the community's awareness of issues related to Latino culture, society and politics;” and “. . . to promote the history and culture of Asian students at (The) College.”²⁰ The multicultural programs office and student organizations frame culture as a set of resources which can be displayed, celebrated, and performed as a semiotic counter to racial marking.

Culture thus formulated becomes available for deployment as a form of symbolic capital for the college, and students and faculty enacting that deployment become available as culture providers. Not only are they culture providers but they are also the preferred providers because they are authenticated by their markedness. Thus, the work of cultural provision presupposes the kind of reductionism addressed by García (1999), a multicultural affairs administrator and faculty member in a comparable liberal arts school. To her, multicultural affairs should mean social justice and organizational change. To her school, it means the four race-named organizations. She describes the institutional compartmentalizing of the marked into manageable groups and in particular the pressure on those organizations to come up with cultural events to “celebrate diversity” along the lines of such nationally marked practices as Japanese tea ceremonies. By equating the latter with Kwanzaa or Three Kings celebrations, “we are fulfilling our cultural role in trappings that are familiar and non-threatening for many in the majority” (1999:305).

Culture in Spoken Discourse: a Prized Possession

In the web pages examined above, the entextualized uses of culture are relatively restricted. When students serving as college cultural providers use culture in spoken discourse, the ways in which it is enregistered shed light on the complexities of the social order that shape their lives at the college in ways that entextualized uses do not.

Multicultural organization members, especially officers, supply a good deal of cultural content, content more compatible with the easily recognizable performances described above by García than with students' actual backgrounds. Many, in some years most, of these students are from urban working class families, and their experience of difference at the college is as inflected by class as by race. I first became acquainted with them for a study of the institutional production of “diversity” in higher education; between 1995 to 2006, I interviewed 44 students on issues of identity markedness.²¹ This included students self-identifying as Latino (22), Asian (5), Black (12), Native American (1), international (4) and gay/lesbian (4); a few students identified across categories. The material presented here is drawn from those interviews, which took the form of conversations and narratives loosely organized around six or eight questions about perceptions and experiences of student life and multicultural organizations. Their consistency of response provides insights into an identity talk register used by socially marked students in an informal but institutionally inflected situation, that is, talking to a faculty member about institutional roles. This clearly breaks down along lines of racial versus gender marking. For example, Latino/a, Black and Asian students all tended to use the term culture the same way when talking about being racially marked. Of the 21 students talking about being Latino/a, 19 used the term culture, and 18 of the 19 introduced the term without prompting from me. All 5 students identifying as Asian used the term the same way without prompting from me. Of the 12 students identifying as Black, all 4 who identified as Caribbean introduced the term themselves, as did 5 of the 8 identifying as U.S. Black. I asked them all what it meant to have a culture, as I routinely heard that locution from them in and out of class. I still hear students of color, without prompting, talk of culture and having a culture in the ways expressed in these interviews.

When Latino, Black, and Asian students talk about their experiences and perceptions of class/race difference at the college, they routinely talk of culture as a possession and as a form of social marking framed by how they grew up. By contrast, insofar as the (mostly white) members of the lesbian and gay student organization spoke of culture at all, they spoke of queer culture and institutional culture, cultural history or cultural ancestors, usages reflecting a cultural studies register in ways rarely heard from multicultural students. Lesbian and gay interviewees did not talk about having a culture, nor did they generally equate culture with social markedness. International students talked about culture in terms of national culture, and raised parallels between U.S. and other national cultures. Insofar as they saw themselves marked at the school, they saw it as a situational rather than as a general condition. One student who was black, international, and gay talked about culture more as other international students did than as black U.S. students did, and he did not talk about gender issues in terms of culture at all. Also contrastive were white students interviewed as resident advisors, whose usage reflected that of residential life professionals, talking about school culture, or culture as diversity, or culture as unwanted practices, for example, alcohol culture, hook-up culture, or the culture we're trying to fight. In classroom discussions with white students generally (i.e. not in any specific institutional role) or in interviews with white student tour guides or sorority and fraternity members, I found few references to culture. Those that did occur paralleled references to diversity and ethnicity, sometimes as characteristic of marked persons or groups, sometimes as generic contributions in ways that echoed the admissions diversity web page; as one student put it, “different cultural things that you could bring here other than just your race.”

The enregisterment of culture among Latino, Black, and Asian students resembles that of multicultural programs insofar as the noun culture denotes a valuable possession of the racially marked and a contribution to the larger community. The points of interdiscursivity connecting students' talk of culture with its web entextualizations exist in the everyday routines of the Office of Multicultural Programming, where there is some degree of speech chaining, in Agha's sense (2007:66–67), between the discourse analyzed here and the Office's routine activities. This speech chaining is institutionally channeled by students participating in the program activities, especially when they perform the roles delineated in the next section, roles that provide the school with cultural capital. When they use the word culture in the discourses analyzed in this section and the next, they are producing something akin to what Mehan (1996:255) refers to as “labeled social facts . . . produced from the ambiguity of everyday life.”²²Culture as used here exists as a precipitate of the system within which it operates. In their acts of reference to practices, knowledge, and values as culture, they bring it into being in ways that fit entextualized usages. At the same time, their usage is more complicated, as it is about their lived institutional and pre-institutional experiences which do not neatly fit the presuppositions underlying the entextualized uses examined previously.

To begin with, differences arise from the fact that this is spoken student discourse through which they construct subjectivity; their use of first-person pronouns especially bears examination. As Urban (1996:44–51) points out, there is no necessary connection between the use of we and the assignment of a group name. We for these students derives not from a preexisting cultural classification but from their perception of shared conditions—urban, non-white, largely working-class—structuring habitus (Bourdieu 1977), and they routinely refer to culture in ways that presuppose its equation with those conditions. Moreover, almost none saw the racially unmarked as having culture. In their usage, as on the Multicultural Programs page (and underlying the ethos of “educating the public”) culture indicates a recasting of racial marking as valued embodiments. This is the antithesis of the devalued conflation of race/class marking that race/class marked people grow up with, in which one is robbed of value by those elements marking one as non-white and poor. Recasting reverses this polarity. That which marks one as non-white is reified and intrinsically valued, as practices worth doing, history worth preserving, customs worth keeping. This neutralizes class marking and naturalizes the relation of culture and markedness. Whiteness becomes the absence of all this so the notion of “white culture” becomes marked, as pointed out by Janet, a New Yorker from a Haitian family in a 1999 interview:

They particularly use white culture? The two words together? I've never heard of that. . . . people always talk about black culture but you don't hear anything about white culture. But you know, if you're black and people don't consider you black, then I guess you're white, you're part of the white culture. . . . 

The antithetical nature of whiteness can be seen as highly aggressive. Whiteness not only lacks culture but destroys culture, as Nick (New York Dominican) explained in a 1998 interview:

Yeah, I always get the feeling that being white is more a loss of culture than—because you can't help but notice that white people—“the man”—goes out and eliminates cultures. They take over Puerto Rico, they take over the Caribbean, they take over—they're conquerors. That's what I grew up believing, they come, they conquer you and then you become whitified.

Students talk about culture as aspects of subjectivity, who one is, or what one does, or where one comes from. When they talk of it in relation to nationality or race, they talk not of boxes to check but ways to be and act. Although at times their projection of cultural selves reflects the lamination of language, culture and nation, it also is about me and my family. Celia, whose family is Ecuadoran and Cuban, and who grew up in New York, brings up culture and race in response to my question, “what do people mean by acting white?” (1995 interview):

To me when you talk about, “oh, that person is acting white” . . . I think more of a person who is Latina . . . and who totally says “screw that culture, I don't want anything to do with it” . . . compared to someone who says “yeah, I'm Latina but I'm a person and I'm just here to do what I have to do. I acknowledge my culture, I speak Spanish, I respect my parents, I visit my country” . . . whatever has to do with being considered Latina . . . 

Celia does not simply gloss acting white, she views it in opposition to and from within her sense of what it means to be who she is, part of which is to “acknowledge my culture” i.e. that way of being by which she defines herself, that people call Latina, and she sees in opposition to white. “Screw that culture” implies a rejection of that being. A similar characterization is expressed by another student, Ely, Puerto Rican from New York, who also locates culture spatially (1995):

But we're here alone and we're separated from that culture so we emphasize and we overemphasize it to ourselves and everyone else in the community and we try and go back and we talk to people and we're like—you know, it's so important that you know who you are and that you stay really close to the culture because when you go away you probably lose it if you're not really in touch with it . . . 

In her repeated use of we, Ely characterizes culture as shared, as a way of being, as who and what she and the rest of her “we” are. She understands culture in terms of locale, separation and distance (“that culture” from which “we're separated”). Elsewhere in the interview, she locates culture in New York, in her family and neighborhood, along with her class and Caribbean migrant background. Keisha, whose family is from Belize, describes culture in terms of possessable family practices, and, like Ely, currently far from her in space and subject to the kind of loss that might result from upward mobility (“assimilation”) (1998 interview):

Well, I'm from New York City and in New York City there's a different, there's a thriving culture that's not really here. So when I go back home a lot of people say—I mean they don't say it in these exact words, but they kind of tell me not to forget where I come from and not to lose my culture. And I think they mean just not to assimilate myself into the culture that's here. But I figure if I'm living here for four years and for a significant part of the year, and I end up not listening to the music that I used to listen to, listening to a whole different kind of music, or I start eating different foods, then I'll be losing my culture. I mean that's what I think they think it is. I can't see how I would automatically stop eating the same kind of foods but I think that's what it is. It means not to forget where you came from and what you're used to and what you grew up on.

Keisha describes culture coming in specific forms, as music and food. These are readily segmented things, easy to perform or participate in, and thoroughly commodified. At the same time, they are crucial elements of subjectivity, reminiscent of growing up in a particular family and neighborhood, and part of habitus. The taste of special food made by family is evocative in ways that a restaurant version, however “authentic,” is not. So underlying apparently cliched references to food, dance or music lies a powerful subjective history. Moreover, food and music provide readily recognizable reference points on a map of culture. In this narrative, Alicia (Dominican, New Yorker, 1998 interview) talks of taking her white friends almost literally to places on that map where she possesses bits of culture such as “my merengue”:

I've taught them a lot about Hispanic culture. I drag them over to parties (and) events (at the Latino club), I'm always playing merengue, I taught all of them to dance merengue. They're like up to here with my merengue. I'm always speaking Spanish, and with my mother, and they love it. I feel I've been very instrumental in teaching them, because they've never been around a culture like this.

Here Alicia parallels dance and language as cultural objects. Her sense of culture as a thing one has and does emerges in her repeated use of I as subject of active, transitive verbs (taught, drag, playing, speaking) and her emphasis on bringing her friends into her world. These practices grow out of family: Spanish is what she speaks with her mother.

The anchoring of cultural subjectivity in kinship recurs often in these student narratives, as demonstrated by Rita, Filipina, also from New York (1998 interview):

And I've gone back to Philippine culture and tried to learn as much as I could from my grandmother and my mom and my aunts and uncles. So here . . . I've kind of grown an attachment to my Philippine culture, and a pride I've gotten. So here . . . it's been more of a positive type of experience and a lot of people know me through the Asian Cultural Society.

While Rita does not specify cultural practices, she does describes culture both as an inheritance and as something learned, coming down to her through her mother, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. She includes nothing not readily recognized as ‘culture’ by an American: when I asked how one “has” a culture, she explained it in terms of inheritance and kinship, a consciousness of continuous descent important to those who live it however outsiders racialize it (and note the social evolutionary perspective in her first sentence):

For me I think it's something people seem to categorize, as like backward or indigenous. Something that's kind of rooted toward rituals and obviously not the norm or the white culture. I guess going back to ways of life, family, traditions, different ideologies, like I know we were talking in my class today about how families in the Philippines, you live with your family, you don't move out of your home after college. You go back home and you raise your family with the parent and the grandparent in the house, you don't separate yourself.

Where Rita leaves unspecified what she learned from her family, Niki, African American from New York, describes her family teaching her specific elements of black history (1998 interview):

But I grew up in a household where that was all I was taught about, black history, black culture—like everyone's talking about Amistad, I knew about Amistad what, when I was in fifth grade?

Niki's perception of culture fits an academic frame, as forms of knowledge. Here, in response to my asking what it means to have a culture, she brings together knowledge, identity, and ownership in a list of what to avoid and what to cherish:

Having a culture? It's more so identity, keeping your identity as a group of people in a certain place. Like at (this school), I feel like I haven't lost my culture, I'm the same person, like cultural identity, the four years I have been here. And I haven't denied any aspect of my culture, or whatever. I haven't made excuses either. I try to explain certain issues to people and they can just take it however they want to take it. . . . I love my culture. I'm not giving it up.

Culture as used among these students is imagined as segmentable practices and forms of knowledge that can be possessed and transmitted, that have intrinsic value, that make people better, that must be actively claimed (“no excuses”), and that have a family and spacial location. Their talk about it indexes their participation in and commitment to an institutional world and trajectory that takes them away from where such ‘culture’ originated for them. Their imagining of “culture” in the terms described here presupposes continual experience of race and (for most) class markedness. Framing that is the contrast of cultural/acultural: college as an institution belongs to the world of the acultural modern in which ‘culture’ exists only in a limited range of forms and enactments whose terms are set by the institutional structures of modernity and which are valued insofar as they contribute to those structures as institutional service.

Making Culture: The Work of Student Cultural Providers

In his study of Quebecois national culture, Handler (1988) details the production of reified, naturalized, possessable, and authentic “culture” that fits institutional parameters and serves institutional functions in a modern nation state. Comparably, such production work is done here by students whose work starts with organizational tasks. Dora, a graduating officer of the Latino student society, outlines her organization work (2004 interview):

I delegated jobs or tasks to the rest of the e-board, depending on what event we were doing for the week or for the month. I would also put agendas together for meetings, both e-board and general membership meetings. I sent out e-mails. I communicated with different faculty and administration about different events that were going on with the organization. There were times when I also contacted outside people that we wanted to book for whatever events we were doing. I sent e-mails out—as secretary I sent e-mails out with the minutes. I took minutes. I handled the budget. I dealt with . . . the Dean of Students office about our budget, handing in receipts and making check requests on time.

This task list would enhance a job resume. Such organizational tasks frame subjectivity among fellow members, especially officers, in part because they spend a lot of time together doing work that no one else does. The shared work enhances the sense of a culture-sharing “us” emerging from these organizations as well as a strong contrast with the unmarked “them.”“We” have a special institutional responsibility (as leaders) and, as explained by Aaron, a graduating member of the Black student society e-board (2002), a specific responsibility to the group represented:

After being community service chair, I ran for vice president and I won, so I became vice president . . . And my role became much more of a leadership role in that I had to serve not only as a role model almost but you had to be very proactive in that whatever you did in terms of—I would argue that (the college) is very limiting in terms of issues of diversity, in that there's a framework you work within as opposed to—you can't offer ideas that are “out of the box,” quote-unquote.

The “out-of-the-box” ideas would be those that push representations of difference (of “our culture”) past what the institution recognizes as an acceptable contribution. To Aaron, that limit appears to be well before any institutional change gets enacted:

So I always had to remain optimistic at all times, in terms of (the college's) claims relating to diversity. However every year we admit the same amount of students of color. . . . You just question whatever motives—is it just in rhetoric? Or is (the college) really—does it intend to do this in practice? As VP, I also administered the budget. In that instance (the college) is very generous, they gave (us) a couple of thousand dollars to do what you want with. The sense I got from that was one of—we're satisfying our diversity component so it doesn't hurt us to lose this amount of money to pretty much placate or appease the people of color at (the college) so that we don't look to complain about diversity because of the fact that they're giving us a sum of money to do what we want with for diversity programming. The VP was an intense role, but I felt sorry for the president who's a close friend of mine.

Aaron makes clear that officership is tasked with cultural provision in a way that maintains a status quo of racial markedness. He speaks as a member of the college, alternating we as the college collectively (We admit, we're satisfying), and we as the Black student group (so that we don't look to complain). He goes on to explain the specific constraints of cultural provision work within the College's expectations:

I would say, as much as I would like to go against it, the charge of (the Black student organization) is to provide the diversity programming for the College. Despite what the students want to do, we still have to get our budget approved so we can get our programming approved, and if we don't fit into the mold of well, how is this going to affect the campus as opposed to an insular event, we can't really do it unless—well, what's the College campus benefitting from, in you doing this event? So I know that the charge of the organization is to pretty much—it's institution driven, it's driven by the administration.

The task structures associated with cultural provision are those of contemporary bureaucracies. Aaron points out that bureaucratic considerations drive both the process of provision, and the desired outcomes of that process: “what's the College campus benefitting from, in you doing this event?” The value is on process rather than on a specific product, further evident in his observation that from the viewpoint of the unmarked, the cultural products of the marked can become interchangeable, an interchangeability reflecting the parallel relation of each marked multicultural organization to the unmarked whole:

Yes—I used to often ask Student Assembly to co-sponsor certain events and they would often mix up the names in terms of—I'd say, would you like to co-sponsor this event with (us) and they'd say well we already did something yesterday with (you) and I'd say actually no, that was (the Asian Student organization). “Whatever, they're all the same.” And that was exactly the response I got from the Student Assembly president.

Childs, Nguyen, and Handler (2008: 179) drawing on senior theses by Nguyen and Childs, consider comparable work undertaken by multicultural organization officers at the University of Virginia: “The clubs themselves exist (in the native viewpoint) to fulfill a mission, solve a problem, make a contribution and generally to ‘improve’ the University.” They note the disconnect between official University discourse of student “leadership” and what student “leaders” (often inexperienced, usually over-scheduled, and routinely faced with structural intransigence) encounter. Childs (2005) shows how students not racially marked can distance themselves from the entire enterprise while viewing the racially marked as “self-segregating,” abdicating their responsibility to provide the unmarked with the opportunity to practice their “intercultural skills” (2005:11–12). Nguyen (2005), writing of her own experiences as an officer of the Asian student society, describes the time and energy required by this work (at least as much as by classwork), an effort touted by colleges and universities. She points out the peculiar dilemma of racially marked students bearing responsibility for “solving” institutional problems caused by the sociohistorical forces originally responsible for racial markedness. She narrates how she started out believing that if they could only communicate and organize enough, they could “solve” institutional “problems” by “educating the community.”Nguyen describes requests from “ ‘mainstream’ clubs and offices to sit in on their innumerable diversity planning efforts throughout the year” (2005:30) which seemed to strike no one as an imposition since she “chose” these commitments. She describes the exhaustion experienced by her and her peers and the frustration with low event turnouts, and the tendency of her administrative contact to cast this as her personal problem brought on by neglect of food and sleep, a mystification of an intransigent structural inequity that maintains the markedness she and students like her are supposed to “solve.” Only racialized subjects can produce diversity, yet institutions whose very structures reproduce so much of the opposition underlying racism do not know what to do with these racialized subjects.

Culture in the Acultural Modern Institution

The term culture is referentially variable even within anthropology, and popular notions of culture bear only superficial resemblance to what anthropologists study. By the late twentieth century, culture in the U.S. social imaginary had become conceptualized, as Segal and Handler (1995:392) put it, as “visible identity groupings,” most prominently “races” or race-like formations, elemental cultures: individually imagined as self-evident, natural, solidary groups united by a “heritage” or “tradition” distinguishing what each culture“possesses” (1995:397) and aggregating into multiculturalism. Such formations, Dominguez (1995:337) argues, recast their subject matter as historically constituted while still racialized and, as Chock (1995) shows, are ranked by moral value and described as narratives of progress in U.S. nation building, dissolving evidence of structural racialization. These constructs thus contain contradictions which surface, as Gaudio and Bialostok (2005) found, in routine talk: culture can be talked about as both individuals making progress and as race holding people back.

This folk distinction echoes the place of culture in the world of the institutionally modern. Insofar as culture contributes to progress and is thus useful, it is compatible with modernity. Insofar as it holds people back, it is not and is therefore useless. In his discussion of folk (as it were) notions of modernity vis-à-vis culture, C. Taylor (1999) describes one notion of modernity as the summit of reason which exists outside of culture (as opposed to the model of the modern as high culture). Culture becomes useful by fitting into the shapes and channels of the acultural modern. As Gershon and J. Taylor (2008) argue, culture exists in modern institutions within bureaucratically defined spaces and with bureaucratically defined functions, classifying and organizing people and practices. The social formations and concepts of modernity—science, technology, medicine, education, law, the economy, and so on—are the taken-for-granted frameworks into which content, including culture and its carriers, must fit. That content is by definition productive. Institutions of higher education are key sites for producing rational, useful knowledge that contribute to career advancement and industrial productivity. Participating in higher education “advances” one to higher possibilities and goals in life. The legitimacy of culture and culture carriers in higher education depends on their capacity to contribute to such advancement. The neoliberal notion of culture as an individually possessed skill set is entirely compatible with this concept. Culture that fits this institutional mission is unmarked, normative. Culture that does not fit is marked—non-normative—and not modern.

Underlying the opposition of the unmarked acultural modern and the marked cultural nonmodern are the conditions under which named and recognized groups form. Examining the dynamics of ethnolinguistic recognition, Silverstein (2003b) describes a set of hierarchic relations moving out and down from a “topmost” set of privileged and enduringly unmarked social formations. The sense of groups as primordially bounded, labeled entities is the cumulative performative outcome of myriad “mutually reinforcing” discursive acts in which social actors “create and sustain an ‘us’ different from either ‘you’ or ‘them’ ” (534). However the labels elsewhere shift, this secure location of unmarkedness persists, as does the renewing dynamic of markedness. That secure location is, of course, the point from which whiteness has historically been generated. So long as that sense of marked groupness exist, the polarity remains, nor do marked groups get to set up the rules by which their locations and identities are recognized through the “sociocultural scheduling of emblematic identity displays” (Silverstein 2003b:538, italics in original). This dynamic can be seen in the Multicultural Programs web site and in the student narratives. Emblematic identity displays can ethnicize (Urciuoli 1996:16) racial markedness, can recast it in ways that mediate the polarity of racial markedness and unmarkedness. But the markedness does not altogether go away.

The institutional work of “cultural” multicultural groups puts them in a situation where their roles as culture providers depend on their being relatively marked. Similarly, as Dominguez (1994) and Dávila (2006) have pointed out, institutions hire diverse or multicultural faculty to represent historically underrepresented groups—faculty who then find themselves handed the work of explaining what race means—while institutions restrict actual opportunities for the kind of hiring equity that might really ameliorate systemic racial markedness. Moreover, as Guillory (1993) points out, academic multiculturalism is basically organized by text production, the authors of which stand for one or another “culture group.”“Culture” is somehow located in the texts themselves despite the fact that such a notion of “culture” only exists because it is entextualized and that such texts mean what they mean specifically in higher education. The cultural capital accruing to such entextualizations of “culture” presupposes the existence of those groups qua groups, since they tend to be texts about “types of people.” And those texts take on cultural capital primarily in the acultural institution in which scholar-teachers (some of whom also write them) assign them to students, very often in the literature classes associated with the languages associated with those cultures.²³

This brings us back to the work of our student culture providers. In their enactments of cultural identities, what grew out of localized, usually class-based immigrant experience is typically relocated to a global identity sphere (as when ethnic language is reframed as national/global) through what Silverstein (2003b:547) describes as elite re-ethnicization. Culture areas worldwide become isomorphic with U.S. categories of racial markedness. This in turn shapes the ways in which student organizations enact such culture. In order for cultural organizations to “educate the community” about African-American, Latino and Asian “culture” (respectively), within and outside the United States, they fashion representations of those “cultures.” The specific content of such cultures is generic, such as festivals, musical and dance performance. Such performance has market as well as educational value, as Dávila (2004) has shown. Given that social mobility has become largely unimaginable without college, and given the increasing commodification of higher education and, as Shumar (1997) has demonstrated, its ever-growing concern with image, such generic cultural provision works nicely as symbolic capital, set out in mosaics of imagery. But student cultural providers can find themselves in a tricky position. When they engage in cultural activities they may do so to make a public statement about what it means to be marked, but their very markedness is what makes them available for those enactments. They look to the multicultural organizations for sociality, and sometimes find that sociality conflicted and problematic for complex reasons of class, gender and degrees of racialization that I cannot address here. Sometimes the institution rewards them more for their cultural work than their schoolwork, and sometimes their involvement in activities gets in the way of schoolwork. As members and officers of student cultural organizations, their job is to craft projections of culture, built from recognizably authentic elements that are also performable in institutions not really looking for social change. However much the prior existence of such culture is presupposed, it only exists insofar as it is enacted, and only as those enactments.

Conclusion

By comparing the entextualized enregisterments of culture on the three web pages with each other, and with talk about culture among the school's culture providers, we see the range of interpretations accruing to the term. Its different enregisterments index distinct areas of institutional and interpersonal dynamics. While there is some degree of interdiscursivity among the three web pages, the promotional page is least coherent with the other two pages, and the most coherent with a neoliberal perspective on culture and diversity as utilitarian goods. The promotional page is also the referentially least specific, not surprising, given that its goal is to attract stakeholders by providing an association of positive images of education and its outcomes. The Dean of Students/Multicultural Programs page is most referentially specific of the three pages, again not surprising given that its goal is to provide institutional support for socially marked students, which relies in turn on race and gender classification. This page is most interdiscursive with talk among students of color about their experience, and the classifications drawn on by this page are largely shared by students. But the more student talk gets into what it means to be a student of color in a white institution, the more complicated the enregisterment gets, and the more distant from anything that has been entextualized on the web pages.

For the students who do this work, talk about diversity becomes talk about equality and safety, however much those students process that message through internalized filters of neoliberal value. As they describe their experiences of difference at the school, talk about culture becomes talk about shared subjectivity. Such talk provides a positive take on markedness, insofar as that markedness can be identified with concepts and enactments of culture that reflect institutional values. Such talk can also be about class and location/dislocation in painful ways. In multicultural programming, culture discourse is intertwined with social justice concerns but it is also intertwined with approved enactments provided by students. When culture surfaces in discourses disconnected from the direct experience of the racially marked, as it does in promotional registers, considerations of markedness, or the conditions generating markedness, drop from sight and emphasis is placed on its utilitarian value. Just as culture in this register is not linked to anything specific, so too enactments of culture showcased in college advertising are disconnected from structural inequalities and reduced to pieces in a mosaic of cultural and symbolic capital provided to the organization.

The historical processes leading to structures of racial markedness have consistently, in U.S. history, been obscured by notions that it is incumbent on the racially marked to demonstrate their worth. Public discussion of racism has long been accompanied by lists of contributions made by racialized people to the society that racializes them. Neoliberalized diversity may be a new paradigm of markedness, but it is coherent with long-established ways of conceptualizing race.

Notes

• Acknowledgments. Versions of this paper were presented to the Anthropology Section of the New York Academy of Sciences (1/08), the Semiotics Workshop at the University of Chicago (2/08), the Think Tank talk series at Hamilton College (9/08), and the Anthropology Department Colloquium Series at the University of South Carolina (10/08). Special thanks for insightful readings and comments to Ilana Gershon, Rudi Gaudio, Richard Handler, Chaise LaDousa, Jonathan Rosa, Michael Silverstein, and Eli Thorkelson.

• 1

  The College uses the Common Application form on which applicants have option of “identifying with a particular ethnic group” by checking all of the following that apply: African American, African, or Black; Native American or Alaska Native; Asian American; Asian including Indian subcontinent; Hispanic, Latino (specify country); Mexican American, Chicano; Puerto Rican; Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander; White or Caucasian; Other (specify). (https://www.commonapp.org/CommonApp/DownloadForms.aspx last accessed 8/13/08).

• 2

  I realize that I use white, non-white, and students of color in this piece without foregrounding them as constructions as I do diverse or multicultural. They are, of course, constructions as are all such classifying terms. For the purposes of this analysis, I use them to the extent that they represent, rather than mask, the presuppositions about markedness that I am trying to explain.

• 3

  https://www.hamilton.edu/admission/diversity/ (last accessed 8/20/08).

• 4

  In his study of admissions at a small liberal arts school, Stevens (2007) discusses both the challenges faced by admissions professionals in presenting a “diverse” face of such a school to non-white prospective students (161ff), the importance of maintaining one's place among one's peer institutions by drawing such students, and the belief that good students are drawn to the school by its “diversity” numbers (179ff). The U.S. News and World Report ranking of “campus diversity” in liberal arts colleges makes clear the market function of diversity as symbolic capital. (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/about/diversity_brief.php last accessed 8/20/08)

• 5

  Thus, I have seen diversity referred to during in-house strategic planning discussions as a “hedge against obsolescence.”

• 6

  http://www.mycareer.ford.com/ONTHETEAM.ASP?CID=15 (last accessed 8/20/08). The web site goes on to order diversity with corporate management, teamwork, and skills references: “We find that well-managed, diverse work teams can outperform homogeneous teams in quantity, creativity and quality; that complex problems can best be solved by cross-functional teams typical of matrix organizations; and that people who work, live and learn in integrated settings develop stronger interpersonal communications and negotiating skills.”

• 7

  http://www.stamats.com/whatwedo/creativeservices/brandmarketing/default.asp (last accessed 8/13/08)

• 8

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/Student_Activities/organizations.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 9

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/Student_Activities/organizations.html?action=getOrgs&category=CO (last accessed 8/30/08)

• 10

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/Student_Activities/organizations.html?action=getOrgs&category=CA (last accessed 8/30/08)

• 11

  There is no student group focused on disabilities though the student government maintains a Diversity and Accessibility committee which addresses disability issues.

• 12

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/dean_of_students/diversity/index.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 13

  http://www.hamilton.edu/college/multicultural_affairs/culture.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 14

  http://www.hamilton.edu/college/dean_of_students/diversity/multiculturalorgs.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 15

  Nowhere on the college web pages is diversity defined, though I did hear that an administrator in either the admissions or communication office had expressed concern over the irregularity among references to diversity across different school web pages.

• 16

  How race came to be identified with these categories is an important question, though one I cannot address here, but see Skrentny 2002 for useful history.

• 17

  Semiotic variability across different indexical orders is especially likely when terms have intangible denotata and are at the same time assumed to be transparent and self-explanatory, as happens with the terms culture and communication. When such concepts are heavily ideologized, reference to them may function to align the referer to specific institutional values such as playing down inequality and playing up a sense of “empowered” agency. Such usages are what I have called elsewhere strategically deployable shifters: referring expressions whose systemic semantic value appears obvious yet is indeterminate, even vacuous, while the contextual or indexical value is its content. In that sense they are shifters (Silverstein 1976). Since the primary function of such usage is the social alignment of user and addressee(s) or audience, or in some cases, of user and non-present third party, the indeterminacy can be deployed to that end, i.e. strategically. I have elsewhere addressed such deployments of diversity (Urciuoli 2003a) and skills (Urciuoli 2008).

• 18

  For example, in Spring of 2008, a campus activist group proposed the establishment of a “Cultural Education Center” to “provide a space for numerous minority student organizations” including multicultural, LGBT and women's organizations, and to “provide a ‘safe space’ for marginalized students.” Here, cultural indicates racial and gender markedness. It is used in the name of the center, and in the phrases “commitment and respect for cultural and intellectual diversity” and “cultural issues.” (“SJI Proposes Cultural Center” by Mallory Reed, http://www.hamilton.edu/Spectator/022208/News/SJI_Proposes_Cultural_Center.html. Last accessed 8/23/2008)

• 19

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/dean_of_students/diversity/index.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 20

  https://www.hamilton.edu/college/dean_of_students/diversity/multiculturalorgs.html (last accessed 8/30/08).

• 21

  In Urciuoli 2003b, I address identity formation issues among students from working-class Latin American and Hispanophone Caribbean immigrant families.

• 22

  Although they are not using culture metadiscursively, to label a phenomenon, in the way Mehan describes. Rather they take for granted what counts as culture.

• 23

  Argument originally developed in Urciuoli 1999.