Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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of what we know as ‘accent’: globalized identities are not absorbed in toto; they 

become an accent, a kind of inflection of other identities. This accented package – 

a-sufficiently-Irish-pub-in-Zottegem – is what we now understand as identity. 

We can see the particular configurations of features mentioned above as the 

‘micro-hegemonies’ mentioned earlier. In different niches of our social and 

cultural lives, we arrange features in such a way that they enable others to 

identify us as ‘authentic’, ‘real’ members of social groups, even if this authenticity 

comes with a lower rank as ‘apprentice’ within a particular field. We enter and 

leave these niches often in rapid sequence, changing footing and style each time 

and deploying the resources we have collected for performing each of these 

identities – our identity repertoire is the key to what we can be or can perform – 

in social life. 

Enoughness judgments determine the ways in which one can rise from the 

apprentice rank to higher, more authoritative ranks – apprentices orient towards 

the ‘full’ authenticity while they start building their own restricted versions of it. 

Fans of Irish pubs, for instance, would begin to exhibit and develop their fanship 

by collecting ‘Irish’ objects: green top hats, shamrock coasters, Guinness beer 

glasses, Irish national team soccer jerseys and so on. They gather objects that 

culturally bespeak ‘Irishness’ – such Irishness that can align them with the object 

they orient towards, the Irish pub and beyond it, an imaginary essential 

Irishness. Throughout all of this we see that ‘culture’ appears as that which 

provides (enough) meaning, i.e. makes practices and statements sufficiently 

recognizable for others as productions of identities. And throughout all of this, 

we see such cultures as things that are perpetually subject to learning practices. 

One is never a ‘full’ member of any cultural system, because the configurations of 

features are perpetually changing, and one’s fluency of yesterday need not 

guarantee fluency tomorrow. In the same move, we of course see how such 

processes involve a core of perpetually shifting normativities (the things that 

enable recognizability and, thus, meaning), and because of that, power – power 

operating at a variety of scale levels in a polycentric sociocultural environment 

in which all of us, all the time, are required to satisfy the rules of recognizability. 

All of this can be empirically investigated; it enables us to use an anti-essentialist 

framework that, however, does not lapse into a rhetoric of fragmentation and 

contradiction, but attempts to provide a realistic account of identity practices. 

Such practices, one will observe in a variety of domains, revolve around a 

complex and unpredictable notion of authenticity, which in turn rests on 

judgments of enoughness. The concise framework sketched here can serve as a 

heuristic for engaging with this enormous and rapidly changing domain of 

authenticity. 

 

References 

Agha, Asif (2007) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press 

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Blommaert, Jan (2009) Language, asylum, and the national order. Current 

Anthropology 50/4: 415-441 

Blommaert, Jan & Ben Rampton (2011) Language and superdiversity: A position 

paper. Working Papers in Urban Language and Linguistics paper 70. 

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. 

Cambridge: Harvard University Press 

Bucholtz, Mary & Sara Trechter (eds.) (2001) Discourses of Whiteness. Special 

issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11/1: 3-150. 

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari (2001) Mille Plateaux. Paris: Minuit. 

Hobsbawm, Eric & Terrence Ranger (eds.) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. 

Cambridge: Canto Books. 

Kennedy, Randall 2001. Racial passing. Ohio State Law Journal 62 (1145), 1-28.  

Mehan, Hugh (1996) The construction of an LD student: A case study in the 

politics of representation. In M. Silverstein & G. Urban (eds.) Natural Histories of 

Discourse: 253-276. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 

Moore, Robert (2011) ‘Taking up speech’ in an endangered language: Bilingual 

discourse in a heritage-language classroom. Paper, symposium ‘Language amnd 

superdiversity’. Gottingen, Max Planck Institute for Multi-ethnic and Multi-

religious Societies, June 2011. 

Rampton, Ben (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among adolescents. 

London: Longman 

Silverstein, Michael (2006) Old wine, new ethnographic lexicography. Annual 

Review of Anthropology 35: 481-496. 

Zizek, Slavoj (1994) Mapping Ideology. London: Verso 

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Chapter 2: 

Culture as accent 

 

Introduction 

Let us open with a mundane but telling example. Figure 1 shows an 

advertisement that was part of a campaign a couple of years ago. The well-

known beer brand Carlsberg here advertises a new bottle. 

 

Figure 1: probably the best bottle in the world 

Isn’t this interesting: a massive worldwide advertisement campaign is launched 

about the new shape of a beer bottle. The beer itself – what most people would 

perceive as the commodity to be purchased – remains unaltered; what changes is 

the packaging, the container in which the beer is sold. What is advertised and 

marketed here is a detail of the whole commodity, a non-essential aspect of it. Or 

is it? 

We see in our present ways of life how often the things that are construed and 

presented as relevant or crucial are in actual fact details, hardly fundamental 

aspects of something bigger and more encompassing. Thus, this paper intends to 

draw attention to the very small proportion of cultural material that seems to 

matter in many aspects of everyday life: the fact that in a world which otherwise 

revolves around strong tendencies towards uniformity, small – very small – 

differences acquire the status of fundamental aspects of being. Identities and 

senses of ‘being oneself’ are based on and grounded in miniscule deviations from 

standard formats and scripts that organize most of what this ‘being oneself’ is 

actually about. This pattern, in which culture increasingly appears as an ‘accent’, 

an inflection of standard codes and norms, is part of consumer culture. In that 

sense, it is old – remember Marcuse’s one-dimensional man (1964) and 

Bourdieu’s remarkably stable class-structuring patterns of cultural distinction 

(1984). But the increased speed and intensity that characterizes the present 

economy of cultural forms and that finds its expressions in the widespread 

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