Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Coupland N.;Kelly-Holmes H.
2017 January
Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations
Making and marketing in the bilingual periphery: Materialization as metacultural transformation
Published
1
Optional Fields
© Cambridge University Press 2017. We are concerned here with the place branding and marketing of material objects offered for sale, and with particular artifacts made and sold in bilingual Ireland and Wales. We consider two specific cases: the Melin Tregwynt woollen mill located on the St. Davids peninsula in southwest Wales (www.melintregwynt.co.uk), and the Louis Mulcahy pottery workshop based in Dingle in southwest Ireland (www.louismulcahy.com). The strategy of place branding is a familiar one, associating a product with a named or symbolically invoked national, regional, or local place that is assumed to give it a measure of distinctiveness and appeal (cf. Schroeder 2009; Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006). But our two chosen cases give us access to sociolinguistic processes that are particular to ¿small and peripheral languages and nations¿ - a controversial phrase1 that we use for orientation purposes - and particular to the contemporary sociolinguistic and sociopolitical circumstances of Welsh and Irish as privileged (in terms of official status and language policy and planning interventions, which Irish and Welsh certainly are) and revitalizing small languages. Peripherality and smallness are, of course, relative concepts, but also flexible ones. Even more than identifying a language in terms of its distance from centers (of power, economic infrastructure, demographic concentrations) or in terms of numbers of speakers or another quantitative measure of vitality and power, we see peripherality and smallness as potentially productive and new ways of being for languages that have histories of minoritization.2 One of our ambitions for this chapter is to illustrate how this apparently paradoxical position has come about in relation to the marketing of nationally branded artifacts, (for an extensive discussion of this and related processes, see Pietikäinen, Jaffe, Kelly-Holmes, and Coupland 2016). We point to similarities in how Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy are able to imbue their enterprises of ¿making¿ - a term that has become conventional for artisanal, craft-based manufacturing - and their products with linguistic and cultural value. They do this not only by embedding fragments ofWelsh and Irish and nationally salient visual themes and tropes in the material objects that they manufacture but also by narrating and interpreting national and cultural values more explicitly in their marketing discourses.
9781107180949
165
184
10.1017/9781316848418.009
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