Shalini Shankar
Biographic Data
| ID | 86473 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shalini Shankar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shalini |
| FAMILY NAME | Shankar |
| SIGNATURE | SHANKAR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3621-4487 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 314 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions
This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's "salvage anthropology," which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropol…
Reel to real: Desi teens’ linguistic engagements with Bollywood
Diasporic media, though widely discussed theoretically and occasionally ethnographically, are seldom explored with explicit attention to language. “Bollywood” films - feature-length movies produced and distributed in Bombay (Mumbai), India - are an excellent media source through which to examine linguistic anthropological topics of indexicality, bivalency, and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, I analyze the circulation and consump…
Nothing Sells like Whiteness: Race, Ontology, and American Advertising
In this article, I examine how white supremacy is reproduced and circulated through advertising. I explore the shift from the racial and ethnic specificities of "multiculturalism" to the more open-ended concept of "diversity," which indexes difference in unspecific and nonthreatening ways. How diversity is represented in general-market advertising and how it differs from multicultural advertising offers a window into white supremacy and the role …
Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal
The recent reframing of the Visual Anthropology section in American Anthropologist was motivated by a sense that new technologies have democratizing power and that through multimodal forms we can address a shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). Our purpose in this essay is to engage and expand the discussion raised by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill in their 2…
Inclusion Rider vs. Race Science
Ads and More
Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations
Here's the Rub on the Dove Skincare Ad
Linguistic Anthropology in 2016: Now What
In this review, I extend the ideological and discursive insights on prejudice and racism offered by Jane Hill in her work The Everyday Language of White Racism to consider the potential of linguistic anthropology to address social injustice. In a year marked by the global rise of right-wing politics, 2016 cannot simply be viewed as business as usual, but rather calls for a reevaluation of the potential of linguistic anthropology in light of what …
Coming in First: Sound and Embodiment in Spelling Bees
The increasingly intense level of competition of the National Spelling Bee in recent years suggests that this "brain sport" has become a complex site for the politics of language standardization, media, and childhood competition. In this article I delve into this nexus to explore its heart: sound. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at spelling bees and with spellers, families, officials, and media broadcasters, I examine how spellers expe…
Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers
In Advertising Diversity Shalini Shankar explores how racial and ethnic differences are created and commodified through advertisements, marketing, and public relations. Drawing from periods of fieldwork she conducted over four years at Asian American ad agencies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Shankar illustrates the day-to-day process of creating and producing broadcast and internet advertisements. She examines the adaptation of gen…
Against Stenography for the Powerful: An Interview with P. Sainath
Award-winning journalist P. Sainath discusses the degree to which journalism has become “stenography of the powerful,” which not only forwards corporate interests but also standardizes the writing of news in ways that kill the very elements of style and commitment that marked the best journalism of earlier generations. His recent responses to such corporatization include the creation of “The People’s Archive of India,” which enlists the citizens …
Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value
In this article, we bring together two distinct ethnographic cases of capitalist production-food producers in northern Italy and Asian American advertising executives in New York City-to illustrate how these producers use language and materiality to produce value in global capitalism. Taken together, the cases illustrate how contemporary capitalist producers utilize particular notions of ethnolinguistic heritage in ways that reflect group-specifi…
Affect and sport in South Asian American advertising
In this article I consider how sport and celebrity athletes are strategically used in advertising tailored toward South Asians in the diaspora, what I refer to as ‘South Asian American advertising’. I discuss how ad executives construct and deploy affect in advertisements to resignify meanings linked to particular sports and analyze the significance of celebrity athletes in creating new diasporic affiliations and identities. Although sport and af…
Racial Naturalization, Advertising, and Model Consumers for a New Millennium
In this article I introduce the term “racial naturalization” to address the ways in which contemporary advertisements depict Asian Americans as model citizens with distinct cultural and linguistic traditions. Through the analogy of naturalization, I draw attention to the capitalist processes of legitimization that make Asian Americans a vital part of multicultural advertising, and how Asian American ad executives contribute to mass-mediated repre…
Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism
Language and materiality have long been considered separate phenomena, but an increasing interest in their convergence suggests the productive potential of considering the linguistic and the material within the same analytic frame. Linguistic anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines have ethnographically investigated how the linguistic and the material are intertwined, focusing on various ways in which this occurs. In order to highlight…
Creating model consumers: Producing ethnicity, race, and class in Asian American advertising
How does Asian American advertising contribute to the construction of race and ethnicity in the contemporary United States? In this article, I consider how executives write advertising copy and create original artwork for Asian American advertisements in ways that index brand identities. I introduce the analytic of "metaproduction," a process of material and linguistic signification that uses metacultural and metalinguistic values to connect micr…
Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration: Formations of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Everyday Practice
In this article I consider "style" as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic d…
Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley
Speaking like a Model Minority: "FOB" Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley
This article discusses what it means to be a "model minority" linguistically by examining how language ideologies, class, and gender shape language use for Desi (South Asian American) teenagers in a Silicon Valley high school. Upper middle-class Desi teens follow monolingual norms while middle-class Desi teens construct heteroglossic "FOB styles" that incorporate Punjabi, Desi Accented English, California slang, and hip-hop lexicon. Style constru…
The anthropology of names and naming – Edited by Gabriele vom Bruck & Barbara Bodenhorn
Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications
This article analyzes an intersection of materiality and language use. I argue that verbal practices, generally overlooked in material culture studies, are an integral dimension of consumption. Types of talk - both referential and indexical - can illustrate how people mediate relationships with objects, as well as with each other. Drawing on ethnographic research in Silicon Valley, California (1999-2001), I present examples from middle-class Sout…
Neuropsychiatric perspectives from nineteenth-century India: The diaries of Dr Charles I. Smith
The history of disease contributes to a better understanding of the growth of ideas in medicine. The colonial period was marked by a rapid increase in the variety of diseases that were known to European practitioners. We have studied the diary of Dr Charles Smith who worked in Bangalore in the nineteenth century. We feel that some of his descriptions tally with later accounts of cysticercosis. He also comments on a wide range of behavioural sympt…
Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America
(1999). Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 151-162
Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism
Language and materiality have long been considered separate phenomena, but an increasing interest in their convergence suggests the productive potential of considering the linguistic and the material within the same analytic frame. Linguistic anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines have ethnographically investigated how the linguistic and the material are intertwined, focusing on various ways in which this occurs. In order to highlight…
Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value
In this article, we bring together two distinct ethnographic cases of capitalist production-food producers in northern Italy and Asian American advertising executives in New York City-to illustrate how these producers use language and materiality to produce value in global capitalism. Taken together, the cases illustrate how contemporary capitalist producers utilize particular notions of ethnolinguistic heritage in ways that reflect group-specifi…
Speaking like a Model Minority: "FOB" Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley
This article discusses what it means to be a "model minority" linguistically by examining how language ideologies, class, and gender shape language use for Desi (South Asian American) teenagers in a Silicon Valley high school. Upper middle-class Desi teens follow monolingual norms while middle-class Desi teens construct heteroglossic "FOB styles" that incorporate Punjabi, Desi Accented English, California slang, and hip-hop lexicon. Style constru…
Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal
The recent reframing of the Visual Anthropology section in American Anthropologist was motivated by a sense that new technologies have democratizing power and that through multimodal forms we can address a shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). Our purpose in this essay is to engage and expand the discussion raised by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill in their 2…
Creating model consumers: Producing ethnicity, race, and class in Asian American advertising
How does Asian American advertising contribute to the construction of race and ethnicity in the contemporary United States? In this article, I consider how executives write advertising copy and create original artwork for Asian American advertisements in ways that index brand identities. I introduce the analytic of "metaproduction," a process of material and linguistic signification that uses metacultural and metalinguistic values to connect micr…
Nothing Sells like Whiteness: Race, Ontology, and American Advertising
In this article, I examine how white supremacy is reproduced and circulated through advertising. I explore the shift from the racial and ethnic specificities of "multiculturalism" to the more open-ended concept of "diversity," which indexes difference in unspecific and nonthreatening ways. How diversity is represented in general-market advertising and how it differs from multicultural advertising offers a window into white supremacy and the role …
Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications
This article analyzes an intersection of materiality and language use. I argue that verbal practices, generally overlooked in material culture studies, are an integral dimension of consumption. Types of talk - both referential and indexical - can illustrate how people mediate relationships with objects, as well as with each other. Drawing on ethnographic research in Silicon Valley, California (1999-2001), I present examples from middle-class Sout…
Coming in First: Sound and Embodiment in Spelling Bees
The increasingly intense level of competition of the National Spelling Bee in recent years suggests that this "brain sport" has become a complex site for the politics of language standardization, media, and childhood competition. In this article I delve into this nexus to explore its heart: sound. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at spelling bees and with spellers, families, officials, and media broadcasters, I examine how spellers expe…
Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration: Formations of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Everyday Practice
In this article I consider "style" as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic d…
Racial Naturalization, Advertising, and Model Consumers for a New Millennium
In this article I introduce the term “racial naturalization” to address the ways in which contemporary advertisements depict Asian Americans as model citizens with distinct cultural and linguistic traditions. Through the analogy of naturalization, I draw attention to the capitalist processes of legitimization that make Asian Americans a vital part of multicultural advertising, and how Asian American ad executives contribute to mass-mediated repre…
Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions
This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's "salvage anthropology," which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropol…
Linguistic Anthropology in 2016: Now What
In this review, I extend the ideological and discursive insights on prejudice and racism offered by Jane Hill in her work The Everyday Language of White Racism to consider the potential of linguistic anthropology to address social injustice. In a year marked by the global rise of right-wing politics, 2016 cannot simply be viewed as business as usual, but rather calls for a reevaluation of the potential of linguistic anthropology in light of what …
Affect and sport in South Asian American advertising
In this article I consider how sport and celebrity athletes are strategically used in advertising tailored toward South Asians in the diaspora, what I refer to as ‘South Asian American advertising’. I discuss how ad executives construct and deploy affect in advertisements to resignify meanings linked to particular sports and analyze the significance of celebrity athletes in creating new diasporic affiliations and identities. Although sport and af…
Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America
(1999). Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 151-162
Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America
(1999). Cultural Politics amongst South Asians in North America. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 151-162
Neuropsychiatric perspectives from nineteenth-century India: The diaries of Dr Charles I. Smith
The history of disease contributes to a better understanding of the growth of ideas in medicine. The colonial period was marked by a rapid increase in the variety of diseases that were known to European practitioners. We have studied the diary of Dr Charles Smith who worked in Bangalore in the nineteenth century. We feel that some of his descriptions tally with later accounts of cysticercosis. He also comments on a wide range of behavioural sympt…
Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications
This article analyzes an intersection of materiality and language use. I argue that verbal practices, generally overlooked in material culture studies, are an integral dimension of consumption. Types of talk - both referential and indexical - can illustrate how people mediate relationships with objects, as well as with each other. Drawing on ethnographic research in Silicon Valley, California (1999-2001), I present examples from middle-class Sout…
The anthropology of names and naming – Edited by Gabriele vom Bruck & Barbara Bodenhorn
Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley
Speaking like a Model Minority: "FOB" Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley
This article discusses what it means to be a "model minority" linguistically by examining how language ideologies, class, and gender shape language use for Desi (South Asian American) teenagers in a Silicon Valley high school. Upper middle-class Desi teens follow monolingual norms while middle-class Desi teens construct heteroglossic "FOB styles" that incorporate Punjabi, Desi Accented English, California slang, and hip-hop lexicon. Style constru…
Style and Language Use among Youth of the New Immigration: Formations of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Everyday Practice
In this article I consider "style" as a linguistic and cultural concept that can demonstrate how identities performed through language use are linked to topics of central concern in studies of immigrant youth, including racial and ethnic formation, generational cohorts, acculturation, assimilation, and gender. I draw on anthropological and sociolinguistic approaches to style not generally considered in migration studies and present ethnographic d…
Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism
Language and materiality have long been considered separate phenomena, but an increasing interest in their convergence suggests the productive potential of considering the linguistic and the material within the same analytic frame. Linguistic anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines have ethnographically investigated how the linguistic and the material are intertwined, focusing on various ways in which this occurs. In order to highlight…
Creating model consumers: Producing ethnicity, race, and class in Asian American advertising
How does Asian American advertising contribute to the construction of race and ethnicity in the contemporary United States? In this article, I consider how executives write advertising copy and create original artwork for Asian American advertisements in ways that index brand identities. I introduce the analytic of "metaproduction," a process of material and linguistic signification that uses metacultural and metalinguistic values to connect micr…
Affect and sport in South Asian American advertising
In this article I consider how sport and celebrity athletes are strategically used in advertising tailored toward South Asians in the diaspora, what I refer to as ‘South Asian American advertising’. I discuss how ad executives construct and deploy affect in advertisements to resignify meanings linked to particular sports and analyze the significance of celebrity athletes in creating new diasporic affiliations and identities. Although sport and af…
Racial Naturalization, Advertising, and Model Consumers for a New Millennium
In this article I introduce the term “racial naturalization” to address the ways in which contemporary advertisements depict Asian Americans as model citizens with distinct cultural and linguistic traditions. Through the analogy of naturalization, I draw attention to the capitalist processes of legitimization that make Asian Americans a vital part of multicultural advertising, and how Asian American ad executives contribute to mass-mediated repre…
Against Stenography for the Powerful: An Interview with P. Sainath
Award-winning journalist P. Sainath discusses the degree to which journalism has become “stenography of the powerful,” which not only forwards corporate interests but also standardizes the writing of news in ways that kill the very elements of style and commitment that marked the best journalism of earlier generations. His recent responses to such corporatization include the creation of “The People’s Archive of India,” which enlists the citizens …
Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value
In this article, we bring together two distinct ethnographic cases of capitalist production-food producers in northern Italy and Asian American advertising executives in New York City-to illustrate how these producers use language and materiality to produce value in global capitalism. Taken together, the cases illustrate how contemporary capitalist producers utilize particular notions of ethnolinguistic heritage in ways that reflect group-specifi…
Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers
In Advertising Diversity Shalini Shankar explores how racial and ethnic differences are created and commodified through advertisements, marketing, and public relations. Drawing from periods of fieldwork she conducted over four years at Asian American ad agencies in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Shankar illustrates the day-to-day process of creating and producing broadcast and internet advertisements. She examines the adaptation of gen…
Coming in First: Sound and Embodiment in Spelling Bees
The increasingly intense level of competition of the National Spelling Bee in recent years suggests that this "brain sport" has become a complex site for the politics of language standardization, media, and childhood competition. In this article I delve into this nexus to explore its heart: sound. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at spelling bees and with spellers, families, officials, and media broadcasters, I examine how spellers expe…
Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations
Here's the Rub on the Dove Skincare Ad
Linguistic Anthropology in 2016: Now What
In this review, I extend the ideological and discursive insights on prejudice and racism offered by Jane Hill in her work The Everyday Language of White Racism to consider the potential of linguistic anthropology to address social injustice. In a year marked by the global rise of right-wing politics, 2016 cannot simply be viewed as business as usual, but rather calls for a reevaluation of the potential of linguistic anthropology in light of what …
Inclusion Rider vs. Race Science
Ads and More
Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal
The recent reframing of the Visual Anthropology section in American Anthropologist was motivated by a sense that new technologies have democratizing power and that through multimodal forms we can address a shift toward engagement and collaboration in anthropological research (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). Our purpose in this essay is to engage and expand the discussion raised by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill in their 2…
Nothing Sells like Whiteness: Race, Ontology, and American Advertising
In this article, I examine how white supremacy is reproduced and circulated through advertising. I explore the shift from the racial and ethnic specificities of "multiculturalism" to the more open-ended concept of "diversity," which indexes difference in unspecific and nonthreatening ways. How diversity is represented in general-market advertising and how it differs from multicultural advertising offers a window into white supremacy and the role …
Reel to real: Desi teens’ linguistic engagements with Bollywood
Diasporic media, though widely discussed theoretically and occasionally ethnographically, are seldom explored with explicit attention to language. “Bollywood” films - feature-length movies produced and distributed in Bombay (Mumbai), India - are an excellent media source through which to examine linguistic anthropological topics of indexicality, bivalency, and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, I analyze the circulation and consump…
Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions
This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's "salvage anthropology," which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropol…
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (11 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)