Dialogic Identities: Language, Food, Sex, and Sovereignty in Henua Ènana (Marquesas)

The Ènana (‘people’) of the Marquesas, an archipelago of the semi-autonomous collectivity of French Polynesia, have been negotiating their sovereignty with colonial and neoliberal forces for over two centuries. I began conducting ethnographic and linguistic research on the formation of their dialogic identities and emergent sovereignty in 1992. My research approach has been to focus on the multimodal socialization of communicative forms, foodways, and gender/sexuality in domestic and public settings and how these are interdiscursively entangled with global ideologies related to language, food, and sex. I have analyzed how these are digested and recombined by individuals, contributing to new subjectivities and ways of thinking, feeling, and acting from the village to the territorial capital over the course of the past 30 years. For this presentation, I analyze a sampling of foodscape photos and transcripts of everyday discourse around and about food, focusing on the intersection of gender roles and other sociocultural identities with the production, circulation, and consumption of food and language. In particular, I trace the relationship of these to efforts at awakening Ènana language and culture over the past 50 years, and I end with a sketch of my plans for my new fieldwork project entitled, Ènana en France. This research will explore how life in the French metropole (specifically in Toulon, Toulouse, and Paris) has influenced Ènana sentiments toward and engagement in programs to safeguard the language, culture, and environment of their homeland. Once again, I will use a discourse analytic lens to zoom in on everyday interactions and public displays involving food in order to understand the ongoing construction of dialogic identities as well as the class and gender dynamics that play a role in the Ènana sovereignty movement. By March, I hope to have some very preliminary findings, or at least hypotheses, to present to CREDO based on the analysis of social and other media, at least one recorded zoom interview with a willing participant, and a quick visit to Toulon.