To tell it directly or not: Coding transparency and corruption in Malagasy political oratory

This article discusses stylistic and contextual variations in the political oratory (kabary politika) of urban Madagascar. New imported oratorical styles and older styles of kabary represent competing linguistic markets where political leaders field broader issues of political modernity, fighting go...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguage in society Vol. 38; no. 1; pp. 47 - 69
Main Author JACKSON, JENNIFER L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.02.2009
Subjects
Accountability
Coding
Colloquial language
Corruption
Corruption in government
Culture
Democracy
Ethics
Goffman, Erving (1922-1982)
Governance
Government
Government corruption
Ideology
Language
Language ideologies
Language use
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistics
Madagascar
Malagasy language
Malaysia
Morality
Opacity
Oratory
Political campaigns
Political corruption
Political culture
Political speech
Political speeches
Politics
Rhetoric
Sociolinguistics
Speech
Syntactics
Transparency
Truth
Madagascar
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Summary:This article discusses stylistic and contextual variations in the political oratory (kabary politika) of urban Madagascar. New imported oratorical styles and older styles of kabary represent competing linguistic markets where political leaders field broader issues of political modernity, fighting government corruption through reforms toward transparency. Kabary has become the object of criticism in models for transparent government practice. This has affected the way leaders speak to and about the country, reifying a moral structure arguing what constitutes truth and how speakers understand language as conveying that truth. In this respect, this article describes linguistic and metalinguistic encodings of transparency versus corruption in the political communication styles of highland Malagasy political orators. It looks at how the rhetorical modes of an urban polity are reorganized in ways that reshape vernacular epistemologies of truth in language and shift the production of particular publics and their access to participation in political process. (Madagascar, kabary, oratory, democracy, linguistic variation, language ideology, truth and ethics, public opinion, public culture)*
Bibliography:ark:/67375/6GQ-SJD4V43M-C
ArticleID:09003
PII:S0047404508090039
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ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
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ObjectType-Feature-2
ISSN:0047-4045
1469-8013
DOI:10.1017/S0047404508090039