Juan Luis Rodríguez
Ph.D. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 2011
Associate Professor
Queens College, City University of New York
About me:
I am an Associate Professor of anthropology at Queens College, CUNY. My expertise is on semiotic and linguistic ideologies, specifically how these are mobilized in the process of state formation and the emergence of diasporic identities. My work relies on a discourse-centered approach to language and culture taking actual instances of language use and performative practices as the starting point of my ethnographic research. I combine this approach with an interest in practices of translation and semiotic transduction. I take translation practices as part of a more general process of transduction of political speech into political influence through the distribution of state resources. My book, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta (Bloomsbury Academic Press), explores the role of translation and transduction in the process of transforming oil revenue into political influence arguing that these are interconnected processes that help us understand the place of Warao speakers in the context of the Venezuelan public political sphere. Over the last year (2019-2020) I started a new research project in collaboration with Dr. Miki Makihara, funded by CUNY’s PSC-Research Foundation and a Research Enhancement Grant from Queens College, in which I explore linguistic intimacy in the Venezuelan diaspora both in Chile and the U.S. In this new project I will conduct a multi-site ethnographic investigation on the ways in which the largest migratory phenomenon in the hemisphere have produced new linguistic and semiotic practices.
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Courses:
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Language, Culture and Society (Anth 104)
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​History of Anthropology (Anth 200)
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​Language and Identity (Anth 280)
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Language and Politics (Anth 380)
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Linguistic Subjectivities in Latin America (Anth282, LALS 206)
Winner of the 2021 New Voices Book Prize, Society for Linguistic Anthropology
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Interview for CaMP Anthropology with Rusty Barret here.
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Publications Academia.edu
Book
2025
(Co-authored with Miki Makihara) Language and Political Subjectivity: Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela. London: Berghahn Books.
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2020
Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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Edited Special Issues
​2012
(Edited with Anthony K. Webster) Special issue: Ordeals of Language: Essays in honor of Ellen Basso. Journal of Anthropological Research 68(3)
Papers and Book Chapters
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2025
(Co-authored Jonathan D. Hill) Building Transnational Social Networks in the Aftermath of the Crisis of the Venezuelan Nation-State. In Transnationalities of Migrant Moral Economies in a Transforming World. Vytis ÄŒiubrinskas and Nina Glick Schiller, eds. London: Berghahn Books.
2023
Fenómeno Lacava: Spectacle, Enjoyment, and Stance in Venezuela’s Online Political Campaigning. Journal of Anthropological Research 2023 79:3, 376-398
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2022
(Co-Authored with Miki Makihara) Lived beliefs: Persuasion and self in Rapa Nui poetry. Language Culture and Society. https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.21013.mak
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2020
(Co-authored with Miki Makihara) "Anthropology of Language Contact and its Sociocultural Contexts". In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0231.xml
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2019
(Co-Authored with Miki Makihara) Posicionamiento, Poder y Política. AGlo Anuario de Glotopolítica 3: 13-34. https://glotopolitica.com/indiceaglo3/postura-poder-y-politica/
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2019
“I Don't Know How People on Minimum Wage Make it”: The Semiotic Scaling of Political Crisis and Emotions in Venezuela. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 24: 518-535. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12413
2016
The National Anthem in Warao: Semiotic ground and performative affordances of indigenous language texts in Venezuela. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(3): 335-351. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12129
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2015
(Co-authored with Jonathan D. Hill) Language in Change: Discourse, Power and History in Amazonia. In Research Companion to Anthropology. Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, eds. Ashgate Publishing, pp. 317-342.
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2012
Introduction. Ordeals of Language: Essays in Honor of Ellen B. Basso. Special issue: Ordeals of Language. Journal of Anthropological Research 68(3): 305-314. https://doi.org/10.3998/jar.0521004.0068.301
2012
Ordeal of Language and Political Agonistic Exchange in the Orinoco Delta Venezuela. Journal of Anthropological Research 68(3): 357-372. https://doi.org/10.3998/jar.0521004.0068.304
2012
The Interplay of Greetings and Promises: Political encounters between the Warao and the new indigenous leadership in the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela. Pragmatics 22(1):167-187. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.22.1.07rod
2011
(Co-authored with Jonathan D. Hill) Materiality, Exchange, and History in the Amazon: A Growing Field of Study. Ethnohistory 58(3): 525-532. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-1263875
2008
The Translation of Poverty and the Poverty of Translation in the Orinoco Delta. Ethnohistory 55(3): 417-438. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2008-003
Book Reviews
2018
"Tell Me Why My Children Died": Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice by Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, Journal of Anthropological Research 74(2): 256-257. https://doi.org/10.1086/697654
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2015
Fluent Selves: Autobiography, Person, and History in Lowland South America. Suzanne Oakdale and Magnus Course (eds). Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 2014. 319 pp. Anthropological Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1353/anl.2015.0000
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2015
Made-from-Bone: Trickster Myths, Music, and History from the Amazon. Jonathan D. Hill. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 195 pp. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 20: 379–381. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12155
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2006
In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (eds). Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 327 pp. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 11(2): 487-488. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlca.2006.11.2.487
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Others
2016
Interview with Anthony K. Webster on his new book, Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry. https://campanthropology.org/2016/10/24/anthony-webster-on-navajo-poetry/
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