In lieu of “keywords”: Toward an anthropology of rapport

Abstract

AbstractThe identification of socioculturally important “keywords” remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of “keyword projects” as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key “words” emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer‐grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally “key” within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of “rapport,” it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond “keyword talk” to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about “keyness” itself.