Owning and Belonging: A Semiotic Investigation of the Affective Categories of a Bourgeois Society

Extract

Categories of ‘belonging' and ‘owning' have reflexes in both linguistic and broader social spheres, in which the same cover terms lead a curious double life in both linguistic and social scientific terminology. For example, the opposition between ‘inalienable' and ‘alienable' possession exists both as a linguistic category and a category relevant for exchange (gifts versus commodities), and has generated immense parallel and unrelated literatures in both linguistics (e.g. Chappell and Mcgregor 1996, and references there) and anthropology (e.g., Carrier 1995 and references there). This paper explores the changing pragmatics of a single Welsh linguistic form which indexes ‘belonging,' to understand which, I argue, one needs to understand broader changes in the way that social and political-economic categories of belonging and ownership are differentially infused with affect from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.