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Secret Language as a “Weapon of Defense”: The Problem of Opacity in Italian Colonial Libya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Nicco A. La Mattina
Nicco A. La Mattina*
Affiliation:
University of California Los Angeles, USA
*
Contact Nicco A. La Mattina at the Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA (nalamattina@g.ucla.edu).
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Abstract

This article examines the role of referential directness and community emblematization in the documentation of Libyan sign processes construed by Italian colonial ethnographers as secretive. I examine the key texts on these practices to show that colonial ethnographers metasemiotically framed the so-called argots of Libya in terms of what was understood to be their occulting function of hiding one’s intentions and their anti-language function of opposing established society. I show that Italian colonial-ethnological preoccupations with clarity and moral unity were articulated against the discursive background of French colonial ethnology of Algeria as well as Italian racist criminology anchored in the metaphor of relative opacity.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Spring 2022 , pp. 191 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved

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Footnotes

I would like to thank above all Erin Debenport, whose fall 2019 seminar “The Language of Secrecy and Exposure” at UCLA motivated this article, as well as Alessandro Duranti, both of whom read and provided insightful feedback on several versions of this essay. I would also like to thank Aomar Boum for his crucial support and encouragement in pursuing Libyan studies. Additionally, I am grateful to Asif Agha and the reviewer of this piece for their perceptive feedback.

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