Mediatized projects at State peripheries

The articles in this volume discuss identity projects that unfold through the communicative activities of organizational employees (journalists, teachers, lawyers, etc.). These activities are organized in each case by specific protocols of communication whereby categories of personnel (or organizational wage-labor) describe and address target populations through emblems linking specific languages and cultures to each other, to those they address, and to populations elsewhere. The localespecific vividness of these emblems and their indexical selectivity for target populations (whose purposes they appear to serve) tend to obscure the mediatized practices that give rise to them, and the uptake formulations that recycle them.

► Speech and other performable diacritics yield emblems of group distinction.
► “Language–culture–people” hybrids are formed through mediatized divisions of labor.
► Assimilation by analogy aligns external and internal norms of institutional conduct.