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Abstract

In this short article I describe the experience of being a stuttering academic, drawing on what I jokingly describe as my longue-durée, multi-sited ethnography of stuttering — that is, my personal identity and experiences as an exotic stutterer moving through space and time. The article plays with the nominal equivalence between Hottentots as the group that long serviced Europeans and their imagined Africa and Hottentots as stutterers (hotteren-totteren in German). Throughout, I discuss the nature of Hottentot community, reflect on Hottentot paranoia and the lure of the Hottentot (suggesting a Hottentot twist to Simmel's foundational stranger), and engage with some other themes arising from the lived experience of these particular speech deviants.

Keywords

stuttering Hottentots academic culture autoethnography self-loathing group formation

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References

Collins, R. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Goldman, R. (1967) Cultural Influences on the Sex Ratio in the Incidence of Stuttering, American Anthropologist 69(1): 78-81.

Gurevitch, Z. (1999) The Tongues Break Dance: Theory, Poetry, and the Critical Body, The Sociological Quarterly 40(3): 525-40.

Mark, J. (1998) The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies . Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.

Richman, B. (1993) On the Evolution of Speech: Singing as the Middle Term, Current Anthropology 34(5): 721-2.

Shell, M. (2006) Stutter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Strother, Z.S. (1999) Display of the Body Hottentot, in B. Lindfors (ed.) Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, pp. 1-55. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hottentot b-b-blues

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