Thus Will the Chaos of Nations be Gradually Resolved Into Order. Writing, Language, and a Persistent Search for Containment
**This event is open to those of the anthropology community ONLY**
For centuries Europeans, and later the global north more broadly, have been preoccupied with the idea that the complexity of humanity must be, and can be, contained for different purposes, everything from disinterested scientific inquiry to large-scale social control. One of the most obvious targets of that containment has been language, and one of language’s most suitable attributes for these efforts has been writing—that is, alphabets, scripts, character systems, and so on. Yet seemingly at every turn writing (and thus language and humanity) has been resistant to the kinds of containment that have been proposed, like universal letterforms, comprehensive alphabets, and innovative symbolic systems. In this talk I’ll examine some of these historical attempts to contain-through-writing, and why I think they tend not to work, alongside (and perhaps in the shadow of) the Unicode Standard, the modern text encoding standard that allows writing to function on most digital platforms. Drawing from an ethnographic study of a small group of technologists responsible for managing and maintaining the Unicode Standard, I’ll explore how and why older logics of containment have given way to something that, for better or worse, just might work.
