The Social Organization of National Identity: A Multi-Modal Analysis of Tourism Websites

 

Richard W. Hallett and Judith Kaplan-Weinger

Linguistics Department

Northeastern Illinois University

 

 

Since regaining their independence, Lithuania and Latvia have sought to re-establish their identities as independent, sovereign nations. One way of promoting national identity is through tourism. The question of how to carry out this promotion of not only tourism but also identity must have arisen soon after independence. Important in answering this question was the choice of language(s) and the use of these languages in tourism materials to identify Lithuania or Latvia as places to visit or homelands with which to reconnect. To this end, both Lithuania and Latvia are currently utilizing the World Wide Web to promote tourism and, simultaneously, forge independent identities.

 

Identity construction most typically revolves around a nation or an individual characterizing a self by associating certain features with that self and by disassociating that self from the others from whom it wants to be viewed as distinct. (Cf. Mead 1934, Morley and Robbins 1995, Harré and van Langehove 1999.) Lithuanian and Latvian tourism websites offer many examples of these characterizations and disassociations:

(1)       ‘Lithuanians are predominantly Roman Catholic as opposed to their

            Russian Orthodox neighbors.’

(2)       ‘Latgale’s close historic, economic and cultural links with Eastern Slavs

have been the impetus for a different development pattern for the region [of Latvia], which has adopted various Slavic cultural elements.’

 

Due to the role of language and, by extension, other semiotic modes in constructing and displaying a self, an analysis of national identity construction must focus multi-modally on how national identities are mediated (Scollon 2001) through text—both linguistic and visual. This paper heeds Kachru’s (1989) call for a paradigm shift in researching and understanding the sociolinguistic reality of English in identity formation.

 

We take as the theoretical and methodological basis for the analysis of the construction of national identity a number of perspectives including social constructionism (Carbaugh 1996), critical discourse analysis (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, and Leibhart 1999), mediated discourse analysis (Scollon 2001), and multi-modal discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). These perspectives share a concern for studying language as social action. With their newfound independence, Lithuania and Latvia are in position to construct their identities anew. In the view of mediated discourse analysis, this constitutes a social problem as Lithuania and Latvia define themselves for their citizens and the world beyond their borders. Because, as Scollon (2001:11) explains, ‘our social world is in fact a discursive social world’ we can look at linguistic and visual texts as mediators in the process of ‘solving the problem’ of constructing a national identity. Specifically, for this study, we can look to Lithuanian and Latvian tourism websites—their language choice, words and images—for how they mediate the social construction of Lithuania and Latvia as independent nations. As a social action, the social construction of an independent identity is undertaken and, therefore, analyzable multi-modally. As such, these websites make ‘meaning in multiple articulations’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996:4).

 

To adopt a multi-modal discourse analysis perspective to this analysis of identity construction, we must understand that ‘Discourses are socially constructed knowledge of (some aspect of) reality…[T]hey have been developed in specific social contexts, and in ways which are appropriate to the interest of social actors in these contexts…’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996:4). Data for this multi-modal analysis come from Lithuanian and Latvian government-sponsored tourism websites. An examination of these sites reveals the integration of linguistic and visual texts to highlight the culture and history of these Baltic states and, in so doing, to co-construct for these states independent identities.

 

Concurrent with the multi-modal construction and promotion of national identity on these Baltic websites through the content and structure of the linguistic and visual texts, is the presence of the English language. At first blush the choice of English on these sites seems obvious; English is truly an international language. Yet its use on these sites complements Latvia’s and Lithuania’s desire to construct identities that are at once distinguished from their former imperialistic (Phillipson 1992) connections (the Soviet Union and Germany) and united with the more neutral (Kachru 1982, 1983, 1986) international language of English.

 

This analysis of the websites of these two Baltic nations reveals that the construction of individual national identities is accomplished through incorporation of particular language and of particular linguistic and visual texts. Through this process, a nation may construct for itself and with its users an independent identity that marks both the dissolution of a previous relationship and the desire to and/or establishment of a new relationship.