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Communities of faith and other communities of discourse police the use of language within their ranks to prevent linguistic “allergens” from disturbing established forms of thought and life. Using postmodern and Anabaptist insights, Downing critiques this control of language and argues for a more open-ended exchange of ideas in both church and academy. Her preferred metaphor for the relationship of faith and learning is “imbrication,” by which she means a pattern of complex and sometimes random overlapping of academic and faith concerns.

Research on partial reduplication has primarily focused on developing a theory that takes into account all of the factors which speakers may invoke in trying to determine how a reduplicant will relate to its base. There have been attempts to characterize the reduplicant in prosodic terms and the role of morphological structure in determining the link between base and reduplicant. This chapter examines verb-stem reduplication in Ndebele, a Southern Bantu language spoken by the Nguni group, and shows how the reduplicant in Ndebele is conditioned by phonological and morphological factors that are “abstract” in nature. It argues that the reduplicant of an Ndebele verb stem must be analyzed as a verb stem itself and explains how its surface form is derived by direct spell-out of its own (identical) morphosyntactic structure, which, in turn, is a direct copy from the base. The chapter also discusses complications arising in the reduplication of stems containing subminimal or “consonantal” verb roots, along with fusion or “imbrication” of perfective -ile, the passive suffix -w-, and palatalization.

This introduction examines the use of the comparative method as an analytic tool for understanding race in Puerto Rico and the United States. Given the limited understandings of race through the silencing of marginalized voices, power dynamics, and social movements, this chapter instead proposes racial imbrication as an alternative lens for understanding race. Racial imbrication permits a relational analysis of different units that also considers the spaces most likely to be ignored or overlooked in traditional comparative analyses. The final third of the chapter offers a brief overview of each chapter and the aims of the book.

This final chapter provides a review of the book and what larger conclusions can be drawn from the preceding chapters and racial imbrication as a methodological concept. In particular, the conclusion considers the longer history of Puerto Rico in the Southern U.S. racial imaginary complicate recent studies that depict Latinidad as a new phenomenon in the region. Finally, the chapter also briefly ponders why race continues to matter in Puerto Rico for different state actors and activists given the failure of economic and colonial policies that have left the island facing one of its largest economic crises in history.

This chapter focuses on resolving the process versus entity dichotomy centered on the nature of organization. It argues for the priority of transaction as the basis of organization since transactions bind actors by establishing complementary rights and obligations. A transactional view of organization explains the emergence of organization as an entity with the identity of a person, who then is repeatedly reconstructed in the conversations of members, since by authoring the organization they can thereby establish their own authority as its agents, translators and representatives. The chapter is built around a re-examination of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and an illustration drawn from the empirical literature to illustrate how organization emerges in the communicative practices of its members.