This paper enquires into the possibility of human connection in divided communities. The study is an anthropological exploration of communication practices in a rural settlement in eastern Slovakia. The region has a history of division between Slovakia's ethnic majority population and its Roma minority primarily, albeit not exclusively, living in conditions of poverty and in physically segregated settlements outside of the main village infrastructure (Kahanec et al., 2020; Scheffel, 2010). In general, the country has had a complicated historical relationship with diversity, especially regarding its settled ethnic minorities. Its well-documented social policies have contributed to enduring negative perceptions, narratives and images of the ethnic and linguistic other (Kubátová & Laníček, 2018).
The view that I want to pursue in this paper is that the questions arising from the current project need to be located in this larger moral landscape of a society's capacity to grant the highest dignity claim to those whom it struggles to imagine as 'us'. Such capacity, which in this paper I call moral imagination, continues to be one of the most pertinent challenges and its lack one of the key sources of conflict and injustice in established as well as emerging democracies (Lederach, 2005).
I draw on relational ethics and its emphasis on the (listening) subject's ethical demand to respond to the call of the Other (Levinas, 1972). According to Levinas (1985), this responsibility is "the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity" (p. 95). This means that our uniqueness as human beings should be understood not as a socially constructed difference from the Other (e.g. as social and cultural identity categories or practices), but as our irreplaceable responsibility for the Other. In this paper, I propose that Levinas's ethics has political consequences for how a society imagines its 'Us'.
I turn to sociolinguistics with its focus on people's communication practices as a site for relating to diverse others by mobilising the concept of semiotic repertoires (Kusters et al. 2017), i.e. communication resources that are embodied and embedded in the physical settings of people's encounters and whose meanings emerge in activity (Canagarajah, 2021; Kusters et al., 2017). Seen through the prism of Levinasian relational ethics, semiotic repertoire in this study gestures towards a possibility of a meaning making practice in which the Other is "illuminated" and can "take signification…so that the subject can receive it" (Levinas, 1972, p. 15). In this context of segregation and erasure, this sociolinguistic "illuminating" is at once political and aesthetic: it creates "a rupture to the perceptual field", for it "makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise" (Rancière, 2003, p. 30). I also argue in this paper that it is in the ethical act of "receiving" that openings for a society's moral imagination can emerge. I explore what this means for advancing the sociolinguistics of ethical encounters.
