Rapa Nui Voice, Stance, and Subjectivities

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Friday, March 6, 2026 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

What happens when a community’s native language isn’t the language they speak at home?
 
In this talk, Miki Makihara draws from her new co-authored book, Language and Political Subjectivity: Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela, to explore a central challenge for Rapa Nui (Easter Island) language and political activists. In their fight for their land and local autonomy, activists have elevated maitaki Rapa Nui—a “pure,” ancestral form of the language. This “cherished” language is a powerful public tool for asserting political authenticity.
 
Yet, this is not the intimate language of the home. Makihara explores the tensions between this purified, political language variety and the syncretic, mixed variety that forms the “glue” of Rapa Nui’s everyday sociality. The talk examines what this paradox means for the future of Rapa Nui struggle for sovereignty.
 

Author Bio

Miki Makihara is a linguistic anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Queens College/CUNY and the Ph.D. Programs in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studies communication and society, and is interested in understanding the ways in which interaction contributes to maintaining and transforming community and inequality. Her research combines ethnography, discourse analysis, and oral history. She has been engaged in long-term research on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and written about its sociolinguistic situation, multilingualism, Indigenous and ethnic identity formation, communicative ideologies, and language reclamation and revitalization. She is currently working on politics of stance-taking and social change.