Linguistic Anthropology

"A grammar of Pacoh: A Mon-Khmer language of the central highlands of Vietnam Mark J. AlvesPacoh is a member of the Katuic group of the Mon-Khmer language family. It is spoken by about 10,000 people in the central highlands of Vietnam. The language is currently undergoing substantial change under the influence of Vietnamese. Pacoh shares many typological characteristics in common with other Mon-Khmer languages including a topic-comment style of basic SVO syntax. It is a classifier language with noun-modifier word order. The major word formation processes are prefixation with 'presyllables' (deriving such things as causative verbs), infixation (deriving nouns from verbs, for example) and reduplication. In common with many other Mon-Khmer languages, Pacoh has a sesquisyllabic word structure in which presyllables are unstressed, and vowel phonemes show a distinction in register.
This book describes the major features of Pacoh grammar and also contains a glossary of Pacoh words. It is an extensively revised version of the author's PhD dissertation from the University of Hawaii ."

Cognitive Linguistics as an enterprise provides new theoretical and methodological instruments in understanding the relationship between people’s thoughts and the language they use. Spiritual and religious experiences (particularly the ones involving some type of revelation from or communication with a transcendent being) are especially interesting since they involve some type of external, physically invisible force or agent, contributing an “ineffable” quality to the phenomenon. However, people can and do describe such events, and metaphors and blends pervade the representations of certain concepts of the transcendental when attempting to talk about such abstract ideas. One of the main tenants of Cognitive Linguistics is that people’s views about themselves and the world around them are deeply rooted in their conceptual systems, created by their experiences and their bodily interactions with the world, whether they be physical, psychological or social. People who practice spirituality reach certain states by means of personal or collective rituals, such as prayer, meditation, and bodily procedures involving discipline, as is the case of fasting or re-understanding pain. When they then communicate certain religious and spiritual concepts, they are revealing a great deal about themselves and their world and the way they interact with it. Concepts dealing with people’s system of beliefs are very “meaningful” for the individual, and the more entrenched a frame of mind is, the less plastic it is, a fact confirmed by the neurosciences which claim that it is difficult to break down and reconstruct certain synaptic structures of the brain. But how do people who have had such awesome experiences represent these supernatural encounters and their states of being? What is the relationship between the concepts of body and soul in devotees who torture their bodies, who have out of body experiences or who describe a body possessed by other spirits? What does the language they use say about the individuals’ concept of themselves and their world? I will present some of my own research data containing conceptual metaphors and blends collected in various sacred texts and during a series of interviews of people who claim to have had such supernatural experiences. The data includes linguistic expressions as well as gesture. Moreover, the interviewees were asked to draw on paper certain experiences of spiritual nature and then to describe their pictures. My investigation will try to shed new light on the phenomenology of spiritual experiences and personhood, using cognitive linguistics as a prime tool of analysis.

This PhD dissertation offers an updated version of the Old Babylonian lexical list Ugumu, a source that was used as a learning and teaching device for the training in cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian scribes. This work includes the new Ugu-mu texts, both monolingual (Sumerian) and bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian), catalogued from 1967 on, when the first edition of the list was published. Besides, the unpublished texts of the list from the Schøyen collection (Oslo and London) are edited and analysed as well.

Since Ugu-mu lists anatomical and body-related terms, a significative part of this dissertation has focused on Sumerian and Akkadian partonomic categories, as well as in the semantic analysis of the vocabulary in Ugu-mu, its use in context, and the ideas, concepts and practices linked to the human body within the corpus of Mesopotamian cuneiform texts.

Disasters often involve regulatory failure. Somebody was responsible for safety and failed to ensure it, through negligence or lack of imagination, or both.  This article revisits the causes of, and inquiry into, the loss of the Titanic. It illustrates how the disaster was an early example of the kind of injustice and regulatory failure that has often been central in
more recent catastrophes. A regulatory body had, in effect, to inquire into its own shortcomings; therefore too little blame was laid in high places, and too much in low places. The Titanic report scapegoated the captain of another vessel, although the question of his blameworthiness was not read into the inquiry’s instructions until after it had heard him. The shipping industry blocked any serious discussion of the disaster
in Parliament.

Avec Cédrick Fairon. Louise-Amélie Cougnon et Cédrick Fairon (2008). "La néologie dans 'l'écrit spontané'. Etude d'un corpus de SMS en Belgique francophone". Actes du Congrès International de la néologie dans les langues romanes. Barcelone. Sèrie activitats, 22, pp. 1139-1154.

Martha’s Vineyard—an island off the East Coast of the United States—is known as a community where ‘‘everyone signed’’ for several hundred years, a utopia in the eyes of many deaf people. Currently, there exist around the world a number of small similar ‘‘shared signing communities,’’ for example, in Mexico, Bali, Israel, and Ghana. A few studies about these have emerged, which give some information about the social and cultural patterns in such communities. Deaf studies researchers have begun the process of ‘‘synthesising’’ and theorising this information, and have developed typologies based on ‘‘traditional’’ Western urban deaf communities. This article critically reviews the existing literature and raises new questions regarding the study and theorising of such communities. It concludes that the study of shared signing communities is not just the study of odd, idyllic, utopian places. It argues for the need to go beyond comparisons between Western deaf communities and shared signing communities and to investigate the latter in more depth, because what the snippets of evidence about deaf-specific experiences and relationships seem to show is that we are dealing with dynamic complex realities. It concludes that the results of more sustained fieldwork and thus more reliable data, cross- compared with the existing research findings, would enable us to broaden and deepen the deaf studies field and promote an awareness of the wide range of variations between deaf-deaf and deaf-hearing interactions and of variations in deaf people’s life worlds.

En este trabajo nos acercamos a la realidad de los jóvenes raperos bolivianos de El
Alto y La Paz. En dichas localidades, varios grupos de jóvenes mezclan música rap
con ritmos altiplánicos para cantar sobre la realidad política boliviana, el orgullo
de sus raíces indígenas, para criticar la discriminación que sufren y educar a otros
jóvenes.

This overview of philosophy of biology lays out what implications biology and recent philosophy of biology have for general philosophy of science. The following topics are addressed in five sections: natural kinds, conceptual change, discovery and confirmation, explanation and reduction, and naturalism.

Older siblings play a role in their younger siblings’ language socialization by ratifying or rejecting linguistic behavior. In addition, older siblings may engage in a struggle to maintain their dominant position in the family hierarchy. This struggle is seen through the lens of language and political economy as a struggle for symbolic capital. Bilingual adolescent sibling interactions are analyzed as expressions both of identity and of symbolic power. This paper proposes a theory of political micro-economy, by which analysts may trace connections between broad societal structures and structures of face-to-face interaction.

Hippo Family Club is an international language-study organization with hundreds of local chapters around Japan, as well as several in the United States, Korea, and Mexico. The group also partners with other organizations in various countries to operate study-abroad and other foreign exchange programs. Hippo's primary activity, though, is the self-directed study of multiple foreign languages. The organization sells audio recordings that relate stories in multiple languages. Club members believe that by listening to these stories and repeating their content, attending weekly chapter meetings where they practice speaking, and participating with the club's exchange programs they can acquire the ability to speak many foreign languages.

This dissertation presents an ethnographic study of Hippo Family Club practices in Japan and the United States. The analysis presented here is based on ethnographic field work in several sites, including Osaka and Kanagawa prefectures in Japan and Massachusetts in the United States, between 2005 and 2009. During this time I participated as a member of Karagoku Family, a Hippo Family Club chapter in Osaka prefecture. I also participated on various occasions with several other chapters, interviewed members of the various chapters, and recorded interactions at weekly meetings. The study combines ethnography with discourse analysis.

I argue that club members in Japan and the USA view the learning of multiple languages as a means to build a form of cosmopolitan citizenship. Cosmopolitan citizenship is a view of personal identity formed not within the nation-state but as a member of a transnational group. Club members view themselves as part of a global community of fellow club members and language learners. This view of identity freed from national or ethnic groups and instead tied to an international organization is seen as a break from Japanese tradition. In contrast, even though club chapters in the United States use the same learning materials and express ideas about language learning that appear very similar to those expressed in Japan, American members do not experience the same break from tradition.  Given the differences in US and Japanese ideologies of language learning, American members view Hippo as an addition to traditional practices.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Co-authored with José Cerda Zepeda. This book compiles oral traditions from Tének and Nahua Indians from the Huasteca area in Mexico. The tales, written in the indigenous language with a translation in Spanish, have an introduction that situates them in the current socio-cultural context. The tales deals with themes like the universal flood, the origin of corn, and the origin of fire.
See also the audioCD "Kuentos tének y nahuas de la Huasteca", which contains audio recording of the tales in the book.

"On the southern tip of the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat (India) and commanding a strategic lookout over the Arabian sea, the small island of Diu has aroused seemingly disproportionate colonial interests throughout its history. Among the various effects of its long domination by faraway Portugal (1535-1961) was the formation of a local variety of Indo-Portuguese, a contact language resulting from the encounter of various linguistic influences, chief among which Gujarati and Portuguese. Although the Portuguese-lexified creoles of Asia have deserved scholarly attention from the late 19th-century, the trend towards accurate linguistic description of these languages is a recent one.

This study provides a linguistic account of present-day Diu Indo-Portuguese, duly embedded in its reconstructed historical and sociodemographic context, with the intention to contribute to our burgeoning understanding of the formation, development and present vitality of the contact languages of (South) Asia and elsewhere."

"The article examines how practices of inscription and structures of addressivity (Goffman) at a symbolic site provide implicit indexical means for establishing subjectivities and agencies. By examining a visitor book located in a national commemoration site in Jerusalem, Israel, the article first argues that inscribing practices themselves can function as implicit indexical mechanisms. In ritualized environments, inscribing assumes the function of a non-referential indexical because discourse is materially engraved unto a surround. These environments are also characterized by prescribed addressivity structures. The article goes on to discern between a number of addressivity structures, evinced in visitors’ aesthetisized entries. These structures serve as contextualizing cues and evince the ways visitors establish
subjectivities and participation in national commemoration. Addressivity structures are shown to construct different types of social actors, and the spaces and temporalities within which they operate. Building on previous research on performance, the article shows how addressivity and inscription together supply the prerequisites for situated performances of identities and selves on inscribed and symbolic stages."

In this article, we emphasize a conceptual distinction between “interaction” and “social relationship”—a distinction that is rejected by one of the predominant currents that analyzes the effects of teacher/students relationships on teaching and learning. We carried out ethnographic research with a group of eighth-graders in Spanish class during the 2004-2005 school year. The results show that establishing social relationships over the year implied agreements on respect and authority that influenced learning. Focusing on social relationships as probabilities of the occurrence of a certain type of interaction, implies emphasizing the temporality and precariousness of their establishment, as well as understanding their formation in the school according to the region’s specific cultural principles. We emphasize individuals’ social constitution and not only the morphology and techniques of face-to-face interpretation and interaction.

We make an analysis of the verbal interaction in the classroom, with the aim to specifying the function the oral speech for the profit the activities understanding reading and for the development of literacy’s implied abilities. We argued that the development and the understanding of the activity’s objectives by means of the verbal interaction (instructions) are obtained by means of the appropriation of certain patterns that sometimes, as in the case of the free commentary, they are against the type of speech that assumes must exercise the students. We were based on the observation and videotape of classes of Spanish in the groups of 4º, 5º and 6º degree in a bilingual school, at three moments throughout an academic cycle. We concluded that the daily practice of the activities of understanding reading has legitimized to resorting to patterns of interaction sketched to solve the implied cognitive tasks in the “search of the correct answer”, these patterns also are used in the case in which this type of interaction is not pertinent, which can be harmful to the linguistic development of the children.

The present paper explores some of the lessons that can be learned from the reigns of the first two Rajahs of the Brook dynasty of Sarawak. They ruled over a realm populated by Malays, Dyaks, Chinese and Europeans with great wisdom and skills. Rajahs James Brooke and Charles Brooke both identified
important local capacities for peace and strengthened them so as to keep their multiethnic state together. Comparing and contrasting the rule of a British dynasty in Southeast Asia during the colonial period to the post-colonial colonialism of the Thai State in the Deep South shows that some
characteristics of traditional colonial rule as exercised by the White Rajahs of Sarawak were more likely to lead to sustainable peace and development than the excesses of post-colonial nationalism.

This article is concerned with the way the French education system deals with new challenges in terms of language, while referring to the (traditional) general framework of language planning in the country. The same principles and mindset that governed the way regional minority languages were treated in the past are now largely determining the way the languages of immigrants and their speakers are treated and considered.
We thus seek to remind readers what the theoretical and practical background to language planning in education is in France, showing how historical factors led to considering linguistic diversity as an unnecessary heritage to be disposed of rather than as an asset. We then move on to examine the state of language teaching generally speaking in the education system, in order to provide a general outlook on the subject.
Finally, through looking at two particular contexts we show that albeit seemingly monolithic at first, the French system can also accommodate diversity to a certain extent.

Participatory learning as a central mechanism of enculturation is put into question based on ethnographic research conducted in a rural village in the West Pacific country of Samoa. The paper investigates the role of observational learning in the transmission of crucial social knowledge in Samoa allowing children to become active participants in their cultural environment. Our data show that observational learning is both a pervasive and potent mode of social learning in the Samoan context. Samoan children learn a range of different values, practices, and beliefs via observation without the benefit of extensive social scaffolding and intensive instruction. These results are particularly relevant to educators as the number of multicultural students in Western classrooms increases. Children, who grow up in family and community environments that emphasize observational learning, may be at a disadvantage in Western classrooms that emphasize active participation and dyadic instruction.

Some have sought to describe the form of the relationship between language and mind, or more narrowed again, how language affects the human mind. Of the many characters that describes the relationship between language and mind, the authors saw that the exposure of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf is widely cited by various researchers in examining the relationship of language and mind. Sapir and Worf says that there is no two languages that have similarities to be considered as the same social reality. Sapir and Worf describe two hypotheses about the relationship between language and thought. The influence of language on thought can occur through habituation and operation of the formal aspects of language, for example gramar and lexicon. Whorf said that "grammatical and lexical resources of individual languages heavily constrain the conceptual representations available to their speakers". Gramar and the lexicon in a language determines that there is a conceptual representation of the user's language.

"Pragnąc rozpocząć dyskusje na temat wielokulturowości wśród mieszkańców miast dobrym punktem wyjścia jest zastanowienie się nad tym czym jest miasto. Zależnie od tego co przez termin 'miasto' będziemy rozumieć, jak szeroko lub wąsko ustalimy jego znaczenie, zmianie ulegnie nasze postrzeganie mieszkańców oraz turystów, a co za tym idzie ich wielokulturowości. Jakikolwiek opis użytkowników publicznej przestrzeni miejskiej musi być przecież uzależniony od zrozumienia czym ta przestrzeń publiczna jest i jaki ma charakter.
Jednak sama odpowiedź na pytanie „czym jest miasto?” skieruje nas najpierw ku kolejnemu pytaniu o funkcje miasta jakie powinny być spełnione względem jego użytkowników: mieszkańców i turystów. Właśnie w momencie poszukiwania odpowiedzi na to pytanie okaże się, że większość komunikatów obecnych w przestrzeni publicznej zależy od funkcji przypisywanych miastu. Czy weźmiemy pod uwagę informacje od „molocha biurokratycznego”, od sklepów, od policji, czy też od prywatnych właścicieli lub wandali, komunikaty, które oni wszyscy umieszają wskazują na konkretne funkcje jakie przestrzeń publiczna ma spełniać. Z tego powodu pozwolę sobie postawić tezę, iż miasto, a szczególnie aglomeracje i metropolie z uwagi na swoją wielokulturowość, charakteryzują się bardzo specyficznym i rozbudowanym językiem w komunikacji.  To właśnie ten język w dużej mierze odróżnia od siebie miasta, to ten język czyni niektóre przestrzenie przyjazne, a inne wrogie. To dzięki temu językowemu obrazowi miasta jaki kreują jego użytkownicy i instytucje jesteśmy w stanie, lub nie, rozpocząć dialog i koegzystencję z urbanistycznym tworem i jego mieszkańcami.
W trakcie prezentacji postaram się pokazać do jakiego stopnia stosunki międzyludzkie zależą od natury komunikacji między miastem i jego użytkownikami. Z przedstawionych przykładów powinno jasno wynikać, że miasta „mówią” w imieniu swoim oraz osób w nich przebywających na stałe lub chwilowo. Dodatkowym wynikiem przedstawionej analizy będzie kilka przykładów na to, że z miastem można również toczyć dyskusje, dzięki którym wzbogaca się zurbanizowane środowisko codziennego życia."

"INTRODUCTION

Our world of the society of the 20th and 21st centuries is becoming the realm of pictorial representation. Modern technologies of recording images and mediating them enable the press, the television, and the Internet to base their messages on images. As images have dominated our communication, their impact on our cognition of the world has grown substantially.

This thesis attempts at discovering
methods in which technology and underlying culture specific features are built into pictorial messages used in the press and posters. It also describes factors unintentionally or deliberately influencing every act of mediating information.
The thesis is divided into seven chapters corresponding to various approaches and analyses employed within them. The first chapter analyses technological implications of mediating messages. Technology is understood here as both the mechanical and physical features of mediating messages with ‘tools’. The chapter also describes the influence senders and mediators of (pictorial) information may exert on final messages that reach readers. The chapter’s concluding part describes the diversity of discourses present in every society. The nature of discourses and their codes, as well as the manipulation of those, are analysed in chapter 3, devoted
to presenting various linguistic and culture studies theories. Various linguistic and cultural theories are employed in analysis of the act of mediating. The chapter begins with the analysis of signs and systems of communication (de Saussure and Lévi-Strauss). Later, theories of culture-specific codes and mythologies are introduced (Eco, Barthes, Hall). Finally, Marxist approach is employed in the analysis of the mediation of pictorial messages (Althusser, Gramsci). The ideas of scholars are interwoven with graphic examples analysed according to the theories presented. Chapter 5 draws a conclusion from the analyses of chapters 1 and 3. The conclusion is graphically presented in a few versions of information chain. The chain evolves with the development of the theories it attempts to encompass. The final chain is
described as a means of reading messages thanks to which readers may sift out information about an event from ideological elements of a message.

The theoretical conclusion of chapter 5 is employed in the analysis of a few examples in chapter 6.  This chapter presents a few examples of images and posters
as it tries to postulate some reading techniques that a reader may use. Finally, in chapter 7, a general conclusion is sketched out of analyses and conclusions of the previous parts. The conclusion attempts to explain if and how ‘we readers’ are constantly manipulated. Chapters 2 and 4 are devoted to demonstrating a few representative examples of press photography, and war and film posters respectively.
Images constitute a collection of press pictures from numerous newspapers (Time, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph) and of film and war posters from picture collections by Hudson, Yapp and Mayes. As in the case of John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, the chapters presenting only images constitute an indispensable reading for the evaluation of the analysis presented in the thesis."

"2 introductory paragraphs:

Winfried Nöth, in his article Alice’s Adventures in Semiosis (Nöth 1994), approaches a variety of signs within Alice in Wonderland from the perspective of Ch. S. Peirce and his
classification of signs into icons, indices, and symbols. Nöth offers an extensive insight into the world of Lewis Carroll’s novel and semiotics at the same time. In the course of the article the readers are presented with a number of examples of various signs along with the explanation on their proper and reasonable reading as proposed by Alice - Lewis Carroll remaining in a surprising unison with Peirce’s tenets.

However, while concentrating on the sign itself and its nature as visible from Alice’s interactions with a multitude of signs she encounters, Nöth resolved to leave pragmatics aside. Therefore, it seems proper to continue Nöth’s analysis from the place where he decided to finish it. While he concentrated on the sign and its structure, this article attempts at pursuing a pragmatic approach to two signs from Alice in Wonderland
analysed by Nöth, namely those which are supposed to enable Alice to go through the tiny door leading “into the loveliest garden you ever saw”. The first of those is the bottle
marked “DRINK ME” and the second the cake marked “EAT ME”. They are also accompanied by a number of other signs (or more precisely, as Nöth proposes, indices) that to some
extant are transparent or incomplete."

"1st paragraph of 1st draft

On 1st May 2004 Poland  joined  the European Union. Within a few months a number of European countries have claimed  their historical and political connections  to  the West (of
Europe). The largest accession so far in the history of the EU will, however, cause more than just  economical or political  shifts of power  and  influence. One of prime differences  in  this new Europe will concern sexuality. The dilemma which European societies will face concerns not sexual behaviours but rather their descriptions, characteristics, and typology. The cause of such  a  situation  is  found  in  religious  behaviours,  history  of  sexual  (in)tolerance,  or  even
(mis)education. The questions which some nations already try to answer is “How many sexes do we  actually distinguish?”,  and  “How  should we  conceptualise  sexuality  and how  should we classify our citizens?” These  issues, although  they seem to deal with the  letter of  law (or good manners), must be  also  approached by  semioticians. The  features described by words man, woman, male, and female are (more than ever) elusive, subject to criticism and must be
reformulated. "

In Ukrainian

Гуцуляк О., Дрогомирецький П. До етимологічних інтерпретацій топонімікону Давнього Галича : германський субстрат // Семантика мови і тексту : матеріали Х міжнародної науково-практичної конференції. – Івано-Франківськ : Видавництво ПНУС, 2009. – Ч.ІІ. – С.74-77.

Oleg Gutsulyak, Petro Drogomyretsky
The Etymological Interpretations of Toponimikon of Ancient Galician: Germanic Substrate

In the paper the etymological interpretation of place-names of Ancient Galician (PreCarpathian, Western Ukraine) linguistic and historical analysis of many place names in the region proves their Indo-European origin, particularly Germanic, which is associated with the presence of relevant ethnic groups (Goths, Gepides) in Slavonic area.

Keywords: toponimikon, etymology, substrate, archaic language, Celts, Germans, Goths, Slavonians, Ancient Galician.

В статті розглядаються етимологічні інтерпретації топонімів Давньої Галичини Лінгвістично-історичний аналіз багатьох географічних назв регіону доводить їхнє індоєвропейське походження, зокрема германське, що пов’язуються з перебуванням відповідних етносів (готи, гепіди) у слов’янському ареалі.

Ключові слова: топонімікон, етимологія, субстрат, мовна архаїка, кельти, германці, готи, Давній Галич.

Applying a combination of ethnographic and discourse-centered approaches to an exploratory case study in Arusha, Tanzania, this paper examines how global discourses are locally (re)produced. By acquiring specialized knowledge that is circulating through handbooks, magazines, websites, and videos, Tanzanian students learn how to become professional “local” guides. During their training they are instructed, both implicitly and explicitly, how to use global discourses to represent and sell their natural and cultural heritage as authentically local. However, in the personal interaction with tourists, guides do not merely reproduce the narratives and practices they were taught at school but become themselves creative storytellers, often subtly questioning or contesting the normative templates.

In tourism studies globalization and localization are often conceived of as a binary opposition. The ethnography of an Indonesian group of tour guides presented here illustrates how the global and the local are intimately intertwined through what has been described as the process of “glocalization”. The guides studied are remarkable front-runners of glocalization. They fully participate in global popular culture and use new technologies in their private lives. While guiding, however, they skillfully represent the glocalized life around them as a distinctive “local”, adapted to the tastes of different groups of international tourists. It is concluded that tourism offers excellent opportunities to study glocalization, but that more grounded research is needed.