Juan Luis Rodríguez, Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta, Bloomsbury Academic (Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistic Anthropology), Londres/New York, 2021, 206 p., bibliogr., index, ...photos (en noir et blanc), carte, tabl.
Webb Keane argues that by looking at representations as concrete
practices we may find them to be thoroughly entangled in the
tensions and hazards of social existence. This book explores the
...performances and transactions that lie at the heart of public
events in contemporary Anakalang, on the Indonesian island of
Sumba. Weaving together sharply observed narrative, close analysis
of poetic speech and valuable objects, and far-reaching theoretical
discussion, Signs of Recognition explores the risks
endemic in representational practices. An awareness of risk is
embedded in the very forms of ritual speech and exchange. The
possibilities for failure and slippage reveal people's mutual
vulnerabilities and give words and things part of their power.
Keane shows how the dilemmas posed by the effort to use and control
language and objects are implicated with general problems of power,
authority, and agency. He persuades us to look differently at ideas
of voice and value. Integrating the analysis of words and things,
this book contributes to a wide range of fields, including
linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, social theory, and the
studies of material culture, art, and political economy.
Introduction to Special Section Eri Kashima
Nordic journal of African studies,
03/2022, Volume:
31, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This introduction to the special section on African multilingualism introduces and contextualises three contributing articles into the recently growing research area of small-scale multilingualism. ...This article does so by briefly characterising the contribution of Africanist work from the author’s perspective as a Papuanist, and contends that the articles in the special section exhibit features in line with Africanist small-scale multilingualism research.
This essay examines the gendering of anthropological theory by selectively exploring recent theoretical discussions on the ontological turn and semiotic anthropology. We argue that three distinct ...forms of exclusion underpin the gendering of theory. First, authors may include the work of women, considered inclusively, but exclude the relevance of gender and feminism in their contributions. We argue that this exclusion is evident in discussions of Marilyn Strathern as a primary influence on the ontological turn, conceived narrowly. The second form occurs when women are cited for their contributions but are not regarded as significant influences by later readers and are subsequently “lost” to theoretical canon formation. This form is evident in the influence of feminist science on multispecies ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and materiality studies among broad ontologists. Finally, the third form occurs when women are not cited as influences at all and excluded from canon formation. The third example we draw on indicates that the settled canon of semiotic anthropology has excluded potential interlocutors, such as philosopher bell hooks and semiotician Lady Victoria Welby. What our examples show is a tendency in ontology and semiotics to underplay the influence of feminist scholarship in accounts of theoretical innovation.
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and ...commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in "hashtag activism" can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in "hashtag ethnography."
This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists' ...research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image
in
discourse. In this article, I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology on prototypic images to show how these advances (e.g., entextualization, performativity, perspective, and enregisterment) can be leveraged to theorize images more generally. In doing so, I argue against any hard distinction between language and image. I conclude by expanding out from a linguistic anthropology of images to what I call "a linguistic anthropology of
...
," a field characterized by an open-ended horizon of objects and modes of inquiry, all linked together
as
linguistic anthropology.
The paper shows how hair colour stereotypes are reflected in two Croatian language corpora: the Croatian Language Corpus hrWaC and the Croatian Language Repository. Both were searched with the Sketch ...Engine corpus tool, utilizing the word sketches function, which shows the information on the most common collocations in which a lemma occurs. Synonymous words denoting female and male persons with fair, brown, black, ginger, or red hair were explored. The following hypotheses were confirmed or partially confirmed: women are more often defined by hair colour than men; more synonyms denote a female person of a particular hair colour than a male person; some synonyms appear in contexts suggesting stereotypes more often than others; in the formation of words especially denoting female persons of particular hair colour, some word-formation models are used to form pejorative and depreciative words and (by onymisation) animal names; and the adjectives pravi (‘real’), jedan (‘one’), and običan (‘ordinary’) serve as focus markers and suggest expressions reflecting stereotypes. Based on the conducted collocation and word-formation analysis, it is concluded that the collocations and word-formation models associated with hair colour words suggest various extralinguistic data, including the social status of women.
U radu se pokazuje kako se stereotipi povezani s bojom kose odražavaju u hrvatskim jezičnim korpusima hrWaC-u i Hrvatskoj jezičnoj riznici. Istraživanje se provodi u dvama hrvatskim jezičnim korpusima, Hrvatskome jezičnom korpusu hrWaC-u te Hrvatskoj jezičnoj riznici. Korpusi se pretražuju s pomoću alata za pretragu korpusa SketchEnginea, odnosno s pomoću njegove mogućnosti dobivanja skica riječi (word sketches), sažete informacije o najčešćim kolokacijama u kojima je izraz potvrđen. Istražuju se sinonimni nizovi imenica kojima se označuju ženske i muške osobe plave, smeđe, crne i riđe/crvene kose. Potvrđuju se ili se dijelom potvrđuju hipoteze: da se bojom kose češće određuju ženske nego muške osobe; da sinonimni nizovi koji označuju žensku osobu određene boje kose imaju više članova nego sinonimni nizovi koji označuju mušku osobu određene boje kose; da se neki članovi sinonimnoga niza češće pojavljuju u kontekstu iz kojega se iščitava stereotip; da su u tvorbi naziva za osobe određene boje kose, osobito ženskih, plodni modeli kojima se tvore pejorativi i deprecijativi te (onimizacijom) imena životinja; da su pridjevi jedan, običan identifikatori izraza u kojima se odražavaju stereotipi. Na temelju provedene kolokacijske i tvorbene analize zaključuje se da se iz kolokacija i tvorbenih obrazaca povezanih s nazivima za boju kose može iščitati mnogo izvanjezičnih podataka, između ostaloga i o društvenome položaju žene.
Neoliberalism has been a popular concept within anthropological scholarship over the past decade; this very popularity has also elicited a fair share of criticism. This review examines current ...anthropological engagements with neoliberalism and explains why the concept has been so attractive for anthropologists since the millennium. It briefly outlines the history of neoliberal thought and explains how neoliberalism is different from late capitalism. Although neoliberalism is a polysemic concept with multiple referents, anthropologists have most commonly understood neoliberalism in two main ways: as a structural force that affects people's life-chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. Neoliberalism frequently functions as an index of the global political-economic order and allows for a vast array of ethnographic sites and topics to be contained within the same frame. However, as an analytical framework, neoliberalism can also obscure ethnographic particularities and foreclose certain avenues of inquiry.
In this assignment, students learn to critique the frequently stereotypical and problematic depiction of Muslims in media sources. Based on their own linguistic analyses of TV shows, movies, or ...political speeches, students build arguments about the messaging and judgment of Muslims in the United States. Close linguistic analysis is a powerful method to practice critical-thinking skills as students select and analyze evidence in order to construct original arguments. I select sources that challenge students to question and critique not just Orientalist and racist stereotypes of Muslims but also representations that seem to be positive on the surface but subtly reinforce inequitable expectations of Muslims. This assignment allows students to explore some of the social justice issues facing Muslims in the U.S., such as the reinforcement of Islamophobia, the expectations to prove their allegiance to the nation, and the demand to conform to “good Muslim” expectations. Based on an exploration of their thesis statements, my analysis demonstrates that students used evidence from their sources to build arguments that condemn the perpetuation of stigma associated with Islam and Muslims. Additionally, many students critiqued media sources for subtly encouraging expectations that Muslims need to continually demonstrate patriotism and particular kinds of assimilation in order to be deemed “good” Muslims. Through this and similar assignments, students practice more critical perspectives on media and explore the challenges of representation through the perspectives of marginalized populations.
Hashtags in social media reflect the Coronavirus pandemic outbreak and the consequential shifts and swifts in people’s lifestyles. Several studies related to the pandemic have used hashtags from ...linguistic, economic, and sociological perspectives. However, the potentiality of hashtags in addressing the pandemic-related anthropological questions is still underexplored. This study verifies how hashtags are primarily anthropocentric and can act as a source for anthropological studies. We have collected COVID-related hashtags in Instagram under five different pandemic-related words like #newnormal, #oldnormal, #quarantine, #lockdown, #pandemic, #corona. Eighty-eight hashtags under the mentioned pandemic-related keywords and 11 neologisms are collected to analyse their linguistic patterns and anthropological implications. The hashtags are segmented into basetags and stemtags to find the lexical significance of individual word units in the pandemic lifestyle. The segmentation helped analyse the range of vocabulary in hashtags used to describe people’s lifestyles during the pandemic. Hashtags are user-friendly and are primarily used as an expressing and recording device. The archival and emotive quality added to hashtags’ searchability and accessibility make them a potential linguistic anthropological research source for the ’COVID-19 pandemic.
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