In Luang Prabang, Laos, pétanque players distinguish two types of gambling: ‘gambling for beer’ and ‘gambling for money’. They readily and vividly contrast these types in abstraction but are more ...circumspect about identifying actual games as instances of one kind or another. In this article, I trace how players use these types in two modes of typification—as generics and specifics—and articulate a new way to approach similar salient and ideologically weighty ‘ethno-metapragmatic terms’, which can appear messy and unwieldy. I argue that pulling apart these modes of typification clarifies how and why people use such terms for social action, and where anyone studying them—or the types that are thought to underly them—should begin. (Generic reference, specific reference, typification, social types, explicit/implicit, metapragmatics, linguistic anthropology, Laos)*
Trash talk: Language as waste practice Cavanaugh, Jillian R.
Journal of sociolinguistics,
June 2022, 2022-06-00, 20220601, Volume:
26, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Language, through its ability to categorize and its performative effects, does not just describe what is waste and what is not: it helps to create, maintain, and occasionally disrupt these ...categorizations. There are multiple ways in which language is implicated in the production of waste, such as in categorizing certain things as waste and not others, the recurrence of particular speech acts , and practices of documentary regimentation that shape how waste is treated and approached, particularly when waste practices are institutionalized.
Invited Forum: Bridging the "Language Gap" Avineri, Netta; Johnson, Eric; Brice-Heath, Shirley ...
Journal of linguistic anthropology,
05/2015, Volume:
25, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, ...educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the concept. The diverse slate of Forum contributions that we have assembled approach the Language Gap topic from a range of linguistic anthropological perspectives—theoretical, empirical, political, ethnographic, personal, and experiential. Based on an acknowledgment of the need to improve educational access for economically and culturally diverse students, the subsequent discussions provide a range of perspectives designed to move away from denouncing and altering home language skills as a panacea for academic woes and social inequity. Linguistic anthropology's focus on language learning ecologies, and the sophistication therein, provides a novel perspective on the Language Gap. The contributions included below problematize existing ideologies, demonstrate the wealth of resources within various communities, and propose new directions for school practices and policymaking in an effort to bridge the "language gap" toward a more inclusive and discerning view of linguistic practices across diverse groups.
This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle ...their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressing and generative avenues of research and thought in phenomenologically oriented anthropology.
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.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” Here I suggest that the inverse is also true: to imagine a form of life involves imagining a language, or at ...least, a way of speaking. More specifically, I argue that those who imagine an alternative way life very often target the practices of interlocutor reference (reference to speaker and addressee of an utterance) for reform, apparently seeing such practices as in various ways constitutive of their social existence, including their relations with others. I discuss some of the ways in which thinking about language is constrained and shaped by the very character of language itself. I then turn to consider two cases in which advocates for social change sought to bring about a hoped-for future through reform of the practices of interlocutor reference.
El presente texto estudia la línea de diálogo entre Platón, Aristóteles, Humboldt y Heidegger acerca del fundamento del habla y su dimensión antropológica, a partir de obras selectas sobre filosofía ...del lenguaje. Se muestra la tradición interna de lectura de sus textos y las conclusiones del desarrollo del pensamiento filosófico a través de ellos. Se dejan abiertas nuevas vías de estudio desde la hondura que el ser humano y la palabra muestran sobre la belleza y lo sagrado. Abstract: The following text analyses de dialogue among Plato, Aristotle, Humboldt and Heidegger on the same the basis of speech and its anthropological dimension, based on selected works on philosophy of language. The paper shows the inner tradition of reading of their texts and the conclusions of the development of the philosophical thinking through them. The text opens new paths of research through the depth that the human being and the word show on the beauty and the sacred.
Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. ...Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics (
rasa
and "everyday aesthetics") that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our ...method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (events of the body that happen in social settings but are only identified as religious in those social settings when they afford, or make available, an interpretation that makes sense in that setting); and striking anomalous events. We demonstrate that local cultural practices shift the pattern of spiritual experiences, even those such as sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences that might be imagined in some ways as culture free, but that the more the spiritual experience is constrained by a specific physiology, the more the frequency of the event will be constrained by an individual’s vulnerability to those experiences. We will call this the “cultural kindling” of spiritual experience.
