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.
Anthropology and Voice Weidman, Amanda
Annual review of anthropology,
01/2014, Volume:
43, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category invoked in discourse about personal agency, communication and ...representation, and political power. This review focuses on scholarship produced since the 1990s in a variety of fields, addressing the status of the voice within Euro-Western modernity, voice as sound and embodied practice, technological mediation, and voicing. It then turns to the ways in which anthropology and related fields have framed the relationship between voice and identity, status, subjectivity, and publics. The review suggests that attending to voice in its multiple registers gives particular insight into the intimate, affective, and material/embodied dimensions of cultural life and sociopolitical identity. Questions of voice are implicated in many issues of concern to contemporary anthropology and can lend theoretical acuity to broader concepts of more general concern to social theory as well.
This article investigates public textual inscriptions in China's Naxi minority region and the role they play in projecting power. Cliff inscriptions in Chinese minority areas may be an attempt to ...enforce the hegemonic project of the "civilizing centre," which sees Han culture as a civilizing force on the "barbarians" that live in China's border provinces. Despite the nominal equality of China's ethnic minority groups, the language and writing system of the Han majority occupy an undeniably privileged position in the country's linguistic hierarchy. But powerful writing does not necessarily have to emanate from the centre of political control, and I argue that there are examples of graphic pluralism where the hierarchy is upturned. One such example of powerful, informal public text acts are the graffiti found on the walls of a cave in an ethnically Naxi township of Baidi in Yunnan province. The most powerful and prestigious graffiti inscriptions are those that are written in the native Naxi logographic script. An analysis of these inscriptions may help to reveal the social implications of writing in heterographic situations, showing how the ritual act of writing Naxi inscriptions on the wall inculcates Naxi values and suggests that China's linguistic hierarchy is not immutable.
Bringing together ethnographic approaches to childhood, linguistic anthropology, and relational-feminist perspectives on care, this review focuses on the role of children as interactional brokers of ...care, a role that has been underappreciated. Building from the premise that, through language, children perform a fundamental form of other-oriented care-that of mediating another person's ability to express themselves-this review explores the material, political, moral, and affective dimensions of children's interactional care work. Attention to the interactional-relational aspects of children's caregiving shows the extent to which children are involved in facilitating the circulation of care and enabling community care networks, and it opens up new possibilities for how we conceptualize care: It illuminates the processes through which care practices are organized, negotiated, and enacted at the intersection of the local and the global; it reveals care as a reciprocal, distributed interactional achievement; and it helps us transcend dichotomies that have characterized scholarly thinking about care.
