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.
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.
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.
Have wireless, mobile communication technologies - phones, laptops and tablets - changed the way people talk to one another? What does it mean to be able to speak or write to anyone, anywhere, ...24/7/365, and get an immediate response? And what does the current profusion of these technologies mean for the study of language in social life? Do we need to develop new approaches, methodologies and theories? Taking a global perspective, this volume provides readers with a nuanced, ethnographically-informed understanding of mobile communication and sociolinguistics. The text explores a wide range of digital applications, including SMS, email, tweeting, Facebook, YouTube, chatting, blogging, Wikipedia, Second Life and gaming. It raises important questions about the nature of language, the role of multimodality and intertextuality in creating meaning, the realities and consequences of digital linguistic inequality. The formation of virtual communities, ways of online socialising and the performance of the 'self' are explored. Based on a multicultural and multilingual approach, the volume provides a comprehensive and intriguing overview of digital communication for both students and researchers.
Informed by eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Montmartre, one of the last village-like neighbourhoods in Paris, in this paper, I analyze how people in this community talked through and ...acted out the COVID-19 pandemic. Using theoretical frameworks from linguistic, cognitive and medical anthropology, I examine “small stories” (Georgakopoulou 2007) about COVID-19, in particular, the analogical and conceptual aspects of this talk. How do people construct understandings of crisis as it evolves? What does this process look like when talk becomes action and reaction and what does it say about the future?
This paper explores how people employed analogy, cultural scripts and other linguistic wor(l)d-building tools in their talk about their experiences and comprehensions of COVID-19. Following the arguments of Ochs (2012), I propose that talking about COVID-19 is itself an experience of the virus, an experience that informs people’s understandings of their present circumstances and future possibilities.
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