Redalyc.Ethnomusicology on the Turn

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Redalyc.Ethnomusicology on the Turn Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música E-ISSN: 1697-0101 [email protected] Sociedad de Etnomusicología España Bielawski, Ludwik Ethnomusicology on the turn Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música, núm. 5, junio, 2000, p. 0 Sociedad de Etnomusicología Barcelona, España Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=82200501 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Ethnomusicology on the turn Revista Transcultural de Música Transcultural Music Review #5 (2000) ISSN:1697-0101 Ethnomusicology on the turn Ludwik Bielawski (Warszawa) Professor Anna Czekanowska belongs to a generation of ethnomusico- logists educated after WWII who became specialists in this discipline, acquiring every possible research degree and establishing a position for ethnomusicology at Polish universities. Anna Czekanowska was the first to receive a Ph.D. and certification (1958, 1968) and become a professor of ethnomusicology (1976). Anna Czekanowska has engaged in many facets of scientific activity and organised co-operation with specialists from East and West, which has enhanced the international status of Polish musicology. Anna Czekanowska was born in Lwów on June 25th 1929, daughter of a prominent anthropologist and ethnologist, Jan Czekanowski. Her father, educated in Zürich, had begun a research career at the Ethnological Museum (Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin, from where he took part in an expedition to Central Africa. He continued his research in St Petersburg, organising the section of African Culture at the Hermitage Museum. He was then appointed a professor of anthropology at Lwów and the President of this university in 1934-1936. The mother of Anna, Elzbieta Sergijewska, was Russian; and her grandmother on her father's side, German. Such international and inter-denominational family connections and experiences shaped Anna's research work into a rare balance between Eastern and Western inspirations in humanities. Anna spent the war partly in Gluchów (Grójec district) on the family estate of Jan Czekanowski, and partly in the Kolbuszowa district and in other places where the family had to take refuge. In 1945/6 Jan Czekanowski was working at the Catholic University in Lublin, where Anna attended a music school (the piano class of Aleksander http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (1 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn Wielhorski). In 1946 Jan Czekanowski became Head of the anthropology department at Poznan University, at which Anna studied musicology in 1948- 1952. Her mentor was Adolf Chybinski, also a pre-war professor at Lwów University and the founder of Polish musicology. Although Anna is my age, she was already in her third year when I started my studies. The only lectures we attended together were those of Adolf Chybinski. At that time a star among students, or rather a fully mature research worker, was another contemporary, Tadeusz Strumillo. A great hope for Polish historical musicology, unfortunately he lost his life in the Tatra Mountains in 1956, aged only 27. Nevertheless he left considerable research. Ours was a unique class in the history of musicology, if we consider the future positions of the graduates. Zygmunt Szweykowski, music historian, the assistant of Chybinski, became the Head of the Musicological Department at the Jagiellonian University. Jan Steszewski, the ethnomusicologist, became the Head of the Musicological Department at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan. In those years (1948-52) musical ethnography was taught by Marian Sobieski, a pre-war assistant of Lucjan Kamienski, a founder of musicology in Poznan (1922). After WWII, Jadwiga and Marian Sobieski organised field recordings of folk music, thus continuing on a much larger scale the endeavours of the 1930s (original collections in Poznan and Warszawa were almost completely lost during the war). Anna Czekanowska from the very beginning specialised in musical ethnography. She took part in field research organised by Marian and Jadwiga Sobieski. The materials then gathered served as a basis for her M. A. and Ph.D. theses. Anna wrote her M. A. thesis about the region of Opoczynskie but she did not think of herself as a student of Sobieskis, because she herself had an everyday contact with a great authority in ethnography and was also absorbed in the research conducted by her father. Of the students of musicology, she distinguished herself because of her better preparation in ethnography. This was demonstrated in her overall ethnographic introduction to the M. A. thesis on songs of the Opoczynskie region. In her next monograph Czekanowska did not write this sort of introduction and concentrated on musicological questions. However, she was always conscious of ethnography, physical anthropology and historical linguistics and valued achievements in these fields. An absolutely new element introduced by Anna Czekanowska into Polish ethnomusicology was the quantitative method of organising folk melodies, first http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (2 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn in the form of Jan Czekanowski's diagram, then in the form of the taxonomy dendrite worked out by a group of mathematicians led by Hugo Steinhaus, former professor at Lwów University. Common features of these procedures is a formalisation of melodic analyses, computation of the extent of differences, and then grouping of the melodies according to their numbered similarities. This created a formal classification of folk melodies within the collections analysed. The diagram by Jan Czekanowski was used by Anna in her M. A. thesis (1952, published in 1956) but not published later, because it could arouse suspicion of "formalism," which could cause serious consequences in those times. It is a pity that in her Ph.D. dissertation (1958, published in 1961) on songs of the Bilgoraj region Anna did not publish the diagram, although it was commented upon in later theoretical contributions. Nevertheless, the adaptation of Jan Czekanowski's method into musical ethnography is her achievement. Anna Czekanowska's Ph.D. dissertation described in detail morphological features of the Bilgoraj region's songs and showed the peculiarities of these songs in the general context of the Polish-Ukrainian musical heritage. A consideration of the East-Slavonic literature is valuable, but the most important results are the stylistic stratification of the repertoire, an attempt to put in chronological order stylistic strata, and the inclusion of musical data in a discussion on the ethnogenesis of Slavonic and Polish folk culture. Anna Czekanowska received her Ph.D. in 1958, a year after her father published his basic work on the ethnogenesis of the Slavs. The certification work of Anna (1968, published in 1972) on narrow-range Slavonic melodies has similar ethnogenetic perspectives. This vast study was carried out with the help of mathematicians guided by Hugo Steinhaus. The tables of similarities were computed, but the graphs of the dendrites had to be drawn manually. A geographic differentiation of styles and scarce data on music history were confronted with the history of settlements and migrations. The conclusions refer to the difficult question of how historical causes influenced contemporary differentiation of styles in musical folklore. Before Anna Czekanowska published her monograph on Slavonic narrow- range melodies, the Ukrainian folklorist Vladimir Hoszowski published a book on the origins of Slavonic music (1971). Unlike Anna Czekanowska, who concentrated particularly on the tonal aspects of the songs, Vladimir Hoszowski, following the traditions of Ukrainian folklore studies, was looking for characteristic rhythmic features. This obviously led his analyses to other conclusions. However, this discrepancy was never resolved, either in an http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans5/bielawski.htm (3 of 8) [01/08/2007 11:42:08] Ethnomusicology on the turn international forum or personally by these researchers. Boguslaw Linette (1981) reduces the problem of Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and Slavonic sources to mutual and rather recent inter-relationships of Ukrainian and Polish music. The Slovakian ethnomusicologists Jozef Kresánek (1951) and Alica Elschekova (1966, 1978) explained in another way differentiation from older styles in folk music. They singled out a stratum of melodies based on formulae with intervals of the fourth and second and defined it as the stratum connected with an agrarian culture, and then accordic melodies with the prevailing interval of the third as the stratum connected with a shepherd culture. In the 1960s computers offered fascinating possibilities of ordering folk melodies. Bertrand Bronson in the late 1940s had already formalised a method for analysis of melodies of Anglo-American ballads and encoded his results in a computer system. Similar studies were conducted later by Oskar and Alica Elschek in Slovakia and Vladimir Hoszowski in the Ukraine and Armenia. Open databases were created for thousands of folk melodies prepared for various classifications. However, the way chosen by Anna Czekanowska differed: it consisted of a kind of closed song collection which has determined criteria for analysis. Since the 1960s ethnomusicologists have tried to code whole melodies
Recommended publications
  • Linguistics for the Use of African History and the Comparative Study of Bantu Pottery Vocabulary
    LINGUISTICS FOR THE USE OF AFRICAN HISTORY AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF BANTU POTTERY VOCABULARY Koen Bostoen Université Libre de Bruxelles1 Royal Museum for Central Africa Tervuren 1. Introduction Ever since African historical linguistics emerged in the 19th century, it has served a double purpose. It has not only been practiced with the aim of studying language evolution, its methods have also been put to use for the reconstruction of human history. The promotion of linguistics to one of the key disciplines of African historiography is an inevitable consequence of the lack of ancient written records in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars of the African past generally fall back on two kinds of linguistic research: linguistic classifi- cation and linguistic reconstruction. The aim of this paper is to present a con- cise application of both disciplines to the field of Bantu linguistics and to offer two interesting comparative case studies in the field of Bantu pottery vocabulary. The diachronic analysis of this lexical domain constitutes a promising field for interdisciplinary historical research. At the same time, the examples presented here urge history scholars to be cautious in the applica- tion of words-and-things studies for the use of historical reconstruction. The neglect of diachronic semantic evolutions and the impact of ancient lexical copies may lead to oversimplified and hence false historical conclusions. 2. Bantu languages and the synchronic nature of historical linguistics Exact estimations being complicated by the lack of good descriptive ma- terial, the Bantu languages are believed to number at present between 400 and 600. They are spoken in almost half of all sub-Saharan countries: Camer- 1 My acknowledgement goes to Yvonne Bastin, Claire Grégoire, Jacqueline Renard, Ellen Vandendorpe and Annemie Van Geldre who assisted me in the preparation of this paper.
    [Show full text]
  • Contesting Regimes of Variation: Critical Groundwork for Pedagogies of Mobile Experience and Restorative Justice
    Robert W. Train Sonoma State University, California CONTESTING REGIMES OF VARIATION: CRITICAL GROUNDWORK FOR PEDAGOGIES OF MOBILE EXPERIENCE AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE Abstract: This paper examines from a critical transdisciplinary perspective the concept of variation and its fraught binary association with standard language as part of the conceptual toolbox and vocabulary for language educators and researchers. “Variation” is shown to be imbricated a historically-contingent metadiscursive regime in language study as scientific description and education supporting problematic speaker identities (e.g., “non/native”, “heritage”, “foreign”) around an ideology of reduction through which complex sociolinguistic and sociocultural spaces of diversity and variability have been reduced to the “problem” of governing people and spaces legitimated and embodied in idealized teachers and learners of languages invented as the “zero degree of observation” (Castro-Gómez 2005; Mignolo 2011) in ongoing contexts of Western modernity and coloniality. This paper explores how regimes of variation have been constructed in a “sociolinguistics of distribution” (Blommaert 2010) constituted around the delimitation of borders—linguistic, temporal, social and territorial—rather than a “sociolinguistics of mobility” focused on interrogating and problematizing the validity and relevance of those borders in a world characterized by diverse transcultural and translingual experiences of human flow and migration. This paper reframes “variation” as mobile modes-of-experiencing- the-world in order to expand the critical, historical, and ethical vocabularies and knowledge base of language educators and lay the groundwork for pedagogies of experience that impact human lives in the service of restorative social justice. Keywords: metadiscursive regimes w sociolinguistic variation w standard language w sociolinguistics of mobility w pedagogies of experience Train, Robert W.
    [Show full text]
  • Intersubjectivity Evolved to Fit the Brain, but Grammar Co
    BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2008) 31, 489–558 Printed in the United States of America doi:10.1017/S0140525X08004998 Language as shaped by the brain Morten H. Christiansen Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, and Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 [email protected] http://www.psych.cornell.edu/people/Faculty/mhc27.html Nick Chater Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom [email protected] http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/people/profiles/chater_nick.htm Abstract: It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a “moving target” both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG – the mesh between learners and languages – arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent “organism,” which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph Harold Greenberg
    JOSEPH HAROLD GREENBERG CORRECTED VERSION* Joseph H. Greenberg, one of the most original and influential linguists of the twentieth century, died at his home in Stanford, California, on May 7th, 2001, three weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday. Greenberg was a major pioneer in the development of linguistics as an empirical science. His work was always founded directly on quantitative data from a single language or from a wide range of languages. His chief legacy to contemporary linguistics is in the development of an approach to the study of language—typology and univerals—and to historical linguistics. Yet he also made major contributions to sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology, and especially African language studies. Joe Greenberg was born on May 28th, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of two children. His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, a German Jew. His father’s family name was originally Zyto, but in one of those turn-of-the- century immigrant stories, he ended up taking the name of his landlord. Joe Greenberg’s early loves were music and languages. As a child he sat fascinated next to his mother while she played the piano, and asked her to teach him. She taught him musical notation and then found him a local teacher. Greenberg ended up studying with a Madame Vangerova, associated with the Curtis Institute of Music. Greenberg even gave a concert at Steinway Hall at the age of 14, and won a city-wide prize for best chamber music ensemble. But after finishing high school, Greenberg chose an academic career instead of a musical one, although he continued to play the piano every evening until near the end of his life.
    [Show full text]
  • JUDITH R. H. KAPLAN Integrated Studies Program University of Pennsylvania 175 Claudia Cohen Hall 249 South 36Th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 [email protected]
    JUDITH R. H. KAPLAN Integrated Studies Program University of Pennsylvania 175 Claudia Cohen Hall 249 South 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6324 [email protected] Updated December 2019 ACADEMIC POSITIONS 2017-Present University of Pennsylvania, Integrated Studies Program, Teaching Fellow / History and Sociology of Science, Lecturer 2016-17 Wolf Humanities Forum (formerly, PHF), Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow / University of Pennsylvania, History and Sociology of Science, Lecturer 2016 Bard College Berlin, Contributing Lecturer 2013-16 Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Postdoctoral Fellow EDUCATION 2012 University of Wisconsin, Madison: PhD in History of Science Dissertation Title: “Language Science and Orientalism in Imperial Germany” Committee: Lynn K. Nyhart, chair; Thomas H. Broman; Ronald L. Numbers; Joseph C. Salmons; Richard A. Staley Preliminary Examination Fields: History of Modern Biology (Nyhart), History of Science and Religion (Numbers), History of Scientific Methodology (Shank) PhD Minor: Modern European Intellectual History, Rudy J. Koshar, advisor Languages: German, French reading knowledge 2006 University of Wisconsin, Madison: MA in History of Science 2004 University of Illinois, Chicago: MS in Disability and Human Development 2002 Hampshire College: BA in Cultural Studies Kaplan CV 2 FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS 2017 Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship (declined) 2011 DAAD-Center for German and European Studies, Graduate Research Assistantship
    [Show full text]
  • Patience Epps Department of Linguistics Professor RLP 4.304 the University of Texas at Austin 305 E
    Patience Epps Department of Linguistics Professor RLP 4.304 The University of Texas at Austin 305 E. 23rd Street, STOP B5100 Austin, TX 78712-0198 USA email: [email protected] phone: 512-471-9015 RESEARCH INTERESTS Indigenous languages of Amazonia (Brazil; Naduhup/Makú, Tukanoan, Arawakan, other families) Language documentation, description, and preservation Linguistic typology, functional linguistics Historical linguistics, language contact and convergence Language and prehistory Linguistic anthropology and verbal art EDUCATION 2005 Ph.D. Linguistic Anthropology. University of Virginia. Dissertation: A Grammar of Hup. 2000 M.A. Linguistic Anthropology. University of Virginia. 1994 B.A. Anthropology, magna cum laude. College of William and Mary, Virginia. EMPLOYMENT AND TEACHING Sept. 2016-present Professor, The University of Texas at Austin. Sept. 2010–Sept 2016 Associate Professor, The University of Texas at Austin. Jan. 2006–Sept. 2010 Assistant Professor, The University of Texas at Austin. Summer Schools 2018 Faculty, Moscow Summer School for Areal Linguistics and Languages of Russia. Sept. 10-14. 2015 Faculty, 68th LSA Summer Institute, The University of Chicago. July 5-31. 2009 Faculty, 65th LSA Summer Institute, The University of California, Berkeley. July 27-Aug. 13. GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS 2019 NEH-DEL award PD-266994-19: ‘Documentation of Nadëb (mbj), a Naduhup language of Brazil’. Funding period: 9/1/2019 – 8/31/2022. ($323,717). 2018 NEH-DEL award PD-260978: ‘Archiving significant collections of endangered languages: Two multilingual regions of northwestern South America’, Co-PI Susan Kung. Funding period: 9/1/2018 - 8/31/2021. ($227,365). 2018 The University of Texas at Austin ‘Research Apprenticeship’ award (for project ‘Investigating Nadëb Word Order’).
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistics, Archaeology, and the Histories of Language Spread: the Case of the Southern Jê Languages, Brazil
    Cadernos de Etnolingüística (ISSN 1946-7095) volume 3, número 2, maio/2011 http://www.etnolinguistica.org/issue:vol3n2 Linguistics, archaeology, and the histories of language spread: the case of the Southern Jê languages, Brazil In this paper I discuss the relationship between archaeology and historical linguistics, and present a case study from my own research on the diffusion of the Southern Jê languages. For a long time, archaeologists were not aware of the fact that the Kaingang and Xokleng languages were related to the Jê languages of Central Brazil, and proposed an autochthonous origin for those southern groups. A new generation of archaeologists, aware of the relationship between Kaingang and Xokleng and the Jê language family, focused on the identification of their migration. The emergence of the so called Taquara- Itararé archaeological tradition around AD 220 was thought to signal the arrival of Jê speakers to the south. In my research I analyzed assemblages of Taquara-Itararé pottery from different areas of Southern Brazil, combined with the available radio-carbon dates, and with the most recent data on subsistence. The chronological and cultural frame resulting from these data corroborates previous hypotheses that the appearance of pottery coincides with a process of population growth fostered by intensive Araucaria pine nut exploitation and maize-tuber agriculture, which rapidly led to the filling up of the landscape by these new settlers and to territorial circumscription—the formation of more restricted and territorial social boundaries, sensu Carneiro (1970). Such circumscription is best evidenced by the development of local pottery styles, as I could identify.
    [Show full text]
  • Trask's Historical Linguistics
    Trask’s Historical Linguistics Trask’s Historical Linguistics, Third Edition, is an accessible introduction to historical linguistics – the study of language change over time. This engaging book is illustrated with language examples from all six continents, and covers the fundamental concepts of language change, methods for historical linguistics, linguistic reconstruction, sociolinguistic aspects of language change, language contact, the birth and death of languages, language and prehistory and the issue of very remote relations. This third edition of the renowned Trask’s Historical Linguistics is fully revised and updated and covers the most recent developments in historical linguistics, including: ᭹ more detail on morphological change including cutting-edge discussions of iconization ᭹ coverage of recent developments in sociolinguistic explanations of variation and change ᭹ new case studies focusing on Germanic languages and American and New Zealand English, and updated exercises covering each of the topics within the book ᭹ a brand new companion website featuring material for both professors and students, including discussion questions and exercises as well as discussions of the exercises within the book. Trask’s Historical Linguistics is essential reading for all students of language, linguistics and related disciplines. The accompanying website can be found at www.routledge.com/cw/trask Robert McColl Millar is Professor in Linguistics and Scottish Language at the University of Aberdeen. His most recent books include English Historical Sociolinguistics (2012) and (with William Barras and Lisa Marie Bonnici) Lexical Variation and Attrition in the Scottish Fishing Communities (2014). Larry Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on Basque language and historical linguistics.
    [Show full text]
  • Computational Historical Linguistics
    Theoretical Linguistics 2019; 45(3-4): 151–182 Gerhard Jäger∗ Computational historical linguistics https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2019-0011 Abstract: Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed for half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational biology and to the release of several large electronic data resources suitable for systematic comparative work. In this article, some of the central research topics of this new wave of compu- tational historical linguistics are introduced and discussed. These are automatic assessment of genetic relatedness, automatic cognate detection, phylogenetic infer- ence and ancestral state reconstruction. They will be demonstrated by means of a case study of automatically reconstructing a Proto-Romance word list from lexical data of 50 modern Romance languages and dialects. The results illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the current state of the art of automating the comparative method. Keywords: historical linguistics, comparative method, phylogenetic inference 1 Introduction Historical linguistics is the oldest sub-discipline of linguistics, and it constitutes an amazing success story. It gave us a clear idea of the laws governing language change, as well as detailed insights into the languages – and thus the cultures and living conditions – of prehistoric populations which left no written records. The diachronic dimension of languages is essential for a proper understanding of their synchronic properties. Also, the findings from historical linguistics are an important source of information for other fields of prehistory studies, such as archaeology, paleoanthropology and, in recent years, paleogenetics (Renfrew 1987; Pietrusewsky 2008; Anthony 2010; Haak et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Real and Spurious Correlations Involving Tonal Languages Jeremy Collins Radboud University, Nijmegen
    Chapter 10 Real and spurious correlations involving tonal languages Jeremy Collins Radboud University, Nijmegen Why are some languages tonal? Is there a fundamental reason why some lan- guages develop tone and others do not, and and does this have an effect on the way the rest of the language is organized? Tone is important in the context of dependencies, because there is no shortage of hypotheses about what can cause tone and what else tone can cause. For example, tonal languages are found pre- dominantly in warm, humid climates, suggesting that they are culturally adap- tive in those environments (Everett, Blasi & Roberts 2015); they are also found in places with low frequencies of two genes microcephalin and ASPM, suggesting that some populations are more likely to use tone than others because of their genetics (Dediu & Ladd 2007). One paper furthermore proposed that phoneme diversity declines with distance from Africa, and number of tones in particular, suggesting a founder effect of migrations, as well as a link with modern popula- tion size (Atkinson 2011). As for effects on the rest of the language, SVOword order (Yiu & Matthews 2013) and various other grammatical properties have been suggested to linked functionally with tone, and by Donegan & Stampe (1983) in particular for languages in the Austro-Asiatic family. At least part of the reason for the large number of correlations proposed in the literature is the visibly skewed geographical distribution of tonal languages (Fig- ure 1). They are predominantly found in Africa and Southeast Asia, immediately suggesting that tone will correlate with a large number of things, from humid climates and SVO languages, to serial verbs, and ancient settlement.
    [Show full text]
  • Language in Culture Syllabus Petko Ivanov Connecticut College, [email protected]
    Connecticut College Digital Commons @ Connecticut College Slavic Studies Course Materials Slavic Studies Department 2015 Language in Culture Syllabus Petko Ivanov Connecticut College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/slaviccourse Recommended Citation Ivanov, Petko, "Language in Culture Syllabus" (2015). Slavic Studies Course Materials. Paper 1. http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/slaviccourse/1 This Course Materials is brought to you for free and open access by the Slavic Studies Department at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Slavic Studies Course Materials by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. C o n n e c t i c u t C o l l e g e Spring 2015 ANT/SLA 226 René Magritte This is not a pipe (1936) Language in Culture Prof. Petko Ivanov ANT 226: Language in Culture Connecticut College Spring 2015 ANT / SLA 226 Language in Culture Spring 2015, Wednesday/Friday 2:45-4:00 Olin 113 Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes Instructor: Petko Ivanov Blaustein 330, x5449, [email protected] Office hours W/F 1:30-2:30 and by appointment Course Description The course is an introduction to linguistic anthropology with a main focus on language “use” in society. Among the main topics to be addressed are the notions of language ideology (how language is conceptualized by its users, e.g., what they think they do with language when they talk and otherwise utilize their language); pragmatics and metapragmatics; socio-cultural semiosis of linguistic practices, incl.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
    C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/4908585/WORKINGFOLDER/KOCK/9781107030077TTL.3D iii [3–3] 4.4.2014 10:32AM The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology Edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman and Jack Sidnell C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/4908585/WORKINGFOLDER/KOCK/9781107030077C27.3D 638 [638–661] 4.4.2014 6:49AM 27 Language and archaeology State of the art Roger Blench 27.1 Introduction: Why link two such different disciplines? Archaeology is the reconstruction of past lifeways through the excavation and analysis of material remains, whereas linguistics is the description of human language and interpretation of patterns that can be observed. Sociocultural anthropologists may well wonder what the two disciplines have in common and their relevance to sociocultural anthropology. Archaeology can provide time-depth for the synchronic observations of sociocultural anthropology and thus add analytic richness to descriptions of social change. For example, the transition from foraging to agriculture must have occurred many times in different regions (Barker 2006). Yet a change with such momentous economic and social implications cannot now be directly observed, so archaeology must provide a window on this process. However, the development and spread of agriculture also had major consequences for the linguistic map of the world. Combining archaeological results with linguistic reconstruction and a nuanced under- standing of social process derived from ethnography allows us to evolve a richer model of prehistory. Linguistics has historically been linked to hypotheses concerning pre- history in three main ways: (a) the correlation of linguistic reconstructions from historical linguis- tics with the findings of archaeology (b) speculations concerning the origin of human language and palaeoanthropology (c) palaeosociolinguistics, the use of language evolution models from the near present to explain both language patterning and archaeological results.
    [Show full text]