Linguistic Anthropology

This article traces the historical background of the term 'belly dance', the English-language name for a complex of solo, improvised dance styles of Middle Eastern and North African origin whose movements are based on articulations of the torso. The expression danse du ventre -- literally, "dance of the belly" -- was initially popularised in France as an alternate title for Orientalist artist Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1863 painting of an Egyptian dancer and ultimately became the standard designation for solo, and especially women's, dances from the Middle East and North Africa. The translation "belly dance" was introduced into English in 1889 in international media coverage of the Rue du Caire exhibit at the Parisian Exposition Universelle. A close examination of the historical sources demonstrates that the evolution of this terminology was influenced by contemporary art, commercial considerations, and popular stereotypes about Eastern societies. The paper concludes with an examination of dancers' attitudes to the various English-language names for the dance in the present day.

The book is devoted to the analysis of ethno-linguistic and socio-cultural foundations of the identity of Dagestanis. The author discribres
particularities of  ethno-linguistic situation in the Mountainous and Lowland districts of Dageston, the influence of migration, urbanization, ethnic mixations on the cultural and language identity,  as well as the correlation of ethnic and religious identitues,  forms of actualization of ethnic and civil  consciousness,  ethnic stereotypes and other components of consciousness of Dagestanis. Special attention is paid to the problem of preserving the language diversity and cultural identity of the peoples of Dagestan.The book is intended for anthropologists, historians, philologists.
culture and a wide range of readers interested in Etnea-
takovymi and ethno-cultural problems.

This table began as a comparison of Etruscan words to other Indo-European words, and it is clear that the linkage to Etruscan illuminates some new patterns in Indo-European word relationships. We added for further comparison words from the Baltic group (Latvian), Kartvelian (Georgian) and Uralic (Finnish) and Basque, a "language isolate" that looks as much Indo-European as othes in the Indo-European group. For those who advocate Hurrian connections Hurrian words that are available have been added to the table.  *PIE specialists have been speculating on the idea that the three language families, Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian may be related to Indo-European, perhaps as a super family.
  The Indo-European family of languages is believed to have originated north of the Black Sea (Pontic Region). Some scholars have indicated a Caucasus origin. Although we can't rule out borrowing among [unrelated] languages it appears from the interesting shifts that the languages in our "Indo-European Table may be one family. I found šāl-a, šali, šala (Hurrian)
ასული, asuli, daughter(Georgian); თვით, t’vit’, self (Georgian), sevi, self (Latvian), vete, (Albanian); ხუთი, khut’i, five (Georgian), пяць, piać (Belarussian), pieci (Latvian), pesë (Albanian), pente (Greek) and pajncha (Sanskrit) interesting. (The interesting relationships continue through the table. The table is alphabetically arranged via the right-hand column, Etruscan words.

Human culture and language are deeply intertwined. Anthropologists would have difficulty understanding a culture without becoming familiar with its language and vice versa. In fact, neither one can exist without the other. Like culture, language is continually changing. Societal norms and practices impact the ways that people communicate with each other. Thus, by looking at how people speak to each other, we can deduce certain things about their relationships and relative status in society.

This paper makes the case for the continuing importance of literacy studies within linguistic ethnography, particularly given the nature of the kinds of societies in which we are working.  It underlines the importance of continuing to develop concepts and approaches for analysis of the textually mediated nature of the contemporary social world, in which the significance of communication in digital environments and multimodal communication have increased.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

"Words and Phrases, Unchanged for Centuries.

Containing a rich glossary and in excess of 300 words and phrases, the texts demonstrate the strength of the Macedonian language through preservation.

Following is a comparison of sentences between the texts and the Macedonian
dialect of Bitola as spoken today.

16th cent., Kostur dialect
21st cent., Bitola dialect

Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostavi ni da spime, ela da jame, i da pieme, dol da pojdime, da rabotime.
Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostai ne da spiame, ela da jaime, i da piame, dolu da pojdime, da rabotime.

Imate hljap-o da kupime, imate vino da kupime, ot koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogasko.
Imate lep da kupime, imate vino da kupime, od koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogatsko.

As can be clearly noticed, most of the vocabulary and grammar is identical.
All of the elements that would later be required to rejuvinate the Macedonian people as they were shaking off centuries of subjugation, were present during this period. The language of the people had solidified, a tradition of heraldry and symbolism had developed which incorporated the emblem of a rapant lion and historical figures from Macedonia's past, and the churches continued preserve the local customs and serve as cultural centres for the population. The significance of all these elements together cannot be overstated, the language of medieval Macedonia is the same as the language of the Macedonians today. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the larger amount of Macedonian literature from the Middle Ages has survived, much of it being looted and destroyed by Greek-speaking officials, clerics and teachers. Nevertheless, Macedonian as a language reached its current form centuries before the creation of the Balkan states in the 19th and 20th centuries. "

This article explains the importance of the Faroese language and the ways in which it is spoken to a Faroese identity. It emphasizes the role and the significance of the radio as well as the policies of linguistic purism, which have been much discussed on air, to build and sustain this identity. A so-called high-intimacy language and public radio make for an obvious ethnographic juxtaposition. The shaping of affective experience through radio sound is heightened if the voice is known, and if the speech and language of the voice index a matrix of values shared by a small, interrelated group. Playing off this sense of familiarity which is embraced in the Faroe Islands (a rather isolated community between Iceland and Scotland governed according to Self-Rule), language has been the tool for the cultivation of a Faroese identity at a time when the Faroes’ relationship to Denmark has looked increasingly uncertain.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

As is common in many Bantu societies, Zambian names come from the natural environment, circumstances of birth and the social setting. Names from circumstances of birth include physical appearance, position of birth, place of birth, and so on. Those from the natural environment include names from plants, animals and other natural phenomena. Nevertheless, the broadest category in Zambian nomenclature is the socio-psychological environment. My recent unpublished quantitative analysis of selected publicly available school registers in Kitwe and Lusaka showed that between 2013 and 2017, 71% of the 13 thousand students sampled used foreign first names-the remaining meagre percentage used local language based first names. This chapter is, however, descriptive rather than structural, of traditional Zambian anthroponyms as they exist at present.

Textiles produced by Tai-Kadai peoples are widely admired and much studied, but to date there has been no comparative survey of weaving techniques. Looms and techniques are transmitted between generations in a conservative manner, and have the potential to reveal deep connections between different groups. In this paper I present a survey of loom and patterning techniques, using a mapping approach, combined with comparative analysis similar to that used by linguists. The results trace Tai migration routes, and parallel the findings of linguists in many respects, with some significant differences. They also highlight the important contribution made by Tai-Kadai weavers to the development of the complex patterning systems (drawloom systems) that eventually found their way to the silk weaving industry in Europe.

Buckley C (2017) Looms, Weaving and the Austronesian Expansion. In: Cultural Exchanges in Monsoon Asia:  Andrea Acri , Roger Blench  and Alexandra Landmann (eds), ISEAS, Singapore.

Weaving plays an important role in Asian cultures, both in the practical and symbolic spheres. In this paper I trace the weaving technologies of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) to their origins on the Asian mainland. A distinctive suite of technologies, including the body-tensioned loom, warp ikat and the tubular sarong, is found across a wide area. In ISEA it is associated with Austronesian speakers, and remnants of it are found on the mainland amongst Daic and Austroasiatic speakers. Significantly, it is absent on Taiwan, which (together with Hainan and parts of Laos and Vietnam) preserve an older form of the loom. I conclude that the weaving traditions of ISEA came directly from the mainland, rather than via Taiwan.

Endangered languages are linguistic varieties spoken by relatively few people (perhaps most of them elderly), and/or in relatively few communities (perhaps even in a single, relatively small one), and/or on relatively infrequent occasions. They are languages whose future as anyone's primary (or even secondary) medium of day-today communication seems seriously in doubt—languages that in former times would have been identified as "moribund" or "dying." Though the term "endangered languages" is of recent (post-1980) origin, research on languages like these has been carried on for a considerable period of time. Indeed, the whole tradition of "Americanist" anthropology has unfolded at least since the time of Franz Boas under the assumption that the linguistic varieties and cultural practices of central interest and concern (usually, those of Native American peoples) are in the process of disappearing once and for all, and need urgently to be documented for posterity (a familiar notion of "salvage" ethnography or linguistics). Leonard Bloomfield commented in 1927 on the special problems of doing fieldwork in rapidly contracting language communities; but it was Morris Swadesh who, in 1948, applied the term "obsolescent" to these kinds of linguistic varieties, and this designation served the purposes of most researchers until the late 1980s. By the mid-1970s a number of studies had begun to appear in the scholarly literature under a variety of rubrics, including "language obsolescence," language "replacement" and "shift," "de-acquisition," and sometimes, simply , "language death." These are not all synonyms, of course: "de-acquisi-tion" suggests a focus on native-speaker competence (and the wide range of fluencies that can be observed), while "language shift" can occur whenever the members of a local speech-community begin pervasively to abandon the use of one linguistic variety in favor of another, regardless of whether or not the language being abandoned continues to be spoken elsewhere.

This course worked well in many ways. I used the Thursday lecture slot to do unlectures - getting students to practice things more actively, from kinship charts, to reading and discussing a short article, to learning how to talk to Star Trek aliens.

RESUMEN
La relación interna entre filosofía, literatura y arte permite examinar con propiedad qué significan la pluralidad y complejidad en los usos de la razón. Posibilita la aproximación a esos usos y figuras desde un ángulo privilegiado. El interés por lo literario y artístico no tendría por qué significar un apresurado abandono del modelo discursivo y analítico -que es característico de la filosofía-, sino más bien el acceso a un punto de vista más completo, un nuevo método reflexivo, otro límite crítico. Esta perspectiva facilita la puesta al día de las tesis modernas sobre la filosofía como emancipación, esto es, como su salida de la minoría de edad.
Espacios ficcionales, campos de proyección de la experiencia, métodos y perspectivas trasdisciplinarias constituyen los distintos niveles a través de los cuales se trata de definir un nexo complejo entre discursos. La ficción como conocimiento, subjetividad y texto, así como la relación entre mundo y lenguaje pretenden acotar algunas dimensiones de esa relación.
A través de la literatura llegamos a estar familiarizados con situaciones, sentimientos, formas de vida, obteniendo así una mirada desde dentro -epistemológicamente empática-. Cada nueva visión del mundo constituye un nuevo tipo de conocimiento, un conocimiento que puede incluir aspectos cognitivos y emotivos y que demandará, probablemente, algún tipo de lógica paraconsistente. De modo que a la par que por nuestras narrativas creamos o descubrimos mundos (dependiendo del estatuto ontológico otorgado a la ficción) también establecemos o desentrañamos la legislación lógica, según la cual tal curso de sucesos o tal tipo de entidades son o no admisibles al interior de este particular mundo posible.
Precisamente, es en la constante re-creación de sus objetos, práctica que surge en una comunidad de problemas -un espacio de representación colectiva- el espacio en que se da la ciencia. Es, precisamente, en una particular forma de hablar y de referirse a objetos, creándolos con el habla, el que funda a la medicina -por ejemplo- como cuerpo autónomo de conocimientos, vale decir como ciencia de primer orden. Las disciplinas, pues, en tanto discursos, están, literalmente, constituidas por él. Por ello es necesario estudiar el discurso científico en tanto que discurso, hay que reflexionar sobre sus orígenes y modo de constitución, hay que aceptar que no es sólo un producto sino una fuerza productiva. La realidad es una narrativa exitosa. Es aquello que se hace hablando. Las comunidades científicas son comunidades de problemas y, sobre todo, de retóricas, reconstrucciones de objetos que sólo existen en tanto se habla de ellos de una determinada manera,
Hasta los mundos narrativos más imposibles tienen como fondo lo que es posible en el mundo que concebimos como real. Las entidades y situaciones que no son explícitamente nombradas y descritas como diferentes del mundo real son entendidas a partir de las leyes que aplicamos a la comprensión del mundo real.
Así, pues, la narración de ficción construye un modelo análogo del universo real, una proyección...lo que permite conocer la estructura y los procesos internos de la realidad y manipularla cognitivamente. Se otorga así un valor cognoscitivo a la ficción, de modo tal que todas las posibles connotaciones, no expresadas directamente por el texto, sino -más bien- mostradas implícitamente o implicadas contextualmente en lo allí dicho, iluminan aspectos de la realidad que sin estas extrapolaciones ficcionales permanecerían en penumbras.
La perspectiva crítica -propia de la filosofía- puede hallarse así implícita en escritos de ficción, de la misma manera como las teorías filosóficas pueden aceptar como suyos a los argumentos procedentes del discurso literario. La reflexión filosófica se articula, pues, desde distintos ámbitos y modalidades discursivas.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

... a typical naive set of assumptions about "group oriented" cultures it that the participants within them are basically altruistic, self-effacing, self-sacrificing and sociable. A society of such individuals should exhibit the very best of human civilization working in equitable, democratic communities. By contrast, those from individualistic cultures should be cold, grasping, selfish, egotistical and almost incapable of the cooperation demanded by a civil society. Indeed, a society of individualists, by this stereotype would be a dog eat dog affair, dedicated to conflict, riven with disloyalty and betrayal, forever failing to build a stable and humanistic community.

COMELA 2021 will be held from May 19 - 22, 2021 in Athens. In the keynote, Professor Georgakopoulou will critically interrogate the designing spree of stories as specific features on social media platforms. She will present these directives and discuss their implications for how young people globally, the so-called Generation Z, are socialized into narrating their lives and into making sense of themselves. To register the COMELA conference, go to https://glocal.soas.ac.uk/

Que font-ils, l’anthropologue et l’ethnologue, lorsqu’ils traduisent ?
Comment les modalités de transcription de l’oral s’intègrent-elles aux
pratiques traduisantes sur le terrain ? Quel est le rôle joué par les informateurs-interprètes ? Comment les différentes traductions et des traductionsbdifférentes agissent-elles sur la construction heuristique d’unenaltérité, sur la production et la réception des connaissances anthropologiques ? Peut-on, sur les traces des processus sous-jacents à l’invention de l’Autre, tenter une approche à la fois traductologique et génétiquemdes « manuscrits de terrain » ?
Les différents essais réunis dans ce collectif interrogent la dimension
interdisciplinaire – méthodologique et épistémologique – que la traductologie partage avec l’anthropologie et l’écriture ethnographique, à
la lumière des enjeux épistémiques activés par les pratiques traduisantes. Les opérations traductives ne se limitent jamais à des transferts uniquement linguistiques, mais elles constituent toujours des pratiques cognitives, culturelles, symboliques et sociales qui, à partir de dispositifs discursifs variés, orientent et transforment la relation entre description et interprétation, traditions et savoirs, croyances et connaissances.