Anthropological Linguistics

Contemporary staged performances of Irish traditional singing feature informal, witty and performed stage talk (Bealle 1993) by singers between songs. This paper explores such performer talk and its functions in English and Irish (Gaeilge) in Irish traditional singing concerts within the Australian community of Irish speakers and learners, based on ethnographic observation and transcriptions from audio--‐ recorded concerts. Performer talk plays an important role in framing how performers want a particular song to be interpreted by the audience and authenticating the performance. It also enables Irish-speaking singers to use the language beyond the song repertoire.

For Huastecan Nahuas, water is a symbolic reference. This book describes the multiple values attached to water through the practice of tale telling in this society. It analyzes several local tales about water manifestations such as floodings, thunderstorms and waterlords, and explores what these mean to Huastecan Nahua in their present socio-cultural context. The author shows how tales about this element represent and discuss current themes like the village´s right to exist, social cohesion among villagers, the need to show respect towards nature, and life and death. The book reveals how the study of tale telling provides a promising angle to address and better understand today´s indigenous cultures in Mexico.

The Etruscan Glossary A spreadsheet presents 2,600 individual words from the major extant Etruscan texts. The texts contain a total word count of 6,000+ words, about 4,000 of which are repetitious. The Etruscan Glossary also sheds light on Etruscan declension and conjugation patterns that are similar to Latin, French & Italian. The glossary accounts for all of the 6,000+ words in the texts, including from the Zagreb Mummy wrapping to the important grammatical and mythological data contained in Etruscan mirrors. Each word in the glossary has alphanumeric locators showing exactly where they are used in the cited texts.

Applying a combination of ethnographic and discourse-centered approaches to an exploratory case study in Arusha, Tanzania, this paper examines how global discourses are locally (re)produced. By acquiring specialized knowledge that is circulating through handbooks, magazines, websites, and videos, Tanzanian students learn how to become professional “local” guides. During their training they are instructed, both implicitly and explicitly, how to use global discourses to represent and sell their natural and cultural heritage as authentically local. However, in the personal interaction with tourists, guides do not merely reproduce the narratives and practices they were taught at school but become themselves creative storytellers, often subtly questioning or contesting the normative templates.

"Le principe de réciprocité développé par Dominique Temple et Mireille Chabal postule que « le don, c’est le nom ». Qu’est-ce à dire ? Donner, c’est avoir un nom, se faire un nom. Le don crée le nom. À l’inverse, « recevoir, c’est déchoir, perdre son nom, devenir esclave, mourir ». Ces objets précieux qui sont, selon le proverbe maori, priés de détruire l’individu qui les a acceptés, ont une valeur magique, le hau, la valeur du nom qu’ils emportent avec eux en tant que symbole. La reconnaissance du nom de l’autre est aussi la reconnaissance du sens du don. Il convient donc d’éclairer ce cheminement qui partant de la notion de réciprocité (positive dans le cas du don, négative dans le cas du meurtre), conduit au nom et partant, à l’ordre symbolique du langage, à la sémiotisation de la nature par le langage. Car dire du langage qu’il est un ordre symbolique, c’est reconnaître avec Ernst Cassirer que dire le sens des conduites propres à un groupe social se trouve davantage dans le discours qui les accompagne que dans leurs aspects factuels et objectifs ; et que finalement, les identités collectives se sculptent à partir du langage et des représentations, puisque c’est dans le discours que le groupe trouve une formulation de son unité et une image de son identité, par différentiation avec d’autres groupes.
Dire du don que c’est le nom, et de la réciprocité que c’est la matrice du langage, c’est prendre cons-cience que c’est le langage, la langue en particulier, qui symboliquement, objective l’intuition du don, cristallisant ainsi les valeurs ainsi désignées et les mobilisant pour une actualisation sans cesse renouvelée, toujours subjective. Comprenons donc que c’est la réciprocité, la réciprocité primordiale qui, au niveau du réel, met en jeu des activités naturelles des hommes, les consume et produit de leur métamorphose une conscience entre les hommes que l’on peut appeler trans-subjectivité. Cette dernière leur est commune, car chacun peut désormais l’exprimer par une actualisation qui le subjective. La subjectivité est cette actualisation particulière, mais qui porte en elle le secret de la réciprocité, dont témoigne la réversibilité de l’actif au passif, qui postule l’autre comme autre sujet."

The interpretation of deixis in language is heavily context-dependent. In spoken language, the addressee(s) have the context of an utterance to aid in its interpretation. In writing, however, language can become separated from both its creator and the context of its creation. This article investigates the use of certain deictics—first and second person markers—in ancient Maya hieroglyphics (circa AD 250–900). The temporal and cultural gap that separates modern language scholars from the creators of these texts means that much of the larger cultural context in which these texts would have been interpreted has been lost. An analysis of the way in which first and second person reference was framed and deployed in Maya hieroglyphs, even when identifying the intended referent proves impossible, provides insights concerning how people recontextualize textual language and how the authors of these texts adapted the form of their messages in response to the modality used.

Among the Tzotzil Maya of San Juan Chamula (Chiapas Highlands, Mexico), dream experience, symptom formation, and certain forms of emotionally heightened self-consciousness are drawn upon to gain knowledge of the social surround. Through an exploration of these ostensibly non-intersubjective domains (and their epistemological and ontological entailments), I begin to trace the contours and dynamics of the “extended relational field” of the highland Maya, emphasizing a distinctly multimodal approach to intersubjectivity which includes interpersonal relations, intersomatic processes, and soul-based “counterpart relations.” By attending to social experience across diverse phenomenal levels, contemporary Tzotzil Maya are able to cultivate a more fully dimensional understanding of the dispositional surround—particularly in terms of those aspects of feeling and intention that are systematically stripped from most face to face interactions. Through this discussion, I hope to broaden the frame through which we view cross-cultural inflections of intersubjectivity, emphasizing the importance of tracing the differential manifestations of relational processes across diverse—and often unexpected—experiential registers, only some of which involve “minds coming to knowing other minds.