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The construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley in western India displaced more than 30,000 families, mostly from Indigenous communities. Many of those displaced were resettled in regions that had a starkly different ecological and social composition from the mountainous areas they were forced to leave. In this paper we draw on the anthropology of landscape, linguistic anthropology, and ethnophysiography to chart the transformation of referential landscape terminology in the indigenous Bhili language as a result of displacement and subsequent resettlement. We focus on semantic domains covering ecological features such as soil, rivers, and forests, as well as the use of land for functional purposes. In doing so, we demonstrate how bridging conceptual and perceptual ethnographic approaches to landscape provides a more holistic view of displacement that encompasses both the memories of the places left behind as well as the unfolding process of resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As national movements coalesced across the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, ethnic Russians penned thousands of letters to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to complain about alleged discrimination and to demand protection and aid. Analyzing the contents of 650 public letters, this article interprets Russians' complaints as a strategy for justifying and maintaining privilege, a discourse that is situated in the history of Russian privilege and non-Russian challenges to it. Under the guise of advocating equality, Russian letter writers demonstrated their understanding of ethnolinguistic and racial hierarchies, emphasized their paternalistic role in developing non-Russian republics, and sought to depart for Russia from non-Russian republics. In dialogue with scholarship on racial formation, whiteness, and privilege in the United States, this analysis highlights the discursive practices that shaped the Soviet social order, revealing citizens' role in forming and maintaining interrelated racial, ethnolinguistic, economic, and spatial hierarchies. Problematizing US-centered frameworks, the article proposes privilege as a capacious analytical lens for describing the complex matrix of advantages and oppression built into societies founded on principles of equality. Soviet stability depended on tacit advantages afforded Russians and an emphasis on concepts like friendship and equality. In the Soviet context, privilege persisted in silences and informal practices. By encouraging citizens to address grievances openly, glasnost laid bare the systemic inequalities that had long structured society and contributed to the Soviet Union's destabilization and collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Onscreen/Offscreen" by Constantine V. Nakassis is a monograph that provides an in-depth exploration of the politics within the Tamil film industry in India. The book examines the gendered politics in Tamil commercial cinema, highlighting the discrimination faced by actresses and the cultural norms that discourage them from playing the role of the heroine. It also delves into the ontological politics that occur in theaters, film sets, and everyday sociocultural lives in the region. Nakassis's analysis of the Tamil film industry contributes to fields such as linguistic anthropology, film studies, and South Asian studies, making it a valuable resource for researchers and students in these areas. [Extracted from the article]

Scholars of Dena'ina, a Northern Dene (Athabaskan) language of south-central Alaska, have assigned great importance to a set of terms derived from the root - ggesh , typically translated either as "trace" or "impurity," proposing the concepts they refer to as a cultural explanation for the otherwise puzzling dearth of human and animal remains at Dena'ina archaeological sites. This paper critically reexamines the root and associated terminology, especially through the lens of the work of Dena'ina writer Peter Kalifornsky (1911–1993). I propose that, rather than an "impurity" (as argued by Alan Boraas and Donita Peter), - ggesh should be interpreted as a morally neutral trace, or more broadly, a site of entanglement between material substance and spirit, which may have acquired a morally negative valence in the context of Dena'ina Christian vocabulary. This revised understanding of the concept helps to make sense of diverse features of the linguistic, historical, and archaeological landscape in Dena'ina Country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking up the trinomial "fat, Black, and ugly" as a discomforting point of departure, this piece explores several ways fatness and Blackness are discursively constructed as social comorbidities for feminine people and examines how this discourse affects lived experience. It considers how the discursive field in which "fat, Black, and ugly" dwells traverses temporal and social scales: from early twentieth‐century science discourse to recent social media discourse, and from state policies to inner voices. Inspired by Gina Athena Ulysse's rasanblaj approach, the analysis uses a combination of personal narrative/autoethnography and discourse analysis, and draws from sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, Black feminist studies, African feminist studies, and fat studies. I convene these fields and methodologies in an effort to think about a semiotic collusion between fatness and Blackness that expels certain subjects from legible and legitimate humanness and value in an anti‐Black anthroposphere—or, via the illuminations of Hortense Spillers, that renders them prodigious flesh that prevails in the beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on mid-twentieth-century exchanges between ethnomusicology and anthropological linguistics, this essay explores the challenges and special insights that came with the study of pitch variations in vocal communication. It surveys the interconnected material and conceptual resources that were available to researchers during this period, describes a number of attempts to discipline sounds for further analysis, and addresses the key conundrum of song in tonal languages. To what extent were researchers compelled by the substantive overlap between musical and linguistic phenomena, and to what extent did they seek to analogize models from one domain to the other? Pursuing this question reveals that sound fell between diverse research orientations that do not conform straightforwardly to "science" and "the humanities." Methodologically, it was subject to variously formalist and contextual approaches; ontologically, it was recruited to the contiguous domains of fixed and free vocal production. These observations, along with an emphasis on language use in the disciplines, shed new light on intellectual crosscurrents and claims to specific disciplinary competence during the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six lexical forms found in similar phonetic shapes in numerous languages of Greater Amazonia are presented and traced throughout various linguistic lineages of this region. Besides a detailed lexical documentation of the six forms in languages and proto-languages of South America, this article provides appropriate maps showing the geographical distribution of each of these forms. Five of the six lexical forms have not been discussed before in the literature, and for three of them a precise etymology will be indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fieldwork is a foundational process of reflection and reworking the professional identity of the anthropologist. The ongoing reflexive process provides a hermeneutic whereby the anthropologist recognizes omissions and silences—failures to draw generalizations implicit at the time of the fieldwork. Initial fieldwork in linguistic anthropology among the Cree of northern Alberta is the baseline from which the author's fieldwork has moved from surface description of cultural patterns and behaviors to their underlying ontologies and relationalities, through an increasingly self-conscious commitment to collaborative research directed by community aspirations and agendas. In retrospect, parallel work in the history of Americanist (Boasian) anthropology integrates the insights of long-term fieldwork into rethinking the nature of history and how continuities from the past follow a consistent albeit nonlinear trajectory, with each apparent paradigm shift containing the seeds of its own becoming otherwise. Our present theories and interpretations are no exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 US Presidential campaign saw the meteoric rise to power of Donald J. Trump, unprecedented perhaps in the history of American politics not only for its style but also for its unswerving "address" (Lempert and Silverstein 2012) to a "base" that was large enough to give Trump an electoral college victory. This talk was connected most distinctively (though of course not exclusively) to the social media platform Twitter. This article provides what is arguably the first anthropological linguistic analysis of Twitter, while also interrogating for the first time Trump's use of Twitter as a speech practice. It is no doubt too soon to tell, but it is suggested here that rather than the broad-spectrum address of the message that has heretofore characterized much of the history of presidential campaigns, Trump's socialmedia address to a base may mark a shift in the rise of presidential talk to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its theorization and elaboration in the path-breaking work of Michael Silverstein, indexicality has served as a foundational analytic category for linguistic anthropology, both in its ethnographic analyses as well as in its theoretical interventions into key issues in the philosophy of language, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. The working out of indexicality's implications for the study of semiosis - and more particularly, language in culture - has and continues to produce a vital and dynamic theoretical field of scholarly activity. This vitality, I argue, emerges from a foundational ambivalence within the category of indexicality: between, on the one hand, immediacy and presence and, on the other hand, mediation and representation. Productively unresolved, this ambivalence is less a problem than an opportunity and invitation for further ethnographic and analytic refinement of our accounts of (meta)semiosis and social life. A reflexive and deconstructive turn to indexicality's ambivalent ground, then, is implied and necessitated by the category itself, though this in no way obviates its utility for semiotic and ethnographic theory and analysis; indeed, as I argue, such a turn is critical to indexicality's ongoing utility to both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commonplace division of labor between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, on the one hand, and sociology and social anthropology, on the other, is predicated on a nominalist error, the belief that institutionally embedded and named fields denote discrete phenomena. An influential and much-cited twentieth-century bellwether of this division was Susanne Langer's distinction between "discursive" and "presentational" form, a polythetic distinction that tacitly constructed a metaphysic. An examination of social interaction in its most elementary form suggests that no such distinction is warranted and that, instead, a systematic account of social interaction transcends the boundaries of these and several additional "preliminary disciplines." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major outlines of enregisterment as a metasemiotic process are well understood in linguistic anthropology, so we can turn to its further systematic implications. The article explores three "moments" in enregisterment, positing that practices and value projects create registers that act as clasps, relays, and graftings, each producing interdiscursivity and thus circulation. They connect arenas of social action in different ways. The connections are rightly called social organizations of interdiscursivity, since they link and organize not only discourses and registers but also the societal arrangements - NGOs, nonprofits, welfare offices, political platforms, academic circles - that are constituted around registers and through which registers have their powerful effects of connection (and separation) in specific historical moments. The examples, mostly from the politics of Hungary, surely have parallels elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarly, the traditional Chinese imperial ideology centered around Confucian-Legalism, which fundamentally confines "the invention of China" and its use, is underreported, although Hayton mentions (74, 137-41) the hidden I tianxia i worldview and the not-so-hidden imperialist elitism behind the invented ideas. By tracing this internalized construct and the resulting sense of mission and mandate among Chinese elites, Hayton describes what the rising power of the People's Republic of China (PRC) is predisposed to do in the world. The tensions between the Western-inspired singular form of Chinese nationalism and the Stalinist brand of multinational socialism (149, 153) could have been explored further to advance Hayton's goal of understanding where China is headed. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, I discuss community noise in São Paulo, Brazil's wealthiest, largest, and most emblematic modern metropolis. I draw on ethnographic research conducted between 2012 and 2015 with the antinoise agency and the police, the two main institutions responsible for dealing with community noise in the city. I present law enforcement assemblages as both unstable and heterogeneous, managed by people with different (and often diverging) expectations regarding how the city should sound. I expand on Bijsterveld's notion of "paradox of control" and show that the heterogeneity of "noise" as an umbrella concept, the complexity of its scientific mensuration, and the unsteadiness of its legal encoding make this a particularly difficult object for the state to grasp. After describing the institutional flows inside the antinoise agency, I examine the troublesome ordeal of community noise for the São Paulo police department. The third section of the article introduces the concept of sound-politics, which I define as the ways in which sounds enter (and leave) the sphere of state control. I am particularly interested in how sounds turn into objects susceptible to state intervention through the establishment of specific regulatory, disciplinary and punishing mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the concept of semiotic ideology and its implications. Semiotic ideology refers to people's underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce. Those assumptions vary across social and historical contexts. But semiotic ideology as such is not a kind of false consciousness, nor is it something that some people have and others do not. Rather, semiotic ideology manifests the reflexivity that is inherent to the general human sign-using capacity. It ties general semiotic processes to specific judgments of ethical and political value: to take a sign a certain way is to take seriously the world it presupposes and, often, the life that that world recommends. Two examples show how attention to semiotic ideologies sheds light on the articulation of general semiotic processes with particular social, cultural, and political ones. The analysis of social class helps show some political implications of semiotic ideologies. Clashes over the status of religious signs reveal the ontological and ethical entailments of semiotic ideologies, in which the very existence of a sign's object may be in dispute. Such ongoing semiotic processes help endow social existence with much of its constructive, uncertain, and conflictual character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steinbrenner, McCafferty, and Ibarra-Rojas all wrestle with the problem of associating language, ethnicity, and material culture, as well. Steinbrenner and McCafferty (chapter 4) deliver the most surprising new data, a bold revision of the standard ceramic chronology. Other chapters summarize research in the Managua area (Lange, chapter 5), providing limited data, but possibly all there will ever be on sites that have been overwhelmed by urban growth. [Extracted from the article]

This essay seeks to clarify an undertheorized dimension of capitalism's transition to post-Fordist flexible accumulation-- namely, the "acceleration in the pace of product innovation" (Harvey 1990:156). Based on ethnographic fieldwork in innovation workshops organized in New York City by consultants and attended by business entrepreneurs, this essay argues that whereas cutting-edge technologies such as computerized algorithms and robotic technologies dominate many post-Fordist production and distribution systems, the Post-it note--a small rectangular piece of paper with weak adhesive properties--looms large as a key semiotic technology of idea generation in many contemporary business-innovation contexts for two reasons: (1) its small dimensions afford pragmatic ambiguity and consequently the decoupling of data from the reality of the market under the guise of its reflection, and (2) its weak adhesive properties afford the synoptic arrangement of such pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like and thus the quick production of ritual insights. In doing so, the essay builds on and contributes to recent semiotic and linguistic anthropological studies that have paid close attention to the role played by graphic artifacts in organizational knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity inequality for a large sample of countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the homelands of ethnolinguistic groups, we constructmeasures of ethnic inequality. Second, we uncover a strong inverse association between ethnic inequality and contemporary development above and beyond its relationship with cross-region and cross-administrative unit inequality. Third, we establish that differences in geographic endowments across ethnic homelands explain a sizable fraction of the variation in economic disparities across groups. Fourth, we show that inequality in geographic endowments across ethnic homelands is a negative correlate of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay on the 1946 article "Moral Valuation" by Richard B. Brandt is presented. It notes Brandt's conviction on the importance of empirically grounded moral theory based on his living among the Hopi Indians and publishing a field study of their value system in his development of moral theory. Topics include his focus on the evaluative side of moral psychology, his methodology that is described as a kind of linguistic anthropology, and his schematization of moral evaluations.

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of officially sanctioned street name signage on the Navajo Nation. Given the Navajo Nation's Enhanced 9-1-1 and Rural Addressing Initiative, this is a moment of transition for such signage. First I describe, in broad strokes, the linguistic landscape of the Navajo Nation. I then look at street name signs that are ostensibly written in Navajo in Ft. Defiance, AZ. These signs show "spectacular typos" that suggest a lack of familiarity with written or spoken Navajo. In the conclusion, following work in linguistic landscaping, I take up the issues of what kinds of audience these signs select and what kinds of imagined community these signs create. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article analyzes the relationship between hiphop music and Blackness in the Japanese music scene. The author reflects on her experience of participating with international hiphop communities. She addresses questions about the authenticity of Japanese hiphop based on its African American origin. In addition, the article relates the roles of language to Blackness.

This paper outlines the establishment of Catholic missions among the Maya in colonial Yucatan, Mexico. A central element in the broader project of reducción (re-ordering, subjugation, missionization) was conducted in the Maya language, which was also the language of governance and the Indian towns. As a result, the colonial period marks the emergence of a new variety of Maya language, born of translation, appropriated by Maya speakers, and ultimately (and ironically) used as an instrument of resistance to colonial oppression. I call this language variety Maya reducido and trace its formation in the translation practices and pedagogy of the Franciscans, who shaped the early missions and codified the new, pervasively neologistic variety in grammars, dictionaries, and catechisms. Maya reducido spread into the Indian towns and ultimately into every genre of Maya discourse, including the Books of Chilam Balam. This would have profound consequences for the historical formation of the language and the people who speak it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the dialect variation across Kumeyaay speech communities, which have long resisted description (Langdon 1991). This paper attempts to bring clarification to the situation, presenting new research findings from an ongoing study of Kumeyaay dialects south of the border, integrating them with the previous literature, and drawing on current linguistic anthropological theory concerning dialect variation and language ideology. It argues that the two indigenous subgroupings of 'Iipay and Tiipay are distinct both linguistically and historically in terms of social organization to some extent. Hill's (2001) anthropological model for dialectology, which includes attention to the relation between human ecology, social organization, and two basic types of stance--"localist" vs. "distributed"--as well as Kroskrity's notion of variationist language ideology, are employed to explain the exuberant lexical variation found between these two dialectal subgroups of the California Yuman language family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the contradictions inherent (adherent) in indigenous nations' (and peoples') articulations of self-determination and sovereignty which are unavoidably constrained by some dominating nation-state, resulting in their "dependent" independence. While such cons fraints and contradictions crosscut a variety of domains from policy-making and implementation to global recognition of human rights, we attend to the interactional scale. To explore the processes whereby such constraints are expressed in interaction as self-censorship and self-suppression we consider the role of surveillance and its accompanying threats in organizing and delimiting particular kinds of participation. The effects of such surveillance appear in the accommodations made by participants; inflections in their voices, discursive parallelisms in their speech, withdrawing of physical comportment, and their whispered silences. To complicate this concept of surveillance (Foucault, Goffman), we compare two different events wherein articulations of self-determination arise and are negotiated by individuals differentially positioned and variably invested in the goals of the interaction. In these events surveillance goes both ways so that the interaction exists as a mutual act of surveillance and self-censorship (Basso) in tandem with its emergence as an expression of constrained self-determination and marginal independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the theme of this JAR special issue-from self-suppression to expressive genres—as a way to investigate Navajo poets' ordeals with languages. If ordeals of languages arise from languages as objects of scrutiny, then intimate grammars can be seen as the use ofexpressive genres in theface ofsuch ordeals of language. I lookfirst at the ways in which Navajo is an object ofscrutiny and how, as objects of scrutiny, Navajos have self-suppressed speaking Navajo. Next I turn to the practice of some Navajos offeigning monolingualism in Navajo to avoid interacting with "outsiders" and to remove their uses of non-mainstream Navajo English from external scrutiny. I then turn to the ways Navajo poets continue to use Navajo English in their poetry and to the fact that Navajo poets now write about social, environmental, and political issues on the Navajo Nation. Here they resist a Navajo injunction, doo ajinIda (don't talk about it), which is meant to discourage critique that can be overheard by outsiders. I conclude by arguing that we can only understand Navajo poetry within the context of both emergent ordeals of languages and the expressive satisfaction of intimate grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is one in a series concerned with language ordeals, in which I examine particular discursive practices involving the self-suppression of voicing. Here I link examples of blackmail or extortion in crime fiction and the more discreet but real practices in commerce and the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Ellen Basso's notion of ordeals of language can help us understand the semiotic mechanisms that affect political agency in the relation between indigenous populations and the state in Venezuela. Here I describe how linguistic performance and the struggle over political gifts influenced the production of what Basso calls "texts of the self" During the 2008 primary elections in the Orinoco Delta, Venezuela, gifts distributed to gain the vote of the Warao produced a situation in which a local leader's political allegiance was compromised and had to be reasserted A close look at the process of creating political alliances through gift-giving shows that ordeals of language are central in the positioning of indigenous leaders in Venezuela. Ellen Basso's notion of language ordeals is particularly useful as a complement to the analysis of political agonistic exchange. I argue that this form of analysis represents a more accurate and powerfid heuristic tool for understanding political relations between so- called populist democracies and Amazonian societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory piece we discuss Ellen Basso's critical insight concerning ordeals of language as the framework for the papers of this special issue. An ordeal of language occurs when one's voice is affected by powerful others. The papers included here deal with this and other issues that have driven Basso's career Here we take inspiration not only from her theoretical innovation but also her ethnographic journey between North America and Amazonia. It is not by coincidence that our papers incorporate cases from the Canadian Yukon, the American Southwest, lowland South America, and Puerto Rico. By covering such a vast geographical territory we demonstrate Ellen Basso's immense ethnographic influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In constructing "texts of the self" in spontaneous song, Wanano women draw on rhetorical and grammatical devices to distance and deflect themselves from the impact of their utterances. Through attributing words to others, the number of contributing voices is multiplied, as the animator's (singer's) own dominance is performatively diminished. A fracturing of speaker roles allows for the presentation of differing positionalities and epistemic attitudes, as quoted spokespersons retain cantrastive relationships to the matter conveyed. In the song performance documented here, a singer bears witness in the face of potential crisis between herselfand the community. The example illustrates the dialogic and recursive processes by which internalized, normative, texts create multiple (and at times conflicting) constitutions of the self Through her disclosure of events, reactions, and responsibilities, the singer hopes to broker an acceptable solution to a dangerous social dilemma. By exposing the illusion of consensus between the collective and the individual, the speech event makes explicit the ways in which speakers navigate that which Basso calls "the ordeals of language." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic acculturation in Nivaclé and Chorote is striking since there are very few Spanish loanwords in either of these two languages, unlike many other Latin American Indian languages, and because there are remarkable examples of the deployment of native linguistic resources to accommodate concepts acquired through contact with Spanish culture. Nivaclé and Chorote do not allow items of acculturation to impose foreign lexical material on these languages, but rather impose their own linguistic resources on newly acquired items. This paper considers the linguistic consequences of acculturation, of contact with Spanish cultural items not formerly known to the speakers of these languages. While the linguistic and anthropological literature contains numerous studies of hispanisms and linguistic acculturation, the Nivaclé and Chorote cases are different from the majority of these other studies, and this calls for closer investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lapita colonization of Remote Oceania involved rapid expansion from New Guinea across onetenth of the circumference of the earth. Implicit in most discussions of this phenomenon is a standard wave-of-advance model founded on demographic growth and the economic advantage provided by food production. The Lapita movement is also routinely embedded within a much larger narrative of the expansion of Austronesian languages and peoples out of Southeast Asia into Island Melanesia and ultimately east through East Polynesia. Although this simple narrative is very attractive, as more data become available, the details of segments of the "Austronesian" expansion require revision in order to reconcile the data from archaeology, linguistics, and biology. This paper looks closely at recent data on the Lapita portion of the "Austronesian" expansion and concludes that it is best explained as a leapfrog rather than a wave-of-advance movement out of New Guinea into Remote Oceania. This has important implications for those interested in modeling linguistic and biological variation in the region and highlights the potential importance of historical accident over process in our understanding of culture history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a computerized alternative to glottochronology for estimating elapsed time since parent languages diverged into daughter languages. The method, developed by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) consortium, is different from glottochronology in four major respects: (1) it is automated and thus is more objective, (2) it applies a uniform analytical approach to a single database of worldwide languages, (3) it is based on lexical similarity as determined from Levenshtein (edit) distances rather than on cognate percentages, and (4) it provides a formula for date calculation that mathematically recognizes the lexical heterogeneity of individual languages, including parent languages just before their breakup into daughter languages. Automated judgments of lexical similarity for groups of related languages are calibrated with historical, epigraphic, and archaeological divergence dates for 52 language groups. The discrepancies between estimated and calibration dates are found to be on average 29% as large as the estimated dates themselves, a figure that does not differ significantly among language families. As a resource for further research that may require dates of known level of accuracy, we offer a list of ASJP time depths for nearly all the world's recognized language families and for many subfamilies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Akkadian personal names that contains PAḪĀRU and SAḪĀRU. It cites the reading of the logograms in Akkadian personal names, NIGIN which means "to surround, gather, and turn," and NIGIN 2. It states that when a logogram is in a personal name, its reading is either paḫāru or saḫāru and is confirmed as syllabic writings of anthroponyms.

Using a Peircean theory of meaning, agency may be theorized in terms of flexibility and accountability, on the one hand, and knowledge and power, on the other. In this theory, residential agency, which is closest to notions such as ‘power’ and ‘choice,’ is the degree to which one can control the expression of a sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant of this signobject relation. Representational agency, which is closest to notions such as ‘knowledge’ and ‘consciousness,’ is the degree to which one can thematize a process, characterize a feature of this theme, and reason with this theme-character relation. Agency, as a kind of social and semiotic facility, is thereby theorized as multidimensional, graduated, and distributed. This theory allows one to analyze, as concomitant phenomena, the longue durée processes that underlie relatively perduring institutions and the real-time practices that support relatively fleeting interactions. Finally, it highlights the theoretical and empirical terrain shared by linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, political economy, and critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on various maize races as identified by farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. It is noted that different maize races dominate the highland communities of the Tzotzil and Tzeltal of highland Chiapas, Mexico. When informants were asked to photograph these plants, their responses showed that they have a universal system of maize classification based on color, and that unnamed but culturally identified categories discriminate maize types according to ethno-linguistic groups. It was found out that ethno-linguistic diversity contributes to the identification of various maize races.

The considerable divergence in inflectional complexity between the northern and the southern branches of the Wakashan family calls out for an explanation. Both branches are equally rich with regard to derivational potential, but only in the northern branch have fine-grained inflectional systems of clitics evolved for demarcating clausal constituents and expressing grammatical relations between them. These are built upon deictic/demonstrative elements common to both branches and reconstructible for the proto-language, as is the system of personal pronouns. It is by no means clear a priori whether the northern branch has innovated here or the southern branch has lost material that was once a common inheritance. This paper is concerned with why and how the diverging situation may have come about, and draws upon considerations of grammaticalizationpathways, internal “drift,” and likely areal influences to suggest that the southern branch—despite the relative paucity and fluidity of its inflectional distinctions—is in fact structurally closer to the proto-language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cavineña, an ergative language spoken in Amazonian Bolivia, has a very intriguing pronominal system where, notably, a pronoun coding a transitive subject can either have a full ‘ergative’ form or a reduced form that makes it look like an ‘absolutive’ pronoun (used to code an intransitive subject or a transitive object). Camp (1985) describes the system as an instance of ‘split ergativity’ conditioned by the difference between main and subordinate clause, the mood/polarity of the clause, the constituent order, and a person hierarchy. The phenomenon of split ergative systems was first discussed in the 1970s (by Dixon 1972; 1979, Silverstein 1976, and Comrie 1978, among others) and this certainly influenced Camp's ‘split ergative’ analysis. The goal of this paper is to reevaluate Camp's analysis in the light of new findings about the coding of grammatical functions in this language. It is shown that the peculiarities of the Cavineña pronominal system can be accounted for in a more elegant explanatory and typologically plausible way by recognizing a distinction between independent pronouns and bound pronouns and the application of a simple morphophonological rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English "this," "that," "here," and "there" whose meanings depend strictly on the occasions of their use. This paper critically examines current approaches to deixis, proposes an alternative framework based on the sociological concept of field, and applies this framework to deictic practice in Yucatec Maya. Drawing on the work of Buhler, Goffman, and Bourdieu, it adapts the field concept to the semiotic structure of deixis. The result is an analysis of deictic practice as an emergent construal of socially embedded deictic fields involving practical equivalences, counterpart relations among objects, and rules of thumb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the contemporary semiotic pragmatism in theorizing the conceptual nexus linking language to culture. Reorientation of linguistic anthropology; Effects of the denotational capacity of the specific words and expressions; Study in the image of the poetics of ritual.

The article presents the author's views on comments of various anthropologists regarding his article "The Meanings of Interjections in Q'eqchi' Maya," which has been published within the issue. The author says that addressee-based transpositions help to begin a conversation in the same way as sign-based transpositions serve as back-channel cues. In response to a comment, the author states that interjections can be generalized as a linguistic form class across languages.

In Western philosophy and linguistic theory, interjections--that is, words like oof, ouch, and bleah--have traditionally been understood to indicate emotional states. This article offers an account of interjections in Q'eqchi' Maya that illuminates their social and discursive functions. In particular, it discusses the grammatical form of interjections, both in Q'eqchi' and across languages, and characterizes the indexical objects and pragmatic functions of interjections in Q'eqchi' in terms of a semiotic framework that may be generalized for other languages. With these grammatical forms, indexical objects, and pragmatic functions in hand, it details the various social and discursive ends that interjections serve in one Q'eqchi' community, thereby shedding light on local values, norms, ontological classes, and social relations. In short, this article argues against interpretations of interjections that focus on internal emotional states by providing an account of their meanings in terms of situational, discursive, and social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of recent archaeological work in Central Asia and Eurasia attempts to trace and date the movements of the IndoIranians—speakers of languages of the eastern branch of ProtoIndo-European that later split into the Iranian and Vedic families. Russian and Central Asian scholars working on the contemporary but very different Andronovo and Bactrian Margiana archaeological complexes of the 2d millennium B.C. have identified both as Indo-Iranian, and particular sites so identified are being used for nationalist purposes. There is, however, no compelling archaeological evidence that they had a common ancestor or that either is Indo-Iranian. Ethnicity and language are not easily linked with an archaeological signature, and the identity of the Indo-Iranians remains elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Roy Rappaport's theory of ritual from the point of view of recent work on linguistic ideology. Rappaport's theory, I argue, can best be understood as an attempt to marry the performative approach to ritual to one that regards ritual as a form of communication. Rappaport effects this synthesis through an argument about the indexical qualities of performatively produced signs and goes on to argue that because ritual produces indexical signs, it is a uniquely trustworthy channel of communication. Because language is an untrustworthy channel of communication, prone to carrying misrepresentations and lies, people turn to ritual to make up for language's shortcomings. Here, Rappaport's argument requires reformulation. His assumptions about language reflect a particular linguistic ideology. Where that ideology is in force, ritual will likely play the role he suggests, but where it is not, ritual will be evaluated differently. I illustrate this with examples from Melanesia and the history of Christianity in the West. The force of this reformulation is an insistence on the need for any theory of ritual as communication to situate its claims in relation to broader issues of linguistic ideology and cultural constructions of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nativist theories of language insist that an infant must possess some abstract concepts about the structure of language or, at the very least, some word-learning biases to be able to acquire the sorts of skills and knowledge displayed by competent language-speakers. A direct consequence of Cartesian epistemology, nativism limits the role of linguistic anthropology to validating its claim that children typically acquire language in essentially the same manner, regardless of the culture in which they are raised. It seeks to confine linguistic anthropology to the study of the socialization processes whereby children use their "innate" linguistic knowledge to become accepted members of their community. Linguistic anthropologists, in contrast, see field studies as a way of discovering what children in different societies actually learn about a language when they learn how to speak. In this non-Cartesian approach, children are seen as learning how to do different kinds of things with words—how to engage in the culturally significant actions that make up their community's ‘form of life’. The case of proper names in Anglo-American and Navaho culture is here examined as an illustration of the significance of this epistemological shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]