S A L S A 2010

SPEECH PLAY AND VERBAL ART:
A CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF JOEL SHERZER

The Symposium About Language and Society Austin is pleased to announce its 18th Annual Meeting to be held March 26, 27, and 28 at the University of Texas at Austin. This year the conference will be held in honor of Dr. Joel Sherzer in order to mark his significant contributions to the study of language and culture. SALSA is now accepting proposals for papers focusing on the theme of speech play and verbal art as outlined in one of Dr. Sherzer’s most recent works, Speech Play and Verbal Art (2002). As Sherzer has noted, speech play consists of “The manipulation of elements and components of language in relation to one another, in relation to the social and cultural contexts of language use, and against the backdrop of other verbal possibilities in which it is foregrounded.”

SPECIAL PARASESSION: POETICS AT THE THRESHOLD OF CONTEXT

In addition to the general session, we are accepting proposals for contributions to a para-session on potential trajectories for further work in linguistic anthropology based on Sherzer’s legacy.  In particular, we see a janus faced threshold for research on the interface of language and culture - the formal properties of language cannot be fully understood without understanding how language is used socially, and social action cannot be understood without understanding how people are making use of the formal properties of language. Such approaches would take seriously both recent work in linguistics and social anthropology.

Please send submissions to SALSA 2010 through the online submission form on the SALSA web site.

http://www.utexas.edu/students/salsa

All submissions must include TWO abstracts: An extended abstract not to exceed 4,100 characters and spaces (approximately 600 words), including references and examples; and a shorter abstract not to exceed 1,100 spaces and characters (approximately 150 words). Please note that the online submission form does not accept special formatting or text such as IPA. Only electronic submissions sent through our online form will be accepted. Each person is limited to ONE submission as the primary author; multiple submissions by the same first author will not be accepted.

Deadline for receipt of abstracts is JANUARY 20, 2010. Late submissions will not be accepted, and we cannot accept papers that are to be published elsewhere. Notification of acceptance will be sent in the first week of February 2010.

Briefly, I think that field-oriented scholars perforce participate in two quite different economies of knowledge: that of their academic speciality, and that of the communities in which they work — and these two economies in most cases value different things. For example, a community might value a combination of language lessons for language revitalization purposes and documentation and printed circulation of important works of verbal art, while in the scholarly economy, grammatical analysis of a typologically unusual construction in the language may be valued. I find it difficult to imagine in most cases how a *single* work could circulate in both economies. If in practice it is unethical to produce technical scholarly works, and yet those works are necessary for participation in the scholarly economy, field-oriented scholars are in a position where they must choose between being scholars and being ethical. (A possible response is that one could provide linguistic training to community members so that they can read the technical works in question — and there are good models for this, such as Oxlajuuj Keej Maya’ Ajtz’iib’ (OKMA) in Guatemala. But only a minority of community members are likely to be interested (as in our own society), so the basic problem remains.)

I think that the root of this apparent difficulty is the somewhat arbitrary conclusion that *all* works scholars produce be accessible to the communities with which they work. I find a more reasonable position to be that ethical behavior on the part of scholars entails that the community be pleased with the scholar’s participation in their lives (which may, for example, include collaborative research) and with what the scholar and local collaborators produce. At least in my experience, this means (among other things) meeting communities’ expectations regarding the production of materials for their use (and not for use by other scholars). On this view, and in practical terms (keeping in mind the scholars participation in two economies), ethical behavior means maintaining some kind of parity between scholarly and community-oriented production. Easier said than done, of course.

I’ve been wrestling with the practical issue of how to maintain a reasonable parity between scholarly and community-oriented work for some time. In the Iquito Language Documentation Project, for example, we produced a number of works, including a pretty hefty dictionary, that were well-received by the community. Of these, only the dictionary is eligible as a scholarly publication, but I’ve been leaving it to languish as an academic publication because dictionaries don’t have very much scholarly currency. On the other hand, I’m writing articles about the very interesting ways in which speakers of Nanti in a different community employ evidentials for a number of subtle social and interactional ends. I’ll be frank: these articles are almost totally inaccessible to the community.

I think one problem faced by well-intentioned scholars (alluded to by Rex in his post), is that the way field-oriented scholars tend to work: they gather data, materials, or experiences, they work it up for scholarly publication, and then, in all their spare time, they produce something for the community. What this means, of course, is that much of the time, the community gets nothing. Deferment leads to neglect. Or scholars just skip the production of scholarly works, which carries serious penalties if one is participating in a scholarly economy of knowledge.

These issues were heavy on my mind when planning fieldwork this past summer on Muniche, a linguistic isolate spoken in Peruvian Amazonia. But thinking about these issues with my long-term fieldwork partner Chris Beier, I think we hit upon a research methodology that addresses some of these issues, especially the issue of deferment. Briefly, In planning our fieldwork we prioritized the specific aim of creating resources for interested community members, with the explicit goal of delivering these resources to the community before we departed from the community. We reasoned that if we did a good job on these community resource, we could use them as the basis for subsequent scholarly work. Arriving in Munichis, we talked with interested community members about the resources they wanted — a dictionary, pedagogical grammar, and spelling primer were foremost — and then spent the rest of the summer working hard to meet our end-of-field-season deadline, in order to avoid deferring the production of community resources.

We met most of our goals (see this post for links to the materials we created), and the speakers we worked with, and the other interested community members, were very pleased with the materials. And apart from being very pleased to have produced resources the community valued, we have been very happy with the resources as the basis for further scholarly work. Since late August, we have been working up a description of the very interesting Muniche phonological system, and will subsequently move on to morphology and syntax.

I won’t claim that the resources we created were perfect — technical grammatical concepts were necessary for the pedagogical grammar, for example, and I’m not sure that we always did a good job in explaining them — but I think it was a strong start. Now that we’ve organized a project this way once, I think we can improve on this methodology in the future.

The details of this approach are presumably not going to be applicable to all field situations, but I think that there are underlying two principles here that are of broad applicability: 1) organize your project so that scholarly works are spin-offs of community-oriented works, rather than the reverse; 2) aim to deliver concrete products that community members want at the end of each field season *before* you leave for the shady groves of academia.

This seems to me to be one practical way to be an ethical field-oriented scholar, but I’d be very interested to get feedback on what others think of this approach.

Based on Kakua data that Bolaños collected this past summer, Bolaños and Epps showed that there were no regular sound correspondences identifiable from Swadesh lists for the languages, although there were a number of forms that were identical, which strongly suggests that these items were borrowed. As Bolaños and Epps remarked, Koch-Grünberg’s original classification was not based on a very substantial body of data, but that through sheer repetition, the classification gained the weight of authority. They also observed that the speakers of Kakua & Nukak and the Nadahup languages are socially marginal hunter-gatherers in the context of the linguistic exogamy system in which the agricultural groups of the Vaupés region participate, and Koch-Grünberg’s classification thus essentially constitutes a linguistic reification of a regionally-relevant social categorization.

Bolaños and Epps then compared Kakua & Nukak, the Nadahup languages, and Tukano for a set of typological features, such as the presence of an evidential system, the number of terms in the tense system, and so on. What they found was that Kakua & Nukak, and the members of the Nadahup languages in the Vaupés area share a significant number of typological features with Tukano. This suggests that Kakua & Nukak, although they are now relatively distant from the Vaupés region, formerly participated more centrally in the Vaupés multilingual area.

Bolaños and Epps’ presentation represented a very solid contribution to our understanding of genetic and areal relationships in northwestern Amazonia, and I very much look forward to the paper stemming from this work.

References

Koch-Grünberg, Theodor. 1906. Die Indianer-Stämme am oberen Rio Negro und Yapurá uns ihre Sprachliche Zuhörigkeit. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 38: 167-205.

Martins, Silvana and Valteir Martins. 1999. Makú. In R.W.W. Dixon and Alexandra Aihkenvald (eds.), The Amazonian Languages, pp. 251-268. Cambridge University Press.

At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.

The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies.

Language death is consequence of people “coming together”? In Amazonia, as in much of the world, language death has everything to do with genocide and political and economic oppression. Does that count as “coming together”?

I’m almost speechless. But I’m out of time for now.

The first ethnonym I want to consider is ‘Payagua’, which I believe is an Omagua name for some or all of the Tukanoan peoples the Omaguas were familiar with. The Omaguas were a large and powerful group which, during the period in question, lived along the Amazon proper, from near the mouth of the Napo to below the mouth of the Putumayo (or Iça, as it is known in Brazil). The Omaguas spoke a language that is related to those of the Tupí-Guaraní family in complicated ways (more on this in an upcoming post). For our present interests, it is relevant that the Omaguas sometimes used binomial ethnonyms for their neighbors, in which the second element was the noun /awa/ ‘person, people’. For example, they referred to their eastern (downriver) neighbors, who lived in a large settlement called Yoriman, as the Yurimawa (/Yurima(n) + awa/), which the Spanish rendered as ‘Yurimagua’.

(In case you are curious, the Omaguas referred to themselves as ‘Awa’ — the eymology of ‘Umawa’ is unclear, the folk etymological ingenuity of the Jesuits notwithstanding.)

The ‘Payagua’, it so happens, were the Omaguas western neighbors, a Tukanoan people that inhabited the northern banks of the lower Napo. The Western Tukanoan groups who inhabited the northern bank of the Napo from its mouth to well into present day Ecuador tended to be called ‘Encabellados’ by the early colonial Spanish — a name derived from their distinctive long haircuts. The present day descendants of this groups, who are usually called ‘Siona’, ‘Secoya’, and ‘Orejón’ in the ethnographic and linguistic literature, employ autonyms incorporating the element /pai/ or /mai/ ‘person, people’. The Secoya, for example, call themselves /airo pai/ ‘forest people’, while the group formerly known as Orejón now prefer to be called /maihuna/ ‘people’ (/-huna/ is apparently a collective plural). It seems plausible then, that the Omaguas followed their binominal ethnonym formation pattern, using the autonym /pai/ to construct /pai + awa/, which the Spanish rendered ‘Payagua’. The reason for overlapping names in this case thus seems to stem from the fact that the Jesuits employed both the Omagua name for the Tukanoan neighbors of the Omaguasm and another term (Encabellados) to denote the Western Tukanoans as a whole.

Which brings us to the ethnonym ‘Masamae’, which was applied by the Spanish to a subgroup of Yameos who lived near the mouth of a southern tributary of the lower Napo River, now know as the Río Mazán. Any one who has read this far can probably now deduce the origin of ‘Massamae’ by themselves: the Tukanoan peoples just discussed lived directly across the river from this Yameo group, and presumably distinguished them from other Yameo groups by referring to them as the ‘people of the Mazán’ or /masa + mai/ (cf. /mai/ ‘person’, as discussed above). So ‘Masamae’ seems to be a name of Tukano origin, used to denote a particular geographically distinguished group of Yameos.

In closing, let me note the name ‘Masamae’ and its rarer variant ‘Masshamae’ pose some further puzzles — for example, why the use of /mai/ in the formation of this name, rather than the /pai/ that surfaces in ‘Payagua’? — but I’ll leave these for another day.

One such aspect concerns the intuitions I have developed about possible pitfalls in elicitation. Among documentary and descriptive linguists, the role of elicitation in a project’s overall methodological toolbox is a source of some controversy, with some linguists, like Tom Payne, recommending a heavy focus on elicitation early on in a documentary/descriptive project, and others, like Bob Dixon, recommending avoiding elicitation until late in a project, after a significant amount of text-based analysis has been carried out. I feel that there are good arguments for both of these elicitation philosophies, but regardless of the approach taken, I believe elicitation involves subtle skills that take time and practice to develop. One especially important aspect of developing elicitation skills, I believe, is acquiring sensitivities to the ways in which the linguistic expectations we have, stemming from the characteristics of our native language(s), can be the source of elicitation difficulties.

One area in which I’ve developed this type of sensitivity, I’ve recently come to realize, is in the use of metaphor. For example, I recently overhead an elicitation session in which a student asked our consultant to translate something like “Dancing gave Fred a headache.” The consultant had some difficulty with translating this sentence, and it dawned on me that I would probably never ask a consultant to translate a sentence like this.

But what kind of sentence is this, and why wouldn’t I ask a consultant to translate it? First, the sentence relies a great deal on metaphor: correctly interpreting the sentence requires interpreting the ‘giving’ expressed in the sentence as a metaphor for causation. And second, it requires understanding (anthropomorphising?) an activity like dancing as capable of ‘giving’ in the first place. Reflecting on this brief interchange and my reaction to it, I realized that over the years, I’ve come to avoid certain metaphors in elicitation. They seem to cause trouble.

But if, as scholars like George Lakoff believe, metaphor is central to human cognition, what exactly am I doing when I am ‘reducing’ my use of metaphor? I think that what I’m really doing is relying on my intuitive sense of what metaphors are cross-linguistically common and which aren’t. For example, I have the sense that the metaphorical use of spatial distances and relations to talk about temporal duration and relations (e.g. ‘a long time’) is very widespread, while the causation-as-giving metaphor discussed above is not. I’m not sure how good my intuition really is, of course, since I’ve only worked with a small number of languages, but the sensitivity I’ve developed seems to be an improvement over having none whatsoever. Of course, what would really be helpful here would a cross-linguistic typological perspective on metaphor, so that we could have a really sound basis for judgements about the use of metaphors in elicitation — but that’s an issue for another post.

The organizer and emcee for the event, Alistair Isaac, began by asking the panel members to give their general impressions of the movie. The tone was set by the first panelist, who was dismayed at what he termed the “driveby linguistics” depicted in the movie. Another panelist wondered aloud if David Harrison and Greg Anderson were actually linguists, and not some reality show adventurers who dabbled in linguistics. The other members of the panel quickly assured him that they were in fact real linguists, and a member of the audience who had worked with David and Greg also assured the audience that they did real language documentation, and that the film was not an accurate representation of their normal methodology.

Quite a lot more criticism of the movie followed, which I will omit here, since much of it was along the lines of my comments in this post. Moving on from there, we had an interesting discussion about the generational locus of language shift, prompted by a question from an audience member regarding a comment David Harrison made in the movie that gave the impression that it was children who were the key players in language shift, since it was they who chose not to speak the minority language spoken by their parents. In the language shift situations familiar to the panelists, however, it is parents’ choices to ensure that their children learn the regionally or nationally dominant language at the expense of the minority language they speak that drives language shift and loss. Nevertheless, I’ve heard observations similar to those of Harrison’s from other linguists, which makes me wonder if there are two distinct but important routes to language shift.

We also had an interesting discussion, spurred by the portion of the film devoted to Callahuaya, regarding to what degree it is reasonable to treat the lexicon of a language as a repository of cultural knowledge, and to what degree the lexicon, and hence the knowledge associated with the notional distinctions made by the lexicon, are practically, if not literally, untranslatable. In When Languages Die, David Harrison argues that specialized lexicons are uniquely well-adapted to expressing the knowledge they encode, and that consequently, language loss entails the loss of cultural knowledge. Harrison’s perspective certainly influenced the film, but my own experience suggests that the loss of cultural knowledge in contexts of language shift has much to do with the perceived or actual utility to the community of the conceptual distinctions encoded by the lexicon. In other words, it seems to me that there are grounds for arguing that in many cases it is the knowledge as such that is not being reproduced, and not that knowledge is a casualty of lexical contraction due to language loss. The important thing to realize, I think, is that language loss normally occurs in contexts of the broad erosion of indigenous lifespheres, and that cultural knowledge and language can each suffer from this erosion independently.

In any event, it was an interesting evening. One thing that I was left wondering, however, given the criticism that ‘the linguists’ leveled at “the Linguists”, is what the broader reaction of linguists has been to the movie. Any insights, dear readers?

This movie is probably one of the most public faces that language documentation has at present, so I really wanted it to be good — unfortunately, I found it pretty disappointing. I think that there was an opportunity here for a deep, fascinating, and moving presentation of the social, political and intellectual issues involved in language shift and the work of communities and linguists in response to this global phenomenon, and although there were some aspects of the movie that strayed in these directions, the subject matter tended to be played for cheap National Geographic-style exoticization, pseudo-dramatic physical adventure, and laughs. And I felt sorry for the two linguists who were caught up in this movie, as the editing and structure of the movie had the effect, I felt, of trivializing the nature of their work and personal commitment.

I could have imagined ‘The Linguists’ having three positive foci: 1) giving an idea of language endangerment from the perspective of the communities in which the use of these languages is dwindling, examining the forces leading to language shift, what this language shift means to people in these communities, and how communities are responding to these circumstances; 2) explaining the significance of the global reduction in linguistic diversity to scientific efforts to understand our species; 3) providing an idea of what language documentation and description is like as a practical activity, and what the intellectual challenges and excitement involved are.

The movie touched all three of these, but in a distressingly superficial manner, and instead presented a story of derring-do that focused more on the banal drama of traveling to fieldsites and locating speakers, and on photogenic shots of local folklore and scenery, as on these profound and interesting issues. Interestingly, if you followed the link above, there were a number of clips following the main movie that appear to be portions of the movie that ended up on the cutting room floor, which focused on the speakers of several highly endangered languages and some language revitalization efforts. Watch them if you have the chance. I think these vignettes, in which these speakers reflect on their languages, the process of language shift they’ve witnessed, and their relationships with younger generations and the diminishing generations of speakers, are much more eloquent and interesting than the movie that was eventually made. I’m not sure why the creators of the movie decided to omit these moving testimonies, and instead opted for ‘Indiana Jones and the Lost Phoneme’. Maybe this is just part of pattern one sees where film makers have a hard time making movies about indigenous or minority peoples without inserting a major white protagonist or two.

Given that the movie focused on the two linguists so strongly, we could have hoped for a rich presentation of what documentary and descriptive linguistics is like in a fieldwork context, but even here the movie was quite poor. The movie seemed to give the impression that one picks a place on map, swoops in, spends a couple of days collecting some wordlists, and maybe a text, and then zooms off to the next endangered language, apparently chosen at random. Absent from this presentation of linguistic fieldwork was a discussion of the reasons that lead linguists to work on particular languages, anything beyond a few comments that language documentation normally involves a serious time commitment and the building of relationships with speakers and the communities in which they live (which were completely undercut by the rest of the movie!), or the fact that linguistic fieldwork involves a lot of analysis and intellectual work, and is not simply lexical butterfly-collecting. Since there were two linguists, I could imagine having been able to shoot some interesting discussions between the two about the analysis of some point of the grammar, like — who knows — the alignment system of one of the languages, or maybe even just figuring out a phonemic inventory. Sure, it would have been impenetrable to most of the audience, but that would be fine — as sci-fi movies show, abstruse scientific babble can serve as way to index a kind of deep intellectual engagement with a technically complex field.

Endangered languages, linguistic fieldwork, and language documentation could all use a public face to enable the broader public to understand what is at stake in these domains, and what work in each of them entails. ‘The Linguists’, however, seems to me to fall far short of the mark. I’ll be interested to see what the audience and my fellow commenters think.

Gazing at this map earlier today I noticed an interesting difference between my Amazonian and Australian maps: the names of rivers on my Amazonian map tend to be drawn from indigenous South American languages, while the river names on my Australian map tend to be English ones. After pondering this difference for a few minutes I generated a hypothesis regarding why the colonial powers who were ultimately responsible for the names that appear on these maps pursued quite different river-naming strategies. Being quite ignorant of Australian ethnography, I have no idea if this is true, but my explanation is the following: Amazonia is replete with indigenous riverine indigenous peoples, while Australia, I’m guessing, is not. Moreover, the exploration of Amazonia by Europeans was carried out in large part via river travel, while the exploration of Australia, if memory serves, was largely carried out overland. If this is basically correct, then, Europeans in Amazonia were constantly running into indigenous peoples living on the rivers, so that European interlopers had ample opportunity to learn indigenous river names, and had no strong reason to invent their own (which did not, of course, prevent them from doing so from time to time). In Australia, my theory goes, Europeans encountered rivers in their overland travels from time to time, but did not encounter large indigenous populations living by the rivers who informed those European interlopers about what the rivers in question should be called, leaving Europeans to invent their own river names.

A little research about Australian Aboriginal groups might settle the answer, but I am deliberately avoiding carrying out this research, for two reasons. First, I’m lazy about doing any research outside of South America. Second, and more significantly, I’m curious if it is possible, based solely on colonial river naming practices, to infer something about Australian Aboriginal settlement patterns.

There are at least two obvious ways to evaluate this hypothesis. One way involves a lot of tedious work reading historical documents, and if anyone has already done this, please let me know. Another way, which involves a lot less work, involves looking at an areal anomaly in terms of the Anglo-centric Australian river naming pattern. At least on my map, there is a cluster of river names of probable Aboriginal origin (to my uninformed eye) in the upper Darling River watershed and some adjacent regions. If the groups living in this area were atypical for Australia in being riverine peoples, then we would have a way to evaluate, within Australia itself, the correlation between the presence of riverine indigenous peoples and the greater tendency for colonial powers to adopt indigenous river names.

So, do the facts support this off-the-cuff hypothesis? (If none of you, dear readers, decide to do my hard work for me, I’ll resort to the next best thing — I’ll pester my Australianist colleagues.)