Week 1.  Introduction to the field.  What makes language and culture different from other linguistic studies?  How does langsuage and culture fit in with other fields of anthropology?  Why do anthropology departments have a language and culture course?  How did early anthropology work in at the turn of the century influence the development of language and culture?

Outline notes for the lectures: Language and Culture notes, Week 1 and 2

I Introductory remarks, interests of Burns and DioNe in this field

A. The history of language and culture and other areas of cultural anthropology.

Language and Culture has been a core area of anthropology because anthropologists have always been expected to learn languages in the areas they work. In many cases, the languages that anthropologists work with are not written down or are not taught in settings like universities.

B. In my case, I learned Yucatec Maya, a language spoken in southern Mexico by about 500,000 people. My dissertation was on how the language is used in everyday life, especially how it is used to pass along historic information about Mayan culture.

C. Sybl DioNe has a career that includes criminal justice, receiving a Juris Doctor of Law, and now working on her Ph.D. in anthropology.  She has done fieldwork in Brazil and the United States and is interested in language and identity, experiences and contributions of native anthropologists, Diaspora studies, as well as race and ethnicity.

II. Language and Culture and other fields of anthropology

A. One way to understand the field of language and culture and the way we are teaching it in this course is to see how linguistic ideas have been used in the different sub-fields of the discipline of anthropology.
 

1. Cultural anthropological fieldwork: an emphasis on students needs to be learning Native American Languages to do fieldwork in the first half of the century. Most anthropology departments used to require all students to do a senior thesis based on research done during the summers. Many anthropology students went to American Indian reservations, but in order to do good work, it was necessary to learn the local language. Nowadays more and more Native Americans speak English, so learning American Indian languages is not as common as it used to be. Still, the history of anthropology in the United States is very closely tied to studies of American Indian languages. One of the important journals in our field is the International Journal of American Indian Languages. You might want to look at it to see some of the things that anthropological linguists study. Today there is a great interest in cultural anthropology on things like text analysis, representations of identity, and new ways of presenting anthropological information. So now there is a renewed interest in linguistic anthropology since linguistic anthropologists have developed ways of studying these topics.

2. Archaeology (the study of the material remains of culture as a way to create the history of people without written history): especially in the 1950s with studies of "linguistic archaeology" or studies of migrations of people based on their "core languages". The most important contribution of linguistics to archaeology was the theory of "glottochronology" or "lexicostatistics." Glottochronology was a technique for dating the divergence of two languages that shared a common ancestry. The technique consisted of comparing lists of what was called a "core vocabulary" and deciding how many of this core the languages shared in common. Another connection between archaeology and linguistic anthropology is more theoretical. Some archaeologists look to linguistics, especially cognitive linguistics to try to determine the category systems that people might have used which resulted in a particular material expression such as house types, artifact styles, and so forth.

3. Physical anthropology (the study of the biological evolution and adaptation of humans): language evolution as part of human evolution. More recent interest in language and brain: studies of neurolinguistics and perception and how it is changed through strokes. The work we will be discussing through the Sacks book is an example of this. Another connection between physical or biological anthropology and linguistics is in the field of medical anthropology. The categories that people use to make sense out of disease and illness are best studied through the tools of language and culture. Intervention research on topics like HIV infection are also often based on linguistic anthropology, since things like sexuality are constructed out of linguistic categories. This is especially true when working with people in other countries.

4. Applied Anthropology (the use of anthropology to intervene, be an advocate, or evaluate social programs): helping with language maintenance and revitalization among indigenous groups. Also studies of how language influences perceptions and actions in specific intervention programs. An example of this was my own work with native filmmakers on the Lakota reservation in S. Dakota or with Northern Athabascan people in Alaska. Another example is that of the anthropologist James Spradley who studied street people in the 1970s. By talking with them and developing ways of analyzing conversational data, he determined that street people were most concerned with places to sleep. This is an example of applied linguistic anthropology, which has had far-reaching implications. We now talk about "the homeless" as a result of Spradley's emphasis of understanding street people on their own terms. Before this, homeless people were thought of in terms of institutional labels such as "the mentally ill," "failures," "lost souls," and "alcoholics." In this course you will hear a lot about applied anthropology as this is one of the major focal points of our department here and is also my own specialty. Educational anthropology is also an area of applied work where linguistics has been important. The work of William Labov with the Black English Vernacular in the 1960s and 70s was important because he focused on the verbal styles and verbal skills of African American children who were very quiet in the presence of white schoolteachers, but very verbose in other contexts. He suggested that schools could do a much better job of teaching African American children if they took into account the way language was used in home and community settings. B.
 
 

1. Linguistics: concern for language "as an object of study," something abstracted from everyday life. 2. L & C : concern for the relationship between language, thought, society, and culture.

a. The work of Benjamin Whorf, Dorothy Lee, and Edward Sapir as an example of an on-going interest in language and culture.

b. Legitimizing speech strategies. The work of William Labov in the 1970s-80s, contemporary works on bilingualism and code switching.

c. How do people structure their activities, values, and plans through linguistic "templates?" The work of Edward Hall on conversation and social distance; expected "grammars" of social activities.

d. Boas' reasons for studying language and culture in 1911:
 

1. Languages are dying out

2. It is best not to work through interpreters

3. Language is an ethnographic fact

4. Language is a window into the functioning of the shared consciousness of a culture.

5. Language is a regular, patterned, and scientifically predictable part of behavior.