ANTH/LING 203

Some terms you should know from Weeks 1 and 2

Anthropology (& subfields)

  • the study of humans and other primates
  • cultural, archaeology, physical, and linguistic

holistic, comparative, fieldwork-based

  • Holistic: All aspects of human condition—from past to present; physical to metaphysical
  • Comparative: Building on tradition of study of “Other” cultures
  • Fieldwork based: Participant observation; Learning what questions are important to the people you study

Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics

  • Linguistics: study of systems of language at all levels
  • Linguistic anthropology: The study of: language origins; how humans use language; how language relates to culture & thought; how language matters in politics & society

Participant observation

  • Agar (1994): 92—“You don’t just stand around and watch like a parody of a lab technician; you jump in and do everyday life with people to get a firsthand feel for how things go. At the same time, you keep a third eye at an altitude of several feet above the action and watch what’s going on in a more distant way.”

Ethnography

  • Agar (1994): 54—“The business of going out and describing the culture of a particular group.”

Language: language within the circle, and outside it

  • Language: Human system of symbolic thought & communication that involves: 1) distinguishing & producing sounds according to a limited set of distinctions (phonemes); 2) sounds combined into meaningful units (morphemes) whose meanings are arbitrarily assigned;3) morphemes are combined according to rules to yield an infinite set of sentences whose meanings can be derived.
  • Language within the circle: ideal system, e.g. grammar rules
  • Language outside the circle: people using language to do things; cultural values; social relations

Culture

  • Symbolic mediation of theenvironment by humans
  • Human system of symbolicthought & communication& its products

Languaculture

  • Agar (1994) 60: A term that serves as “a reminder…of the necessary connection between its two parts.”

Semiotics

  • The study of how things mean

Signs: icon /index/ symbol (iconic sign, indexical sign, symbolic sign)

  • icon: meaning by virtue of resemblance
  • index: meaning by virtue of physical relationship
  • symbolic: meaning by virtue of convention

Deixis (deictic terms)

  • this is an example of how spoken language is indexical
  • Deictics: words whose meaning depends on context, like “I, you, here, now”

onomatopoeia

  • is an example of how spoken language is iconic
  • Words that sound like what they represent:tick-tock, slush, whirr
  • Animal sounds:cock-a-doodle-doo, kukuriku

woof woof, hav hav, wa wa

Paradigmatic/syntagmatic

  • paradigmatic: relationship to things that can go in the “same slot”
  • syntagmatic: relationship to signs in other slots in a system

signified, signifier

  • sign is made up of: signifier (e.g. a word: “tree”) and signified (e.g. an object or concept; relationship between signifier & signified is arbitrary

Saussure

  • Swiss linguist,“Father of modern linguistics”, seen as setting foundations for structuralism

Langue / parole (language /speech)

  • langue: Langue: idealized system—“language inside the circle” (Agar); object of study of linguistics, grammar rules, patterns, ideal speaker-hearer
  • parole: messy, imperfect actual speech

Ethnocentrism

  • Judging another culture on the basis of your own

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