Thanks to all those, either in the comments or elsewhere, who helped with additional suggestions for my Lexiculture project for my undergraduate course this fall. I now have over 50 words on my long-list for the students to choose from, which should be enough, but more ideas are, of course, welcome, especially if I decide I want to assign this project multiple years.
Category: Anthropology
Lexiculture redux: new adventures in teaching linguistic anthropology
Just about three years ago, while teaching my undergraduate Language and Culture course, I ended up poking around the etymology of the word honk and turned up some neat things, leading to the germ of an idea for a student project that I ended up calling Lexiculture. That term, I did a test run with my students, using the word ‘chairperson’ as a really interesting in-class exercise, and then got to work putting it together as a full class assignment in the fall of 2010. This was considerably advanced about a month later at the Language, Culture, and History conference in Wyoming, organized by Leila Monaghan, and discussions I had with many of the participants there about how to think about the linguistic anthropology of English words: moving beyond lexicography and etymology towards a real integrated approach to language and culture using words.
When I ran this in 2010, I introduced Lexiculture using an in-class exercise where we jointly researched the surprising history of the local term Michigan left. I then put together a list of projects for them to choose from (or let them choose their own) and set them to work. I was working under a few impediments: I had never done this before, so I was sort of muddling along. I didn’t give the students quite enough guidance to undertake research projects with good results. At the time, I couldn’t find a good text to help the students conceptually or methodologically. So it turned out to be OK, and we got some good results (I especially liked student papers written on the words wife-beater, bitchin’, and ketchup/catsup) but it wasn’t a complete success. In 2011 I was on sabbatical so I didn’t teach that course, and in 2012 (my last year prior to submitting my tenure file, which is happening now), I decided to focus on some research projects (wisely, I think), and to make the course a bit more traditional.
Well, now it’s 2013, and my tenure file will be set in stone by September, and instead of kicking up my feet and phoning in the last 30 years of my teaching career, I figure it’s time to dust off the notes and put Lexiculture back together. I’ve had the great fortune to have found a wonderful short, inexpensive text: How to Read a Word
So here are a few of the words / topics on my list for this year:
Information Superhighway: I want to know how this transformed from an index of the speaker’s technological knowhow in the early 1990s, to a sign of outmodedness a decade later.
Stalemate: I want to know by what process this chess term became figuratively adopted for a situation where victory is impossible.
Uppity: What is the metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of this word in, by, and around African Americans, both in the 19th century and today?
I have a longer list, but I need more, and here’s how you could help. I’m looking for more English words or phrases that students could research and that could help illuminate something of social significance. Some basic requirements:
– The topics need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800, the full-text searchable databases / corpora that the students will need are relatively few and inaccessible.
– While the papers will focus on single words or short phrases (i.e. the sort of things that can be researched readily without too much training), I’m not just interested in etymology, but rather, in words or phrases that have cultural significance or whose contextual importance has changed over time.
– The words/phrases could be primarily analyzable quantitatively (using corpora, Google Ngram Viewer, etc.), qualitatively (broader social analysis or close reading of specific textual examples) or both.
– The words/phrases can’t have been over-researched – e.g., tweet and LOL and cool have been researched in such detail that there’s too much risk of plagiarism and not much interest in it for me.
Any ideas for suitable words or phrases would be appreciated in the comments below. So tell me: do you have a great idea for some lexiculture?
Ward Goodenough (1919-2013), RIP
Ward Goodenough, whose contributions to anthropological linguistics and cognitive anthropology influenced all of us who followed in his footsteps, died a week ago. You can read his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, or see tributes from Rex at Savage Minds and Mark Liberman at Language Log. I didn’t know Goodenough, although I do know some of his students, so I’ll let others speak about his influence. New students in the field will probably never hear of him, alas, except perhaps through his now-famous definition of culture as “the things one needs to know in order to meet the standards of others” (1981: 50). I’d also direct you to his short monograph, Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology
Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1970. Description and comparison in cultural anthropology. Chicago: Aldine.
Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1981. Culture, language, and society. Menlo Park, Calif: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.
Screws, hammers, and Roman numerals: An allegorical complaint
Let’s imagine that you have a toolbox in your garage, full of all sorts of different useful things, and I’m your annoying neighbor. One day I drop by while you’re working. I rummage around, pick up a screwdriver, and say to you, “Gosh, that’s not a very good hammer, is it?” Naturally, you protest that it isn’t a hammer at all. Next, I hold the screwdriver by the head instead of the handle and say, “Well, of course, you could use it like this to bang in nails, but it would be very cumbersome.” You look at me, wondering whether I didn’t hear you properly, and say, “No, really. It’s not a hammer. I have a hammer, but it’s in the trunk of my car, and that’s not it.” I turn to you and say, “Well, I’ve never seen your hammer, and it would really be a lot easier if you just used the handle of a screwdriver to bang in nails. Except that it’s no good for that.”
Now let’s turn from this surreal Pythonesque world to another scenario.
You’re an epigrapher and you find some inscriptions with some Roman numerals. You look at them and say, “Gosh, those things aren’t very good for math, are they?” Of course, the writer is dead, so he/she doesn’t say anything. Next, you fiddle around with the numerals and think to yourself, “Well, look at that! You could use those for arithmetic if you wanted to, but it would be very cumbersome.” Again, the writer is not around to protest, although as it turns out, someone else dug up an abacus a few kilometers away. You think of that, though, and say, “Well, it would really be a lot easier if they had just used numerals to do arithmetic, except that their numerals are no good for that.”
So this is the world I live in, and this is the battle I fight.
The problem is a cognitive and ideological one. We are so attached to the idea that numerals are for arithmetic that it’s very hard to stop and ask whether number symbols were actually used for doing calculations in a given society. There’s essentially no evidence that Romans or anyone else ever lined up or computed with Roman numerals on papyrus or slate or sand or anything else, while there’s abundant evidence that they used an abacus along with finger-computation. This should give us pause, but our cognitive bias in favour of the numeral/math functional association overpowers it. For almost all numerical notation systems used over the past 5000 years, there’s precious little evidence that numerals were manipulated arithmetically. You might have a multiplication table, or you might write results, but you wouldn’t line up numbers, break long numerals into powers to work with them, or anything of the sort. And since we don’t know that much about abaci and other arithmetic technologies, even though they were obviously used for arithmetic, we assume (wrongly) that they certainly could never be equally good as written numbers. And thus we conclude (finally, wrongly, again) that Romans were hopeless at arithmetic. We might even blame their (purported) lack of mathematical proficiency on their lack of a ‘good’, ‘efficient’ numeral system.
It’s a casual, all-too-easy ethnocentrism, and hard to detect. It’s not the nativistic, “our ways are good, your ways are bad” ethnocentrism that we mostly know to avoid. Because arithmetic as it is presently taught almost everywhere relies on the structure of the positional decimal numerals, lined up and manipulated as needed, it takes on a naturalness that is deceptively difficult to untangle. Yes, the Roman numerals are quite difficult to use if you presume that the way to use them is to break them apart, line them up, and do arithmetic in something like the way we were taught. This isn’t to say that the functions of technologies aren’t relevant, but if we decide in advance what their functions must be, we are likely to miss out on what they actually were, and our judgements will be compromised.
To hammer the point home: if we do that, we’re screwed.
Martin Bernal (1937-2013)
I heard the sad news today that Martin Bernal, the political scientist/historian/classicist and ‘humanist’ in every relevant sense of the word, passed away on Monday at the age of 76 (follow the link for his obituary in the Ithaca Journal). At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell. One can only imagine that he was, and will be, the only figure to hold simultaneous professorships in these two fields. He was also a genial, considerate scholar, and it was my honour to have worked with him.
Bernal is, of course, best known for his three-volume Black Athena (Bernal 1987, 1991, 2006), a massive attempt to show the indebtedness of classical civilization to Egyptian and Phoenician influences and that Greek civilization was only secondarily Indo-European but principally an African and Near Eastern civilization which, due to racism among European early modern scholars, was not recognized as such. To say that it was controversial is a gross understatement – few claims in the study of the ancient world have attracted as much scorn, including an entire edited volume dedicated to its refutation. The scholarly consensus today is that Bernal’s linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence is too rough-and-ready and that he was too willing to take coincidence as evidence when considering similarities in the languages and symbolic lives of Greeks and Egyptians. The Greek pantheon is not simply a set of African deities with a European veneer, any more than the Greek language is some sort of bizarre mixed language full of Semitic and Afro-Asiatic roots.
These are serious problems, and to his credit, Bernal did attempt to address them, not always successfully. I do not, however, agree with the assessment of some that he was credulous. Rather, I view his work as a conscious attempt to provide a counterpoint to mainstream views, even when – or especially because – the ideas he was proposing were so challenging. He was unafraid to be wrong if the alternative was to be silent. Unlike, say, Erich von Daniken, to whom he has been most unjustly compared, Bernal’s work was meticulously thorough in its citation, and rather than simply postulating massive conspiracies, asking ridiculous rhetorical questions, and dishonestly ignoring all contrary evidence, he was a very serious scholar, sometimes out of his depth, but never out of his mind.
I corresponded with Martin over the past five years (we never met in person) during the preparation of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger. His chapter in that volume, ‘The Impact of Blackness on the Formation of Classics’ (Bernal 2013) will surely prove to be one of his final published works. I do not know if he had an opportunity to read the entire volume prior to his death, but I want to echo the remarks I made in the introduction: there is enormous value in Bernal’s demonstration of the role of implicit and explicit Eurocentric biases in shaping the course of classical scholarship from the 17th century to the present day. His chapter expands on his earlier work by addressing the role of some key scholars, such as James Bruce, in shaping views of Greece and of Africa, and their interrelations. He insists that postulating links between societies does not stigmatize borrowing: “I do not accept that hybridity leads to sterility; a culture is not a mule!” (Bernal 2013: 14). Throughout the process of editing and revision and production, Martin was cheerful, thoughtful, and open, responsive to editorial comment and a true professional.
I wrote Bernal to invite him to participate in the volume, knowing full well that Trigger had been publicly quite critical of Black Athena and its revisionist assertions. Indeed, that was part of the point. Bernal exemplified an unflinching willingness to spend decades on an extreme version of a position that, over time and with much refinement and revision, has come to limited acceptance in some scholarly communities, at the cost of great scorn from others. You might count this in the ‘loss’ column, if scholarship were measured in wins and losses. But this was never the point. The point is the process, and both Bernal and Trigger exemplified the principled willingness to present a point of view regardless of its conformity to some present orthodoxy. In my view, too much anthropology and archaeology, and quite a lot of linguistics, lack this principled willingness to challenge, to doubt even when doubting has costs, to publish the unpublishable – a luxury his position afforded him, but alas, too few of us today enjoy such freedom.
In 2002, when I was just finishing my PhD and writing my first published article, ‘The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals’, I un-courageously felt the need to distance myself from Bernal in writing, “This theory is a further contribution towards delineating the economic and intellectual transfers between Egypt and Greece in antiquity, though of course at a later date and with a more secure contextual foundation than that found in Bernal’s (1987) analysis of the subject.” (Chrisomalis 2003: 58). It’s a true statement, but at the time, what I failed to recognize is that I could not have had my hypothesis considered fairly without the sort of framing that Bernal’s body of scholarship afforded me. I am grateful, a decade later, to have had a chance to know the man and return the favour.
Bibliography
Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin. 2006. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 3: The Linguistic Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Bernal, Martin. 2013. The impact of blackness on the formation of classics. In S. Chrisomalis and A. Costopoulos (eds.), Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, pp. 12-30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2003. The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals. Antiquity 77 (297): 485-496.
Glossographia 