Chasing Voices

Check out this fascinating trailer for a forthcoming documentary: Chasing Voices: The Story of John Peabody Harrington.  Harrington was one of the most enigmatic and interesting anthropological linguists of the 20th century and a recorder of data on hundreds of California languages.   Obviously most of us don’t do work quite like this anymore, collecting and documenting virtually for its own sake, but you can’t possibly dismiss its value.   I will be interested to see how much his ex-wife, the anthropologist Carobeth Laird, whose memoir Encounter with an Angry God (1975) recounts much about their troubled marriage and Harrington’s own troubled personality, features in this new film.    I know of Harrington’s work most directly not through his work on California, but from his ethnographic comments on modern Maya numeration (Harrington 1957), published late in his life.  Martha Macri at UC Davis is the PI of an NSF-funded project on his life and work.

(H/T: Mr. Verb)

Harrington, John P. 1957. Valladolid Maya enumeration. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 164, no. 54, pp. 241-278. Washington: United States Government Printing Office.

Laird, Carobeth. 1975. Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press.

schrisomalis's avatarLanguage and Societies

The abstracts below are summaries of papers by junior scholars from the 2012 edition of my course, Language and Societies. The authors are undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology and linguistics at Wayne State University. Over the next few weeks, some students will be posting links to PDF versions of their final papers below their abstracts. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at this critical juncture over the next week, when the authors are making final revisions to their papers.

Siobhan Gregory: “Detroit is a Blank Slate”: Metaphors in the Journalistic Discourse of Art and Entrepreneurship in the City of Detroit

Stephanie Nava: Language Loss and Maintenance in the United States: An Examination of Mexican and Japanese Immigrants and their Kin

Scott Shell: The Conversion of Scandinavia by Means of Script Transition

Sean Shadaia: Analyzing medical discourse through the lens of the non-English-speaking patient /…

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Numerals inside the Great Pyramid

A couple of weeks ago all the news was about some new red ochre markings found in a shaft on the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza (a.k.a. the Pyramid of Khufu), identified using an exploratory robot. That was pretty cool. But if you’re a professional numbers guy (as I am) you’ll be doubly excited to learn that it is probable that those marks are hieratic numerals. If this interpretation is correct, these are almost certainly mason’s marks used to indicate some quantity involved in the construction. Other than the fact that I would like all news outlets to stop calling them hieroglyphs (they aren’t – the hieratic script is a cursive Egyptian script that differs significantly from the hieroglyphs, and the numerals look nothing alike), this is really cool. I do want to urge caution, however: this does not imply that the Great Pyramid was designed along some sort of mystical pattern or using some numerological precepts. It actually doesn’t tell us even that the marks indicate the length of the shaft (as Luca Miatello suggests in the new article) – it could just as easily be 121 bricks in a pile used to make a portion of the pyramid. I am also not 100% convinced of the ‘121’ interpretation – the 100 could be a 200, very easily, or even some other sign altogether, for instance. But the idea that numerical marks using hieratic script would be made by the pyramid-makers is entirely plausible and helps show the role of hieratic script in the Old Kingdom. Although it’s hardly going to revolutionize our understanding of Egyptian mathematics, it may well help outline the functional contexts of the use of numerals in Old Kingdom Egypt.

Language and Societies abstracts, vol. 3 (Spring 2011)

The links below lead to abstracts of papers from the 2011 edition of my course, Language and Societies, posted at the course blog of the same name. The authors are junior scholars at Wayne State University, including both undergraduate and graduate students. Comments and questions are extremely welcome, especially at the critical juncture over the next week, when the authors will be making final revisions to their papers.

Marius Sidau
A Linguistic Approach to the Authorship of the Book of Mormon

Brent Collins III
An investigation of contributing factors that lead to social fragmentation between Black-Americans, Africans, Caribbeans and West Indians

Jean Calkins
African American Vernacular English in the Classroom

Jacqui
The cultural and linguistic relevance of naming practices

Isra El-beshir
Women’s Language and its Legal Implications

Ashley Phifer
Eskimo or Inuit: What ethnonym do museums use in displaying art and material culture?

Lauren Schleicher
Physicians’ use of persuasive techniques as a verbal tool to increase colorectal cancer screening adherence

Jennifer Meyer
The Antonine Plague: A Linguistic Analysis

Molly Hilton
Thick: Social Censorship in an Empathetic Online Community

Daniel Harrison
From sauvage to salvage: a quantitative analysis of European-Algonkian vocabularies from contact to the mid-19th century

E.J. Stone
The Power of Rumor: Blood Libel in the Modern World

Amy C. Krull
From Grits to Corn Chips: An Invention of Tradition

Zein Kalaj
The historical, linguistic, and social stigma of leadership titles

Sofía Syntaxx
Live by the drum: exploring linguistic expressions of pan-Indian ethnic identity in contemporary indigenous music

Rachel Doyle
Gesture: An Integral Component of Language Acquisition and Learning

Krystal Athena Hubbard
Rice and Gullah: Linguistic Resistance and Economic Growth on Antebellum South Carolina Rice Plantations

Summar Saad
The Changing Linguistics of the Organic Food Market

Yasmin Habib
Code-switching among Arab-American speakers

Slightly less interesting than numerals

Fiona Jordan, an evolutionary anthropologist who does some fascinating work on numerals and numeral classifiers, has blogged about some of her research on an only slightly less interesting topic: The Contextual Vulva.

Howarth, Sommer, and Jordan (2010) compared three genres of images (medical illustrations, feminist publications, and internet pornography) to investigate differences in the visual representation of female genitalia (PDF available here). They found significant differences between the three sets of measurements (e.g. in the size of labial protuberance), and further showed that of the three, the porn showed much less overall variability than the other two. While I think it is impossible to write about this topic without a chuckle (Fiona’s report of her request to her IT people to have access to porn sites at work is highly amusing!), this is serious stuff insofar as it suggests ways in which our perception of bodies, particularly female bodies, is influenced by skewed representations of actual morphological variability, and as a contributing factor to social constructions of what constitutes ‘normal’.

Howarth, H., Sommer, V. and Jordan, F.M. 2010. Visual depictions of female genitalia differ depending on source. Medical Humanities 36: 75-79.