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Collegiate Professor; Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 1979, M.A. 1977, B.S. 1967, Columbia.
Email:
Personal Homepage: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~bs4/
Research Interests: Linguistic anthropology, language ideology, literacy, language socialization, childhood, missionization, Papua New Guinea, Caribbean.
Selected Works:
“Marking time: The dichotomizing discourse of multiple temporalities.” Current Anthropology, 43: 5-17. 2002.
“Introducing Kaluli Literacy: A Chronology of Influences. In Regimes of Language, P. Kroskrity, ed. Santa Fe: SAR. 2000.
"The 'Real' Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice." In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, co-edited with K. Woolard and P. Kroskrity. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998.
"Language Ideology," co-authored with K. Woolard. Annual Review of Anthropology 23. 1994.
The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1990. Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 The meanings of language choice in contexts of rapid language and social change continue to motivate my major research and writing projects. “Tok bokis, tok piksa: Translating parables in Papua New Guinea” (in Social Lives in Language: Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities, ed. M. Meyerhoff and N. Nagy) examines how changing Bible translation decisions in Tok Pisin affected how the meaning of one critical genre, parable, was translated and understood by Bosavi pastors and speakers. This essay on the cultural nature of translation, in addition to several others I have been writing which address changing ideas of place and the body in the context of missionization, formed the centerpieces of my lectures as Visiting Professor in Anthropology and Linguistics at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes in May. My three-week stay in Paris also included invitations to participate in two conferences: one organized by the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laicités, entitled “Innovations Religieuses et Dynamiques du Changement Culturel en Océanie Contemporaine,” and the second, held at Musée du Quai-Branley, focused on comparative Christianity (Amazonia/Melanesia) and was extremely thought provoking and informative During the summer and fall of 2009 I plan to really finish my book manuscript under contract with University of California Press’s “Anthropology of Christianity” series. It will provide a detailed ethnographic account of missionization and Christianization in Bosavi, as well as contribute a perspective from linguistic anthropology, which is only beginning to be part of this rapidly developing and important field of study.
While connections between speech activities in Bosavi and Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea) and English-based communicative repertoires developed and circulated on the internet may seem unlikely, both contexts lend themselves to exploring issues of agency, language ideologies, voice, evidence, and highlight the suppleness of language as a medium across communicative channels. Inspired by my previous work on Bosavi notions of evidence and quotatives, in “Enquoting voices, accomplishing talk: Uses of be + like in Instant Messaging,” (Language & Communication 29,1) Graham Jones and I analyze shifting patterns of quotative use by American college students in face-to-face and IM interactions. We were encouraged by the positive feedback to our framing these practices in terms of polyphonic styles specific to a particular speech community, and have accepted an invitation to prepare a chapter on reported thought, which has received relatively little attention from linguists.
Seduced by the dynamic, meme-rich linguistic environment of new media, my recent forays have taken me to two unexpected anthropologically neglected locations – YouTube and icanhascheezburger.com – with surprising and satisfying results. Exploring the use of poetic language and metalanguage, Graham Jones and I analyzed a trilogy of television commercials that enjoyed wide YouTube circulation and featured a tween-aged girl, Beth Ann, who only speaks in the language of text messaging. While mainstream news media depicted texting and associated teen language practices in terms of a moral panic, viewed in conjunction with the highly stylized, dialogic responses from Tubers, we offer insights into the carnivalesque dimensions of language play in “Talking Text and Talking Back: ‘My BFF Jill’ from Boob Tube to YouTube,” (Journal of Computer Mediated Communication July 2009).
As part of my Collegiate Seminar on the cultural nature of language, I included a project on invented languages, and couldn’t help suggesting that interested undergraduates examine the worlds of LOLcats and icanhascheezburger.com, which turned out to be a rich visual and verbal communicative context (check the website). Five students from the seminar signed up for a more intensive and systematic investigation of this phenomenon during the spring semester, which culminated in a panel, “The Social and Linguistic Lives of LOLcats” presented at the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Conference. This prize-winning panel featured historical, linguistic, economic and religious dimensions has well as new hybrid memes of the LOLcat speech community, and explored connections between the visual and verbal. It has piqued my curiosity even more about how language is used for a variety of purposes in these new media technologies. Could be my next big project.
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