Suchergebnisse

The awareness of endangered languages is part of a larger picture, arising out of social and political changes in the past decades. This awareness has brought about many changes in linguistics. This chapter reviews background material, including the language situation around the world, causes of language endangerment, reasons why language endangerment has garnered the concern that it has in the past few decades, and responses to language endangerment. The increasing recognition among linguists of how many languages were endangered encouraged a greater emphasis on fieldwork. This in turn promoted discussions of language documentation, language revitalization, and the ethics of fieldwork. The nature of language is much discussed in the anthropological responses to the endangerment literature. Current methods of language documentation focus on audio and video recordings of natural speech, narrative and conversation, as well as structured elicitation.

In Relationship Thinking, N. J. Enfield outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings, by putting human relationships front and center. It is a naturalistic approach to human sociality, grounded in the systematic study of real-time data from social interaction in everyday life. Many of the illustrative examples and analyses in the book come from the author's long-term field work in Laos.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Human Sociality as a New Interdisciplinary Field -- Part 1: Properties of Human Interaction -- 1 On the Human "Interaction Engine -- 2 Interaction: The Infrastructure for Social Institutions, the Natural Ecological Niche for Language, and the Arena in which Culture is Enacted -- 3 Human Sociality as Mutual Orientation in a Rich Interactive Environment: Multimodal Utterances and Pointing in Aphasia -- 4 Social Actions, Social Commitments -- Part 2: Psychological Foundations -- 5 Infant Pointing at 12 Months: Communicative Goals, Motives, and Social-Cognitive Abilities -- 6 The Developmental Interdependence of Theory of Mind and Language -- 7 Constructing the Social Mind: Language and False-Belief Understanding -- 8 Sylvia's Recipe: The Role of Imitation and Pedagogy in the Transmission of Cultural Knowledge -- Part 3: Culture and Sociality -- 9 The Thought that Counts: Interactional Consequences of Variation in Cultural Theories of Meaning -- 10 Cultural Perspectives on Infant-Caregiver Interaction -- 11 Joint Commitment and Common Ground in a Ritual Event -- 12 Habits and Innovations: Designing Language for New, Technologically Mediated Sociality -- Part 4: Cognition in Interaction -- 13 Meeting Other Minds through Gesture: How Children Use their Hands to Reinvent Language and Distribute Cognition -- 14 The Distributed Cognition Perspective on Human Interaction -- 15 Social Consequences of Common Ground -- 16 Why a Deep Understanding of Cultural Evolution is Incompatible with Shallow Psychology -- Part 5: Evolutionary Perspectives -- 17 Culture and the Evolution of the Human Social Instincts -- 18 Parsing Behavior: A Mundane Origin for an Extraordinary Ability? -- 19 Why Don't Apes Point?.

Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies' whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, reciprocity, social cohesion, and exchange can be understood as material and immaterial interrelationships between entities of a more than a corporeal world. I argue, then, that to go beyond the mere anthropocentric conceptualisation of sociality in a nature good to think, we need to holistically conceive the interconnected levels of trophic, socio-structural and socio-cosmic relationships and exchanges between human and non-human beings in the ecosystem.