{FUNKNET}new books on pragmatics and on kinship

[David Kronenfeld]

Friends,
I just thought that, while I have a moment, I would circulate some 
information regarding my two new books. Together with my 1996 Plastic 
Glasses and Church Fathers (Oxford University Press) they offer a 
coherent and organized approach to the semantics and pragmatics of 
collectively held concepts, including the words of ordinary language.

Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies (2009, 
University of Illinois Press)
The publisher’s URL is 
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/33qps5ad9780252033704.html

Culture, Society, and Cognition: Collective Goals, Values, Action, and 
Knowledge (2008, Mouton Series in Pragmatics No. 3, Mouton de Gruyter)
The publisher’s URL is
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/sp/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783110206074-1

While the book is new, the studies that Fanti Kinship... brings together 
cover an extended, and still continuing and evolving, research project 
that began in 1965. This book
provides the solid and systematic empirical base for much of what 
follows in the other two. Because of the special nature of kinship, and 
the long history of its anthropological study, kinship provides a unique 
laboratory for careful and well-defined study of instances of a wide 
range of generally relevant linguistic and cultural phenomena. It offers 
especially tight empirical control of reference and contrast, of 
cultural norms and presuppositions, of conversational usage, and of the 
interrelationship between terminological categorization and the 
categorization of kinsfolk that is implicit in behavioral patterns. On 
the other hand, particular important aspects of kinship seem unique to 
kinship.
My first attempt to extend the theoretical insights of the kinship work 
to general language and culture came in Plastic Glasses and Church 
Fathers, which considers the semantics of ordinary, everyday 
words--words which lacked the kinds of special constraints seen in the 
terminological domains of kinship and color. Developed examples include 
words for drinking vessels, political factions, warring religious 
groups, and women’s and men’s household tasks in Los Angeles households. 
The analytic approach, a prototype-extension one, makes use of 
psychological work on conjunctivity, linguistic work on marked vs. 
unmarked categories, and general aspects of cognitive ease. 
Communicative function, context, and the role of form definitions figure 
importantly in the discussion.
The other new book, Culture, Society, and Cognition, continues where 
Plastic Glasses leaves off, and considers the pragmatics of collective 
distributed knowledge systems, that is, the kinds of systems of cultural 
knowledge that are required to understand the interactive and 
communicative force of language as well as of non-language culture. The 
book first explores the systematic implications of taking culture as the 
parallel distributed processing system of variably distributed knowledge 
that enables all levels of social systems to function and that enables 
our division of labor. It then considers the kinds of productive 
cultural knowledge systems that exist, paying extended attention to 
“cultural models of action” in which knowledge (including how to do 
stuff, who does which stuff, what stuff is good for, and so forth), 
goals, values, and emotions are brought together in scenarios that we 
use to construct our own actions and interpret the actions of others.

This is, I guess, sort of like a birth announcement--except that no 
presents are expected !





Best,
David

-- 
David B. Kronenfeld             Phone   Office          951 827-4340
Department of Anthropology              Message 951 827-5524
University of California                Fax             951 827-5409
Riverside, CA 92521             email   david.kronenfeld at ucr.edu
Department:     http://Anthropology.ucr.edu/
Personal:       http://pages.sbcglobal.net/david-judy/david.html