[Linganth] CFP for 2019 AAA Panel Proposal on Sacred Language

[Bender, Margaret]

*Presence, absence, and space-time in sacred language*

A panel submission for AAA 2019

Organized by Margaret Bender and David Tavárez



            Sacred language is frequently chronotopic (Eisenlohr 2008;
Lambek 2002, 2008), and it encodes and regulates profound relationships
between its users and the tangible and intangible space-time worlds they
inhabit or seek to invoke. This panel analyzes sacred relationships among
people, language, time, and landscapes embedded in ritual language, a topic
intimately linked to the plurality of cultural stances toward environmental
crises--which is our annual meeting's principal theme.  Our current global
transformation reflects a self-inflicted crisis in our ability to rely on
and predict the existence of vital entities and phenomena, such as
temperatures, crops, glaciers, sea levels, and coastal cities.  Our panel
illustrates the ways in which ritual language is used to evoke, explore,
and confirm the presence and absence of essential entities, sacred beings,
and powerful non-human actors.  Drawing on examples from indigenous
communities from across the globe, we will consider the sacred, social, and
physical worlds indexed and acknowledged through deixis, evidentiality,
performance, and spatio-temporal frames.

            Some presentations will be comparative and consider the
grammatical and performative differences between indigenous languages and
the languages and linguistic genres missionary Christianity introduced (cf.
Handman 2010, 2014; Hanks 2010;  Sparks et al. 2017; Tavárez 2017).  These
cases demonstrate a complex articulation between frames of reference and,
in some instances, a tension between an asymptotic goal of laminating or
calibrating these different worlds on the one hand, and a struggle or
resistance between the indexical invocation of such worlds on the other. As
a whole, the panel comprises a dialogue among various culturally-specific
relationships between ritual language and its ontological and
epistemological connections to chronotopic natural and social worlds.



Please send proposals or questions to benderm at wfu.edu and tavarez at vassar.edu
.

*******************************************************

Margaret Bender

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Wake Forest University

P.O. Box 7807

Winston-Salem, NC 27109

Phone: 336-758-5326

Fax: 336-758-6069

Email: benderm at wfu.edu

http://college.wfu.edu/anthropology/people/margaret-bender

Street address for FedEx: 1834 Wake Forest Road, Winston-Salem NC 27106
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