<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b>Presence, absence, and space-time in sacred language</b> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">A panel submission for AAA 2019</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Organized by Margaret Bender and David Tavárez</p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> 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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"> 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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt"> </span><span style="font-size:12pt"> </span><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Please send proposals or questions to <a href="mailto:benderm@wfu.edu">benderm@wfu.edu</a> and <a href="mailto:tavarez@vassar.edu">tavarez@vassar.edu</a>.</p><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div align="center" style="text-align:-webkit-center;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">*******************************************************</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Margaret Bender</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Associate Professor of Anthropology</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Wake Forest University</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">P.O. Box 7807</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Winston-Salem, NC 27109</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:12.8px">Phone: 336-758-5326</span><br></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Fax: 336-758-6069</font></p><p style="text-align:left"><font face="arial black, sans-serif">Email: <a href="mailto:benderm@wfu.edu" target="_blank">benderm@wfu.edu</a></font></p><p style="text-align:left"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="arial black, sans-serif"><a href="http://college.wfu.edu/anthropology/people/margaret-bender" target="_blank">http://college.wfu.edu/anthropology/people/margaret-bender</a> </font></span></p><p style="text-align:left"><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:12.8px">Street address for FedEx: 1834 Wake Forest Road, Winston-Salem NC 27106</span><span style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="arial black, sans-serif"><br></font></span></p><p style="text-align:left"></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>