[lg policy] Fwd: [LINGANTH] AAA 2014 invited session on language documentation

[Harold Schiffman]

 Forwarded From: : LINGANTH at listserv.linguistlist.org

AAA session on language documentation

Dear Colleagues,

I am going to attempt to organize an 'Executive Session' for the AAA
meetings on the topic of language documentation. I am hoping for a mix of
theory, methods, and case studies of linguistic documentary work involving
endangered languages. If you want to get political in your paper on
language documentation, that would be really cool, too. Below is a first
stab at a title and proto-abstract. I am not precious about any of this, so
if some people want to join me, I am happy to change the title and the
abstract, so long as we stick with the topic!

I visited the LSA website, but there is no information there on the 2014
meetings, let alone a space to organize stuff or collaborate, as Judy
encouraged. Perhaps I just missed the correct link, so if someone has the
URL for the LSA session-building page, please post that to the list.

best wishes,
Alex

Producing Salvage Anthropology: The Growing Importance of Endangered
Language Documentation as a Subfield in the 21st Century

The field of Endangered Language Documentation (ELD) is a burgeoning
subdiscipline in lingusitics. ELD projects produce high quality digital
audio and video recordings together with sophisticated transcription,
translation and annotations in some kind of txt or xml format with the goal
of archiving primary data and its description for future centuries. ELD
gained significant traction among academics with the growth of significant
funding, initially in Europe (Volkswagen Stiftung and MPI for
Psycholinguistics, European Science Foundation, Hans Rausing ELDP), and now
the Documenting Endangered Languages Program at NSF. While the majority of
scholars engaging in ELD have been linguists, anthropologists have been
involved in these projects from the beginning. These projects produce a
particular kind of anthropology that was anathema in the second half of the
twentieth century, as it closely resembles the much maligned salvage
anthropology of the Boasians. ELD projects must demonstrate a lack of data
in the record, a "blank spot" on the ethnographic map. ELD projects must be
broad, not too narrowly focused on testing hypotheses or being driven by a
specific theoretical agenda. Linguists engaged in ELD emphasize the
importance of social connections, political context, interpersonal
relationships and other "paralinguistic" factors important to understanding
the production of texts (utterances). Linguistic anthropologists should be
delighting in these developments and rushing into linguistic departments
and conferences to make new friends to produce a renewed Boasian linguistic
anthropology.

----------------------
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

Koryaks Net: http://www.koryaks.net/blog
Sibirica: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/sib/
Koryak Language Archive: http://elar.soas.ac.uk/deposit/koryak-140247
Tweet @Ememqut01

The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013683.



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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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