2002 AAA: CFP/CFI

[samuels at anthro.umass.edu]

Please forgive multiple postings.

I am planning a session for the 2002 AAA meeting, in which we will
investigate the various ways that ambiguity and indeterminacy may be
deliberately deployed in the discursive construction of cultural meaning.
This may include such things as poetic indeterminacy, various forms of
code-switching and border-crossing, punning and double-entendre, resistant
forms of discourse that undermine naturalized reference, and any work that
people are doing in any and all forms of cultural practice that enter the
realm of the non-semantico-referentio-practico-rational, such as art,
music, and dance.

If you have something you know you'd like to do, or if you have an interest
in pulling something together, please contact me directly. Below is a draft
of a session abstract, obviously waiting for specific papers before being
finalized.

RESISTING LANGUAGE

The goal of this session is to explore the range of what costitutes a
cultrally meaningful commuicative act. The Western semantic tradition casts
all forms of communication in the mold of 'language' - and casts language
as a means of transporting propositions between speakers and hearers via
lexical referents and syntactic rules. Acts judged "non-communicative" by
reason of obfuscation, vagueness, ambiguity, or indeterminacy have proven
problematic for theories that    represent language and communication as
forms of logic and coherence. By    contrast, the papers in this panel
examine semiotic practices in which communicative goals are achieved
through the productive use of features that are vague, indeterminate, and
ambiguous, as part of the sociocultural and political positions in which
they are contextualized. One feature of this is the language of resistace -
the ways in which forms of phonology, syntax, semantics, genre, poetics, or
rhetoric express a discourse community's relationship to dominant or
hegemonic forms of meaning-making. Another aspect involves the expressive
use of non-semantic aspects of linguistic forms. A third consists of
comminicative acts that resist language in that their meanings reside in
non-linguistic forms such as music, dance, or graphic arts.

* *  *   *     *        *             *                     *
David W. Samuels
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
212 Machmer Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

VOX: (413) 545-2702
FAX: (413) 545-9494
email: samuels at anthro.umass.edu
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~samuels/

wot 2 be got 2 be