AAA 2014 invited session on language documentation

[Alexander King]

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.

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Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

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