[Linganth] AAA panel on Amazonian and Arctic/Sub-Arctic verbal art

[Aimee Hosemann]

Hello, colleagues. I am organizing a panel comparing Amazonian and
Arctic/Sub-Arctic verbal art, and am in search of one more
Arctic/Sub-Arctic specialist. Please see the session abstract and current
list of participants below. Please respond to <ahosemann at utexas.edu>.

Thank you,

Aimee J. Hosemann

University of Texas at Austin & Southern Illinois University Carbondale

ahosemann at utexas.edu


*“Honoring the Fire”: Expressing the Other, the Familiar, and the Strange
among Amazonian and Circumpolar Groups*

Organizer & Chair: Aimee J. Hosemann (Southern Illinois University
Carbondale and The University of Texas at Austin)

Discussant: Alexander D. King (University of Aberdeen)

Participants: Jonathan D. Hill (SIUC), Juan Luis Rodriguez (Queens College
of the City University of New York), Kathryn Graber (Indiana University)





In Alexander D. King’s *Living with Koryak  Traditions: Playing with
Culture in Siberia *(2012), he begins the book with a vignette in which a
Koryak friend, Dima, makes a spirit offering into a fire. As he does so,
Dima explains that he once thought that only Koryaks did thus, but he had
come to understand that peoples in other places “honor[ed] the fire.”  This
panel puts into dialogue the way groups from the Amazon and circumpolar
regions honor the fire. We pick up the comparison between Amazonian and
Siberian conceptions of personhood (Brightman, Grotti, and Ulturgasheva
2014) by extending this dialogue to the linguistic expression of personhood
and other conceptions of familiarity and strangeness through the realm of
verbal art. The Amazon and circumpolar territories share particular
features: shamanic practices in which humans engage with spiritual others,
and “frontier” environments that are idealized as inhospitable to outsiders
and understood as valuable for their extractive potential.  We expand the
basis of this inter-regional comparison by examining how these contextual
similarities - which result in particular, localized constructions of
Otherness – may result in a richness of expressive artistry that finds
itself at once localized and yet evocative of a distant other.  We adapt
Hill’s (2013, 2014) discussion of musicalizing the other to consider how
expressivity (*expressing the other*) more generally can familiarize the
strange, and estrange the familiar, be the familiar stranger a non-human, a
nation-state, the “opposite sex,” or some other category of being.   Our
papers  draw on genres such as narratives, political oratory, shamanic
traditions, song, and other linguistic resources.

-- 
Aimee J. Hosemann
Lecturer, Dept. of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
ahosemann at utexas.edu
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