[Linganth] Reminder - Call: Amazónicas VII conference abstract deadline Jan. 15; info on new linguistic anthro symposium

Sat Jan 6 01:55:23 UTC 2018

Dear LINGANTH community, 
I'm writing to spread the word that the 7th biennial Amazónicas conference on indigenous languages of the Amazon, the major gathering of Amazonianist linguists, is for the first time launching a new Language and Society symposium, in addition to the traditional symposia on morphosyntax, phonology, and language families and areas, opening the door for more linguistic anthropological papers. 
The 2018 conference will be held from May 28 to June 1 in beautiful Baños de Agua Santa, Ecuador, followed by a summer school in Quito at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito the next week, covering topics of interest for fieldworkers. 
This year Lev Michael and I are organizing the Language and Society symposium with the theme of "Verbal Art", broadly covering performative and creative aspects of language in the Amazon, potentially including work on poetics, narrative, ritual, word play, ethnomusicology, and many other topics. Since this is the first time we feature a more anthropologically themed symposium, we are hoping to expand the attendance and increase representation from linguistic and/or cultural anthropologists working in the Amazon region. If that describes you, we encourage you to submit to the conference, and in particular to our symposium. 
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2018. Submission info can be found through the link below. 
Below you will find the description of the Verbal Art symposium in English; please follow this link for information on the other symposia (and general info updated as more details are confirmed) as well as info in Spanish and Portuguese. 
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~asalanov/Amazonicas/en/inicio.html

All the best,
Simeon FloydDept. of AnthropologyUniversidad San Francisco de Quitosfloyd1 at usfq.edu.ec

Symposium on Verbal Art (Language and Society)

Organizers: Simeon Floyd and Lev Michael

This year Amazonicas launches a fourth major symposium, Language and Society, which will focus  on research that contextualizes Amazonian languages in their broader social contexts, and examines the interaction between the structural aspects of these languages and the cultural processes and social organization of the societies in which they are spoken. The theme of the inaugural Language and Society Symposium is Verbal Art, and we invite abstracts for talks that examine verbal art forms in Amazonian societies from structural, social, and cultural perspectives.

Verbal art emerged as a major research focus for linguists and linguistic anthropologists in the 1980s (Urban and Sherzer 1986), with the subsequent decades seeing important work on diverse Amazonian societies from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives (e.g., Basso 1995, Briggs 1990, Graham 2000, Hill 1993, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1993, Uzendoski 1999). This growing body of research focuses on varied aspects of Amazonian verbal art genres, including their structural organization, their role in mediating broader linguistic processes, and their role in social and cultural processes. Today many field linguists are engaged in documenting verbal art genres and local repertoires of "ways of speaking" (Hymes 1989, Sherzer 1983) in Amazonia as important elements of linguistic and cultural documentation (see Woodbury 2003, Gippert et al 2006, Austin 2010, etc.).

Research on the structural properties of Amazonian verbal art has focused on both the large- and small-scale artistic and poetic organization of Amazonian verbal art genres, such as parallelism (e.g., Urban 1991), line structure (e.g., Floyd 2005, Michael 2006), and specifically poetic phonological and morphological processes (e.g., Skilton 2016). This area of research also intersects with work on music in Amazonian societies (e.g., Fausto 2013, Meyer and Moore 2013, Seeger 2004).

Verbal art and conventionalized discourse forms more generally may sometimes play an important role in Amazonia in mediating lexical borrowing and structural convergence (Beier et al. 2002). It has been observed that incipient linguistic convergence in the Xingú area (Chang and Michael 2014) was historically preceded by widespread borrowing of ritual practices and discourse genres (Seki 1999), suggesting that shared discourse genres may have paved the way for structural convergence. Likewise, Epps (2016) has argued that parallelistic shamanic discourse has played an important role in overcoming cultural obstacles to lexical borrowing in northwest Amazonia.

Verbal art plays an important role in social processes and organization, being capable of both maintaining social forms, and contesting them (Hill 1993, Urban 1986). It also intersects with the area of metaphor and figurative language (Dancygier and Sweetser 2014) and related questions of cognitive and linguistic diversity in Amazonian societies.

We invite abstracts on Amazonian verbal art, which we define broadly as discourse genres with heightened aesthetic or performative properties (Baumann 1975), that addresses these and other questions. Areas of focus may include both the structural aspects of speech genres (e.g. narrative, oratory, songs, stories, shamanic language, wailing, and many others) and the ethnography of their social contexts, humor and play languages, music and ethnomusicology, metaphor and figurative language, and a range of other topics related to poetic and performative aspects of language in Amazonian societies.

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