30.1643, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Burkette (2018)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1643. Mon Apr 15 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.1643, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Burkette (2018)
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Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 22:59:27
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at english.su.se]
Subject: Language and Classification: Meaning-making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-1074.html
AUTHOR: Allison Burkette
TITLE: Language and Classification
SUBTITLE: Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2018
REVIEWER: Heli Tissari, Stockholm University, Sweden
INTRODUCTION
Allison Burkette’s book “Language and Classification: Meaning-making in the
Classification and Categorization of Ceramics” is a relatively short but
intriguing study of what could be summarized as the “negotiating
classification”, as the title of the first chapter suggests. However, it could
also be called the “sociolinguistics of naming”, or something similar, because
Burkette sees herself as a sociolinguist who is interested in how people
categorize and name objects. In this book, she has chosen to focus on such
activity in the field of archeology.
Restricting the study to archeology does not, in this case, mean that it has a
very limited scope. Burkette approaches archeology from several points of
view. Chapter two looks at different scientific ways of classifying ceramic
objects; chapter three focuses on how classification works in a teaching
context at a university; chapter four takes us to archeological fieldwork, and
chapters five and six introduce us to methods of establishing which material a
ceramic object consists of.
SUMMARY
The introduction of the book branches into two major directions. One is
archeology, and the other is classification. These overlap in Labov’s (1973)
classic study of cup-like objects. The chapter covers both the Aristotelian
understanding of concepts as having discrete boundaries that can be defined in
terms of features, and the prototype theory that originates in Rosch’s work.
The author does not criticize the older, Aristotelian theory. However, she
eventually suggests that classification is, above all, practice-based. This is
very much what the book is about: the practices of labelling and
meaning-making.
The chapter on ceramics classification covers several historical approaches to
categorizing ceramic objects. It is amply illustrated, containing fourteen
figures that show us various types of containers, classified in terms of
different systems and theories, and visualizations of how the categories
relate to each other. The three tables list vocabulary used of the objects by
different authors. We learn, for example, that if laypeople are asked to name
the same objects on two different occasions, they will not appear completely
consistent in the naming. We also learn that the vocabulary an archeologist
frequently uses about the objects depends on how much they focus on the items
themselves, their various characteristics such as material and color, or their
uses. The conclusion is that ceramic objects can be classified in various ways
and that people’s naming practices fluctuate.
The chapter on teaching classification is rather lively. It tells about the
author attending a course in categorizing archeological objects, which
includes various kinds of exercises ranging from categorizing cookies and
crackers to drawing shapes of objects and comparing objects to color charts.
This chapter reads like a student diary and includes photos illustrating the
activities of the learner as well as lists that the author wrote down in the
class to help understand the objects. One of these lists is a list of
questions that an analyst can as of an object, such as “What choices does the
potter make?” and “Why make it that way and what does it tell you about
culture?” (p. 66). These questions become pertinent from a rather different
point of view in chapter seven where a currently operating potter has her say
on objects that the author shows to her and interprets the choices of her
predecessors.
However, before that we are taken to the field to understand how
classification works there. Chapter four describes the author’s participation
in archeological investigations at an excavation site called Old Salem where
people have found remnants of pottery from the seventeenth to the twentieth
centuries. She is taught how to identify different types of sherds. The
chapter includes some conversations between her, the field director, and
another student to illustrate how they reason about the sherds in order to
find the right classification. Both this and the previous chapter show how the
students learn the classification from a particular person who teaches them
hands-on.
Chapters five and six then explain how the methods of thin-section petrography
and instrumental neutron activation analysis work to identify what kind of
material a piece of pottery was made of. A main idea is to compare these two
methods which are favored by different scholars. Burkette discusses why
representatives of one school do not trust the method used by the other
school. She herself nevertheless appears to think that both methods yield
useful information and can complement each other.
To illustrate further how different people’s practices of classification
differ, Burkette finally takes us to visit a potter who sees the archeological
site from the perspective of a current practitioner. The potter’s thoughts
differ from the archeologists because she knows how it is to form the ceramics
with her hands, what kind of tools and equipment might have been used and what
kind of decisions a potter tends to make. An interesting detail is when the
potter explains why she would dump an object. Such information can help an
archeologist to understand why an archeological waster dump looks the way it
does.
In the concluding chapter, Burkette once more illustrates how archeological
objects can be classified by analyzing three sherds with various methods. She
says that the point is not whether her analysis is completely correct but that
the classification can be made in various ways. She then discusses the
practice of classifying and naming things, emphasizing the decisiveness of the
cultural and discursive context. In her view, classification is interpretation
and is in constant flux. She suggests that it would be very interesting to
study further practices of classification and naming but that it would, at the
same time, never lead to an ultimate conclusion.
EVALUATION
This book is rather innovative. Its author is really involved in the
classification processes that she studies, and has been able to operationalize
a challenging research question. At the same time, the book is easy to read
and, despite the many angles it takes on archeology, it forms a consistent and
reasonable unity. It is like a beautiful kaleidoscope of sherds that we can
look at from many angles and admire the beauty of the human ability to discuss
and categorize things. If there is a weakness in this presentation, it could
present a clearer linguistic method to begin with, or at least say more about
the choice of the methods used. There is some discourse analysis and a small
corpus analysis. However, the study mainly reads as a description of the
different ways of categorization that the author learns in the course of her
archeology studies and of the discussions that constitute the learning
context. As such, they do show that classification differs from context to
context, person to person and even when the classifier is the same person but
does the exercise at different points in time.
While Burkette ultimately analyzes ceramic objects in terms of their names, a
recent Swedish PhD thesis in arts and crafts by a practicing potter provides
us with a view to ceramics that differs even from the potter’s view presented
in Burkette’s book. It is relevant because Medbo (2016) is interested in the
language that clay speaks, according to him. Every finished product is based
on his previous experience, because everything that he has learned earlier
helps him to develop a new product, and the new product conveys a message of
its own. While this is particularly relevant in the context of ceramics as
artwork rather than ceramics as mass production, it is an interesting aspect
to consider alongside Burkette’s investigations. From the linguist’s point of
view, a piece of ceramics is a material object that can be understood and
categorized, while from the potter’s point of view, it expresses something. In
other words, from the potter’s point of view, the object is more than its
material and name, even more than its use. It would be interesting to see if
these two approaches could be combined.
There is also another aspect of Medbo’s study (2016) that directly speaks of
an issue treated by Burkette, that of the cultural embeddedness of each
ceramic object. In the archeologists’ terms, culture seems to have very much
to do with people’s roles in the society and how society functions. This is,
in a sense, exactly what Medbo discusses when he considers whether a piece of
pottery is a piece of art and what constitutes art. The latter question
relates to his interest in the role of funding bodies and arts sponsors in the
creation and exhibition of pottery. The objects that Burkette analyzes during
the fieldwork represent a different period and different discussions, but one
wonders if there is any potential connection here between the two rather
different studies. One important question is how the concept of meaning
relates to the objects and systems of classification that Burkette discusses,
as compared to the meaning that a ceramic object has to its creator.
REFERENCES
Labov, William. (1973). The boundaries of words and their meanings. In
Charles-James Bailey & Roger W. Shuy (Eds.), New Ways of Analysing Variation
in English (pp. 340-373). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Medbo, Mårten. (2016). Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet. [The experience
of clay and its language.] PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
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