30.850, Books: Talking Like Children: Berman

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-850. Fri Feb 22 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.850, Books: Talking Like Children: Berman

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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2019 10:51:36
From: Alyssa Russell [Alyssa.Russell at oup.com]
Subject: Talking Like Children: Berman

 


Title: Talking Like Children 
Subtitle: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands 
Series Title: Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language  

Publication Year: 2019 
Publisher: Oxford University Press
	   http://www.oup.com/us
	

Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/talking-like-children-9780190876982/?WT.mc_id=gl-ling-11-2018-01 


Author: Elise Berman

Paperback: ISBN:  9780190876982 Pages: 224 Price: U.S. $ 29.95


Abstract:

Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk
around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to
others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable
truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things?

Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate
immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do
things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before
children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's
main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through
interaction and is a social production. 

In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the
Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations,
efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about
supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences
emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the
power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods -- participant
observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings --
that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded
naturalistic social interaction. 

Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an
intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like
gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially
important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both
groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often
complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like
Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central
concern of anthropological and linguistic research.
 



Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics


Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=134174




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