ANTH 250 - Language, Culture, and Society

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

This course draws on a wide range of theoretical perspectives in exploring a particular problem, emphasizing the contribution of linguistics and linguistic anthropology to issues that bear on research in a number of disciplines. At issue in each selected course topic are the complex ways in which cultures, societies, and individuals are interrelated in the act of using language within and across particular speech communities.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2018/19a: Language, Empires, and Nations. INTL 250 and LALS 250 ) How have early global (colonial) and late global (post- or neo-colonial) states formulated language policies, and to what degree have their subjects conformed to or resisted these attempts? How does language use relate to the notion of belonging to globalized colonial, national, and local domains? This course offers a survey of anthropological, historical, and linguistic approaches to these questions through a consideration of language contact in colonial and neo-colonial situations, a comparison of linguistic policies upheld by empires, nation-states and transnational processes, and the conflict between language policy and local linguistic ideologies. The course addresses case studies from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia that cover the range between institutional language reform and individual strategies of accommodation and resistance as they relate to early and contemporary forms of global expansion from the sixteenth century onwards. David Tavárez.

Topic for 2018/19b: Language and Power. How can the study of language and its use advance our understanding of power and political action? This course analyzes how language and rhetorical prowess are essential for the distribution and exercise of power through the discussion of readings on political oratory, rumor and scandal, and satire. Readings on mass media and the public sphere illustrate the role of language in political mobilization, the formation of collective identities, and the enforcement of social inequalities and exclusion. Readings on campaigns and electoral politics explore the use of language for the performance of civility and moral virtue, as well as the covert mobilization of class, racial, gender, and ethnic stereotypes. Finally, readings on democracy promotion campaigns in post-colonial settings explore the use of language in the affirmation and contestation of ideals of secularism, liberal democracy, and modernity. Students apply methodological and theoretical tools of linguistic anthropology to analyze the structural features and the political effects of real world examples of political satire, scandal, and oratory. Louis Römer.

Two 75-minute periods.