ANTH 250 - Language, Culture, and Society

Semester Offered: 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 2023/24b: Language, Empires, and Nations. (Same as 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 2023/24b: Metaphor, Mind, & Culture. Is metaphor merely a rhetorical dress-up of language or does it shape our thinking and worldview? This course addresses this question through focusing on the study of metaphor, an area of research in semantics that crosscuts not only the fields of linguistics and anthropology, but also philosophy, psychology, history, and English. We explore metaphors and their relationship to language through several additional questions. Does metaphor in language structure the way we understand and reason about the world? How do speakers identify and understand metaphors? Are there universal metaphors across languages, akin to grammatical structures? Does culture influence the kinds of metaphors a language may use? How do speakers creatively employ novel metaphors? This class also emphasizes methodology, as we explore how metaphor researchers identify and analyze metaphor through approaches that include corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, metaphorical creativity, discourse analysis, and metaphor in religion, politics, science, literature, and art. This class provides students with the tools to discuss metaphor and related topics, and also fosters the development of analytic skills required to address related issues across several language-related fields. A previous course in anthropology or the social sciences is desirable, but not required to enroll in the course. Rebecca Dinkel.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS