You can buy required books from Akademika Blindern bookstore, or purchase through online booksellers such as amazon.co.uk. Required books can be borrowed from the University Library (provided the item is held).
"Kopiutsalget” on the lower level of Akademika Blindern bookstore, sells course materials such as compendia. You will be required to show your UiO student ID and semester card prior to your transaction. If course material is out of stock, please contact the department asap in the semester in order for us to re-order.
Many of the online articles require that you use a computer within the university network. If outside the university network, go to UiO Network services
Seminar: Signs in Performance: The Study of Language and Semiotics in Ritual and Political Contexts
Teacher: Matt Tomlinson
Anthropological understandings of how language and signs work—their use in performance, their effects, and related ideologies— have gained depth and nuance in recent decades. Rather than settle debates with clear-cut answers, however, studies of language and signs have often prompted new questions. This course is an overview of some of the approaches taken and questions raised in the anthropological study of language, signs, and performance, especially within ritual and political contexts.
The course is organized in four thematic sections: dialogue; performance; translation and semiotic ideologies; and narrative.
Syllabus
Readings part one: Dialogue
The course begins with a consideration of dialogue and “dialogism” as well as their under-studied counterparts, monologue and monologism. To what extent is speech crafted in response to the words of the past and the responses one expects in the future? How do speakers present their own words as products of different voices—as consensual common opinions or, conversely, as singular unchallengable truths?
Bakhtin, M.M. The Problem of Speech Genres. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. [42 pages].
Keane, Webb. 1999. Voice. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1): 271-273. [3 pages] jstor.org
Howell, Signe. 1994. Singing to the Spirits and Praying to the Ancestors: A Comparative Study of Chewong and Lio Invocations. L’Homme 34(132): 15-34. [18 pages]. jstor.org
Kulick, Don. 1993. Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic Arguments in a New Guinea Village. Cultural Anthropology 8(4): 510-541. [31 pages]. jstor.org
Rumsey, Alan. 2017. Monologue and Dialogism in Highland New Guinea Verbal Art. In The Monologic Imagination, eds. Matt Tomlinson and Julian Millie, pp. 59-79. New York: Oxford University Press. [20 pages].
Readings part two: Performance
The second part focuses on performance. What counts as “performance” in the first place, and what respective roles do speakers and audiences take in shaping performance? What is the relationship between performance and “performativity”? What real-world effects do performances have in such areas as politics, religion, and education?
Geertz, Clifford. 1972. Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. Daedalus 101(1): 1-37. [37 pages]. jstor.org
Schieffelin, Edward L. 1985. Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality. American Ethnologist 12(4): 707-724. [17 pages]. jstor.org
Barth, Fredrik. 1990. The Guru and the Conjurer: Transactions in Knowledge and the Shaping of Culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Man (n.s.) 25(4): 640-653. [13 pages]. jstor.org
Kaell, Hillary. 2016. Can Pilgrimage Fail?: Intent, Efficacy, and Evangelical Trips to the Holy Land. Journal of Contemporary Religion 31(3): 393-408. [15 pages]. ORIA
Readings part three: Translation and semiotic ideologies
The third section of the course focuses on “metalanguage” (language about language), translation, and semiotic ideologies (expectations of how signs and symbols “work” in the world). How do the expectations people have about signs (and language more generally) affect the ways we think about subjectivity, responsibility, and larger existential questions?
Handman, Courtney. 2010. Events of Translation: Intertextuality and Christian Ethnotheologies of Change among Guhu-Samane, Papua New Guinea. American Anthropologist 112(4): 576-588. [12 pages]. ORIA
Kolshus, Thorgeir. 2016. Mana on the Move: Why Empirical Anchorage Trumps Philosophical Drift. In New Mana: Transformations in a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures, eds. Matt Tomlinson and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan, pp. 155-182. Canberra: ANU Press. [27 pages]. ORIA
Robbins, Joel. 2001. God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language, and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society. American Anthropologist 103(4): 901-912. [11 pages]. jstor.org
Tomlinson, Matt. 2012. God Speaking to God: Translation and Unintelligibility at a Fijian Pentecostal Crusade. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 23(3): 274-289. [15 pages]. ORIA
Readings part four: Narrative
In the fourth and final section, the discussion turns to narrative. To give the theme coherence, we will focus on narratives of life and death. What role might narratives play in mediating experience and representation? What are the different political and religious purposes to which stories about life and death are put?
Kolshus, Thorgeir, and Even Hovdhaugen. 2010. Reassessing the Death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson. Journal of Pacific History 45(3): 331-355. [24 pages]. ORIA
Kalvig, Anne. 2017. The Rise of Contemporary Spiritualism: Concepts and Controversies in Talking to the Dead, chapter 3 (“Communication with the Dead Today”) and chapter 4 (“Spiritualist Messages and the Appeal to Women”). Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge. [34 pages]. eBook
Ortner, Sherry B. 1997. Thick Resistance: Death and the Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering. Representations 59: 135-162. [27 pages]. jstor.org
Seminar: The anthropology of crisis: perspectives on loss and recovery
Foreleser: Ingjerd Hoëm
Kursbeskrivelse:
Anthropologists have focused on crises and conflict situations in order to understand factors that motivate human creativity and resilience.
In this course we explore different approaches to the experience of existentially disruptive events.
The monograph by C. Stewart represents an event centred historical analysis of human agency triggered by dramatic social change. The monograph by T. Hylland Eriksen is a study of human consciousness and adaptation in a situation of increasing environmental risk.
The monographs and the articles will be used to discuss how societal processes, ideology, but also affect relate to social processes of loss and recovery.
PENSUM
Bøker
@ Charles Stewart: Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece. Harvard University Press, 2012. 259 pages.
@ Thomas Hylland Eriksen: Boomtown. Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast. Pluto Press, 2018. 272 pages.
@ Connerton Paul: The Spirit of Mourning. History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Chapters 1-3, pages 1-82.
Online artikler
Narotsky, Susana and Niko Besnier 2014. "Crisis, value and hope: rethinking the Economy", Current Anthropology, Vol. 15, No. S9 (Wenner Green symposium supplement). 13 pages. jstor.org
Knigh, Daniel M. and Charles Stewart 2016 "Ethnographies of Austerity: temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe", History and Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 1, Routledge. 18 pages. Taylor&Francis
Hoëm, Ingjerd 2018 "State, labour, and kin: tensions of value in an egalitarian community", Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Pp. 166-179. Wiley-online
Caroline Humphrey 2013 "Fear as a property and an entitlement" Social Anthropology, 21, 3, p 285-304. 20 pages. Wiley-online
Pillen, Alex 2016 "Language, Translation, Trauma", Annual Review of Anthropology, 45, 95-111. 16 pages. Annual Reviews