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An exploration of a key theme in anthropology (examples have included talk, objects, food, the body, death, gender). In 2011-12, the topic of AN114 is Talk.
Many people have noted that learning a new language feels like entering a new world. Usually we assume that it is somehow the languages themselves that make the difference, as in the cliché about Eskimo having a lot of words for snow. But linguistic anthropologists have shown that it is talk -- the things people do with language -- that makes the most difference. Even people who live in the same place and speak the same language sometimes have different linguistic cultures, and most of us probably live in more than one "world" by participating in different cultures of speaking. In this module we will look and listen to how one society, the Western Apache, construct worlds out of talk, comparing their linguistic culture to that of other societies, including our own.
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CULTURE: THEMES IN ANTHROPOLOGY II
