Alex Pillen
University College London, Anthropology, Faculty Member
- Alex Pillen specialises in the anthropology of language. A first theoretical piece that explored visual and spatial ... moreAlex Pillen specialises in the anthropology of language. A first theoretical piece that explored visual and spatial dimensions of linguistic practice was published in Current Anthropology in 2017 as The Space that Will Never be Filled. This is a study of how language is ‘stretched to its limit’ at times, when humanity becomes reduced to war, brutality, trauma (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/ca/pr/171206). She coined the term ‘antipodal words’ for words that encapsulate their opposite, or carry out a U-turn in meaning. Such can be the fate of words as they convey death, radical displacement, sacrifice.
Alex Pillen’s interest in the spatial conceptualisation of language led to a collaboration with the architect and composer Emma-Kate Matthews. Metaphors related to weaving, sewing and fabric have been used since ancient times to talk about language. ‘Text’ from the Latin ‘textus’ (woven) is but one example. It is misleading to imagine language simply as words on a page or ephemeral sounds that can be jotted down as musical scores. In order to further explore the complex shapes embedded in a language’s grammar, Alex Pillen and Emma-Kate Matthews used contemporary software that was developed for video animation and gaming. This resulted in a ‘digital weave’ or 3D conceptualisation of natural language published as a co-authored piece with Emma-Kate Matthews in 2022 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01089-5).
Recent work by Alex Pillen continues this research trajectory or the mobilisation of theory within an anthropology of language to project visual forms based on natural language. In a study of Northern Kurdish or Kurmanji she relies on concepts within the work of Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), Émile Benveniste (1902-1976), William Empson (1906-1984), Josette Rey-Debove (1929-2005), and Julia Kristeva (1941-). In this work visual tropes such as opaqueness and transparency are central to the analysis of spoken Kurdish. Alex Pillen furthermore focusses on the ‘arcs of reflection’ built into the language via quotation and the use of a reflexive pronoun. This work Endurance: Speaking Kurdish in a Warped World will be published as a monograph by Brill (Leiden, Boston) in the autumn of 2024.
For some ideas about my future research see: https://alexpillen.com/blog/edit
Natural language is a high-dimensional form that evolved through innovation and repetition over millennia. We tend to imagine language in the shape dictated by our writing system, as words on a page, or as sound. The aim of this paper is... more
Natural language is a high-dimensional form that evolved through innovation and repetition over millennia. We tend to imagine language in the shape dictated by our writing system, as words on a page, or as sound. The aim of this paper is to explore how one aspect of this high-dimensional form could be rendered in 3D. Contemporary software developed for the production of film and video animation became a tool for us to model natural language. The paper begins with an overview of historical material about features of language and computational design that became relevant for our project. The whole system and structure of a language, its grammar has been compared to a geometry for centuries, as principles that define its shape. One aspect of this complex configuration was selected for 3D modelling; evidentiality. This aspect of every language points at the evidence for what people are saying. The paper lays out the research trajectory that allowed us to conceive of evidentiality as a t...
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Research Interests: African Studies, Philosophy Of Language, Historical Linguistics, Violence, Linguistic Anthropology, and 10 moreLiterary Criticism, Revolutions, Sanskrit language and literature, Postmodernism, Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Cultural Anthropology, Amazonian Ethnology, William Empson, and Anthropology of Language
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Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a... more
Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a framework can be compared with ethnographic work on the silence of survivors. Experiences of inhumanity and extreme violence eventually find a discursive niche but nevertheless pose problems of translation. Through the lens of traditional anthropology another realm emerges-a world of vampires, zombies, and cannibals. "Crimes against humanity" can be added to the list, but overall translations seem oriented toward the maintenance of interpretative control, even in contexts of mass dehumanization. Anthropologists are well placed to pay attention to both the complex evidential systems of survivors and the construction of liberal voices. The image of trauma and its untranslatability, however, linger in the background of interventions and point to the vital but endangered bond between language and humanity.
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6 The Discourse on Trauma in Non-Western Cultural Contexts Contributions of an Ethnographic Method ALEXANDRA ARGENTI-PILLEN Between seventy and a hundred thousand people have disappeared in Sri Lanka, there is a cultural collapse, the... more
6 The Discourse on Trauma in Non-Western Cultural Contexts Contributions of an Ethnographic Method ALEXANDRA ARGENTI-PILLEN Between seventy and a hundred thousand people have disappeared in Sri Lanka, there is a cultural collapse, the normal rituals perJormed after ...
Un espace qui ne sera jamais rempli Communication à double-tranchant et simultanéité des contraires Le mépris des traditions humaines, la brutalité de la prédation, le sacrifice, et le désir sexuel sont enracinés dans les langues, et cela... more
Un espace qui ne sera jamais rempli Communication à double-tranchant et simultanéité des contraires Le mépris des traditions humaines, la brutalité de la prédation, le sacrifice, et le désir sexuel sont enracinés dans les langues, et cela à travers les cultures. L'article suivant traite d'une caractéristique linguistique fondamentale qui reflète cette situation difficile : celle d'énoncés qui englobent leur contraire, et opèrent un revirement du sens. Ce mode de communication apparait lorsqu'une représentation rend compte de la friction entre des mondes incommensurables-au moment même où ils sont conçus ensemble. Le point de vue d'un ennemi ou celui d'une réalité désagréable sont ainsi logés dans la langue. Je me propose ici, à travers une recherche pluridisciplinaire, de trouver des exemples de telles déclarations et offrir un assemblage comprenant cinq images pertinentes de ces énoncés singuliers. Chacune de ces images apporte une contribution conceptuelle distincte. Une attention de tous les instants (vigilance), ainsi qu'une prise de conscience d'autres points de vue, sous-tendant la plupart des énoncés de cette étude, que je propose d'appeler « communication à double-tranchant », cette communication qui se situe au croisement de perspectives opposées.
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Organised by Dr. Natalia Buitron and Dr. Hans Steinmuller
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Distinct theoretical innovation led David Parkin to carve a path for an anthropology of language in the UK. Each conceptual moment merits attention in its own right. His chapter in Bloch's volume on political language in 1975, the notion... more
Distinct theoretical innovation led David Parkin to carve a path for an anthropology of language in the UK. Each conceptual moment merits attention in its own right. His chapter in Bloch's volume on political language in 1975, the notion of language as exchange in Kapferer's 'Transaction and Meaning' a year later, as well as work on simultaneity in speech and the Curl lecture in 1979 on creative abuse constituted a first movement. This was followed by two paradigmatic statements, the book Semantic Anthropology in 1982 and his Political Language in the Annual Review of Anthropology of 1984. Later texts make a contribution to an anthropology of indirect semiosis: the power of incompleteness, which was published in Masquelier and Siran's Pour une anthropologie de l'interlocution: rhetorique du quotidian (2000), and recent work on allusion that mediates between lexicon and language shadows (2015). The current development of the idea of Semiosis as Orchestration, continues a line of conceptual thought, already initiated in his early work. It is an intellectual engagement over decades, and form of revisiting both fieldsite and theory that led to unique scholarship. Not only to be briefly celebrated, but given a timeless place in our curriculum in linguistic anthropology.
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Event organised by Alex Hinton, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University & UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention.
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Invited paper/Executive Session, by Sally Engle Merry
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Panel on ‘Semiosis as Orchestration’, convened by David Parkin and myself, with Adam Kendon as discussant.
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Panel organised by Jon Holtzman & Richard Werbner
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Panel on ‘Evidentiality in contact zones’, organised by Ozge Korkmaz and myself, with Judith Irvine as discussant
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Panel 52: Communicating Bodies: New Juxtapositions of Linguistic and Medical Anthropology, invited by Charles Briggs, David Parkin and Paja Faudree
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Panel convened by Estelle Amy de la Breteque and myself
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Invited paper for a panel organised by Alex Hinton, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University & UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention.