I am interested in the anthropology of literacy and ethnographic history, with a regional specialism in Southeast Asian studies.
My research focuses on language and creative agency in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and West Africa. In particular I am interested in the varied ways in which speakers manipulate symbolic systems to adapt to changing circumstances, or to solve specific problems.
Across these regions, communities have engineered specialised language registers and alternative lexicons while others have extended their languages technologically through the invention of unique graphic codes.
These interventions have been motivated by a need to amplify the scope of ‘ordinary’ communication: to converse across thresholds, enact political identities, constrain social interaction, ritually influence environmental processes or produce aesthetic and narrative effects.
Thick ethnographic analyses of creative communicative phenomena—in comparative perspective—are vital for addressing higher-order questions in linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of literacy and the evolution of symbolic systems. Beyond ethnography, conscious symbolic manipulations are often revelatory of broader historical processes and contact dynamics, and may provide cognitive insights into communication as a defining mode of human interaction.
I am most influenced by ethnographically informed research that connects the complex specificities of lived experience with wider generalities that are necessary to make sense of them. Some of the texts that have informed my research direction and general intellectual outlook are here: https://bravenewwords.info/2016/10/27/academic-texts-i-have-known-and-loved/
I have recently taken up a fellowship at The Mint, a new research group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte in Jena, Germany.
My research focuses on language and creative agency in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and West Africa. In particular I am interested in the varied ways in which speakers manipulate symbolic systems to adapt to changing circumstances, or to solve specific problems.
Across these regions, communities have engineered specialised language registers and alternative lexicons while others have extended their languages technologically through the invention of unique graphic codes.
These interventions have been motivated by a need to amplify the scope of ‘ordinary’ communication: to converse across thresholds, enact political identities, constrain social interaction, ritually influence environmental processes or produce aesthetic and narrative effects.
Thick ethnographic analyses of creative communicative phenomena—in comparative perspective—are vital for addressing higher-order questions in linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of literacy and the evolution of symbolic systems. Beyond ethnography, conscious symbolic manipulations are often revelatory of broader historical processes and contact dynamics, and may provide cognitive insights into communication as a defining mode of human interaction.
I am most influenced by ethnographically informed research that connects the complex specificities of lived experience with wider generalities that are necessary to make sense of them. Some of the texts that have informed my research direction and general intellectual outlook are here: https://bravenewwords.info/2016/10/27/academic-texts-i-have-known-and-loved/
I have recently taken up a fellowship at The Mint, a new research group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte in Jena, Germany.
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What is referred to as the ‘Tulalang epic’ is a collection of oral stories, all of which involve the Ilianen Manobo culture hero Tulalang and his exploits. Of this tradition, four distinct episodes were selected for careful documentation and explanation: The Famous Young-man Who Disguised Himself as a Monkey, The Children Who Were Septuplets, and two versions of The Woman Who Lived Alone. Wrigglesworth is at pains to point out, however, that these names are her own device—the Ilianen Manobo do not use titles to refer to their stories. In the introduction, Loren Billings, draws attention to one of the most linguistically interesting aspects of the epic. Ilianen Manobo narrators use the much wider range of pronouns available in their language to direct the perspective of the audience. Thus, in a room full of people gathered to hear a story, as depicted on the front cover, the narrator makes heavy use of the dual-inclusive ‘we’ as if there is only a single person present as his or her sole listener. Likewise, the singular ‘you’ is frequently and effectively used to locate the listener in the midst of the action. The intimacy of such a technique is difficult to convey as neither pronoun exists in English.
Within an Ilianen Manobo story it is common to switch between person perspectives. Thus for example, the narrator can produce sentences such as Midambak se pilas te kayu kayi te tedtab ne medsandeng ka “The young monkey then climbed a tree at the edge of the farm and you [singular] are looking out over it”, to create an impression of zooming in and out of the situation. The cinematographic analogy is apt. As two characters meet, the prononimal ‘camera’ might cut from one point of view to the other in the same sentence, then zoom out again into the third person. In such a way, ‘you’ (singular) are encouraged to identify and sympathise with multiple protagonists. The complex use of tense is equally remarkable. Take for instance lines such as:
Kenà iya egkevangen se lipetuan ini./ Medwaleng se lipetuwan ne medteganes./Nekeipus se edtegatnes ne mid-ipanew en, su dkelà iya se kegkeipeng din.
“The chief could not be hindered from going./ So the chief is proceeding now and is getting dressed. / As soon as he finished dressing he then set out, because his anxiety was really very great!” (pp22-23)
Again, these switches of time reference draw the listener into the centre of events then out again to a more distant and perhaps more neutral perspective.
Beyond the stylistics, the stories themselves are vivid and engaging. I am fascinated by the way that narratives appear to be divided by the swidden cycle of clearing, burning, planting and harvesting; the work seasons providing natural chapter-like boundaries. Interestingly, Wrigglesworth has opted for a typological approach to categorising the stories’ motifs via the Aarne-Thompson classification system. There is certainly merit in recognising the universality of certain motifs and that explanations for narrative typologies are not necessarily found at the site of innovation. However, I can’t help feeling that in this instance, the system overemphasises the generalisable at the expense of the particular. To me the Tulalang epic is distinctively Austronesian and southeast Asian. Balete trees and talking monkeys, for example, have enormous relevance in Visayan and Tagalog storytelling where the cultural connotations are surprisingly similar. The appearance of virtually identical motifs in both Manila and the jungles of North Cotabato has historical and social import, and provides a worthy challenge to the contemporary indigenous/non-indigenous dualism in popular Filipino discourse (duly derided by William Henry Scott in Looking for the prehispanic Filipino). Ilianen Manobo storytelling may thus be experienced as different without being ‘other’.
In addition to the challenges of translation there are countless difficulties in transforming an oral text into a written one. At the heart of the problem is the fact that the translation is simultaneously one of language and discourse. Wrigglesworth has judiciously placed the Ilianen Manobo on even-numbered pages, and her annotated English translation on the facing page. While this solves some problems it creates others. There is, for example, no interlinear gloss but this is partially mitigated by the fact that the English itself is highly literal. Unfortunately, this literality produces some very stilted prose; for example on p93 “When they came to what the monkey had said he had burned [in the belitì-tree], ih, what they saw was that it hadn’t been burned well at all”). While Ilianen Manobo readers have access to ‘pure’ text, English speakers are deprived of the literary aesthetics, and linguists are left without morphosyntactic guidance. The result is a thicket of footnotes, which provide excellent cultural, linguistic and literary information but which also draw attention to what the English-speaking reader is really missing out on. One possible solution might have been to provide the original text and an interlinearisation on the even-numbered pages, with a freer and more literary English translation on the facing pages. After all, literary translation is more an art than a science and does not automatically imply a corruption of the original. Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ is a shining example of the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the form. It should be taken for granted that a good translation is, to a large extent, a retelling of a story, and not simply the processing of linguistic data. The volume is nonetheless a magnificent achievement of scholarship and sets a high standard for future documentation efforts."
Ask any Filipino, and they will spin you a good story about an uncle or a friend-of-a-friend who who was convinced that they knew exactly where "X" marked the spot.
Legend has it that during World War II, the Japanese appropriated millions in war bullion from the territories they occupied. Since the Japanese command under General Yamashita assumed that the Philippines would never be recaptured, it was chosen as the safest place to conceal the loot. But at the close of the war, Allied and Filipino soldiers forced the Imperial Army to retreat in haste, leaving Yamashita’s gold behind in several undisclosed locations. [see link for more]
Despite the low-risk nature of their fieldwork, this was by no means a frivolous undertaking. Ever since anthropology emerged as a discipline in the context of European colonial expansion the figure of the anthropologist has been much romanticised and maligned.
Indigenous modes of graphic communication.
It illustrates how at least 21 logosyllabograms were attested in the Vai script from the 1840s, and that only three remained by 1981. To understand this chart certain sources need to be disregarded. For example, Payne (1860) is extracted from a short text of only 102 graphemes so it constitutes only a very partial documentation of the script at this point in its history. Similarly, Wilson (1834) is also a short text but it is included because it represents the earliest dated source for the script in the historical record. Stewart (1958), University of Liberia (1962) and Unicode (2005) should also be set aside because they compiled with a view to including obsolete symbols for scholarly purposes. All other 20th century sources, on the other hand, were intended to be faithful and comprehensive records of the script as used at that time.
The degree to which Vai logosyllabograms had phonetic as well as purely semantic values is hard to ascertain. The best chance of determining this would be to examine the Ndole manuscript of ca. 1845 to see whether any of these graphemes were also used in a compositional way, for example, to represent one of the syllables in a multisyllabic proper
This conference aims to tackle this theme from multiple perspectives, including the various declinations of the humanities, ranging from literature to linguistics, from pedagogy to philosophy. Such a wide and interdisciplinary approach will shed further light on the dynamics of orality and writing, hopefully leading to a more comprehensive view of their interactions, so that their contribution to the development of human thought and culture may be equally recognized.
Programme:https://oralitaescrittura.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/programma/
«La scrittura ha trasformato la mente umana più di qualsiasi altra invenzione». Questa affermazione di W. J. Ong può suonare strana a chi vive in una società che ha ormai familiarizzato con la scrittura. Alcuni studi fondamentali del XX secolo – fra cui, per l’ambito classico, Cultura orale e civiltà della scrittura di E. Havelock (1963) seguito poi da Oralità e scrittura di Ong (1982) – hanno evidenziato che è stato proprio il passaggio da una società orale a una chirografica, e di qui alla stampa e infine all’elaborazione elettronica della parola, a determinare gli sviluppi più significativi del pensiero, delle società e della storia dell’uomo. Ma è davvero questa l’unica prospettiva possibile? Il convegno si propone di affrontare il tema da una prospettiva ampia e interdisciplinare, declinandolo nei vari ambiti degli studi letterari e umanistici e cercando di accogliere le dinamiche dell’oralità e della scrittura in una visione complessiva, dove entrambe risultino ugualmente importanti nello sviluppo della coscienza e della cultura umana. Programma: https://oralitaescrittura.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/programma/