Andrew Strathern - Language and Culture in Dialogue

Language and Culture in Dialogue

Also available from Bloomsbury:

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Sharon K. Deckert

Ritual, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern

Violence: Theory and Ethnography, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern

Where Is Language?, Ruth Finnegan

Language and Culture in Dialogue

Andrew J. Strathern
and
Pamela J. Stewart

To words of love and sounds of being

Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern) and Andrew J. Strathern are a wife and husband research team who are based in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, and co-direct the Cromie Burn Research Unit and the Okari Ritual/Environmental Program. They are frequently invited to be international lecturers and have worked with numbers of museums to assist these organizations in documenting their collections, especially from the Pacific. They have worked and lived in many parts of the world.

Figure 1 Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern at Mbukl area, Hagen, WHP, Papua New Guinea, 2017. Photo authors own.

Stewart and Strathern have published over fifty books and hundreds of articles, book chapters, and essays on their research in the Pacific (mainly Papua New Guinea and the South-West Pacific region, e.g., Samoa, Cook Islands, and Fiji); Asia (mainly Taiwan, and also including Mainland China and Japan); Europe (primarily Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and the European Union countries in general); as well as New Zealand and Australia. Their most recent co-authored books include Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kinship in Action: Self and Group (Routledge, 2016, originally published in 2011); Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New Guinea Perspectives (University of Queensland Press with Penguin Australia, 2011); Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Working in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Diaspora, Disasters, and the Cosmos: Rituals and Images (Carolina Academic Press, 2018); Story of the Kuk UNESCO World Heritage Prehistoric Site and the Melpa, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea: Pride in Place (Angkemam Publishing House, 2018); and Sacred Revenge (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Their recent co-edited books include Exchange and Sacrifice (Carolina Academic Press, 2008); Religious and Ritual Change: Cosmologies and Histories (Carolina Academic Press, 2009, and the updated and revised Chinese version: Taipei, Taiwan: Linking Publishing, 2010); and The Research Companion to Anthropology (Routledge Publishing, 2016, originally published in 2015).

Stewart and Stratherns current research includes the new subfield of Disaster Anthropology, which they have been developing for many years. They are the Series Editors for the new Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology. Also, the topics of Cosmological Landscapes and the Environment; Healing Practices; Ritual Studies; Political Peacemaking; Comparative Anthropological Studies of Disasters and Climatic Change; Language, Culture, and Cognitive Science; and Scottish and Irish Studies are all research topics that they are engaged with.

Stewart and Strathern have been, respectively, Visiting Research Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham, England. They are also Research Associates in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2003present), and have continuously been Visiting Research Fellows at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, during parts of every year from 2002 to 2014. They are affiliated faculty at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (2015present). They have served as Senior Visiting Fellows at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands (1998); as Research Visitor and Research Scholar (respectively), Minpaku, National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Expo Park, Osaka, Japan (2000 and again in 2014); as Visiting Scholars, Department of Anthropology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (20062011); as visiting professors, Department of Anthropology, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia (19971999); and (20042005, and 20172018) as invited lecturers at a number of Chinese Universities: Peking University, Xiamen University, Shanghai University, Nanjing University, Fudan University (Shanghai), Minzu University (Tongliao, Inner Mongolia), Inner Mongolia Normal University (Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China), and Inner Mongolia Art School (Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China). They jointly presented the 2012 DeCarle Distinguished Lectures at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and have been Visiting Fellows at the University of Otago (2008, 2012, 20152016, 2018). They were Special Advisers to the Organization for Internal Cultural Development (OICD) (20132016) and have served as Guest Lecturers on conflict studies and medical anthropology at the University of Augsburg, Germany (20142018).

For many years, they served as Associate Editor and General Editor (respectively) for the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania book series. They currently edit three book series with Carolina Academic Press: Ritual Studies, Medical Anthropology, and European Anthropology, and they are the longstanding Co-Editors of the Journal of Ritual Studies (available through JSTOR and AtlaSerials). They also are the Series Editors for Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific with Routledge Publishing (formerly with Ashgate Publishing). They are on the editorial boards of the journals Shaman and Religion and Society. They are the Co-Leaders of the University of Pittsburghs Study Abroad program Pitt in the Pacific, which they developed from their contacts in the Pacific, especially at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Their web pages, listing publications and other scholarly activities, are: http://www.pitt.edu/~strather/and http://www.StewartStrathern.pitt.edu/.

What is the relationship of language to culture? Answers to this classic question take various forms, depending on whether we seek to identify the place of language in culture or the place of culture in language. Language is not separate from culture, but a part of it, although it has a special capacity and role within the formation of cultural patterns themselves. Culture operates in many embodied and material manifestations that are separate from language, although language can be involved in discourse about them. In this book, we bring to bear on this topical arena of discussion insights and viewpoints from social and cultural anthropology. We recognize also the physical evolution of forms that have contributed to the ability of humans to speak, as well as the cognitive patterns that have fed into the development of language as a cultural creation. We draw generally on the fields of language study, sociology, and social analysis, primarily taking our materials from ethnography, including our own long-term work in different parts of the Pacific, Asia, and Europe. A major focus of our interest lies in the study of continuity and change in language and culture and the importance of identifying creativity and transformation, as well as the maintenance of cultural forms. Our broad aims emerge out of teaching courses over many years in this arena in universities around the world and an extensive engagement with field languages in general as a part of long-term ethnographic work and continuous engagement with grounded versions of theory. The book aims to include interesting field research materials of a primary kind as well as giving a broad coverage of contemporary and historical issues in the domain of language and culture studies. We target throughout it a middle ground of exposition not only without too many technicalities but also without oversimplifying the materials when we discuss cases. This is not a textbook in either cultural anthropology or linguistic anthropology, if these are defined as separate categories of disciplinary study. We would like to make this clear because some commentators on an earlier proposal for this book complained that it did not deal with all minutiae on technical topics in linguistic anthropology, although it was never intended to do so. Instead, it explores a continuous middle ground of interest between arenas of concern within anthropology, covering a broad swath of studies, and aiming to be relevant to students in the field of humanities as well as to practitioners in anthropology. The book reflects our own vision of anthropology in general and its relevance for both the humanities and the social sciences. We include in earlier chapters materials of a kind needed for both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as materials in later chapters from our own field researches that go deeper into contemporary debates on issues of meaning in language practice.