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7176 results in Media, mass communication

Page 128 of 359

Culture and Communication
  • An Introduction
  • James M. Wilce
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017
  • James M. Wilce's new textbook introduces students to the study of language as a tool in anthropology. Solidly positioned in linguistic anthropology, it is the first textbook to combine clear explanations of language and linguistic structure with current anthropological theory. It features a range of study aids, including chapter summaries, learning objectives, figures, exercises, key terms and suggestions for further reading, to guide student understanding. The complete glossary includes both anthropological and linguist terminology. An Appendix features material on phonetics and phonetic representation. Accompanying online resources include a test bank with answers, useful links, an instructor's manual, and a sign language case study. Covering an extensive range of topics not found in existing textbooks, including semiotics and the evolution of animal and human communication, this book is an essential resource for introductory courses on language and culture, communication and culture, and linguistic anthropology.

  • Appendix: IPA and Other Specialized Marks

  • James M. Wilce, Northern Arizona University
  • Book:
    Culture and Communication
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017, pp 298-302

  • Summary

    Especially in Chapter 4 of this book, you will find some marks – quotation marks, slash marks, and square brackets – setting off individual letters and sometimes groups of letters in the text. You will also find some unfamiliar symbols enclosed in these marks. In this appendix, we explore a bit of the story behind those marks and symbols.

    I put these bits of the story in an appendix instead of in Chapter 4 because they are parts of a more specialized understanding than you need at this level of linguistic anthropology. Nonetheless, they provide an interesting glimpse of some of the technical aspects of our discipline that are worth being aware of.

    First, we'll talk about these specialized marks, then about what are called IPA symbols, and then a few last details about phonetic transcription options more generally.

    Specialized Uses of Punctuation Marks

    Let's begin by explaining how three basic marks are used in discussions about languages and their sound components.

  • • Quotation marks around an individual letter indicate I have something to say about that specific letter. I am not saying anything about the sound of that letter, only about the letter itself.

  • (Example: The letter “p” can be pronounced differently in different words.)

  • • Slash marks around a letter indicate I'm talking about a phoneme. (Think of phonemes in pairs – two objectively similar sounds that are distinct enough to native speakers as to change a word's semantic meaning.)

  • (Example: Because /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes in English, replacing one with the other changes the meaning in words like “pat” and “bat.”)

  • • Square brackets around one or more letters (or symbols) indicate I'm talking about an allophone. (Allophones are such subtle variations on a phoneme that a native speaker is not even aware of them, even though waveforms and spectrograms do show the difference.)

  • (Example: English has one /p/ phoneme. Its speakers pronounce the two consonants in “pat” [ph] and “spat” [p] differently, yet perceive no difference.)

    • So these specialized marks in a text tell us whether we're talking about a letter, a phoneme, or an allophone. Talking about a specific letter – “p” – is easy to understand. Phonemes – /p/ and /b/ – can be harder, and perhaps allophones – [ph] and [p] – are harder still. Yet it is these phonemes and allophones that are often represented by the unfamiliar symbols that we talk about next.

  • Preface

  • James M. Wilce, Northern Arizona University
  • Book:
    Culture and Communication
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017, pp xv-xxiii

  • Summary

    A young woman in South Asia performs a traditional dance, full of hand motions that “speak” to her audience. A student posts an update to her Facebook page and receives responses within moments. Emerging drowsily from sleep, a couple ask each other how they slept, while halfway around the world, in a village made up of longhouses, other people emerge from sleep and a ritual dream-telling occurs.

    Participants in a university course discuss language and communication. Someone approaches a few friends who, as it happens, had been talking about the very man approaching them now. He asks what they had been discussing. They say, “Oh, nothing. We were just talking.”

    Opening Up Culture and Communication

    In these two paragraphs, I have introduced the topic of culture and communication in a way that illustrates a theme I develop throughout this book: We not only communicate with each other in many ways, in many media, all the time, but we also communicate about our communication – we engage in metacommunication. (Note that bolded words like this are defined in the Glossary at the end of this book.) As exotic as metacommunication might sound, it is really quite ordinary and pervasive in our lives.

    This book is intended for students on anthropology, linguistics, or communication courses receiving their first exposure to linguistic anthropology – to “culture and communication” as seen through the lens of linguistic anthropology. If anthropology is the study of humankind from many angles, linguistic anthropology is the anthropological field that mines the practices of communication – language in particular –for their sociocultural significance. It studies human life, human culture, and human societies through the social production, exchange, circulation, and reception of signs in society.

    Linguistic Anthropology: Features of My Tribe

    My tribe – linguistic anthropologists or “linganths” – is as exotic as any other. Note that I associate “tribe” here with “the exotic” – in a purely tongue-in-cheek manner! I use “tribe” elsewhere in this book in the technical anthropological sense (Ranjan 2012).

    My tribe works well with others, in the sense of having related interests and sometimes approaches to what we do. At the same time, my linganth tribe is also unique in what we do, in how we explore and reflect on the interconnections between culture and communication.

  • 8 - Human Social Semiotics

  • James M. Wilce, Northern Arizona University
  • Book:
    Culture and Communication
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017, pp 172-197

  • Summary

    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

    After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

    • Recognize two different kinds of linguistic indexicality.

    • Describe two kinds of linguistic iconicity.

    • Understand communicative or semiotic multimodality.

    • Identify communicative or pragmatic metaphors.

    • Distinguish between sociolinguistic forms that index groups and those that index situations and persons with expertise in those situations.

    Introduction

    In this chapter, we explore how the nature of signs and their workings – particularly indexes/indexicality and icons/iconicity – help to create the sociocultural realities we inhabit.

    Here we revisit the two kinds of indexicality we first discussed in Chapter 2 and the important role they play in the contexts of communication. We also build on the preliminary discussions of iconicity in previous chapters and explore diagrammatic iconicity as a key concept in the analysis of ritual communication.

    Next in this chapter, we move on to multimodality, which is the complex nature of most instances of human communication, often involving layers of signs, including those that are visible as well as audible. Finally, we discuss cultural reflections on signs and their workings, with an emphasis on cultural metaphors for aspects of communication and communicators.

    In Chapter 9, which follows, we continue building on these themes.

    Language as Social Action, Communicationas Culture

    Linguistic anthropologists approach language and communication in a very particular way, which sets us apart from linguists, cultural anthropologists, and those in communication studies, among others. Linguistic anthropologists agree that language is a cultural resource and that speaking and communicating in general are forms of social action (Duranti 1997:1).

    This chapter addresses the question of how communication, particularly discourse, constitutes society (i.e., the social order) and culture. By discourse, I mean language-in-use, in both face-to-face and mediated interaction. Discursive communication (re)constitutes or (re)creates the social order. The importance of interaction via new media reflects what we mean by a changing “social order,” with international borders and populations both shifting in new, rapid, grand, and unpredictable ways. (We explore these topics in more detail in Chapter 11.)

    Indexes, Indexicality, and Indexicalities

    By now, you are familiar with icons and symbols as well as both indexes and indexicality. Indexicality is the property or properties of being an index – immediacy, context-bounded-ness, or pointing-ness. Here I argue that it is useful to distinguish two indexicalities, or ways in which indexical signs relate to their context.

  • 12 - Applying Linguistic Anthropology

  • James M. Wilce, Northern Arizona University
  • Book:
    Culture and Communication
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017, pp 269-297

  • Summary

    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

    After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

    • Summarize the history of applied anthropology, particularly applied anthropology involving language.

    • Describe the issues uniquely related to culture and communication in the areas where applied/engaged/public anthropologists work.

    • Explain why applied or engaged work has sometimes been controversial.

    Introduction

    In this chapter, we focus on applied linguistic anthropology. We begin with the frequently troubled (and troubling) history of applied anthropological projects involving language. However, the brief history we review here also includes increasingly promising links between theoretical models of language ideology – with which you are familiar – and their importance in projects designed to resist language shift.

    In this chapter, we frequently echo anthropologist Eleanor Nevins (2013), who emphasizes that projects involving communities with traditionally spoken languages that are now in decline consist of more than just documenting that language as it declines. She also emphasizes that language revitalization efforts involve much more than outsiders “suggesting” to Indigenous groups what they should do.

    After an extensive look at language revitalization, we then discuss how linguistic anthropology can help improve the quality of practitioner–patient encounters and thus the experience of medicine. This includes engaging with hospitals and other providers that require translation services but often fall back on untrained interpreters, including children, serving as “language brokers.” Beyond these brokers, whose task is clearly one of mediation, we also consider two other kinds of mediating technology. The first is the now pervasive use of computers coming between practitioners and patients in literal and figurative ways. The second example is the use of therapy dogs to help children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to participate in communicative activities that are more challenging without their service dogs.

    The final pair of examples we present in this chapter are stories of engagement outside of both medical settings and communities facing “language contraction” that we discuss earlier. The first entails encouraging university students and faculty to break out of the “ivory tower” – to engage with local communities in addressing local linguistic inequality. The second takes place at the national level. It involves linguistic anthropologists joining together to propose policy changes that could affect schools all over the United States.

  • 11 - Globalization, Media, and Emotion Talk

  • James M. Wilce, Northern Arizona University
  • Book:
    Culture and Communication
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    15 June 2017, pp 241-268

  • Summary

    LEARNING OBJECTIVES

    After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

    • Describe how anthropologists think of globalization.

    • Name unique features of anthropological approaches to media.

    • Describe how globalization, media, and emotion are linked in our contemporary world.

    • Explain the global circulation of emotion as an important new phenomenon.

    • Distinguish between old and new media.

    Introduction

    In this chapter, I address three major themes in contemporary scholarship, particularly in studies of culture and communication. The first two, globalization and mediation, are undoubtedly familiar terms to you. The last one – emotionalization/subjectivization – is likely not. And, as you have certainly come to expect, even familiar terms like globalization and mediation have specialized meanings for our purposes here.

    In this chapter, we explore specialized perspectives on how “the global,” media influences, and subjective human experience interact to create new ways of thinking and being in our world today. As you might anticipate, we see in this chapter that language plays a central role in the globalization of culture. Moreover old, but especially new, media are central to the production and circulation of contemporary forms of language. This chapter distills some of the exciting and recent work in the “anthropology of media,” especially by anthropologists concerned with language. Their media-centered ethnographic studies offer insights not only into “the media” but also into the nature of emotion and what it means for emotion to be culturally constituted and socially circulated.

    The Interconnection of Globalization, Media, and Emotion

    As you begin this chapter, you might well wonder how globalization, media, and emotion pertain to one another. Their interconnections have captivated me, at least since I wrote Crying Shame (Wilce 2009a). In that book, I traced the damaging impact of globalization on local traditions, especially “crying songs” or laments. The echoes of lament traditions in globally circulating media, albeit distorted and distorting, intrigued me, as did the stark differences in ideologies of emotion in globalizing modernity versus traditions such as ritual wailing. In this chapter, I tell a related but different story about the collaboration of globalization, media, and emotion, one that you may more easily recognize than you would in relation to a perhaps “exotic”-seeming tradition like ritual wailing.

Page 128 of 359