On Language Distribution in Ilam Province,Iran

As is still the case in many parts of Iran, the distribution of languages and dialects in Ilam Province, western Iran, is unevenly documented. There have been several studies on specific language varieties spoken throughout the province but, in large part because of conflicting perspectives on the relationship between language and ethnicity, the situation for the region as a whole has until now remained unclear. The present study first of all brings together existing sociolinguistic and demographic data on language distribution and highlight areas of uncertainty. The main part of the study provides an overview of local perceptions of language distribution and language use based on field research and interviews conducted in each of the province's ten regions (shahrestān) and their twenty-five districts (bakhsh). Here, respondents' assessments of the geographic extent of the province's four main languages—Kurdish, Luri, Laki and Arabic—as well as more minor languages spoken by immigrants from elsewhere in Iran are summarized. For Kurdish in particular, which is the major of the four languages, the article shows the perceived geographic distribution of each major dialect and its affiliation within one of two major Kurdish dialect groups: Ilāmi (or “Feyli”) and Kalhōri. This analysis is followed by a brief discussion of multilingualism. The results of the study are brought together in a map of the province's languages.     

Colonialism in the periphery: Spanish linguistic policy in New Granada,c. 1574–1625

This article examines how the Spanish Crown's attempt to implement a systematic linguistic policy across the New World from the last quarter of the sixteenth century failed in the New Kingdom of Granada. Based on the ambiguous and problematic idea of ‘general languages’ that had arisen in Mexico and Peru, this one-size-fits-all policy was wholly unsuited to even the Muisca heartlands of the archdiocese of Santa Fe. Instead, local authorities settled on the use of bespoke translations of catechetical and pastoral texts into individual local languages, even at parish level, thereby reinforcing linguistic particularism—but availing themselves of the disciplinary and procedural framework of the legislation to support their strategy. In doing so, the article seeks to challenge established assumptions about the treatment of indigenous languages in New Granada in this period, and to throw new light on unanswered questions about the Spanish response to the region's linguistic heterogeneity.     

Dissecting Policy Designs: An Application of the Institutional Grammar Tool

An enduring challenge for the policy and political sciences is valid and reliable depiction of policy designs. One emerging approach for dissecting policy designs is the application of Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom's institutional grammar tool. The grammar tool offers a method to identify, systematically, the core elements that comprise policies, including target audiences, expected patterns of behavior, and formal modes of sanctioning for noncompliance. This article provides three contributions to the study of policy designs by developing and applying the institutional grammar tool. First, we provide revised guidelines for applying the institutional grammar tool to the study of policy design. Second, an additional component to the grammar, called the oBject, is introduced. Third, we apply the modified grammar tool to four policies that shape Colorado State Aquaculture to demonstrate its effectiveness and utility in illuminating institutional linkages across levels of analysis. The conclusion summarizes the contributions of the article as well as points to future research and applications of the institutional grammar tool.     

The South Sulawesi group and neighbouring languages

The languages of the genetically based South Sulawesi (SSul.) group share many specific substantial and structural features with other languages of Southern and Central Sulawesi. Among the non‐SSul. languages of the area, it is the so‐called Highland Toraja languages that bear the strongest resemblance to the SSul. group. Within the last‐named group, the northern languages show more numerous Toraja (esp. Highland Toraja) characteristics than the southern ones. This pattern of isoglosses must be explained as due to areal contacts. In all likelihoo'd, during the greatest part of the history of the SSul. group its languages have been subject to deep influence of old local languages (which were probably similar to present‐day Highland Toraja idioms).     

The bamboo raft as a key to the introduction of the sweet potato in prehistoric Polynesia

The idea that American Indians played no part in Polynesian prehistory originated with J.R. Forster, a companion of Cook on his second voyage. Forster made a comparative study of five Polynesian languages, using a basic list of 40 words that included 'sweet potato'. He concluded that although there were many similarities between those languages and the languages of Southeast Asia, 'no distant or accidental similarity' existed between the Polynesian and American languages. Moreover, the 'wretchedness and small size' of American sailing craft proved 'incontestably' that the Pacific Islanders had not originated in the Americas. The premises for Forster's claims have long been proved to be wrong. Yet many scholars still accept his main conclusion. This article contraverts that view. It argues that voyagers from Mindanao crossed the Pacific to Ecuador in about 200 BC on a bamboo raft and that this became the prototype of the balsa rafts of Ecuador and Peru of early Spanish times. Such rafts made prehistoric voyages to Mexico, south-central Chile, and the Galapagos Islands. Easter Island's first settlers, it is argued, were drifted there in a balsa raft. A new claim that Polynesians from Easter Island sailed to South America and returned with the sweet potato and bottle gourd is also discussed.     

Gendered Structures of Local Politics in Turkey

Indicators offered by available international statistical data and observations of many researchers point out that women's formal political involvement at the local level is stronger than that at the national level for the majority of states. However, gendered political patterns in Turkey have been following a rather different path. One and the most significant contradictory aspect is that women's representation at local elected organs is weaker than the national parliament. This article, first, investigates the reasons for this relatively weak existence in formal local politics. The references of this relativity are both national formal politics of Turkey, and the dominant worldwide model. Secondly, the article tries to establish country‐specific links between formal and informal local politics concerning women's participation. The experience in Turkey has proven that women's local engagement does not necessarily propel decision‐making power and women's empowerment. Women's local mobilization in Turkey has been mostly limited to socio‐cultural and charity activities instead of central decisions on the settlement, and of efforts for establishing women's local political agendas. Moreover, as a very prominent factor concerning the maintenance of asymmetric gendered structures of local politics, women's movement at the national level has been lacking in systematic political interest in the issue until very recently. In this article, these pretensions and future prospects are discussed in terms of the actual global‐national circumstances affecting local politics as well as women's local conditions. To these ends, existing quantitative‐qualitative research, data and analysis, and relevant findings of the author's recent (2000–2003) original research, as well as her observations through participation in recent feminist activism targeting local politics are being evaluated.     

Language and Archaeology in Southern Africa: The Search for Post-colonial Reality

Issues to do with languages, particularly those of the former colonizers and the dominant have always been very emotive topics in post-colonial settings. Surely, such languages are living reminders of the bad associated with domination. Ironically, the same languages have emerged as mediums of communication in many post-colonies replete with ethnic groups who speak unrelated languages. For example, the thriving nature of English remarkably contrasts with the fast disappearance of many of the world's languages. However, as archaeologists and in view of the diversity of our languages, how do we communicate and understand each other? We may invent a neutral language or translate every other article into our many languages. But at what cost? Half the world is dying of hunger and disease as we argue over the need to make all languages important; research money is becoming difficult to access. Therefore, the need to communicate is probably more important than the need to perpetuate a victim mentality.     

‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris

The paper considers William Morris's belief that modern language was ‘degraded’, and explores how his late fiction tried to resist this degradation. Morris was influenced by the romantic philology of the mid-Victorian period which depicted languages as living organisms. Philologists such as Max Müller claimed that modern civilization had arrested this growth, mechanizing language into conventional signs; and Morris adapted the idea into a critique of industrial capitalism. He conceptualized modern English as manufactured external forms, sundered from organic history. His late prose fictions trace the ‘natural’ meanings of words which he imagined feudalism and capitalism had suppressed. However, this narrative of organic origins existed in tension with Morris's socialist ideals, which sought an objective language above local or national perspectives. The older Morris was writing at a time when romantic philology was coming under attack from a new generation of scholars. These proto-linguists regarded meaning as conventional and narratives of organic ‘roots’ in the distant past as mere mythology. Morris's struggles to reconcile the contradictions in his philosophy of language reflect wider tensions in romantic philology. His imaginary worlds in which everyone spoke the same relied upon myths of original linguistic unity and stasis which new research and theories were undermining. Ironically, Morris's attempts to re-organicize English inadvertently demonstrated the conventionality and perspectivism of language, relying upon common cultural frames of reference.     

Antiquarianism and abduction: charles vallancey as harbinger of indo-european linguistics

Scholars generally dismiss the ideas of the eighteenth-century founder of the Royal Irish Academy, Charles Vallancey, who argued for links between ancient Irish, Phoenician, and Scythian languages and cultures. Vallancey's antiquarian writings were widely known at the time and impacted upon thinkers such as William Jones, who first correctly articulated the links between Indo-European languages. Earlier, Vallancey had hypothesized similar links and a “common source” of world languages, relying on Irish origin legends and supposed similarities between Ireland and the “Orient.” Though inaccurate, his ideas spurred fuller investigations, prompting philologers in new directions. The father of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, argued for the value of speculative reasoning, outlining the logic of discovery. For Peirce “abduction” is the beginning of the scientific method, the formation of a hypothesis. Reading Vallancey's speculations as abductive suggestions accounts for his prominence at the time and asserts his influence in the history of philology and linguistics.     

Commensurable language and incommensurable claims among the Greek linguistic minority of Southern Italy

Abstract

More than ever, minorities reflexively engage with global frameworks in their endeavour to promote distinctiveness. Scaling local diversity through specific frameworks has resulted in familiar commensurable languages of international claim recognition. By presenting the case of the Grecanici – a Greek linguistic minority of Southern Italy – this paper critically assesses the creative mingling of global structures and local particularities which effects commensurable languages of representation. These languages in their global dimension reveal a certain degree of commensurate social commentary between global agents and local actors. This commentary is veryoften structured around master tropes such as awareness, victimization and consumption. Despite their global applicability, languages of representation do not necessarily imply commensurability at the local level. Often it is only after careful mediation by skilled rhetors that commensurability on a local level becomes possible.     

Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy

This study is about how gender and local urban scales interact with each other to influence individuals' motivations and resources for political recruitment. The data came from interviews with twenty women who ran for and lost the 2004 local elections for their neighborhood office, muhtarlik, in Eskisehir, Turkey. Considering both individual and institutional factors and the neighborhood scale as important for women's candidacy for local offices, this paper relies on a “relational” view of citizenship while examining the mediating roles of the local scale for citizenship. My findings overall disagreed with the arguments that “women's interests” drive women to enter politics and that the local offices provide more opportunities for women's political recruitment. As women's roles and responsibilities had been changing across multiple spaces, they ran for elections to search for ways to practice their capacities in public arenas. Yet to the electorates, first, even women with high qualities for the office did not appear as the most qualified candidates. Second, most electorates tended to evaluate candidacy qualities in relation to the neighborhood office's weak status in Turkish political system and as an unskilled job. Third, they seemed to associate this “job” positively with men's traditional domestic role as the main breadwinner, consider women's charity and communal works as women's traditional care responsibilities, and to vote mostly for over-middle-aged male incumbents with locally embedded relations. Finally, women missed an opportunity for their candidacy by not transforming their local network-based assets into resources for candidacy.     

Hannah Arendt's Political Theology of Democratic Life

Abstract

In this essay, I explore Hannah Arendt's suggestion that we conceptualize human power and freedom polytheistically if our aim is to understand the challenges and requirements of democratic self-governance. Although it is not clear that politics must always be understood through theological grammars, if it is to be, polytheism affirms that there may be multiple sources of value and of right, offering both a metaphysical counterpart to value pluralism and a vision of how to create political practices and institutions that mirror and honor both the equality and distinction of human beings.     

International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

The “Greenberg Controversy” and the Interdisciplinary Study of Global Linguistic Relationships**

This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro-level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine-grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For specialists in the anthropological and comparative-historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities.     

Spinners and weavers of auffay. Rural industry and the sexual division of labour in a French village, 1750–1850

German scholars of Jewish origin who were students of Martin Heidegger in the 1920s and 1930s are frequently criticized for their supposed postwar refusal to ‘disavow earlier liaisons with Heidegger.’ These scholars are thus indicted for being fundamentally anti-liberal or apolitical, and for those reasons dangerous disciples of Heidegger. By examining the works of Karl Löwith and Hans Jonas, two of Heidegger's influential former students, the following paper presents a more nuanced reading of the relationship between master and disciples, namely that Jonas and Löwith operate with Heidegger's philosophical grammar in order to turn against Heidegger, philosophically and politically. Within this framework, the article fleshes out the crucial importance of theology to the understanding of Jonas’ and Löwith's philosophical critique of Heidegger's thought. Following this theological turn, the paper demonstrates the complexity of Jonas’ and Löwith's postwar approach, that is an anti-Heideggerian ethical and political quest which is anchored nonetheless in Heidegger's philosophy. As such, Jonas’ and Löwith's political projects demonstrate the manner in which Heideggerian categories are not exhausted by Heidegger's own political interpretation; they grippingly denotes the aptitude to steer Heideggerian philosophy towards new ethical and political shores.     

Local gender contract and adaptive capacity in smallholder irrigation farming: a case study from the Kenyan drylands

This article presents the local gender contract of a smallholder irrigation farming community in Sibou, Kenya. Women's role in subsistence farming in Africa has mostly been analyzed through the lens of gender division of labor. In addition to this, we used the concept of ‘local gender contract’ to analyze cultural and material preconditions shaping gender-specific tasks in agricultural production, and consequently, men's and women's different strategies for adapting to climate variability. We show that the introduction of cash crops, as a trigger for negotiating women's and men's roles in the agricultural production, results in a process of gender contract renegotiation, and that families engaged in cash cropping are in the process of shifting from a ‘local resource contract’ to a ‘household income contract.’ Based on our analysis, we argue that a transformation of the local gender contract will have a direct impact on the community's adaptive capacity climate variability. It is, therefore, important to take the negotiation of local gender contracts into account in assessments of farming communities' adaptive capacity.     

Arthur's refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast

Arthur's refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world. Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.     

'Creating a Place to Belong': Girls' and Boys' Hut-building as a Site for Understanding Discourses on Childhood and Generational Relations in a Norwegian Community

The empirical focus of this article is children's huts as a particular place for constructions of identities and peer relations among children in a Norwegian local community. Building huts can be seen as children's construction of special places during childhood. Often these places are seen as secret places, reflecting a separate 'children's culture' developed within a particular microcosm. I argue that the social practices developed among girls and boys are related in complex ways to local cultural practices and the construction of gendered generational relations in the community. The title 'Creating a place to belong' refers not only to children's attachment to particular physical places, but also to children's place within a field of age-related as well as inter-generational relations.     

Notes on Contributors

By the end of the century, and under pressure from new scientific theories of minds and emotions, the languages in which the Victorians understood the relationship between inner feeling and moral action came under great pressure. At the same time, the established association between aesthetic and moral value was being challenged by aestheticism's espousal of ‘art for art's sake’. This essay examines one very distinctive response to these issues: Vernon Lee's development of the concept of ‘empathy’. Lee offers empathy as a scientifically verifiable process which explains why beauty matters to us. She also seeks to use it to mediate a new position capable of acknowledging the power of aestheticism's critique of Victorian moralism, while re-establishing moral action as central to aesthetic experience.