Indigenous minorities of Siberia and Russian sociolinguistics of the 1920s: A life apart?

ABSTRACT

In the 1920s, two strong intellectual trends were simultaneously developing in Russia: the studies of languages and cultures of the indigenous population of Siberia and the Far North (led by Vladimir Bogoras, Leo Shternberg, and others), and sociolinguistic studies (led by Evgeniy Polivanov, Afanasiy Selischev, Rosaliya Shor, and others). Sociolinguistics as a new and fashionable branch of knowledge included many topics (sociolinguistic theory, social dialectology, influence of rapid social changes on language), but there never were attempts to study sociolinguistically the languages of indigenous “Northern” minorities. In 1929 Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoy, who by that time were both living abroad, launched a project called “Languages of the USSR.” The project could have united the two trends, but it was soon terminated because of the Great Depression in the West and a sharp turn in Stalin's policy in 1929 when many Russian scholars were prosecuted, academia became split in a fight over who represented “the true Marxism”, and international collaboration became dangerous for Russian scholars. Another reason for the lack of interest in sociolinguistic studies of indigenous minority languages was the evolutionist paradigm of Siberianist cultural anthropology of the time. As a result, the Soviet language planning for Northern indigenous minority languages in the1930s and later did not sufficiently take into account the sociolinguistic aspect of the problem; this may be responsible for its many failures and inconsistencies.     

"This war for men's minds": the birth of a human science in Cold War America

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order - one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science.     

Marriage Customs of the Southern Gallas

Evidence shows divergent perceptions of the wolf in different parts of the world. The populations of Asia, the Near East and the indigenous peoples of North America see the wolf positively, as an ideal hunter, warrior and survivor in the wilderness, although shepherds and animal-herders in these regions seem to have an ambivalent attitude towards the animal. Among many of the peoples mentioned above, there appears to be a desire to emulate the wolf, and magical powers have been attributed to the animal and to his body parts. On the other hand, the wolf is feared as a ravenous beast by the populations of Europe and by European immigrants to America.     

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.     

Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire

In 1808–1809, a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō (1775–1844) traveled to Sakhalin Island, called Kita Ezo or Karafuto by the Japanese, to map the land and document its inhabitants and natural features. In the seventh month of 1809, according to the lunar calendar, Mamiya arrived at Deren, a Chinese outpost along the Amur River in the Heilongjiang region. When Mamiya mapped Sakhalin and central Heilongjiang, he employed Western cartographic sciences to guard Japanese sovereignty by delineating national borders between Russia, China, and Japan; but he also ‘anticipated empire’ in a manner reminiscent of European powers. His maps placed Sakhalin on a universally recognizable grid and emptied the land of its inhabitants, who were formally relegated to the pages of illustrated ethnographies. Mamiya's activities, as well as those of cartographer Inō Tadataka (1745–1818), suggest a global early modern experience with cartography and ethnography, one in which Japan emerged as a periphery of calculation and deployed cartographic tools to construct nation and empire.     

Ethics and Archaeological Tourism in Latin America

Archaeological tourism and ethics are two fields that, with exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to combine. There is, however, an increasing concern on the general subject of tourism and ethics and this article will draw examples from Latin America to explore the intersection between both. An overview of the history of archaeological tourism in Latin America will be provided. A growing number of archaeologists all over Latin America are becoming active in promoting or assisting the conversion of sites into tourist attractions. For some, it is a way of protecting sites in the face of the dangers brought about by uncontrolled tourism and for others helping locals to earn a living is a humanitarian question. Yet, archaeological remains are not neutral, but powerful means of creating historical memory and identity. Tourism becomes a means of advertising and even of legitimizing the existence of groups and that politicizes archaeologists’ engagement with tourism. This politicization represents an ethical challenge for the profession. Also, the conversion of archaeological ruins into tourist attractions can only be made through the commodification of culture. This has been denounced by some scholars as another postcolonial appropriation and neoliberal method of controlling indigenous groups, but hailed by others as a good thing for indigenous communities as it provides them with a living.     

Foraging–Farming Transitions in Island Southeast Asia

The origins of agriculture have been debated by archaeologists for most of the discipline’s history, no more so than in Island Southeast Asia. The orthodox view is that Neolithic farmers spread south by sea from mainland China to Taiwan and thence to Island Southeast Asia, taking with them a new material culture and domestic rice and pigs and speaking the precursor of the Austronesian languages that are spoken in the region today. Opponents of this ‘farming/language dispersal’ theory have proposed models of acculturation, in which foragers acquired new material culture and food resources by trading with farmers. However, new work in archaeology, palaeoecology, palynology and anthropology, especially in Borneo, and in genetics and linguistics for the region as a whole, is suggesting that foraging/farming transitions in Southeast Asia were far more complex than either of these opposing ‘grand narratives’ of discontinuity (population colonisation) or continuity (acculturation) allows. Through the course of the Early/Mid-Holocene new material culture, technologies and foods were variously taken up, promoted or resisted in order to provision changes in the social and ideological constitution of societies. Whilst new readings of the data for foraging–farming transitions in the region vary, a consensus is emerging that it is more useful to focus on how materials and modes of life were used to underwrite changes in social networks than to seek to explain the archaeological record in terms of migrating farmers or acculturating foragers.     

Virtue language in historical scholarship: the cases of Georg Waitz,Gabriel Monod and Henri Pirenne

Historians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German historian Georg Waitz (1813–86), his French pupil Gabriel Monod (1844–1912) and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935)—this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense (‘only epistemic’), but in a weak one (‘epistemic’ as one layer of meaning among others).     

Towards new (graphic) narratives of Europe

The cultural policy of the European Union (EU) has become more important than before as economic crisis threatens to undermine the EU’s nascent political identity. This paper offers graphic narrative (or comics) as a medium particularly suited to the task. This suitability results from several features: (1) the text/image hybridity of comics, which eases translation into multiple languages; (2) the topological aspect of graphic narrative, in which panels compose a spatial network of relations of various intensities that is isomorphic with the theorization of European space offered by a key EU think tank; and (3) the potential for comics of the ‘everyday’ to narrate a plural, non-didactic identity with which both Europeans and others can identify. It is hoped that a policy such as this could have a more positive influence on the more territorial, exclusive notions of the EU.     

Amerigo Vespucci and His Alleged Awareness of America as a Separate Land Mass

ABSTRACT

The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci is widely believed to have been the first European to realize on his third voyage (May 1501 to September 1502) that America was a separate land mass, unconnected to Asia and completely surrounded by water, a communis opinio refuted in the present article. Close analysis of the geographical terms used in Vespucci’s letters, and their comparison with early sixteenth-century printed cosmographies, suggest that, on the contrary, Vespucci regarded the newly discovered land mass as a southern extension of the Asian continent. Also discussed are Matthias Ringmann’s 1507 Cosmographiae Introductio and Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, whose depiction of America as a separate land mass, allegedly based on Vespucci, paved the way for a concept that could not have been recognized as geographical truth in early sixteenth-century Europe.     

„On employera les meilleurs Graveurs pour les Figures”︁. Zeichner und Stecher der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1700–1806

“We will employ the best engravers for the figures” – Draughtsmen and Engravers of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, 1700–1809. – Although barely mentioned in accounts of its history of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, draughtsmen and engravers were, from the very inception, essential collaborators. Based on previously overlooked archival sources, this paper investigates the strategies that scientists used to select the most appropriate candidates during the first hundred years of the academy's existence. These included: (1) the engaging of artists already known to the scientists or those who had been recommendaded to them; (2) maintaining long‐term relationships with a number of artists, and later with their offspring (who had frequently been trained by their fathers); in 1768 this strategy culminated in the creation of a permanent position for one academic draughtsman; and (3) hiring draughtsmen who specialised in the subject matter in question, which entailed, for example, employing different people to carry out anatomical and botanical illustrations.     

Transatlantic Correspondence and ‘Mobile Knowledge’ in Alexander von Humboldt's Exploratory Travels to Hispanic America

Summary

This article focuses on the relevance of Alexander von Humboldt's correspondence in the formation of transatlantic scientific networks at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Apart from connecting Humboldt with scientists and scholars worldwide, his correspondence turned out to be a fundamental tool for assuring the material conditions and the social and scientific connections he needed to carry out his research on the Spanish colonies and to simultaneously diffuse his achievements on the European side of the Atlantic. His contact with Hispanic American scientists and with the local elites enabled him to build a broad social network, gaining access to key material, human and intellectual resources. The letters sent to scientists, scientific institutions and noblemen in Europe, for their part, kept Humboldt's European correspondents informed about his activities in Hispanic America, contributing to the validation of his work before the scientific community and the fulfilment of the duties resulting from the political and institutional support he received both before and during his travels. This stresses the importance of strategic social groups and their cooperation in the framework of exploratory travels as a means to gaining access to resources in the peripheries. It also reveals the scientist's dependence on all those who supported his research: kings, barons, botanical gardens, universities, and academies.     

Explaining Global Patterns of Language Diversity

The six and a half thousand languages spoken by humankind are very unevenly distributed across the globe. Language diversity generally increases as one moves from the poles toward the equator and is very low in arid environments. Two belts of extremely high language diversity can be identified. One runs through West and Central Africa, while the other covers South and South-East Asia and the Pacific. Most of the world's languages are found in these two areas. This paper attempts to explain aspects of the global distribution of language diversity. It is proposed that a key factor influencing it has been climatic variability. Where the climate allows continuous food production throughout the year, small groups of people can be reliably self-sufficient and so populations fragment into many small languages. Where the variability of the climate is greater, the size of social network necessary for reliable subsistence is larger, and so languages tend to be more widespread. A regression analysis relating the number of languages spoken in the major tropical countries to the variability of their climates is performed and the results support the hypothesis. The geographical patterning of languages has, however, begun to be destroyed by the spread of Eurasian diseases, Eurasian people, and the world economy.     

Comprehending the Qing Empire: Building Multilingual Competence in an Age of Imperial Rivalry, 1792–1820*

Abstract

European knowledge of the four dominant languages of the Qing Empire, Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan, was transformed between 1792 and 1820 as a consequence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although these conflicts did not dramatically alter European political relations with the Qing Empire, they inaugurated a series of more subtle changes that collectively produced this surge in linguistic ability. First, this period saw unprecedented European interest in, and access to, the inland frontiers of the Qing Empire. Such access convinced some that China was newly accessible through the empire’s diverse Inner Asian territories, leading them to plan bold ventures in diplomacy, trade, proselytization, and academic research. These ambitious projects, although rarely accomplishing their goals, stimulated research by seeming to demand new linguistic capabilities for their execution. The fact that they often envisioned crossing Inner Asia to reach China explains why progress in Chinese occurred together with Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Another factor promoting a sudden surge in multilingual competence was the speed with which breakthroughs could now be communicated through imperial and trans-imperial networks. Printing, evangelical and learned societies, and new professional opportunities, gave European scholars unprecedented access to advances made on or near the Qing frontier.     

Correspondence(s) in The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson

In The Pen Friend published in 2009, Ciaran Carson draws upon the form of the epistolary novel, albeit in a somewhat non-conformist way. How to convey reality through language, or languages – photography, painting among others – is once more the purpose of the writer, even though subject and form have been renewed. This article aims at showing how the reader is transported into a world full of correspondences, a world transfigured by the power of language.     

An analysis of a Natchez gunflint assemblage from the lower Mississippi valley and its implications for eighteenth-century colonial economic interactions

Archaeological analyses of European lithic technologies in North America are often discussed anecdotally within the context of other material evidence of European occupations. In North America, the presence of gunflints manufactured in Europe, generally England (which became part of Great Britain in 1707) or France, is used as a marker for the influence of these European powers and as a reflection of from whom residents obtained their material culture. Gunflints were made in Europe and in North America (north of the Rio Grande) from the early 1600s to the late 1800s. Thus, gunflints from sites such as the Natchez Fort, Louisiana (AD 1729–1731) provide a unique avenue of analysis for understanding both continuity in lithic technologies and the interactions between indigenous and introduced technologies. We address methodological concerns in typifying historic lithic collections, specifically eighteenth-century gunflints, particularly as these concern sourcing and the implications of sourcing for eighteenth-century colonial interactions in the southeastern United States.     

A Note on Kalhori Kinship Terms

Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.     

Modern Greek in the European Union: Language,Economy and Culture

Abstract

For those teaching and researching in Modern Greek Studies outside Greece, discussion of the eighties and nineties is characterised by reference to changes in Greek political life, as well as in the Greek educational system and policy making directly connected with Greece's entry into the European Union. Greece became a member of the EU as recently as 1981. PASOK, viewed membership as temporary but these claims were dropped after 1985. In the same period changes introduced into the linguistic system of the Greek language led to discussions of educational and cultural interest. More recently, however, certain developments concerning the role of strong languages in the European Union have brought to the fore issues concerning weak languages, those spoken by less people in the European Union, and their related cultures. This has once again opened the forum of discussion regarding matters of linguistic survival and cultural variety.