ANTH 120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Keith H. Basso, Anthropological Linguistics, Placemaking
56 views2 pages
Anth. 120 Week Six Lecture Notes
● The author of Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso, lives in Arizona near/in the Apache
reservation there.
● Western Apache didn’t want English maps for the reservation, but rather the Apache
names and landmarks to help signify this was Apache land. So Basso worked with a
group to go out and survey these landmarks to create the cartography.
● Western Apache
○ Place making, place worlds
■ Place making, the stories about a place that make it what it is
■ Place worlds, the outcome of these stories the final product/world of all
these stories come together
○ Names quote the ancestors
■ Thus it’s important to pronounce the names correctly
○ Speaking with names
■ Communicative practice, such as the kind of storytelling that occurs in the
books which has moral cultural historical and instructive properties
■ Way of invoking a story associated with that place
■ Moral cultural historical instructive
● Features of Place-making stories
○ Told in the present tense
○ Quoted speech from the ancestors
○ Concise, clear plot
○ Verisimilitude (suspension of disbelief accomplished by making things that aren’t
maybe so realistic seem realistic)
● Three Paradigms: A History of Approaches
○ Anthropological linguistics
■ Focuses on language documentations (such as Boas and Whorf)
○ Linguistic Anthropology
■ Focuses on theoretical study of language use
○ The third paradigm
■ Addresses anthropological questions using linguistic data and methods
○ All these paradigms emerged chronologically but are all still used today
● First Paradigm Tradition
○ Boasian tradition
○ Tells us what is grammatical, what is possible
○ Documenting place names for instance which Boas did do as well as a similar
thing that was done with the Tewa
○ However none of this tells us what people do with these resources
● Hymes argues for looking at ways of speaking
○ Second paradigm
○ Genre
○ SPEAKING
■ S - Setting and scene