The word socialism seems to be much in vogue in the United States recently, primarily as an epithet for one’s political opponents, especially for representatives of the Obama Administration or the Democratic Party, but also for “the Media” collectively.
I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find two recent blog posts pointing out how this usage differs from the traditional definition of socialism as a political position.
Fourth linguistic anthropology roundup, written by Alex Enkerli
The International Summer School on Language Documentation and Description will be held in July 2010 in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #3
The Boston Globe’s “The Word”, Conversations with Ron Scollon, Monkeys with Internet Access, Voting Osage, and more
In a followup to my post from last week about the language section in the Snopes database of online myths and hoaxes, I’d like to… Read More »Language Related TV Tropes
Oxford and Elsevier offer discounts to SLA members.
Celso Alvarez Caccamo had such an interesting response to my first roundup that I have pasted it in full so anyone seeing the blog will… Read More »Celso Alvarez Caccamo on Catalan Language Policies
A special edition of the Linguistic Anthropology Roundup to introduce, Ben Zimmer, a Chicago-trained linguistic anthropologist, linguist and lexicographer who was just appointed as the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine, “On Language” columnist.
NPR has a nice profile of the couple which runs Snopes.com. Having long ago convinced most of my contacts to stop forwarding chain e-mails, I… Read More »Language Myths in Your Inbox
Welcome to the inaugural Society for Linguistic Anthropology Roundup Blogpost that will briefly summarize some of the current interesting linguistic anthropology related materials available on… Read More »Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #1
We got so many interesting paper proposals that we have extended the conference for an extra half day so we could fit them all in. The Wyoming Language, Culture and History Conference now runs from Thursday, July to Saturday, July 3. See full blog post for the preliminary program
A piece in Scientific American Mind called “Accents Trump Skin Color” reviews work by Katherine Kinzler and colleagues suggesting that, for young children, accent is as important as visual cues to race, gender, and age in selecting friends. The magazine article was interesting, and led me to look for the research paper it was based on.
The perfect cartoon for teaching Deborah Cameron and Berlin and Kay
Ethnographic Field School in Highlan Guatemala 6 undergraduate credits in anthropology May 25–July 8, 2010 (two days on-campus, six weeks abroad) Maury Hutcheson, Ph.D. mhutcheson@vcu.edu… Read More »Study the life and culture of the Highland Maya (Deadline: March 26, 2010)
CFP Volunteer Session AAA 2010: How We Formulate “Circulate-able” Selves: Introductions as a Social and Political Discourse Genre. Send to Nathaniel Dumas by March 15th, 2010.
A radio quiz program suggested that Toyota uses a character written with eight strokes, while Toyoda uses one with ten, and that eight is a more auspicious number. This is strange for at least two reasons.
It turns out that BBC News contributor Kathryn Westcott published an article last week addressing the question, “Why is the car giant Toyota not Toyoda?” which does a pretty good job explaining the apparent inconsistency.
In order to form a more perfect Society for Linguistic Anthropology and provide the SLA with a recognizable visual identity, we would like to have a logo that we can use as an avatar in diverse social media contexts (Twitter and Facebook, especially). To that end we are having a logo design competition, open to anyone involved directly or indirectly with the SLA.
The deadline for this contest is May 1, 2010, and we will award a prize of $100 for the winning design.
History traditionally was part of linguistic anthropology but in more recent years much of the focus of the field has been on close analysis of… Read More »CFP AAA: Circulating Discourses of Past and Present: Linguistic Anthropology and History
I know very little about adoption practices in Haiti, and all I know about events in that country since the earthquake last January I have learned from the news media. Still, I wonder whether the thing that American missionaries call an orphanage is really the same as what most Haitians think of as an orphelinat. It appears that Haitian orphanages are quite different from my own image of an orphanage.
AAA 2010: SLA Call for Invited Sessions