Not available in 2024/25
AN393 Half Unit
Language, Signs, World, Action! Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
This information is for the 2024/25 session.
Teacher responsible
Dr Yazan Doughan
Availability
This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in Social Anthropology, Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Cape Town), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Fudan), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Melbourne), Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Singapore) and Exchange Programme for Students in Anthropology (Tokyo). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.
Pre-requisites
Unless granted an exemption by the course teacher, students taking this course from departments other than Anthropology should have completed EITHER an introductory course in anthropology such as AN100 or AN101 OR have completed an AN200 course in their second year of study.
Course content
This course introduces contemporary anthropological approaches to understanding socio-cultural life as what is precipitated through socially organized linguistic and broader semiotic processes. It considers how socio-cultural life is mediated by sign phenomena in all modalities of experience, and how sign systems are produced through socio-cultural processes. We will look at sign phenomena from two complimentary perspectives: how signs function semantically by looking at how signs (re)present their objects, and how they function pragmatically as appropriate and/or effective practice-in-context by drawing on and instantiating structural orders. The focus, however, will be on the pragmatics of language use, or how people act through language use. We will study the social life of language use by considering various artifacts, sites, institutionalizations, processes, and social networks. The aim throughout is to investigate the constitutive role of language and semiotic figuration in sociocultural power and in sociohistorical processes.
In the first half of the course, students will be introduced to some key concepts in semiotic and linguistic anthropology and their place in the long tradition of thinking about language in anthropology and related disciplines, such as linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, and sociology. These will include concepts such as sign, text and context, poetics, performativity, pragmatics and m