Garrett, Andrew. 2023. The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall. Language, Memory, and Indigenous California. Cambridge: MIT Press. 472 p. ISBN 9780262547093
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In January 2021, at a time when many institutions were reevaluating fraught histories, the University of California removed anthropologist and linguist Alfred Kroeber’s name from a building on its Berkeley campus. Critics accused Kroeber of racist and dehumanizing practices that harmed Indigenous people; university leaders repudiated his values. In The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall, Andrew Garrett examines Kroeber’s work in the early twentieth century and his legacy today, asking how a vigorous opponent of racism and advocate for Indigenous rights in his own era became a symbol of his university’s failed relationships with Native communities. Garrett argues that Kroeber’s most important work has been overlooked: his collaborations with Indigenous people throughout California to record their languages and stories.
The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall offers new perspectives on the early practice of anthropology and linguistics and on its significance today and in the future. Kroeber’s documentation was broader and more collaborative and multifaceted than is usually recognized. As a result, the records Indigenous people created while working with him are relevant throughout California as communities revive languages, names, songs, and stories. Garrett asks readers to consider these legacies, arguing that the University of California chose to reject critical self-examination when it unnamed Kroeber Hall.
Surrallés, Alexandre . 2023. La raison lexicographique. Découverte des langues et origine de l’anthropologie. Paris : Fayard. 504 p. ISBN 9782213725222
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À partir du début du xvie siècle, les dictionnaires bilingues connaissent une expansion vertigineuse : plusieurs centaines d’ouvrages cherchent à couvrir des langues non européennes. De quelle révolution témoignent ces nouveaux outils de connaissance entre les mains des savants et des diplomates ? Indiquent-ils l’émergence d’une vision sociale et historique du langage, ou poursuivent-ils une mise en ordre ontologique du monde ?
Parallèlement à l’expansion coloniale du Vieux Continent, la recherche d’une trame langagière commune supplée à l’effritement de la conception biblique d’une langue originelle. Face à l’extraordinaire diversité des langues amérindiennes, les Européens créent avec les dictionnaires un espace de traduction qui assigne une correspondance entre leurs catégories fondamentales, telles que « personne », « humain », « dieu », « corps » ou « âme », et des termes autochtones qui n’en sont pourtant pas les équivalents.
En explorant les failles de l’univers créé par cette « raison lexicographique », il devient possible de saisir des formes de construction du monde que l’ontologie du langage, profondément ancrée dans la tradition de la pensée européenne, avait effacées.
Barron, Nathaniel. 2023. Language in Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism. Leyden: Brill (Historical Materialism Book Series, 299/2). ISBN 978-90-04-68058-6
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Nathaniel Barron offers the first book length account in English of Ernst Bloch’s contribution to a Marxist philosophy of language. It is ambitious both in situating Bloch’s ideas in the broader Marxist engagement with language as it currently exists, and in using Bloch’s utopian categories to challenge that engagement. In particular, Barron reads Voloshinov’s insights into language through Bloch’s categories, and argues that Bloch advances on Voloshinov by offering an understanding of the social materiality of language which is more useful for challenging fascist forms of utterance.
Kantor, Benjamin Paul. 2023. The Standard Language Ideology of the Hebrew and Arabic Grammarians of the ʿAbbasid Period. Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers. (Semitic Languages and Cultures, 21). 232 p. (xii+220). ISBN 978-1-80511-183-2. DOI : https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0382
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Book in open access
As a discipline, the study of Biblical Hebrew grammar began largely among Arabic-speaking Jews of the Middle Ages, particularly in the ʿAbbasid period (750–1258 CE). Indeed, it has long been acknowledged by scholars that the Hebrew grammatical tradition, in many ways, grew up out of and alongside the Arabic grammatical tradition. Many concepts present in Hebrew grammar have their origins in the writings of Arabic grammarians of the ʿAbbasid period. And yet, as recent linguistic and anthropological work has shown, setting down ‘the grammar’ of a language can be as much an ideological or political activity as an academic one.
In addition to the language itself, speech communities also share beliefs and attitudes about that language—what linguistic anthropologists would term a ‘language ideology’. Language ideology can have a dramatic impact on what forms of the language one regards as acceptable and what sort of rules one imposes on and through their description of the language. Nevertheless, while much work has been done on the interface between Hebrew and Arabic grammar and literature in the Middle Ages, interface of their respective language ideologies has yet to be treated theoretically or systematically.
In the present book, then, we survey six specific characteristics of a ‘standard language ideology’ that appear in both the writings of the Hebrew grammarians who wrote in Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic grammarians during the ʿAbbasid period. Such striking lines of linguistic-ideological similarity suggest that it may not have been only grammatical concepts or literary genres that the medieval Hebrew grammarians inherited from the Arabic grammatical tradition, but a way of thinking about language as well.