Tag Archives: Bronislaw Malinowski

The Sexual Lives of Others

As a linguistic anthropologist, I turn my attention to the fact that sex is not only about, well, sex, but how people talk about sex. In Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia, I address a distinctive way of ordering sex, reproduction, and romance among the Khevsurs of Georgia. As a linguistic anthropologist, my goal was to use ethnography to illustrate the pervasive role of language in mediating some sphere of social life, in this case, sexuality. Language and sexuality are explored through the linguistic genres of romance such as conversation, poetry, and gossip. read more…

  • dateMay 25, 2015
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  • posted byPaul Manning
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Fieldwork Cartoons Revisited

In 1989 when conducting fieldwork in Masset, Haida Gwaii, I complemented my standard social anthropological toolkit of camera, cassette tapes (before the days of digital), and field notebooks with a small black sketchbook—my cartoon book. This proved to be a rewarding and useful means to tell an immediate story about fieldwork, drawn late at night, and before any photographs could be developed. I used the cartoons to start conversations with Haida community members, and we shared perspectives on the events I depicted—from the ordinary to the celebratory. read more…

  • dateMarch 23, 2015
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  • posted byGillian Crowther
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Learning Graphic Novels from an Artist’s Perspective

About five years ago, I was hit by a bolt of lightning. It happened on an otherwise normal workday, while I was struggling to tame what was becoming an increasingly unwieldy project. In a single bright flash, I pictured the entirety of my project in the form of a graphic novel. Establishing shots that parachute the reader into a specific place. Close-ups that bring the reader into the mind of a person. Simplifications that focus attention. Relationships among people inscribed in gestures, pose, action. Panels whose very internal composition and arrangement on a page move the reader through multiple perspectives. Pages whose layout make an implicit argument about how one thing is connected to another. In my mind’s eye, the exaggerated staging of sequential snapshots could lift my story out of the sticky slowness of explanation. read more…

  • dateFebruary 27, 2015
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  • posted byStacy Leigh Pigg
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