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Multidirectional language contact involving more than two languages is little described. However, it probably represents the most common type of contact in the world, where colonization, rapid socioeconomic and demographic change, and society-wide multilingualism have led to dramatic linguistic change. This book presents fascinating cases of multidirectional contact and convergence between highly diverse languages in an emerging linguistic area in Suriname and the Guianas and proposes a framework for comparable studies.
In this volume, Li Wei brings together contributions from well-known and emerging scholars in socio- and anthropological linguistics working on different linguistic and communicative aspects of the Chinese diaspora. The project examines the Chinese diasporic experience from a global, comparative perspective, with a particular focus on transnational links, and local social and multilingual realities. Contributors address the emergence of new forms of Chinese in multilingual contexts, family language policy and practice, language socialization and identity development, multilingual creativity, linguistic attitudes and ideologies, and heritage language maintenance, loss, learning and re-learnin...
Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders, such as American missionaries, through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.
The Indigenous Languages of South America: A Comprehensive Guide is a thorough guide to the indigenous languages of this part of the world. With more than a third of the linguistic diversity of the world (in terms of language families and isolates), South American languages contribute new findings in most areas of linguistics. Though formerly one of the linguistically least known areas of the world, extensive descriptive and historical linguistic research in recent years has expanded knowledge greatly. These advances are represented in this volume in indepth treatments by the foremost scholars in the field, with chapters on the history of investigation, language classification, language endangerment, language contact, typology, phonology and phonetics, and on major language families and regions of South America.
The Anthropology of Love and Anger questions the very foundations of western sociological thought. In their examination of indigenous peoples from across the South American continent, the contributors to this volume have come to realise that western thought does not possess the vocabulary to define even the fundamentals of indigenous thought and practice. The dualisms of public and private, political and domestic, individual and collective, even male and female, in which western anthropology was founded cannot legitimately be applied to peoples whose 'sociality' is based on an 'aesthetics of community'. For indigenous people success is measured by the extent to which conviviality, (all that ...
Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage (SK & CH), First Nations of the Americas, testifies to the growing commitment of museum professionals in the twenty-first century to share collections with the descendants of people and communities from whom the collections originated. Thanks to collection histories and the documenting of relations with particular indigenous communities, it is well known that until as recently as the 1970s, museum doors - except for a handful of cases - were shut to indigenous peoples. This volume is the result of an ""expert meeting"" held in November 2007 at the National M ...
This is a comprehensive descriptive grammar of Trio, a Cariban language, spoken in the remote rainforest of Suriname and along the border in Brazil. Typologically interesting features of Trio include a basic word order Object-Verb-Subject and a system of evidentiality that expresses whether or not the speaker was eye-witness to an event. Trio has several grammatical morphemes that mirror the group's conceptualization of the world of the visible and the invisible in which they live; one is a facsimile marker that expresses that the denotee of a noun is manifestly but not intrinsically that denotee; the role of the individual in contributing to a harmonious collective, recognized by anthropologists as a salient aspect of Amazonian life, is expressed by two responsibility clitics. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists, anthropologists, and everyone interested in the finer points of Guianan-Amazonian languages.