Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

Shankar, Shalini; Cavanaugh, Jillian R.

doi:10.1017/9781316848418.001

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 91 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…How can we conceptualize reading as an embodied and a textual practice? In answering this question, we have drawn inspiration from Shalini Shankar and Jillian Cavanaugh (2017), whose “language materiality” approach advocates paying attention to how each of the terms—language, materiality—helps us understand the other. In our cases, “putting language and materiality together at the center of analysis” (ibid.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Explorations of Christian textual ideologies or language ideologies, that is, cultural theories of how words operate in the world, tend to give less attention to the political-economic structures and embodied relations of textual practice (though for a critical reflection, see Bialecki and Hoenes del Pinal 2011). In order to widen the analytical frame, we combine work on “semiotic ideologies” (Keane 2007) and “language materiality” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2017) to shed light on the important interweavings created across linguistic and material forms—including bodies—in Christian reading. Indeed, though not often analyzed alongside theories of Christian linguistic practice, scholarship on Christian women's organizations has often presumed inextricable connections between textual engagement and the cultural negotiation of tensions surrounding gender, religion, and race (see e.g., Griffith 2000; Casselberry 2017).…”

Section: Anthropological Perspectives On Reading In Christian Communimentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

Halvorson

Hovland

2021

Comp Stud Soc Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Anthropological Perspectives On Reading In Christian Communimentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

Halvorson

Hovland

2021

Comp Stud Soc Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…According to Shankar and Cavanaugh, language should be considered a medium that travels through selected channels, such as the voice, the page, the screen, the MP3, and such forms "matter to what it is and does". 18 Speech, the voiced phonetic form, and text, the graphic form, are the most common modes of language used in everyday life. Both of these are products of physical activities that have a material presence.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silky entanglements in Chinese color‐naming and its diachronic change: A new materialism perspective

Dai

2021

Color Research & Application

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This work seeks to explore the silk-shaped Chinese color lexicon from the Bronze Age to the present, drawing upon a new materialism perspective that recognizes the force of matter and challenges the privileged position of humans in the historical progress. Rejecting the dichotomy of material and immaterial-established by structuralism and empiricism-this approach explores the complex interactions between language, matter (silk), environment, climate, social transformation, ideology, and culture by assessing Chinese color-naming and its semantic changes. The article traced the diachronic changes of 13 terms and found that the materiality of silk and its color attribute was generally entangled in one character in the Bronze Age, conforming with the object-attribute entangled word-creation habits and general cognitive patterns in Chinese. The natural environment and economic transformation led to the predominance of silk-color entangled terms than other object-color entangled terms to denote colors. The strict association between identity and color in the hierarchical ideology caused improvements in dyeing techniques, which enhanced human color cognition and expanded the silk-color entangled lexicon. After the fourth century AD, the introduction of cotton reduced the social and cultural influence of silk. This, along with the internal adjustment in the language system, reduced the significance of silk in the semantics of silk-color entangled terms. It is believed that silk-color entangled terms may go through six stages or stop at any of them: from silk-color entanglement to silk-color differentiation, and then to the shedding of silk meaning. According to the stages that they have went through, silk-color entangled terms and object-color entangled terms are classified into three types: semantic color terms, pragmatic color terms, and occasional pragmatic color terms. This study indicates that the current color lexicon was co-shaped due to the interaction and dynamic assemblage of multiple material and non-material factors.

show abstract

“…For instance, the recent interest in the materiality of language, culminating in an edited volume by Cavanaugh and Shankar (), led to many studies that employ the Peircean framework to focus on the materially conditioned mediality of linguistic practice—that is, “the quality, nature, and characteristics of the connections enabled by any particular medium” through which semiotic work takes place (Shankar and Cavanaugh , 4). Such extensions toward materiality, in turn, allow metasemiotic analysis to trace, with greater precision, the intermedial and interdiscursive movement of signs that produce specific ideological effects.…”

Section: Metasemiotic Chains Of Circulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

Park

2019

American Anthropologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using the keyword movement, this essay reviews linguistic anthropological research that appeared in 2018 (November 2017 to October 2018) to highlight how linguistic anthropology continues and extends the discipline's traditional focus on the deep embeddedness of language in the dynamism of sociocultural practice.Based on an overview of works on (1) itineraries of people, (2) tensions with the nation-state, (3) shifts in the political economy, (4) digital communicative practices, (5) metasemiotic chains of interdiscursivity, and (6) movements of

show abstract

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

Cited by 16 publications

References 91 publications

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading: A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women

Silky entanglements in Chinese color‐naming and its diachronic change: A new materialism perspective

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About