Articles with the keyword deixis
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“That’s a great culture. I’ve got to learn that culture.” A conversation with John B. Haviland. Full transcription online.
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 33(3) 2008: 49-56
Abstract
This is an abbreviated transcription of an informal interview held with Professor John
Beard Haviland in Helsinki, where he was making one of his sporadic and very welcome
lecturing visits at the end of 2007. Haviland is a linguistic anthropologist, previously at
Reed College and now Professor of Anthropology at UCSD. His decades of very extensive
fieldwork have been conducted principally among Tzotzil-speaking Zinacantecs of Chiapas,
Mexico, and at the Hopevale Aboriginal Community near Cooktown in far northern
Queensland, and his enthusiasm for, and commitment to, learning from these communities
of which he is part, are an inspiring example to young anthropological scholars—indeed,
anthropologists at any professional stage. Here we briefly explore Haviland’s approach to
working ‘on the ground’, relationships between theory production and empirical data
collection, and his current interest in the physical deixis of gesture along with methodological
problems in its transcription.
As Haviland points out to me, however, entextualising verbal communication—talk—
though something almost taken for granted in ethnographic work, also poses intractable
problems: “We’re already doing a radical abstraction when we write down speech as a piece
of text” (see below). In the light of his comment before I started taping, that in editing oral
speech to conform to written standards “all the interesting bits” are lost, we have deliberately
left the transcription in a comparatively raw state, though the urge to shape and polish an
essentially informal exchange is very hard to resist. I hope Professor Haviland will forgive
the liberties I have taken with “smoothing the turn structure” of our interaction, “eliminating
processing difficulties” such as “grammatical hitches in the original speech” and slight
adjustments made to the “register” and “the referential focus of the emerging narrative”
(Haviland 1996: 47). In the interests of readability we have excluded the usual notations
which accompany a detailed piece of transcription.Keywords deixis, fieldwork, gesture, linguistic system