One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.

Download it here: A history of the Akpafus (PDF, 2.5Mb)

The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and Culture at the 108th AAA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2-6. Come visit us on Friday morning from 8.00-11.45 in the Liberty Ballroom A, on the 3rd Floor of the Downtown Marriott.

What? The Senses in Language and Culture, an SLA-sponsored session
When? Friday December 4th, 8.00-11.45
Where? Downtown Marriott, Liberty Ballroom A, 3rd Floor
Who? Stephen C. Levinson & Asifa Majid (organizers); Asifa Majid, N.J. Enfield, Niclas Burenhult, Gunter Senft, Clair E. Hill, Hilário de Sousa, Connie de Vos, Shakila Shayan, Ozge Ozturk, Mark Sicoli, Sylvia Tufvesson, Mark Dingemanse, Olivier Le Guen, Penelope Brown (participants); Lawrence Hirschfeld, William F. Hanks (discussants)

Session Abstract

(See also the program and abstracts for individual talks below.)

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is “wired-up” and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? This symposium brings together the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic project focused on the encoding of the senses in language and culture, organized by the Language and Cognition group, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.

The “Language of Perception” project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more “ineffable” – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations.

To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than a dozen languages. The results of this investigation will be presented in the first presentation of the symposium. The stimulus materials also serve as a jumping-off point for more detailed analysis of the relations between the senses and language and culture provided by the remaining talks. The talks in the first half of the symposium explore “variation in space and time”. Speakers explore how semantic categories for the senses are influenced by individual variation, cultural expertise, and by the influences of contact histories with other social groups, languages and the forces of globalization.

The second half of the symposium explores “iconicity” in how the senses are expressed. Speakers explore how iconicity in signed and spoken languages is utilized to convey sensory experiences. Particularly revealing are ideophones (also known as “expressives”), a special class of words used to convey a vivid impression of certain sensations or sensory perceptions. These are found abundantly in Asian and African languages, as well as in some South American languages but are rare in Indo-European languages, and provide a unique window into the senses, language and culture. Straddling boundaries that have long been considered self-evident in Western thought (such as perception vs. emotion, or the traditional five-senses model), ideophones provide a unique view of cultural meaning systems relating to perception and sensation. Some languages such as the Mayan ones make use of structural iconicity to achieve similar cross-modal effects, compounding roots from different domains or using special derivations to signal affective overlays. These linguistic systems challenge preconceptions of limits to the expressive power of language.

Program

Individual talks are linked to abstracts. Times can be found on the AAA program.

Abstracts of individual talks

These abstracts are also available on the AAA Program for registered participants.

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Asifa Majid & Stephen C. Levinson: An overview of the senses across languages and cultures

Why is it that language is good at describing certain states of affairs (e.g., the kinship relation between me and my grandfather), but very limited in others (e.g., describing smells)? Ineffability – the difficulty or impossibility of putting certain experiences into words – is a topic that has been relatively neglected within the cognitive sciences. But limits on the ability to express sensorial experiences in words can tell us important things about how the mind works, how different modalities do or do not talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. This talk presents the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of how different perceptual domains are coded across languages and cultures. Speakers from more than a dozen languages – including three sign-languages – were asked to describe a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. The results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.

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Nick J. Enfield: The senses in contact: A study of Mainland Southeast Asian languages

Historical contact between social groups is well known to cause convergence not only in patterns of cultural practice, but also in the structure of unrelated languages. While a fair amount is known about convergence in grammatical form, less is known about convergence in the semantic distinctions made in the lexicon. Research on the linguistic effects of culture contact often cites isolated examples (e.g., Matisoff has noted that Southeast Asian lexical semantic systems include ‘many verbs for different kinds of carrying’, and lexical idioms like ‘insects in the teeth’ for dental decay, or ‘pig crazy’ for epileptic), but little systematic work has been done. To make a move in this direction, in this talk I compare lexical semantic distinctions in the semantics of the senses in several languages of mainland Southeast Asia, focusing on some of the perceptual categories under investigation in a large-scale comparative project being undertaken by researchers in the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen. Special attention is paid to data from Lao (Tai), Kri (Vietic), and Cantonese, within the domains of taste, smell, and color.

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Niclas Burenhult & Asifa Majid: Smell across space, time, and culture: The case of Aslian (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula)

It has been claimed that odor is relatively less codable in languages than vision, audition or other sensory modalities. On this basis, researchers have attempted to draw conclusions about how representational systems in the mind/brain are organized. Aslian-speaking communities (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula) are a counter-example to this claim. This talk provides evidence that Aslian communities are “smell cultures” with an elaborated set of smell distinctions in their lexica. Comparison of smell vocabularies across the diverse Aslian cultures suggests these distinctions do not have any relation to particular cultural practices but are linguistically motivated and remarkably stable across space, time and ecologies.

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Gunter Senft: Talking about color and taste on the Trobriand Islands: A diachronic comparative study

How stable is the lexicon for perceptual experiences? This talk presents results on how the Trobrianders talk about taste and color, and how these have changed over the years. In 1904 Charles S. Myers published a paper on the taste vocabulary of the Torres Strait Islanders. In 2008 I continued fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea with the aim of researching the Trobriand Islanders’ language of perception. Contrasting my findings on taste categories in Kilivila with Myers’ work reveals that many of his original results can still be verified. The Trobriand Islanders have never developed a sophisticated cuisine – and their simple ways of preparing their food is mirrored in their vocabulary on taste. However, some effects of globalization have reached the Trobrianders and get reflected in their taste vocabulary. In 1983 I collected data on Kilivila color terms. The second part of my talk compares these data with the data I collected 2008. Many of the predictions I made about the development of color categories in 1983 were right. However, although the strategy to use color terms that refer to the plants, fruits and soils used to make colors for dyeing grass-skirts does not play an important role any more because women use chemical colors for dying their skirts these days, these color terms are still used. Kilivila provides evidence that terms used for talking about color and taste are relatively stable over time, with only a few effects of language change induced by language contact.

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Clair Hill: Ineffability and ‘gaps’ in the linguistic encoding of Umpila visual perception

In what ways do language systems manage areas of ineffability and semantic gaps? This paper considers this issue with regard to the linguistic encoding of visual perceptual modalities in Umpila, a Paman Australian language. In Umpila, areas of ineffability in the visual domain are supported by salient domains outside the perceptual realm and by other communicative resources. For example, kin categories are put to work by speakers to fill ‘gaps’ in the color spectrum, and simultaneous co-speech gesture is employed to add shape specificity to a simple two term ‘big-small’ lexical distinction.

This paper compares data from three contexts – responses to MPI ‘Language of Perception’ stimuli, supplementary tasks, and conversational narratives. Based on these comparative datasets, two broad types of relative perceptual ineffability can be posited: (1) domains with established systems of domain-specific lexicon – the ineffability here, is that such systems do not consistently map across an entire domain’s perceptual space; and (2) domains which employ all-purpose vocabulary (e.g. antonym pairs like good-bad, big-small) that can be readily applied across an entire perceptual domain, but lack the codable precision that domain-specific lexicon affords a speaker.

A comparison of types of ineffability and ‘gap’ filling strategies will be used to address a number of wider questions, such as: What is the relative resilience of perceptual categories in the midst of language obsolescence and cultural innovation given the current rapid language/cultural change situation in Aboriginal Australia? What is the relationship between areas of poor and rich linguistic and cultural elaboration?

Hilário de Sousa: Changes in the society and perception in Cantonese

Enormous changes happened in the Cantonese society in the last fifty years, from a relatively third world and illiterate society, to a relatively first world and highly literate society. Western-style education created a shift in the categorisation of perceptual categories; while some are enriched, especially in the distal senses, others are suppressed, especially in the proximal senses. As part of the ‘Categories across language and cognition’ project, I conduced a set of perceptual experiments on Cantonese. The Cantonese data that I collected reveal noticeable differences in the language of perception between older and younger speakers. With colours, older speakers uniformly provided the six basic colour terms of hung4 ‘red’, caang2 ‘orange’, wong4 ‘yellow’, luk6 ‘green’, laam4 ‘blue’ and zi2 ‘purple’, whereas many younger speakers provided two extra basic colour terms: ceng1 ‘light green’ and juk6 ‘peach’. With shapes, younger speakers tended to use terms which explicitly express the 3D-ness of 3D shapes (e.g. kau4tai2 ‘sphere’), whereas older speakers tend to use terms which do not explicitly distinguish the 2D-ness versus 3D-ness of the shapes (e.g. jyun4jing4 ‘round shape’/ ‘circle’ for a sphere). On the other hand, older speakers outperform younger speakers with gustational and olfactional terms. For instance, younger speakers do not distinguish the umami taste (the glutamate taste) from the salty taste, and tend to be less certain about the meanings of the numerous bad-smell terms in Cantonese.

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Connie de Vos: Iconicity and Variation: Conventionalisation of Color Terms in Small versus Large Signing Communities

Studies on color terms in signed languages have suggested that color term systems are not only affected by language mode, but also by characteristics of the language community (Washabaugh, Woodward, & DeSatis, 1978; Woodward, 1989; Nonaka, 2004). In this talk I present data from Kata Kolok, a signed language used in a small community of North Bali. In Kata Kolok, all indications of color are based on visual iconicity, which allows for contextual flexibility and high variability among signers. First of all, pointing to indicate color is conventionalized for white, red, and black which are referred to by touching teeth, lips, and hair respectively. Second, in spontaneous conversations signers often point towards objects in the vicinity which have the color which they would like to express. For example, one might point to a color on one’s sarong. A third strategy is to produce signs for objects which prototypically have that color. There is a high degree of variation between signers in the choice of objects. For example, one might choose either banana or turmeric to indicate the color yellow. One possibility is that this variation is due to the limited time depth of the language and the relatively small size of the signing community. A comparison between young and small sign languages like Kata Kolok to larger and more established signed languages, such as American Sign Language, suggests that conventionalization of color is a function of expressive mode, cognition, context, critical mass, and time.

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Shakila Shayan & Ozge Ozturk & Mark Sicoli: The thickness of pitch: Crossmodal iconicity in three unrelated languages; Farsi, Turkish and Zapotec

This paper considers parallels in the poetics of everyday life in both the Middle East and Meso-America. Sound is difficult to describe. While certain professionals (like linguists) may have expert vocabularies dedicated to sound description, speakers of many languages around the world rely on the vocabulary of more tangible domains, like space and size, extending them to talk about the intangible domain of sound. English is an example of a split system where one dimension has a dedicated vocabulary, like “quiet” vs “loud”, but the dimension of pitch uses spatial metaphors “high” and “low”. We present the language of sound in three unrelated languages—Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec—whose speakers use metaphors of spatial dimension to talk about sound. All three refer to high frequency sounds as “thin” and low frequency sounds as “thick”. While it may be possible to explain similar patterns of Farsi and Turkish due to the extensive history of language contact in central Asia, our inclusion of the out-of-contact Meso-American language Zapotec suggests more is going on regarding the natural iconicity between dimensions of size and the perception of sounds. We discuss how vocabulary that discretely break up continua of size dimensions lend themselves to less-tangible sound continua like pitch, loudness, and tempo. “Thin” always entails a comparison with “thick” like “high” entails a comparison with “low”. An iconic relationship is set up between dimension and sound, which are domains that are both ontologically continuous but made phenomenologically discontinuous through their categorical representation in language

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Sylvia Tufvesson: Analogy making in the Semai sensory world

How are related sensory perceptions expressed linguistically? What drives similarity judgments between sensory experiences in, and across, sensory modalities? This paper examines analogy making in sensory perception in an Aslian speaking community on the Malay Peninsula. The language of focus is Semai (Austroasiatic, Mon-Khmer), in which the main class of words for sensory encoding, is that of ideophones. Semai ideophones convey speakers’ perceptual experiences in semantically detailed ways, with multiple perceptions encoded in one word. This ideophonic vocabulary displays a rich inventory of linguistic iconicity, where related meanings map on to related forms by means of sound symbolic templates. Through motivated form-meaning mappings, speakers make use of analogy to capture parallels across perceptual experiences. Such structural mapping is done both within and across sensory modalities. Focus is given to the sensory domains of color and smell, domains particularly rich in lexical distinctions and in sound symbolic templates to express fine-grained sensory differences. This high level of elaboration within color and smell lexical domains, correlates with speakers salient reference to colour and smell when characterizing and interacting with the environmental world. The last part of this talk will focus on the cross-modal usage of sensory terms. A large portion of the Semai sensory vocabulary can be used to refer to sensory perceptions in multiple modalities, capturing complex sensory events. An overview of the more common modality overlaps and speakers’ similarity judgments of cross-modal perceptions is discussed.

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Mark Dingemanse: Ideophones and the senses: The interplay of language, culture, and the perceptual world in a West-African society

In this talk I look at the language of perception through the prism of ideophones in Siwu, an underdescribed Kwa language spoken in Ghana’s mountainous Volta Region. Data from standardized elicitation tasks will be coupled with an analysis of speech during joint activities (e.g. making gunpowder, producing palm oil) to show that ideophones are a key expressive resource in talking about perception and sensation in Siwu.

In the first part of the talk I will discuss data elicited with the help of perceptual stimuli designed to study the comparative codability of different sensory experiences. Some domains (e.g. touch, taste) are almost exclusively covered by ideophonic vocabulary, while in others (e.g. colour, shape) ideophones are supplemented by other linguistic constructions.

The second part focuses on the ubiquity of ideophones across a wide variety of speech genres, which reflects a concern of Siwu speakers with their perceptions. A video recording of conversations during the making of gunpowder shows that the collaborators calibrate their understanding of processes and technologies not with cold technical terms, but with vivid sensory language. Ideophones evoking visual and tactile perceptions abound in this environment. A contrastive analysis of the use of ideophones in both natural discourse and elicitation tasks throws light on the interplay of language, culture and the perceptual world in Mawu society.

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Olivier le Guen: The Hidden Grammar of Yucatec Maya: Senses, Language and Perception

Despite that fact that all humans potentially have perceptual access to the world and have ways of linguistically expressing these perceptions, the question remains how sensory domains are carved in each language. What are the specific linguistic resources available such that some percepts are ineffable? This paper argues that the productive morphology of Yucatec Maya, a language spoken in Southern Mexico, provides speakers with linguistic resources to talk about specific sensory perceptions. In Yucatec Maya, the lexicon is divided into two classes: a noun class and a verbo-nominal root class. A large portion of verbo-nominal roots can be derived (using reduplication and special suffixes) according to a common template that encodes particular perceptual features of the world (e.g. tak’, ‘adhere(nce)’ becomes tak’-lemak ‘sticky’, chak-tak’-e’en, ‘dirty red’, etc.). Some derivations fit some roots more readily than others according to their semantics, nonetheless these derivations provide a default pattern for speakers to express particular perceptual modalities (namely sight and touch) and specific properties of percepts (mainly agency, completeness, texture, color and spatial distribution). These derivational processes raise questions about the core meaning of the verbo-nominal roots that seem to encode a skeletal concept (e.g. roundedness, piled-upedness), rather than concrete properties (a ball or bulge, a stack or to pile up). This linguistic system has consequences for language-culture interface. Contrary to previous claims, Yucatec Maya suggests that there is no causal relationship between the size of the color or texture lexicon and the specifics of the environment or the material culture.

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Penelope Brown: ‘It tastes cold-soft-soft’: Cross-modal compounding in Tzeltal perception terms

Although the human perceptual apparatus is biologically given and hence universal, languages differ in how they lexicalize aspects of sensory experience. Within a given language and culture, the distinct sensory modalities are often given differential treatment in ways reflecting culturally-specific ideas about, and uses for, the different senses. This paper reports on the Mayan language Tzeltal, as spoken in Tenejapa in southern Mexico. Drawing on data derived from the responses of 13 Tzeltal consultants to a standardized set of elicitation stimuli for different sensory modalities, and from talk about perceptions in naturally-occurring Tzeltal conversations, I provide an overview of the words and constructions used for describing perceptual qualities in six domains: color, shape, sound, touch, smell, and taste. I then focus on color and taste, two domains where, despite limited sets of basic terms, productive reduplication and compounding processes are used in analogous ways to more finely discriminate sensations. For example, although Tzeltal has only five basic color terms, a number of derived forms specific to color modulate the meanings of the basic terms (e.g., ‘grue’-el-el-tik, ‘white’-lik-an-tik, ‘black’-som-som). Similarly, in the domain of taste there are six basic terms and a more limited set of compounded forms for tastes (e.g., ‘sweet’-pik-pik-tik , ‘cold’-lo’-lo’-tik). In the domains of color and taste, these reduplicated endings are formed from roots with meanings based in other sensory domains; these are cross-modal modifiers. I suggest some ways in which these properties of the Tzeltal language of perception provide insights into Tenejapans’ construction of sensory experience.

The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago. Now I’ve found a full transcription of the other, buried in a somewhat obscure thesis titled The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. How that thesis came to be in my possession is a story of its own, involving an utterly unhelpful secretary at the University of Ghana’s Music Dept, a forged letter, and a surprise parcel from professor Kofi Agawu in my pigeon hole back home — but let me not waste any more time on that.

(Gesänge der Apafu-leute, Plehn 1898:119)

So what do we have? First Plehn’s transcription. Rendered as mekoko lofomadisu, it’s a bad case of garbled transmission at multiple levels. Word boundaries and the contrast between open and close vowels didn’t make it; even the verb is lost in translation, leaving us with a simple apposition of ‘Die Henne, die Küchlein’ (‘the hen, the chicks’). Plehn does have quite an interesting interpretation of the song:

“Wie die Henne die Küchlein beschützt, so beschützen die Apafu-Leute die umwohnenden Stämme. Es bezieht sich dies auf die Schmelz- und Schmiedekunst der Apafu-Leute, die sie in Stand setzt, die umliegenden Stämme mit eisernen Waffen und Werkzeugen zu versehen. Sie thun sich auf ihre Berühmtheit als Schmiede viel zu Gute.”

“Just as the hen shelters the chicks, the Akpafu people shelter the surrounding peoples. This refers to the iron smelting and forging craft of the Akpafu people, which puts them in the position of providing the surrounding tribes with weapons and tools. They are very proud of their renown as blacksmiths.”

From Plehn 1898 to Agudze 1991

Now fast forward a century. We’re still in Akpafu-Todzi, the mountain citadel of the Mawu people. Francis S. K. Agudze, the son of the then paramount chief (ìgara kpakpa) Oyete Akuamoah II, has access to the elaborate musical traditions connected to the worship of the deity Tokpaikɔ and decides to write on this topic for his diploma in Music at the University of Ghana. The thesis is essentially a description of Tokpaikɔ music, instruments, and texts. I think it is worthwile to quote Agudze’s motivation for his work:

Two categories of readers have been kept in mind in the writing of this thesis. Firstly, it is meant for citizens of Akpafu who should see it as a great relief to have a written document, on the religious music of their ancestors, which they can easily lay hands on for reference.

Secondly, it is meant to disabuse religious fanatics of prejudices against traditional religion. It is also hoped that this thesis will help the general reader by broadening his scope on matters concerning traditional religious music. An attempt has been made, through the exposure of Tokpaikor music, to show that African traditional religion is based on the worship of God.”

Agudze’s concern about prejudices against traditional religion links back to my previous discussion of the decline of funeral dirges in Kawu.

Apart from a wealth of very valuable ethnographic and ethnomusicological information, this thesis contains over 40 transcribed songs. And one of these happens to be the song of which Rudolph Plehn wrote down a fragment in the 1890s. How cool is that? Now we have not only the full version of the song (admittedly short though it is), but also its translation, a transcription of its melody, and background information on its ethnographic context: the worship of Tokpaikɔ. From the fact that it was the first song written down by Plehn, we may infer that it was relatively well known in the community at that time.

The song

Below is Agudze’s flagstaff transcription of the song, followed by a glossed translation.

(Agudze 1991:101)

Couplet 1

Ɔ̀-ɖe kɔkɔ́ nɛ ɔ-fu mà-bi iso

3SG-be hen TP 3SG-cover Cma:PL-child on

‘Like a hen covering the chicks’

Couplet 2

Ɔ̀-lɛbɛlɛbɛ ɔ-fu mà-bi iso

3SG-IDPH.be.hovering 3SG-cover Cma:PL-child on

‘Hovering, covering the chicks’

The first stanza consists of repetitions of this one line, which, as Plehn correctly noted, conveys the image of a hen providing shelter for its chicks. Plehn applies the image to the Mawu people themselves (it is not clear on whose authority), but according to Agudze it actually refers to the deity Tokpaikɔ.

The second stanza, not recorded by Plehn, changes the first half of the line into ɔ-lɛbɛlɛbɛ, which Agudze translates as ‘He [sic] hovers’. Now lɛbɛlɛbɛ, a reduplicated monovocalic disyllable, is clearly an ideophone. And this song is not alone in featuring ideophones — 9 out of 37 songs (or a good 25%) in this collection prominently feature one or more ideophones. Is it surprising to find ideophones in traditional worship songs? Perhaps no more than it is to find them in funeral dirges or greeting routines. (Check out my paper “Ideophones in unexpected places” to learn more about this.)

Refinding something that was never lost

On reflection, one may wonder what’s so special about finding a piece of text written down by a German colonial in the 1890’s back in an obscure thesis a century later. Of course, it’s gratifying for me as a linguist and lover of early sources to connect the pieces of the puzzle and thereby place this ‘lost’ fragment back in its proper context. But that’s not the only reason I’m happy with the finding.

Here is the other reason. Significantly, this fragment has always been embedded in the continuity of Tokpaikɔ worship, which Agudze happened to have better access to than Plehn a hundred years before. So the two pieces of written text that I have connected here are mere decontextualized artefacts of a living and breathing cultural heritage, kept alive and well by generations of Siwu speakers.

In a time of severe language loss all over the world, that is not a given — especially seeing Plehn’s prediction, in the 1890′s, that it was only a matter of time before these ‘little islets of tribal languages’ would disappear. Yet as I have learned, on the whole, the Mawu turn out to have strong and positive attitudes to their language and culture. The really cool thing, then, is not so much the refinding of this mangled fragment recorded by Plehn. It’s that in a very real sense, this fragment was never actually lost.

References

1. Agudze, Francis Symon Komla. 1991. The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. University of Ghana.  
2. Christaller, J. G. 1888. Die Volta-Sprachen-Gruppe, drei altbekannte und zwei Neubekannte Negersprachen vergleichend besprochen. Zeitschrift für Afrikanische Sprachen 1: 161-188.
3. Dorvlo, Kofi. 2008. A Grammar of Logba (Ikpana). PhD thesis, Leiden University.
4. Plehn, Rudolf. 1898. Beiträge zur Völkerkunde des Togo-Gebietes. Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 2, no. part III: 87-124.  
5. Seidel, August. 1899. Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Sprachen in Togo. Zeitschrift für Afrikanische und Ozeanische Sprachen 4: 201-286.  

The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts. As they write,

Specifically, we’re investigating posting the 2007 and 2008 AAA annual meeting paper abstracts, which would be posted exactly as they were submitted to AAA and would not be interactive, although they would be searchable. Posting these two years is a substantial project, because the combined total is nearly 7,000 specific abstracts.

Obviously, this would be an interesting resource. With a fulltext search you could track down previous research on your topic of interest, find potential collaborators, or just look up specific abstracts to refresh your memory of a talk. Besides, these abstracts are a record of the collective effort of AAA members; it is somewhat of a letdown that hitherto they have only been available in a bulky printed booklet obtainable at the meeting.

After a number of very helpful questions on how the resource should be designed, one page of the Survey is devoted to the question of how to finance and maintain it. The first option is to host paid advertisements and make it free for members. That option is out of course: with member-only access, advertising income would be next to nothing. Options 3-6 rely on users paying for the information, which I wouldn’t expect to be very successful either: the added value is too low for users to be willing to pay a fee or have their membership dues increased for it. So it seems we’re left with advertising + free access to all (option 2), or with not using the site (option 7).

How about Open Access?

Note however that one option is conspicuously absent from this list: (8) Stop worrying about the cost and make it open access. But that’s just because it is the most stupid option, isn’t it?

Well, that depends. First of all, let’s face the truth: in any of the advertising scenarios it is doubtful that there would be enough visitors to get ROI. The content of the resource simply isn’t fit for that business model. More importantly, what is missing in all of the scenarios is the benefit the AAA would be deriving from it. Developing this resource improves the AAA’s web presence and shows that the AAA cares about representing the collective efforts of its members. That is worth something.

I also think the cost shouldn’t be that much of a factor. Bandwidth and hosting fees for a resource like this would be negligible, as the whole thing boils down to an interface pulling short texts from a database. There would be no hassle with PDF files (and the attendant bandwidth use); it’s all just text. Copyright of the abstract fulltext is probably already with the AAA, so that’s again one problem less. Finally, in an open access model one doesn’t have to worry about costly integration with an authentication system.

Could we crowd source it?

But surely developing the resource, be it open access or not, would require a considerable investment? Again, that depends. If you go for a commercial solution, it might very well be. As a freelance graphic designer and web developer in another life, I know the kind of profits some companies like to make from unsuspecting academics with complex-sounding ideas. It’s always good to take a step back and see how things can be simplified. I’ve already made the point that this resource is not going to be much more than an interface that pulls texts out of a database. So how would one go about developing it?

Here’s a wild idea: crowd source it. The AAA has in excess of 10,000 members. It is unlikely there wouldn’t be some very qualified people among them willing to join hands to just get this going; and don’t forget the scores of skillfull research assistants and grad students. Developing a web resource like this is not going to be very complex. Building it using open source technologies would help to keep full control over content and format, and would avoid commercial licensing costs. The team of developers could be compensated for their efforts by a small remuneration or some kind of public recognition. The result could be easily integrated into the look and feel of aaanet.org, but it would be open access to increase the use and reach of the site.

Anyway, regardless of the question whether crowd sourcing it would be practical or not, there are huge advantages to a true open access approach. Let me just reiterate them. First, it improves the web presence of the AAA because useful content is made more widely available (and as we know, content is king). Second, it is a great way for the AAA to once more turn words into deeds and to show their commitment towards open access. Third, having these abstracts freely available online is a token of recognition and appreciation for the collective efforts that AAA members put into their meetings. Fourth, a closed model with fees or advertising wouldn’t work anyway; Open Access is probably the only way in which a resource like this could be viable. Fifth and finally, crowd sourcing it would show that the AAA is a community with a human face, whose members can pull off something together.

That’s my two cents. Call it a belated contribution to Open Access Anthropology Day. I’d be interested to hear your comments.

“See what I just did? Made another me.”
Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37.

There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd’s (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why ‘culture is essential’ (the chapter title) and noting the influence of Darwin’s population thinking on biology, there is the following remarkable aside:

[I]f through some miracle of cloning Darwin were to be resurrected from his grave in Westminster Abbey, we think that he would be quite happy with the state of the science he launched. (p. 5)

Note how that statement in one breath essentializes biology (Darwin = his genes alone) and totally ignores culture (Darwin’s clone = Darwin now as then).

It would be a great miracle indeed if the encultured product of a cloning operation on Darwin’s remains would view Darwinism as ‘the science he launched’ and be happy with it!

References

1. Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2005. Not by genes alone. How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are really beautiful — I’m honoured that one of my submissions is featured among them (and happy that Siwu ideophones are getting some press!).

Click on a photo in the slideshow below to show the author and the caption; or go directly to the slideshow on Flickr.

Edit: The semifinalists are now online, too: Flickr gallery.

Science has just published a comment by me on Oard’s “Unlocking the potention of the spoken word” (Oard 2008). It is a critique of the monomodal view of language adopted in that article. (If you haven’t read the original piece, check it out here, or see my brief summary.)

The Enduring Spoken Word
In his Perspective (“Unlocking the potential of the spoken word,” 26 September 2008, p. 1787), D. W. Oard describes how writing caused a landslide in humanity’s cultural landscape, in large part because it was a findable, permanent record. He suggests that today’s speech recognition and recording technologies may mean that the comeback of the spoken word is upon us. However, Oard’s argument suggests a radical turn where there is none, for the simple reason that speech has never left our side.

The invention of writing allowed information to be stored reliably in a medium other than human memory. Speech processing technology is just a variation on that theme. Oard highlights the potential of the spoken word for information retrieval purposes. In no sense does this bring us to “the threshold of a new era”; it merely dusts off the worn-out view of the spoken word as mere vehicle for transporting ideas (Reddy 1979).

The full potential of the spoken word has always been more complex than the words themselves; the speaker and listener jointly construct meaning guided by common ground, social relationships, gestures, body language, and facial expressions as much as by the auditory signal (Tedlock & Mannheim 1995; Clark 1996; Enfield & Levinson 2006; Tannen 2007).

Discourse over the past 50,000 years has encompassed a lot more than neat text ready to be data-mined. Unlocking its full potential requires a richer and more dynamic view of language than that espoused by Oard.

Mark Dingemanse
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The letter is a rigorously edited version of a commentary I posted here some time ago. I will tell you that the headline I suggested was ‘Dusting off the conduit metaphor‘ — but given the good-natured response by the original author I’m quite happy with the more positive title supplied by the editor.

Response

Doug Oard responds gracefully:

Rather than arguing that speech would overcome writing in another radical cultural shift, my intent was to suggest that speech would reemerge to stand side by side with writing as a conduit for transporting ideas with permanence and findability. As M. Dingemanse observes, speech can be so much more than a mere conduit, and I would agree that we are far from being able to build machines that can reasonably model the full richness of human expression, whether spoken or written. Many of our most widely used machines for processing language (such as search engines and translation systems) rely on fairly shallow representations of meaning, and predicting fundamental changes in that situation would seem to me highly speculative. Machines are merely tools, however—it is we, not our machines, who must ultimately make sense of what we see, hear, and read. But we should not underestimate the importance of having machines that can help us to find what we need. Dingemanse’s critique reminds us that change and continuity coexist, and that although permanence and findability can help us to use speech in new ways, many of the ways speech presently pervades our lives will surely also remain with us.

Douglas W. Oard
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland

I agree with Oard that the recent developments in speech recognition are quite interesting. Still, as Oard himself notes, most of today’s speech processing technologies still rely on ‘fairly shallow representations of meaning’. Things would get really exciting if we could harness the full potential of language — but that won’t happen as long as we keep thinking of it as a mere conduit (‘language as a series of tubes‘). I’m happy that my critique has served its purpose of pointing out the need for a more sophisticated conception of what language is and what it does.

Text quoted from Dingemanse & Oard 2009. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

References

1. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Dingemanse, Mark; and Douglas W. Oard. 2009. The Enduring Spoken Word. Science 323, no. 5917 (February 20): 1010b-1011. doi: 10.1126/science.323.5917.1010b.
3. Enfield, Nick J., and Stephen C. Levinson. 2006. Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and human interaction. Oxford: Berg.
4. Oard, Douglas W. 2008. Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word. Science 321, no. 5897 (September 26): 1787-1788. DOI: 10.1126/science.1157353
5. Reddy, M. J. 1979. The conduit methapor – a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony, 284-297. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd ed. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Women performing a funeral dirge in Akpafu-Mempeasem

Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are a special genre of songs to be sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

The funeral dirge below was recorded August 17, 2007 in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana (along with six other dirges). It was transcribed and translated with the gentle help of Reverend A.Y. Wurapa.

[See post to listen to audio]

The Siwu is beautifully economic in expression. It contains only two verbs: pia ‘be (with)’ and ɖe ‘be (existential)’. The sɔ that is translated as ‘said’ is actually a quotative complementizer. An English translation cannot do without marking tense, but in Siwu, the poem does not contain any tense or aspect markers, being set in an aorist-like default that can be interpreted as recent past or present.

Some of the poetic devices at work here are lost in translation. One is the focus construction which emphasizes the content words in the last four Siwu lines (‘mourning it is; tears it is; sadness it is; graves it is’). Another is the fact that these content words belong to four different grammatical genders in Siwu: the first is an noun in KA with locative connotation, the second a liquid/mass noun in MI, the third a singular noun in I, the fourth a plural noun in A. I’m not sure whether this pattern is as striking to native speakers as it is to me, but note that the gender is reinforced by the agreement morphology on the ‘be’-verb (ka-, mi-, i-, a-). One could think of it as a case of ‘subliminal verbal patterning in poetry’ (Jakobson 1980).

By fronting the content words and by presenting all four of them in the exact same frame, the dirge forces the reader to meditate on the inevitable consequences of being surrounded by mortality. We may think we’re lucky to have company, but in the end it turns out to be mourning, tears, sadness, graves. The enumeration of closely related tropes is a common technique in the funeral dirges of the Mawu.

A Dutch translation

It is difficult to approximate the beauty and subtlety of this piece of poetry in another language. Nevertheless I have tried my hand at composing a translation in Dutch, my native language, if only because I am intrigued by the subtle interplay of words and grammar in this poem. This translation, then, is a modest attempt to translate not just the words but the terse form-feel of the original. I realize it will be difficult for non-native speakers of both Siwu and Dutch to judge whether the attempt has been successful, but I do provide some explanatory words below.

The first line stays quite close to the Siwu (“I said (to myself), ‘people are with me’”). A less literal translation would have been Ik was blij dat ik mensen had ‘I was glad I had people’, but in the original the expression of contentness remains only implicit, so I felt making this more explicit was not necessary. The inflected verb form dacht ‘thought’ (past) in the first sentence also establishes the temporal setting.

Contributing to the terse style, the Dutch verb blijken ‘turn out (to be)’ nicely packages the Siwu sêgbe ‘not knowing’ together with the be-verb. Dutch verbs inflect not just for tense but also for number; hence the bleken/bleek alternation in the last four lines. To put this fact of grammar to poetic use, I have exchanged ‘crying’ for another word: afscheid. This makes it possible to couple the singular/plural alternation with two different rhyme patterns: Droefheid and afscheid are end rhymes, while tranen and graven are linked by assonant rhyme. The effect is an aesthetically pleasing ABAB structure in which the members of each pair agree in rhyme type and number. In the original, àsekpe ‘graves’ is the final word, but in the Dutch version it isn’t; it somehow doesn’t sound quite right to end with the plural graven; besides, afscheid (parting) is a very appropriate word to end the poem.

The future of dirges in Kawu

Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. Elsewhere I wrote that “culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself”, yet at the same time I can’t help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.

However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.

Next in this series: a discussion of parallelisms in Siwu funeral dirges.

References

1. Agawu, Kofi. 1988. Music in the funeral traditions of the Akpafu. Ethnomusicology 32, no. 1: 75-105.
2. Fox, James J. 1991. Our ancestors spoke in pairs. In Explorations in the ethnography of speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 65-85. 2nd ed. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Jakobson, Roman. 1980. Subliminal Verbal Pattering in Poetry. Poetics Today 2, no. 1a, Roman Jakobson: Language and Poetry (Autumn): 127-136.
4. Kruse, F. W. 1911. Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu. Der Anscharbote, October 29.

It’s that time again! The 60th edition of Anthroblogging’s very own blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is up at Middle Savagery. Check it out, there are lots of interesting posts.

The results of the AAA photo contest have just been announced. Congratulations to the winner, Peter Biella! Of my four submissions, one made it to the finals (best 20) and one to the semifinals (best 54). All 294 submissions will appear in the AAA Flickr gallery in due course; mine follow below.

My finalist was the following photo, titled “Kããã“:

Kyeei Yao, an age group leader, oversees a festival in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. The expensive draped cloth, the Ashanti-inspired wreath, the strings of beads which are handed down through the generations, and the digital wristwatch work together to remind us that culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself.
Kããã is a Siwu ideophone for ‘looking attentively’.

This picture was taken by my wife, Gijske de Boo, while I was busy videotaping the same events that Kyeei Yao is attending to. Together with the other 19 finalists it will be featured in the upcoming issue of Anthropology News; the finalists will also be hung as prints in the AAA office.

The photo that made the semifinals is called “The drum makers“:

Two artisans repair an atumpani drum in preparation for the funeral of a chief in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. A newly prepared antelope skin is fastened to the hard wood frame of the drum using a nylon cord and wooden pegs.

This picture was taken on the compound of Joseph (the man to the right), very close to my own home in Akpafu-Mempeasem. The earthen wall behind the men is Joe’s house, built of sun-hardened puddled mud like most houses in the village.

Bad Death

A submission which I thought was perhaps the most interesting even though it didn’t make it to the semifinals was “Bad Death ritual“:

A ‘bad death’ ritual in Ghana’s Volta Region. On the village cemetery, relatives of a man who died in a hunting accident listen anxiously to a woman who is possessed by the spirit of the deceased. The hunters, who have just brought the spirit home from the place of the accident deep in the jungle, keep their distance. Red is the colour of danger, black that of death.

This event took place right after a long and tiring march into the jungle and back, to pacify the spirit of a hunter killed in a tragic accident. I was able to take the picture from this perspective because I was dragged right in front of the possessed woman by Foster, one of my assistants, who had been my guide on the expedition. I also have an audio recording of her speech, which turned out to be a very interesting mix of prophesy and admonition. I’ll have to write more about that some time.

My final submission was the photo of Akpafu-Todzi which is also featured on this blog.

It’s a sunny day in Akpafu-Todzi, the old mountain citadel of the Mawu people in the central Volta Region of Ghana. The town, which has endured numerous sieges and which was the site of an ancient iron industry, is tranquil because this is the time for most people to engage in collaborative rice farming.