Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
If You Cannot Whisper: The Performative Language Of Magical Spells, Denice J. Szafran
If You Cannot Whisper: The Performative Language Of Magical Spells, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Meaning is not primarily what a word has; it is something a word does. The basis of much Slavic folk wisdom is a belief in the inherent power of words: some utterances are taboo, others sacred. Still more words are the province of magic, a culturally contextual conceptual system within which spells, curses, and oaths are the primary vehicles utilized by a practitioner seeking to affect the world around him/her. An analysis of Austin’s and Levinson’s theories of the performative aspects of linguistic utterances can provide an explanation of how folkloric practitioners empowered their spells with conjoined magical words and …
Simply History: A Review Of Recent Thought On Ethnography, Reflexivity And Auto/Ethnography, Denice J. Szafran
Simply History: A Review Of Recent Thought On Ethnography, Reflexivity And Auto/Ethnography, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Since its inception as a discipline, anthropology utilized fieldwork with methodologies of participant-observation, surveys/interviews, and archival research, to record information on cultures. Traditionally the researcher disseminated this information in the form of a monograph, theoretically framed and laden with data, aimed almost exclusively at interested parties within academe. Informants spoke to researchers, who in turn "translated" what they heard into information on the varied and various traits of that culture, conflating methodology with presentation into the concept of ethnography. The debate about how best to represent ethnographic realism as a totality of cultural experience began in the discipline several decades …