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Full-Text Articles in Anthropology
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 …
Starhawk Re/Claims A View Of The World, Denice J. Szafran
Starhawk Re/Claims A View Of The World, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
From the turmoil and turbulence of society in the United States in the mid-20th century arose many movements and groups labeled “counter-cultural.” One such group, Reclaiming Collective, allegedly began as a feminist and alternative religious venture, but through the influence and leadership of its founder, Starhawk, it has taken on the additional role of attempting to alter the society from which it sprang. Culture change is complex and has far-ranging effects. I examine the possible reasons for the birth of Reclaiming through: the theories of cultural materialism and Weberian theories on religion; apply theories of intentional community and invented tradition; …
Words Leave No Fossils: Positing The Spread Of Indo-European Languages Across Neolithic Europe, Denice J. Szafran
Words Leave No Fossils: Positing The Spread Of Indo-European Languages Across Neolithic Europe, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Various disciplines of anthropology generally accept that the Indo-European language spread throughout Europe some time after the Mesolithic era; how and when this happened is consistently debated, however. Archaeological and archaeogenetic theories on these details are wide and varied, including Gimbutas' kurgan invasions, Renfrew's peer polity, Renfrew and Bellwood's first farmers, Adams and Otte's climactic change, Robb's sociological and Cavalli-Sforza's genetic studies. Most of these give only cursory glances to linguistic theories of the methods of language diffusion and dispersal, or in the case of memetics, have attempted to combine the two divergent fields. An analysis of these theories leads …
Reclaiming The Concept Of Culture: A Review Of Recent Thoughts On Cultural Invention And Cultural Change, Denice J. Szafran
Reclaiming The Concept Of Culture: A Review Of Recent Thoughts On Cultural Invention And Cultural Change, Denice J. Szafran
Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.
Defining culture as the capacity for humans to symbolically classify, codify, and communicate their common experiences, Boas' "genius of a people" (Bunzl 2004), has yielded to popular understandings of culture as a bounded entity that exists discretely in the world. These latter notions are constructs arising from the imposition of Western cultural notions on examined societies. The concept of culture, once the exclusive tool of anthropological investigations and explanations, finds itself arrogated by "everybody everywhere," facing devaluation of its meaning and rendering it ineffective as an analytical tool, (Marcus 2008) yet reclaiming the more nebulous meanings of the term culture …