Ethnohistory Home

This Year's Workshops

Previous Workshops

About the Program

Join Our Contact List

Border Signs: Instruments of Communication in Culture Contact

Prospectus

In 1995-1996, the Ethnohistory Workshop will focus on the processes of communication that mediate the contact between different cultures. We will explore cultural codes in action on the cultural borders: the sign systems through which different groups of people attempt to communicate as they come in contact with each other, in social as well as geographical spaces.

The 1994-95 Workshop focused on the image--both mental and material--and its relationships with the word in different cultural and historical contexts. In 1995-1996 we will work with other cultural codes as well. Topics will include: Differing media (such as image, speech, music, sound, or electronic versions of these) and their influence on intergroup contact relations; similarities and contrasts among colonial and contemporary processes of contact; and comparisons of sets of communicative practices as they are employed in, and affected by, contact situations. The communicative/representational instruments and technologies whose social influence we plan to investigate include written and unwritten verbal languages, pictographic writing, systems of visual representation, and codes for ritual performances including music and dance; processes of translation and mistranslation; attempts to legislate practice; and the spontaneous development of new discursive instruments and their social spaces--pidgins, creoles, slangs, and emergent styles in dress, performance, and the visual and plastic arts.

Some of the questions to explore are: How are new realities comprehended with pre-existing signs? Can we detect the influences of semiotically mediated consciousness in given historical cross-cultural understandings or misundertandings? What kinds of alterations do intercultural encounters produce in the modes of communication and representation themselves?

Too often, cultural encounters are conceptualized in terms of meetings of disparate content, whether of belief or behavior, without recognition that the meetings themselves are complex discursive/communicative events influenced by the natures and forms of the mediating instruments. We will examine ways in which the modes of communication themselves have shaped the intercultural encounter: that is, we will look at social practice as well as ideational content.

We wish to concentrate on culture in the sense of process. This is a particularly good way to look at culture in the contact zones where so little can be taken for granted by the participants, and the pace of change is accelerated. The power to signify is up for grabs; in colonial and post-colonial situations in particular, the success or failure of improvised modes of communication has life-or-death consequences. Yet the process of improvisation is not random, but is affected by the characteristic forms and practices of the previously distinct (or distinguishable) cultural modes.

Such systems of signs make 'arbitrary' divisions and combinations of experience and imagination. Different kinds of knowledge and different ways of pursuing knowledge are reflected or contained in the structural properties and component signs of different symbol systems--be they verbal, pictorial, musical, or gestural. While any symbol system is continually shaped by the social relations of its production, it equally constructs social relations through its particular organization of the knowable and the representable.

The intercultural encounter entails processes of translation. Different systems for communicating event and intention, representing sacred and profane knowledge, or performing symbolic acts in the world are rendered in terms of each other. The symbolic instruments themselves are given unequal values in the encounter's field of power relations.

Speakers, 1995-1996

Fall 1995

September 21, 1995: "Border Signs: Instruments of Communication in Culture Contact"
A Roundtable Discussion of the 1995-96 Ethnohistory Workshop theme with members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty

October 12, 1995: Steve Feld, Department of Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz
Paper Title: "pygmy POP (A Sketch Toward an Aural History)"

November 9, 1995: Arjun Appadurai, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Paper Title: "Making the National Geographic: Changing Images of Territory in Colonial India"

December 1, 1995: Tom Cummins, Department of Art, University of Chicago
Paper Title: "Imagined Relations: Colonial Artists, Subjects, and Anxieties"

Spring 1996

February 1, 1996: Peter van der Veer, Department of Religious Studies, University of Amsterdam
Paper Title: "The Moral State: Religion, Nation and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India"

February 15, 1996: Charles Briggs, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego
Paper Title: "Scientific Narratives and the Naturalization of Race and Class in the Latin American Cholera Epidemic"

March 28, 1996: Jackie Urla, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Paper Title: "Basque Hip-Hop? Language, Popular Music and Cultural Identity"

April 18, 1996: Judith Irvine, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University
Paper Title: "Sound Politics: Speaking, Writing, and Printing in Early Colonial Africa"