Art in Society

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Art in Society
Venus of Willendorf
Aboriginal Art Van Goghs
Cypresses
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What is Art?

• Art is very difficult to define, but it generally
  refers to the manifestations of human creativity
  through which people express themselves in dance,
  music, song, painting, sculpture, pottery, cloth,
  story telling, verse, prose, drama, and comedy.
• At least 28,000 years old

This photo, taken in Berlin, Germany, illustrates
art within art. In the background, the
experimental artist Christo has wrapped the
Reichstag. Another man has wrapped himself and
is now posing in front.
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Body Decoration and Adornment

• Perhaps one of the oldest forms of art
• Ranges from permanent (tatoos, piercings, scars,
  change in skeleton) to temporary (paint, objects,
  clothing)
• Aesthetic and social - can represent rank, sex,
  occupation, identity, religion
• Drawing attention
• Females - makeup, earrings, necklace, belt,
  clothing
• Males - beards, tatoos, clothing
• Change in status (usually puberty)

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Variation in Art

• Visual Art
• mirroring environment
• differential use of natural materials
• relationship between art and culture
• repetition, space, symmetry, enclosure
• Music
• song style varies with cultural complexity
• importance of a regular rhythm
• Folklore
• urban legends (www.urbanlegends.com or
  www.snopes.com)
• North Carolina ghost stories

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Art in Other Cultures

• Civilized and Primitive Art
• timelessness
• ethnocentrism
• communal works
• tourist art
• Culture Contact
• with Europeans (Australia)
• with other groups (Native Americans)
• scholars

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Art and Religion

• Definitions of both art and religion focus on the
  more than ordinary aspects of each with regard to
  how they are different from the ordinary and
  profane/secular.
• A lot of Western and non-Western art has been
  created in association with religion, but it is
  important to remember that not all non-Western
  art has ritual or religious importance.
• Art and religion both have formal (museums and
  churches, temples) and informal (parks, homes,
  and regular gathering places) venues of
  expression.
• State-level societies have permanent structures
  for religion and art.
• Nonstate-level societies lack permanent
  structures for religion and art.

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Language and Communication
Proto-Indo-European Linguistic Family Tree
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Introduction

• Language is our primary means of communication.
• Language is transmitted through learning, as part
  of enculturation.
• Language is based on arbitrary, learned
  associations between words and the things they
  represent.
• Only humans have the linguistic capacity to
  discuss the past and future in addition to the
  present.
• Language serves to convey all the complex,
  elaborate behavior that constitutes our culture.
• Anthropologists study language in its social and
  cultural context.

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Communication

• We communicate by agreeing to call an object,
  movement, or abstract concept by a common name in
  our spoken language.
• Other forms of communication
• Direct facial expression, body stance, gesture,
  tone of voice
• Indirect writing, algebra, music, painting,
  signs
• Non-linguistic communication

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Nonhuman Communication

• Systems of communication are not unique to
  humans.
• Animals communicate through sounds, odors, or
  body movements.
• Some animal communication systems are symbolic,
  which means that even when the referent is not
  present, the communication has meaning.
• Example Vervet monkeys in Africa
• Closed versus open communication systems

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Call Systems

• Call systems consist of a limited number of
  sounds that are produced in response to specific
  stimuli (e.g. food or danger)
• Calls cannot be combined to produce new calls.
• Calls are reflexive in that they are automatic
  responses to specific stimuli.
• Although primates use call systems, their vocal
  tract is not suitable for speech.

Apes, such as these Congo chimpanzees, use call
systems to communicate in the wild
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Call Systems
Contrasts between human language and a primate
call system
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Sign Language

• A few nonhuman primates have been able to learn
  to use American Sign Language (ASL).
• Washoe, a chimpanzee, eventually acquired a
  vocabulary of over 100 ASL signs.
• Koko, a gorilla, regularly uses 400 ASL signs and
  has used 700 at least once.
• Sherman and Austin--both chimps--were trained on
  computer keyboards. Sherman and Austin began
  communicating with each other via computers.
• Kanzi, another chimp, has come closest to having
  a primitive English grammar.

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Sign Language

• These nonhuman primates have displayed some
  human-like capacities with ASL.
• Joking and lying
• Cultural transmission they have tried to teach
  ASL to other animals
• Productivity they have combined two or more
  signs to create a new expressions
• Displacement the ability to talk about things
  that are not present

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The Origin of Language

• The human capacity for language developed over
  hundreds of thousands of years, as call systems
  were transformed into language.
• Language is a uniquely effective vehicle for
  learning that enables humans to adapt more
  rapidly to new stimuli than other primates.
• First real language usage probably began 100,000
  years ago with early Homo sapiens, or as late as
  40,000 years ago.
• Language center in the human brain increased.

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The Origin of Language

• By studying creoles and childrens acquisition of
  language, we can try to reconstruct how humans
  first learned language.
• Creoles
• pidgin - simplified version of a language,
  generally lacking prepositions and auxiliary
  verbs
• creole - incorporates vocabulary from two
  languages but has a grammar that differs from the
  new and native languages
• Childrens Acquisition of Language
• a child can learn any language, any grammar
• children around the world learn to speak at the
  same general age
• childrens speech patterns are the same in
  different languages
• errors children make are consistent with creoles

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Descriptive or Structural Linguistics

• In human language, meaningful sounds and
  sequences are combined without conscious
  knowledge of the rules of a language.
• Language rules are those that refer to patterns
  of speaking that are discoverable in actual
  speech.
• Grammar includes the unconscious principles that
  predict how most people talk.
• Descriptive (or structural) linguistics tries to
  discover the rules of phonology--the patterning
  of sounds morphology--the patterning of sound
  sequences to form meaningful units and
  syntax--the patterning of phrases and sentences
  that predict how most speakers of a language talk.

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Phonology

• There is a huge number of phones (different
  sounds) that the human vocal tract can make each
  language uses only some of these.
• Hard to learn a foreign language and the sounds.
• Phones might take different positions (e.g. ng
  sound)
• Alphabet can represent phones differently
• Example Ghoti Fish (tough, women, position)
• English has 26 letters but 40 distinct sounds
• Phoneme sound or set of sounds that makes a
  difference in meaning in the language
• ways of pronouncing sounds a (ay, ah), the
  (thee, thu)

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Morphology

• Morpheme is the smallest unit of language that
  has meaning could be one word, could be a
  prefix, could be a signifying syllable.
• Examples dog (word), indefinite (prefix),
  boldly (adverb sig)
• A lexicon consists of words and morphs and their
  meanings a dictionary approximates the lexicon
  of a language.
• Meanings can depend on order (English, French, or
  Spanish) or changing morphemes (usually called a
  declension, as in Latin, Russian, or Greek).
• Some languages have gendered words (Romance
  languages, German, Greek, Old English, etc.).

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Syntax

• The rules of syntax may be partly learned in
  school, but most children know many of them as
  soon as they learn the language.
• Example Lewis Carrolls Through the Looking
  Glass
• Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
• Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
• All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome
  raths outgrabe.
• Which words are adjectives? Verbs? Singular
  noun? Plural noun?

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Historical Linguistics

• Historical linguistics focuses on how language
  changes over time.
• Compare the following works from Old, Middle, and
  Modern English
• Beowulf (Old English)

Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of
spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,we have
heard, and what honor the athelings won!Oft
Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes, from many
a tribe, the mead-bench tore,awing the earls.
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym
gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft
Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum,
meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas.
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Historical Linguistics

• The Canterbury Tales (Middle English)
• This worthy lymytour, this noble Frere,
• He made alwey a maner louryng chiere
• Upon the Somonour, but for honestee
• No vileyns word as yet to hym spak he.
• This worthy limiter, this noble friar, He turned
  always a lowering face, and dire, Upon the
  summoner, but for courtesy No rude and insolent
  word as yet spoke he.

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Historical Linguistics

• Hamlet (Early Modern English)
• For who would bear the whips and scorns of
  time,The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
  contumely1,The pangs of despised love, the law's
  delay,The insolence of office and the
  spurnsThat patient merit of the unworthy
  takes,When he himself might his quietus2
  makeWith a bare bodkin3? Who would fardels4
  bear,To grunt and sweat under a weary life,But
  that the dread of something after death,The
  undiscover'd country from whose bourn5No
  traveller returns, puzzles the willAnd makes us
  rather bear those ills we haveThan fly to others
  that we know not of?

1 Haughtiness and contempt 2 Death 3 Dagger 4
Burden 5 Destination
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Historical Linguistics

• Historical linguistics also studies the long-term
  variation of speech by studying protolanguages
  and daughter languages.
• Anthropologists are interested in historical
  linguistics because cultural features sometimes
  correlate with the distribution of language
  families.
• Linguists can reconstruct changes that have
  occurred by comparing contemporary languages that
  are similar these usually derive from a common,
  ancestral language.
• Proto-Indo-European
• Sino-Tibetan
• Borrowing

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Proto-Indo-European

• 50 of the worlds populations speak an
  Indo-European language
• Many rules uncovered by Jones and Grimm
• In Germanic, d of Romance switched to t, as in
  duo to two
• The p of Romance switched to f, as in pater to
  father.
• Cognates - words that are similar in sound and
  meaning

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Sino-Tibetan

• Another major language family, spoken by more
  than a billion people, is Sino-Tibetan.

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Linguistic Divergence

• Gradual change
• Natural boundaries
• Social boundaries
• Borrowing
• Change by force
• Military means

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Language and Culture

• Explaining the diversity of language can help
  explain the interaction between language and
  other parts of culture.
• Culture influencing language
• Berlin and Kays color word study
• simple societies will have few color words
  (white/black)
• complex societies will have numerous color
  words (red, green, blue, yellow . . . To colors
  found in a J. Crew catalogue)
• All languages have a core vocab of about the same
  size.
• Language influencing culture
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggested that language is
  a force in its own right and it affects how
  individuals in a society perceive and conceive of
  reality.

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Ethnography of Speaking

• Sociolinguistics is concerned with the
  ethnography of speaking--with cultural and
  subcultural patterns of speech variation in
  different social contexts.
• Examples
• A non-native speaker might know all the rules of
  English but is unsure what to say in social
  situations--is it more proper to talk about the
  weather, or about personal finances?
• Social status and speech
• Higher class tends to have more homogeneous
  speech
• Honorifics (in German and in English)
• Gender differences - will talk about on 7/17
• Multilingualism and Codeswitching
• Interethnic communication - will talk about on
  7/17