This book explores verbal and non-verbal communication from a social anthropological viewpoint, drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in East Africa. It gives an overview of developments since the 1960s in the anthropology of language use and how these have influenced the author’s thinking. The volume makes the argument that language and other forms of communication involve semiotic transactions between interlocuters; that such communicative exchanges do more than convey information; and that they give identity to the recipients of such transactions who reciprocate by defining speakers. The density and situational totality of such semiotic exchange can moreover be regarded as a kind of materiality, both in terms of their impact on social interaction and in how interlocuters interact bodily as well as verbally among themselves.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: Communication as Transaction and Becoming
1. From Multilingual Classification to Translingual Ontology: A Turning Point
2. Emergent and Stabilised Multilingualism: Polyethnic Peer Groups in Urban Kenya
3. Language Choice in Two Kampala Housing Estates
4. Language Switching in Nairobi
5. The Creativity of Abuse
6. Exchanging Words
Part 2: Political and Formulaic Communication
7. Political Language
8. Language, Government and the Play on Purity and Impurity: Arabic, Swahili and the Vernaculars in Kenya
9. Being and Selfhood among Intermediary Swahili
10. Controlling the U-turn of Knowledge
11. The Politics of Naming Among the Giriama
Part 3: The Materiality of Language and Communication
12. Unpacking Anthropology
13. Revisiting: Keywords, Transforming Phrases, and Cultural Concepts
14. Loud Ethics and Quiet Morality among Muslim Healers in Eastern Africa
15. Reason, Emotion, and the Embodiment of Power
16. The Power of Incompleteness: Innuendo in Swahili Women’s Dress
17. Simultaneity and Sequencing in the Oracular Speech of Kenyan Diviners
References
Index
About the author
David Parkin is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK, where he was a Professor of social anthropology. His research focuses on the coordination of multimodal communication.
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