On Thursday, February 24 at 7:30 pm Dr. Bruce Mannheim, professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, will present the 51st JAR Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology 163.  His talk Mother Tongue, Father Tongue, Place Tongue: 21st Century Language Transmission and Language Survival in the Andes and Amazonia will be followed by a specialized seminar in Hibben 105 at noon the following day, entitled Anthropology as a Consilient Science: Quechua and Ancestral Inka Cases.

[SUBJECT TO COVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH & UNM ORDERS; MASKS & UNM ID or VACCINATION PROOF REQUIRED]

Talk abstract:

While specialists in linguistic anthropology & cognitive development have long since discarded the idea that language is merely inherited from parent to child, drawing evidence from virtually all parts of the world, the imagery & ideology of parent-child transmission as the foremost or dominant mechanism persists among educators, international aid workers, agencies such as UNESCO, and even geneticists. The favored expression among educators & international aid workers, “mother tongue”, has been challenged by researchers in the Andes & western Amazonia, who have observed that in marriages among speakers of two indigenous languages, the children adopt the language of their fathers, so “father tongue.”  But that does not capture the generalization either. In the central Andes, though people speak to each other and to the places in which they live and work, in a place tongue, and under the right circumstances, the places speak back. So, to understand language transmission & persistence, we need to understand the ways in which people are connected to their communities & places through the languages of each place. There are some practical consequences.  The languages in question are threatened with extinction; the response of educators & international agencies has concentrated on maintaining the languages through western institutions & among individuals, in the best of circumstances engaging communities in ensuring the survival of their languages.  But the lesson of our transmission story for their communities in South America—and for their counterparts in the US Southwest-- is that language survival is so intimately bound up with everyday social practices and places that it is bound to the survival of these practices thus to cultural & social sovereignty.

Seminar abstract:

North American anthropology, since the early 20th century and as we currently practice it, is a compound discipline, defined by a partially overlapping set of problems that have reconfigured the relationships among its subfields continuously.  Research that crossed subfields most often followed a model of “inter-disciplinarity” in which researchers worked on separately conceived problems & compared results.  I advocate a different approach, consilience, in which a singularly conceived research question brings together evidence that nominally comes from different disciplines/sub-disciplines to study a single social phenomenon.  The disciplines themselves exist primarily to organize research methodologies & scholarly communities, but do not define distinct objects of study. I’ll discuss two examples: (1) understanding human face-to-face social interaction in general & (2) understanding the process of world-making among southern Quechuas, including their Inka ancestors.  Both examples are centered in anthropology, but spill over into other disciplines: linguistics, cognitive science, and colonial Latin American history.  I conclude with (admittedly utopian) implications for the future of anthropology.

 Free, open to the public, wheelchair-accessible.  Unless you have a UNM permit, park in a metered space to avoid a fine. The Journal of Anthropological Research has been published quarterly by the University of New Mexico since 1945. The event is co-sponsored by the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII).

[SUBJECT TO COVID-19 PUBLIC HEALTH & UNM ORDERS; MASKS & UNM ID or VACCINATION PROOF REQUIRED]