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The Transformative Materiality of Meaning-Making
About this book
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.
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Table of contents
- Frontcover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- 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: Introduction and Parts 1–3 Commentaries