Morning reading, Kenneth Burke is always fascinating, and this collection of reviews, from Austin to Kermode to Warren, is rather entertaining
07.03.2026 17:12
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Morning reading, Kenneth Burke is always fascinating, and this collection of reviews, from Austin to Kermode to Warren, is rather entertaining
Also, for those who have never read the version from Bright's Sociolinguistics, there's a lovely comment by Myles Dillon of a story Mrs Yeats told him about Lady Gregory and whom one should invite for tea versus lunch versus dinner in Irish society
Among the many things one learns reading Paul Friedrich's analysis of the use of pronominals in Russian novels, is just how much subtlety is lost in translations into English
"The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is that language functions not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly as a way of defining experience for its speakers"--Harry Hoijer
Looking forward to seeing Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets here at UT Austin
Always nice to see the wonderful things my students are doing
Ice and pines
That time Rex Lee Jim read at the Poetry Center at UT Austin
youtube.com/watch?v=gLuh...
"Former Navajo Nation Vice President Rex Lee Jim, a naatβΓ‘anii, poet and hataaΕii who spoke eloquently in DinΓ© Bizaad, has died. He was 63."
navajotimes.com/reznews/form...
Dialogues: anthropology and literature
Siddratul Muntaha Jillani, Kiran Nazir Ahmed, Liliana Colanzi, Jessica Sequeira, Elisa Taber, Rex Lee Jim, Anthony K. Webster, Najet Adouani, and Andrew Brandel
Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute
rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
In 2000, Rex Lee Jim had the idea for me to do research on Navajo poetry. In 2006, I published this short paper on one of his poems. And for 26 years, he and I kept talking about poetry and other things. He was a poet's poet's poet. His poetry lives on.
www.jstor.org/stable/20739...
If anyone is interested in spending some time at UT Austin next year as a postdoctoral fellow, follow the link below:
Postdoctoral Fellow - Native American and Indigenous Studies
utaustin.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UTstaff/job/...
Evening reading, Sean O'Neill's Culture Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California, a book in conversation with Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Pliny Goddard, Mary Haas, William Bright, Victor Golla, Harry Hoijer & Benjamin Lee Whorf. His talk tomorrow at UT Austin
At the Blanton
"When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different than the way we are"--Italo Calvino
The clouds hinting that winter is not yet over
"So much of what passes for science in the social sciences, including anthropology, derives directly and recognizably from the commonsense notions, the everyday premises of the culture in which and by which the scientist lives"--David Schneider
In 1984, David Schneider published a pointed critique of kinship theory in anthropology (A Critique of the Study of Kinship), where he argued that much kinship theory was full of smuggled in ethnocentric assumptions
Among the pines
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
Anthropology News just published their latest issue, including a wonderful SLA column from Deina Rabie on Zohran Mamdaniβs subversion of White public space in his recent mayoral campaign.
www.anthropology-news.org/articles/how...
Virtual Issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Ambivalence, Bivalency, and Ambiguity
Guest curator:
Sarah Muir
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...
The right-wingification of UT continues as the school's leaders take βa giant leap backwards.β
Happy Anthropology Day! I was lucky as an undergrad to get encouragement from Richard Emerick, Sandy Ives, Jack Waddell, O. M. Watson, and Myrdene Anderson. And while anthropology seems out of favor at this particular moment, that's because anthropology is ever more relevant
To paraphrase Mr. Auden, anthropology doesn't make one more moral, and heaven forfend it doesn't make one more efficient, but it might make one less easy to deceive. And that, as Mr. Radin pointed out, is what makes the powers that be suspicious towards anthropology.
I was a graduate student at UT Austin when Rev. Jackson came to protest Hopwood, I remember going to the event, it was quite warm that day, it was a different time then, UT Austin wasn't militarized
www.kut.org/austin/2026-...
"By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls"--Eric Wolf
Cypress
"Those who write in a minority language...sooner or later come to the bitter conclusion that the possibility of communicating rests on slender threads like spider webs: change merely the sound and order and rhythm of the words and the communication fails"--Italo Calvino
"All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I should say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us, and the other half of books we intend to read"--Italo Calvino