Alan Rumsey

Language, desire, and the ontogenesis of intersubjectivity

Abstract Benveniste argued that subjectivity is constituted through the linguistic category of person. Equally crucial, I argue, are the categories of mood and modality, especially the imperative. As with personal pronouns, the use of these categories presupposes commutability of perspectives between speaker and addressee. Drawing on language-acquisition research on four languages, I show that children master the imperative before the personal pronouns, and that the linguistic categories of person and modality are closely connected within a reversible figure-ground relationship, in which intersubjectivity is constituted through the interplay of desire and recognition.

Ethnographic Macro-Tropes and Anthropological Theory

Many accounts of the use of tropes in ethnography have not taken them seriously enough as potential sources of insight. Particularly important in this respect are ‘ethnographic macro-tropes’, which operate at the level of an entire ethnography to model its subject matter in particular ways. Thornton’s (1988) pioneering work on the ‘rhetoric of ethnographic holism’ focused on one such trope as if it were the only available one: the trope of ‘classification’, through which textual part–whole relations are used to build up an image of corresponding social ones. Through a close reading of four sample ethnographies I show that other, quite different macro-tropes have also been used, and that their use has contributed in an essential way to anthropological understanding, in at least some cases running ahead of related developments in theory rather than merely changing in response to them.

Bilingual language learning and the translation of worlds in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond

This article deals with two kinds of translation among Ku Waru people in the New Guinea Highlands: (1) translation between the local language and the national lingua franca within everyday interactions between young children and their caregivers; (2) intercultural translation between the story world of a local genre of sung tales and the contemporary lived world of Highland Papua New Guineaas practiced by skilled composer-performers of the genre. Although these two kinds of translation take place on very different planes, they both operate in terms of a well-developed set of procedures establishing equivalence, between words and worlds, respectively. On both planes a key role is played by parallelism, suggesting a connection between equivalence in the ordinary sense of the word and in the specific sense of it that was developed by Roman Jakobson—a connection which is significant for the understanding of translation in general.

Obituary: Thomas Mitchell Ernst (1943–2016)

We knew Tom Ernst over the last three decades of his life. Our fondest memories of him are of a medium-sized bear of a man with rounded shoulders, bushy moustache and wirebrush grey mop of hair, looming over our kitchen table in Sydney and talking at a steady clip about all the things that most interested him: baseball stories; Coen brothers films; the McCarthy era in the United States; his youth in Buffalo, New York; his graduate work at the University of Michigan; his time at the University of Adelaide; and his fieldwork with the Onabasulu of the Papuan Plateau, where he had done his PhD research. On most of those visits he would have just arrived from Bathurst, Wagga Wagga or Albury with his partner, anthropologist Kerry Zubrinich. They came regularly to the big smoke for conversation and get-togethers with academic friends, some of them former students and colleagues from the University of Adelaide. During some of that early period of our acquaintance, Tom was gracefully oblivious and (as needed) situationally attentive to the squawking of our then very young sons James and Jesse, in a period when Francesca believed she would never finish another sentence. Tom kindly assured her that she would. We would also make occasional trips to Bathurst, Albury or Wagga to visit Tom and Kerry. Tom would think of interesting expeditions for small fry. He drove us out to the Murray River, allegedly to catch yabbies. Although such expeditions were anticipated excitedly, strangely they never resulted in catching anything—the fun was all in the stories and expectations. Our family later moved to Canberra and, some years later, so did Tom and Kerry. Tom had a long and close association with Papua New Guinea. He first went there in 1969, from the University of Michigan, to do his doctoral research among the Onabasulu people in the Strickland-Bosavi region on the Papuan Plateau. In the early 1970s during the lead-up to independence, he taught in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Papua New Guinea. In 1974 he was hired by foundation professor Bruce Kapferer as the first lecturer in the newly created Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide, where he stayed until 1990. From then until his retirement in 2004, he taught in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Charles Sturt University. It was following his retirement that Tom and Kerry moved to