William Washabaugh

The deaf of Grand Cayman, British West Indies

Argument . In this essay I will argue, first, that there are at least two kinds of deaf communities besides diglossic deaf communities. I will call them isolated deaf communities and developing deaf communities. Second, I will show that a consideration of a developing deaf community, specifically the community on Grand Cayman Island, contributes a great deal to our understanding of the forces that swirl within diglossic deaf communities.

Linguistic Anti-Structure

The organization of face-to-face languages ranges from an extreme positive structuring to an extreme negative structuring. Positively structured language is a context-independent system of arbitrary, clearly defined units. Negatively structured language is a context-dependent system of multi-channeled, partially motivated, ambiguous unit. Negatively structured language must be said to be a primary and fundamental sort of organization insofar as it performs the task of constituting the social group which in turn constructs and employs positively structured language. Positively structured and negatively structured languages are not part of a static typology of language types. Rather they are dialectically related pressures existing within all language communities. Every resolution of the dialectic tension between these pressures is constrained by the social situation of a people. Specifically, a people who are secure in their social unity and social significance will develop a positively structured language. A people who are dominated and thereby made to doubt their social significance will forsake positively structured language in order to focus on their fundamental task of social and cultural self-definition through the use of negatively structured language.

Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain

Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain William Washabaugh Farnham: Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, 2012

The role of speech in the construction of reality

The discipline of semiotics and its discovery that the world is a perfusion of signs threatens essentialisms and universalisms. Essences, which, in the Platonic-Cartesian economy, are noumenal and ultimate explanans, become, in the Peircean economy, merely another level of phenomenal explananda. Explanations, in the semiotic economy, are never ultimate but always provisional, so that the process of explanation becomes as unlimited as semeiosis itself. The full impact of this semiotic doctrine has not yet been felt in the human science. Linguistics and anthropology, to consider just two facets of the human science, still run, for the most part, according to the essentialist economy. Anthropologists ascribe an ultimately explanatory value to the logic of human decision making, to universal mental structures, and to a psychic unity which is said to unite the human species. Linguists talk of the innate and universal capability to acquire a language, and they appeal to that capability to account for patterns of grammatical diversity. For both the anthropologist and the linguist, a diversity of behavior and knowledge is to be explained by a singularity of human essence, by an unconditioned, plenipotentiary, transcendent human Self. The present essay is directed at this heaviest investment of human science in the essentialist doctrine that Self is the ultimate unconditioned source of thought, meaning, and independently, of language/ speech. When reconsidered in the light of semiotics, Self turns out to be, not an unchangeable human essence, but a conditioned product of semeiosis (Peirce 5.383), and, as such, Self must be defined in terms of semiotic structures (Eco 1976:319). Speech turns out to be a major condition on the semiotic construction of Self. These theses will be discussed prospectively and retrospectively. Prospectively, I will describe some aspects of a theory of speech in the semiotic economy and consider the details of the thesis that speech is a condition on the construction of Self. Retrospectively,

Complexities in creole continua

Abstract Linguistic variation in Caribbean English post-Creole continua is not simply a product of decreolization, nor are all differences between post-Creole continua products of differential decreolization. There are at least two additional processes which create complexities in post-Creole continua. First, social pressure to avoid the creole (basilect) stimulates variation within a continuum which is unrelated to the acquisition of standard forms, but which still permits speakers to avoid the use of basilectal forms. The denasalization of the vowel in the past tense marker MEN is one such process. Second, different paths taken in creolization account for some differences between continua. An example of a widespread, but not universal, creolization process is the development of a mood marker from the infinitivizing complementizer. In some communities this development has not occurred at all; in others infinitivizer-mood marker appears in matrix clauses and even in embedded clauses.

The acquisition of communicative skills by the deaf of Providence Island

It is taken for granted these days that if a group of people with normally functioning brains find themselves without a language and without anyone to learn a language from, they will fall back on their innate resources to construct a language of their own. So it is said to happen in inchoate Creole communities (Bickerton 1981), and also among deaf people wherever and whenever they appear (Fischer 1978). In both cases, language acquisition, being a human biological destiny, proceeds in spite of extraordinary external circumstances. The process in these extremes is more a language creation than a language acquisition, but whatever it is called, the brain is assumed to be running the show. However, the evidence from Providence Island runs against the flow of this mainstream linguistic conjecture. Specifically, on Providence Island, cerebrally normal deaf persons live side by side and have every opportunity to develop a complete and mature sign language, but they do not. For more than two generations these deaf people have lived on Providence Island. And, at the moment, some twenty profoundly deaf people live scattered about the island. They are as young as five years, and as old as

Flamenco Postmoderno: Entre tradición y heterodoxia: Un diagnóstico sociomusicológico

Scholarly approaches to flamenco music have been caught up in a whirlwind of late. In contrast to past studies, which were narrowly attentive to the historical roots of this style of music and dance in Andalusian and Gypsy cultural traditions, recent scholarship, and especially Gerhard Steingress’s, pursues wide-ranging analyses informed by cultural theory and critical reflection. Steingress’s critical studies were launched in 1993 with Sociologia del Cante Flamenco, a work that questioned the then conventional view that flamenco song was a distinctive local musical style, long harbored by Gitanos (Gypsies) and made available to wider audiences only in the mid-nineteenth century. He used a combination of historical evidence and critical scholarship to support an alternative view, namely that flamenco arose in response to commercial interests among bohemians in urban centers of Andalucı́a around 1850. His Sobre Flamenco y Flamencologı́a (1998) advanced these heterodox claims against defenders of the conventional views, and his Cartas a Schuchardt (1996) showed that a similar and influential heterodoxy dates back to the first initiatives in flamenco scholarship in 1880. His Y Carmen se fué a Paris (2006) explored the influences of French theater on the flamenco dance style, and, now, in Flamenco Postmoderno (2007), he has assembled essays published between 1989 and 2006 to further his arguments in three new ways. First, Steingress contends that the bohemian urban roots of flamenco were fundamentally hybridized subversions of the regnant musical styles of the early nineteenth century, Second, he argues that developments during the century between 1880 and 1980 witnessed the rise of a powerful nationalist ideology that denied the hybridity of flamenco while affirming its singular Andalusian provenance. Third, he argues that since 1980 flamenco has recovered the hybridized quality of its pre-1880 origins, and has moved rapidly to transform its hybridity toward a cohesive and universal artistic style. In pursuing these arguments, Steingress shows that he is committed to moving beyond the politics of ethnic music, which, he says, backhandedly demeans the value

ON THE SOCIALITY OF CREOLE LANGUAGES

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights sociality of creole phenomena. Bickertons terminology reflects a certain commitment to a Saussurean paradigm in only that he is committed to some major principles of linguistic analysis which date to that seminal work. It would be correct enough to say that he is one of a school of linguists who are out to refine and clarify the contributions of Saussure and to rectify the inadequacies of Saussurean linguistics. Saussure argued that linguistic statics was a branch of the more general study of human symboling. The cerebralism that surfaces so regularly in Bickertons linguistics is not a quirk, a whim, or a fetish. In Bickertons view, internally motivated changes are directed by an innate blueprint, the same innate blueprint which guides creolization.

The Performance of the Material Word

The Material Word by David Silverman and Brian Torode. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. pp. xiv + 354.

Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.

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