A commentary on: Reappropriation of Gendered Irish Sign Language in One Family

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Dyson
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Social History ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Positive Sign ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Communication Design ◽  
Language Standardization ◽  
Graphic Communication

Barbara LeMaster’s article “Reappropriation of Gendered Irish Sign Language in One Family” in Visual Anthropology Review piqued my interest with its initial sentence:  The native vocabularies of one segment of the Dublin deaf community (i.e., primarily women over 70 and men over 55) contain different signs for the majority of common lexical items examined (LeMaster 1990).  From this I learned that there existed different female and male signs in Irish Sign Language. This intrigued me and led me to explore further, despite recognizing that I was probably out of my comfort zone. I would be addressing a topic of social history, through my lens of theoretical and empirical aspects of communication design. Curiously, I rejected a more comfortable choice of an article that uses an approach far more familiar to me: research analyzing the covers of introductory texts on cultural anthropology (Hammond et al., 2009). I am therefore acutely aware that the questions I ask about Irish Sign Language not only stem from another discipline, but also introduce different research methods. I also suspect that some of the issues I raise are covered elsewhere, either by LeMaster or by other researchers. This I regard as a positive sign of considerable overlap between our disciplines. In the following commentary on LeMaster’s article, I start with a brief account of what I consider to be main themes within the article. This is not a comprehensive summary, but sets the scene for discussion points. I then propose some general differences in approach and emphasis between the disciplines of visual anthropology, as represented in this article, and communication design. Although I have situated myself within a particular sector of communication design (in the introduction), I have nonetheless tried to cover a wider field encompassing design practitioners and historians. From more general topics, I narrow down to specific areas that might inform, or be informed by, graphic communication research: the process of language standardization and dictionary design. The final section on signs moves us some distance from LeMaster’s study. However, personally, one of the most exciting aspects of research is forging links between apparently disparate areas of research, which might require a leap in the dark.

scholarly journals Irish consequences of the Great War

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (156) ◽  
pp. 643-658 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Great War ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War ◽  
The Postponement

AbstractIt is now widely admitted that the Great War was also Ireland’s war, with profound consequences for every element of Irish life after 1914. Its impact may be discerned in aberrant aspects of Ireland’s demographic, economic and social history, as well as in the more familiar political and military convulsions of the war years. This article surveys recent scholarship, assesses statistical evidence of the war’s social and economic impact (both positive and negative), and explores its far-reaching political repercussions. These include the postponement of expected civil conflict, the unexpected occurrence of an unpopular rebellion in 1916, and public response to the consequent coercion. The speculative final section outlines a number of plausible outcomes for Irish history in the absence of war, concluding that no single counterfactual history of a warless Ireland is defensible.

The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Vernacular Architecture ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Initial Cluster ◽  
The Government ◽  
Theatrical Music ◽  
The Devil

This handbook presents a broad sampling of current historical scholarship on Shakespeare’s period that it is hoped will prove useful to scholars of his poems and plays. Rather than attempting to summarize the historical ‘background’ to Shakespeare, individual chapters explore numerous topics and methodologies at the forefront of current historical research. An initial cluster shows how political history has expanded beyond a traditional focus on relations between Crown and Parliament to encompass attention to attempts by the government to manage opinion; military challenges; problems in subduing Ireland and mediating relations between the British kingdoms; and the interplay between national affairs and local factions and concerns. Additional chapters deal with relationships between intellectual culture and political imagination, with detailed attention to varieties of early modern historical thought and the emergence of a ‘public sphere’. Other contributors examine facets of religious and social history, including scriptural translation, concepts of the devil, cultural attitudes concerning honour, shame and emotion, and life in London. A final section deals with vernacular architecture, Renaissance gardens, visual culture and theatrical music.

scholarly journals “Male” and “Female”: Gender in the Focus of Domestic Historical Research (Course Materials “Fundamentals of Cultural Anthropology”)

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
Maria V. Vasekha ◽  
Elena F. Fursova
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Course Materials ◽  
The Social ◽  
European Part Of Russia ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Purpose. The article presents a brief overview of the 30-year period of the development of Russian gender studies and reviews the state of gender studies in Siberia in the last decade. Results. The authors came to the conclusion that the gender approach in Russia was very successful in the field of historical disciplines, especially in historical feminology and women’s studies. The authors analyze the emergence of various areas within this issue, the key topics and approaches that have been developed in the Russian humanities. The main directions were reflected in the anniversary collection digest on gender history and anthropology “Gender in the focus of anthropology, family ethnography and the social history of everyday life” (2019). Conclusion. The authors describe the current position of Siberian gender studies and conclude that gender issues in Siberia are less active in comparison with the European part of Russia. In recent years, Siberian researchers have increasingly replaced the category of “gender” with neutral categories of “family research”, “female”, “male”, and so on. More often researchers choose “classical” historical problems raised in historical science before the “humanitarian renaissance”, which began in the 1990s in Russia. In modern gender studies in the Siberian region, the capabilities of critical feminist optics and gender methodology are rarely used, and queer-issues are not developed.

Introduction: The makers and the made

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Zender
Keyword(s):  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Communication Design ◽  
Advance Knowledge

Academic disciplines are a help and a hindrance. While they advance knowledge by focusing disciplinarians on a coherent set of related issues, those same boundaries that define and focus, also delimit and inhibit expansion of universal knowledge for the broad benefit of humanity. Such are Communication Design and Visual Anthropology.

German Club Life as a Local Cultural System

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Eidson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
Nazi Era

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF FIELD RELATIONSHIP CULTURAL AND VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE LOGIC OF THE CRISIS OF TEXT-CENTERED METHODS OF CULTURAL RESEARCH

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-59
Author(s):  
O. Y. Pavlova
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Video Production ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Empirical Material

The article is devoted to the study of the relevance of anthropological issues in the beginning of twentieth century and socio-cultural background of the anthropological sciences. The specificity of the subject and method of anthropology as a science in general focused on the systematization of empirical material which was studied. In this context, the logic of the formation of cultural / social anthropology and its instrumental interest to the video productions of technical media is studied. Anthropology tried to form a scientific understanding of human world as a holistic phenomenon (combining theoretical generalizations based on empirical data), while cultural anthropology focused on the study of cultural diversity. Visual anthropology emerged as a crossing of the fields of cultural anthropology as an academic discipline and the field of application of technical optical media, and thus a new source of empirical material. The gradual accumulation of empirical material in the "field researches" of anthropologists allowed to significantly expand the subject area and optics of anthropological science. And also it allowed visual anthropology to go gradually beyond the instrumental function that was originally intended for it. Meanwhile, the text-centered view of ethnographic material led to the transform of the culture of indigenous peoples into the codes of Western civilization, and hence to its reduction. Any of the various authentic non-Western cultures fundamentally distinguishes them from the unification style of the modern culture. The accumulation of video production by ethnography has allowed not only to preserve the disappearing authentic cultures, but also to develop methods of systematization of visual material, as well as to understand the role of visual anthropology as an autonomous discipline of the humanities. The integration of two aspects of visual anthropology (the production and study of images) casts doubt the classical style of positivist science: in particular, on the one hand the status of the subject as an observer or a spectator, on the one hand, and the monopoly of text optics, on the other.

scholarly journals Drawing the city: a proposal for an ethnographic study in Rio de Janeiro

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 609-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karina Kuschnir
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
International Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Drawing the city is a proposal for an ethnographic research project in Rio de Janeiro. I begin by mapping the production of an international group calling themselves ‘urban sketchers,' whose collective project extols drawing as a form of looking, knowing and registering the experience of living in cities. Next I show the connections between art and anthropology, as well as their relation to cities and to Rio de Janeiro in particular. The sources and bibliography on the themes of the social history of art, drawing, visual anthropology and urban anthropology are also discussed. Setting out from the latter area, I present the possibilities for undertaking an ethnography that contributes to our comprehension of the graphic and symbolic narratives of urban life.

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