A Rumsey
Biographic Data
| ID | 17372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Rumsey |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Rumsey |
| SIGNATURE | RUMSEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9710-4695 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 526 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Barbara F. Kelly and the study of children’s multimodal language socialization
Our contribution to the special issue in honour of Barb Kelly is a combination of personal reflections on her extraordinary life and work, discussion of her contributions to the study of gesture and other actions during young children’s early language learning, and exemplification of how that work is being built upon in a current research project in which Barb was to have been a Chief Investigator. The article draws on Eve’s experience as a membe…
The sound of one quotation mark
Part Two. The Ethics of Speaking
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Reported Speech and Represented Speech
All languages have indexical words and/or grammatical categories (e.g. “I,” “you,” “this,” “that,” the past tense marker ‐ ed ) for grounding speech in the situation where it is being used. All languages also have ways of representing another speech situation within the immediate one through the use of reported speech . Its most basic form, which is found in all languages, is direct discourse , in which the indexical grounding of the reported utt…
Language and Mind
Understandings of the relationship between “language” and “mind” depend on how we understand those terms. Linguistic‐anthropological understandings tend to stress their sociocultural dimensions. That emphasis has run in two different directions. The first approach was pioneered by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It focuses on differences among languages, and associates them with presumed differences in ways of thinking about the…
Ku Waru Clause Chaining and the Acquisition of Complex Syntax
How do children learn to understand and use complex syntactic constructions? In English, Diessel (2004) shows that they do so in two different ways. Complex sentences with dependent clauses (e.g., ‘Peter promised that he would come’) develop out of simple sentences that are gradually expanded into multi-clause ones. Complex sentences with coordinate clauses (e.g., ‘He tried hard, but he failed’) develop by integrating two independent sentences in…
Obituary
After growing up in New York City James (Jimmy) Weiner attended Franklin and Marshall College, in Lancaster Pennsylvania (the heart of Amish country), where he was awarded a BA degree, cum laude, i
Intersubjectivity and engagement in Ku Waru
Following Evans et al. (2018a, 2018b), I use “engagement” to refer to grammatical encoding of the relative accessibility of an entity or state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. I refer to what is thereby encoded as the “engagement function”. How neatly does that function map on to grammatical categories of particular languages? Here I address that question with respect to the Papuan language Ku Waru, focusing on spatial and epistemic demon…
The sociocultural dynamics of indigenous multilingualism in northwestern Australia
Tracks, Traces, and Links to Land in Aboriginal Australia, New Guinea, and Beyond
Obituary
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, lo...
Mana, Power and ‘Pawa’ in the Pacific and Beyond
In this chapter I address three interrelated topics pertaining to mana and how it might be understood in relation to ‘power’ as a socialanalytical construct, and to pawa as a vernacular term used by some Pacific peoples
Language, affect and the inculcation of social norms in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond
Culturalist accounts of emotion and morality have focused on how they are constructed and inculcated through particular, more or less culturally specific ways of talking about them. Both Bourdieu and recent affect theorists have opposed what they see as an overemphasis on language in such accounts. Here I argue that the dichotomy between the ‘verbal’ and the ‘non‐verbal’ that is common to both is misconceived. A more useful distinction is between…
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, an…
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.…
Anthropology, Linguistics, and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Anthropology, Linguistics, and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration Alan Rumsey (bio) Among all the human sciences, none is more interdisciplinary than anthropology. This has followed almost inevitably from the fact that anthropology has from the start always been concerned with the question of what it is to be human, and therefore with understanding the full range of dimensions along which human societies and cultures resemble or …
Introduction
Intersubjectivity, deception and the 'opacity of other minds
Introduction
Pigeon the outlaw
The substantive point of this article is to put into print some versions of the story of Jandamarra,2 also called Pigeon, a famous Aboriginal 'outlaw' of the Kimberley district of Western Australia (see Map), who in the 1890s worked as a police tracker, then turned against the police, releasing all their prisoners and fleeing to the Kimberley ranges. He and his followers evaded search patrols for over two years, during which time he led several r…
L'anthropologie a-t-elle besoin de sa propre pragmatique
Pour rendre compte de manière adéquate du rôle du langage dans la vie sociale, l'anthropologie a besoin d'une pragmatique qui permette de décrire de façon systématique et rigoureuse les espaces d'interaction parmi les locuteurs en présence, c'est-à-dire d'analyser les actions qui se déploient dans ces espaces et de montrer comment ces contextes d'interaction sont à leur tour reproduits et transformés. L'anthropologie linguistique a élaboré une te…
Introduction
IntroductionCultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey The essays in this Social Thought and Commentary section are exercises in a tried and true anthropological trick, albeit one that these days is perhaps not so often performed. The trick involves taking some very focused, one might even say "small," bits of ethnography and using them to unsettle major doctrines of social thought. Among famo…
Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea
Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea Alan Rumsey As will be evident from our introductory essay, the impetus for this Social Thought and Commentary section has come in part from our puzzlement at the co-occurrence within Melanesianist ethnography of two apparently contradictory motifs. One is the widely reported idea that one can never know what is in the minds of others, partly because what they say cannot be tak…
The Articulation of Indigenous and Exogenous Orders in Highland New Guinea and Beyond
One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of the interaction between indigenous and exogenous socio‐cultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation. Here I review three recent attempts to do so: (1) a model of structural transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins; (2) a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford; (3) a model of ‘adoption’ proposed by Joel R…
Introduction
IntroductionCultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey The essays in this Social Thought and Commentary section are exercises in a tried and true anthropological trick, albeit one that these days is perhaps not so often performed. The trick involves taking some very focused, one might even say "small," bits of ethnography and using them to unsettle major doctrines of social thought. Among famo…
Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology
Two seemingly disparate areas of English language structure-the grammar of reported speech and of textual cohesion-are functionally related in that both entail a distinction between "wording" and "meaning." This is consistent with the Western ideological disjunction between language and reality, talk and action. Neither these language structures nor this linguistic ideology are found among the Ngarinyin people of northwestern Australia, suggestin…
Agency, Personhood and the 'I' of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond
Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian 'heroic history' partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun 'I' in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins's consequent emphasis on 'encompassment' as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern's on 'partibility', the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men…
Kinship and Context among the Ngarinyin
Ku Waru
The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows through examination of them how larger social structures are reproduced and transformed. As part of t…
Tom Yaya Kange
Contra Parry (1930) and Lord (I960), and orality theorists inspired by their work, Tedlock (1983) has argued that metrical verse arises only under the influence of alphabetic or syllabic writing. Reviewing Parry and Lord's findings concerning Homeric and Yugoslav traditions, I compare them with my findings concerning torn yaya kange, a metrical genre from New Guinea that provides a strong counterexample to Tedlock's generalization. Comparing this…
Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea
Confession, Anger and Cross-Cultural Articulation in Papua New Guinea Alan Rumsey As will be evident from our introductory essay, the impetus for this Social Thought and Commentary section has come in part from our puzzlement at the co-occurrence within Melanesianist ethnography of two apparently contradictory motifs. One is the widely reported idea that one can never know what is in the minds of others, partly because what they say cannot be tak…
Language groups in Australian aboriginal land claims
Intersubjectivity, deception and the 'opacity of other minds
Language, desire, and the ontogenesis of intersubjectivity
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 'class…
The sociocultural dynamics of indigenous multilingualism in northwestern Australia
Introduction
A Social-Technological Model for the Evolution of Language [and Comments and Reply]
This paper develops a model for the evolution of language that is consistent with semanticist and pragmaticist interpretations of the forms and functions of language and the processes of language acquisition and language change. The proximate aspect of the model emphasizes the social contexts of language acquisition and language change; its adaptive aspect emphasizes the sociobiological concept of communication as social manipulation. Both aspect…
Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages
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.…
Pigeon the outlaw
The substantive point of this article is to put into print some versions of the story of Jandamarra,2 also called Pigeon, a famous Aboriginal 'outlaw' of the Kimberley district of Western Australia (see Map), who in the 1890s worked as a police tracker, then turned against the police, releasing all their prisoners and fleeing to the Kimberley ranges. He and his followers evaded search patrols for over two years, during which time he led several r…
L'anthropologie a-t-elle besoin de sa propre pragmatique
Pour rendre compte de manière adéquate du rôle du langage dans la vie sociale, l'anthropologie a besoin d'une pragmatique qui permette de décrire de façon systématique et rigoureuse les espaces d'interaction parmi les locuteurs en présence, c'est-à-dire d'analyser les actions qui se déploient dans ces espaces et de montrer comment ces contextes d'interaction sont à leur tour reproduits et transformés. L'anthropologie linguistique a élaboré une te…
Christianity, Culture Change, and the Anthropology of Ethics
Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 419 pp. This is a path-breaking book on several counts. One is that, notwithstanding the central importance of Christianity in the lives of many Papua New Guineans and the hundreds of English-language ethnographic monographs that have come out of field settings there, this is the first of them to take the c…
Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia
Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Joel C. Kuipers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, No. 18), 1998. xvi. 183 pp
On the transitivity of ‘say’ constructions in Bunuba 1
Drawing on Hopper and Thompson's model of transitivity, Munro argues that ‘say’ verbs are of intermediate transitivity. Evidence from Bunuba generally supports this claim, but Bunuba ‘say’ clauses themselves vary in transitivity: some have ergative‐marked subjects and some absolutive. The difference is correlated with the extent to which the reported locution is being represented as a discrete speech event. Also relevant is the presence or absenc…
The chimera of Proto-Indo-European ergativity
Reading and Remembering the Anthropologist James F. Weiner
à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés
Language, affect and the inculcation of social norms in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond
Culturalist accounts of emotion and morality have focused on how they are constructed and inculcated through particular, more or less culturally specific ways of talking about them. Both Bourdieu and recent affect theorists have opposed what they see as an overemphasis on language in such accounts. Here I argue that the dichotomy between the ‘verbal’ and the ‘non‐verbal’ that is common to both is misconceived. A more useful distinction is between…
Orality
Language Learner's Field Guide. Alan Healey
Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages
Kinship and Context among the Ngarinyin
Meaning and Use in Ngarinyin Kin Classification
A Social-Technological Model for the Evolution of Language [and Comments and Reply]
This paper develops a model for the evolution of language that is consistent with semanticist and pragmaticist interpretations of the forms and functions of language and the processes of language acquisition and language change. The proximate aspect of the model emphasizes the social contexts of language acquisition and language change; its adaptive aspect emphasizes the sociobiological concept of communication as social manipulation. Both aspect…
Social/Cultural Anthropology
The chimera of Proto-Indo-European ergativity
Language groups in Australian aboriginal land claims
Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology
Two seemingly disparate areas of English language structure-the grammar of reported speech and of textual cohesion-are functionally related in that both entail a distinction between "wording" and "meaning." This is consistent with the Western ideological disjunction between language and reality, talk and action. Neither these language structures nor this linguistic ideology are found among the Ngarinyin people of northwestern Australia, suggestin…
Ku Waru
The highlanders of New Guinea are renowned for their elaborate systems of ceremonial exchange. Although much has been written about them, previous accounts have concentrated far less on the conduct of exchange events than on the structure of exchange systems. This 1991 book deals centrally with the conduct of particular exchange events, and shows through examination of them how larger social structures are reproduced and transformed. As part of t…
Ku Waru; Language and Segmentary Politics in the Western Nebilyer Valley, Papua New Guinea
The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice
The myth/history and orality/literacy oppositions are interrelated ones, through which Aboriginal culture has been stereotyped as the simple inverse of European. The Dreaming has been seen as antithetical to historical consciousness, as it assimilates contingent events to a pre‐existing order which is objectified in natural features of the landscape. I argue that The Dreaming is one instance of a more general mode of orientation through which a g…
On the transitivity of ‘say’ constructions in Bunuba 1
Drawing on Hopper and Thompson's model of transitivity, Munro argues that ‘say’ verbs are of intermediate transitivity. Evidence from Bunuba generally supports this claim, but Bunuba ‘say’ clauses themselves vary in transitivity: some have ergative‐marked subjects and some absolutive. The difference is correlated with the extent to which the reported locution is being represented as a discrete speech event. Also relevant is the presence or absenc…
New Guinea ‘Classificatory Verbs’ and Australian Noun Classification
Comment on Mulvaney et al. 1997 My Dear Spencer and Review of it in Oceania by Diane Austin‐Broos
Orality
Tracks, Traces, and Links to Land in Aboriginal Australia, New Guinea, and Beyond
Emplaced Myth
Agency, Personhood and the 'I' of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond
Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian 'heroic history' partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun 'I' in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins's consequent emphasis on 'encompassment' as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern's on 'partibility', the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men…
Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia
Language, Identity, and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba. Joel C. Kuipers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, No. 18), 1998. xvi. 183 pp
Tom Yaya Kange
Contra Parry (1930) and Lord (I960), and orality theorists inspired by their work, Tedlock (1983) has argued that metrical verse arises only under the influence of alphabetic or syllabic writing. Reviewing Parry and Lord's findings concerning Homeric and Yugoslav traditions, I compare them with my findings concerning torn yaya kange, a metrical genre from New Guinea that provides a strong counterexample to Tedlock's generalization. Comparing this…
Language, desire, and the ontogenesis of intersubjectivity
Christianity, Culture Change, and the Anthropology of Ethics
Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 419 pp. This is a path-breaking book on several counts. One is that, notwithstanding the central importance of Christianity in the lives of many Papua New Guineans and the hundreds of English-language ethnographic monographs that have come out of field settings there, this is the first of them to take the c…
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 'class…
The Articulation of Indigenous and Exogenous Orders in Highland New Guinea and Beyond
One of the leading challenges for contemporary anthropology is to try to contribute to an understanding of the interaction between indigenous and exogenous socio‐cultural orders, especially at the frontiers of globalisation. Here I review three recent attempts to do so: (1) a model of structural transformation as developed by Marshall Sahlins; (2) a model of articulation as developed by James Clifford; (3) a model of ‘adoption’ proposed by Joel R…
Philosophy (34 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Linguistics (24 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · History (15 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (12 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (12 works)