Brigittine M French
Biographic Data
| ID | 81566 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brigittine M French |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brigittine M |
| FAMILY NAME | French |
| SIGNATURE | FRENCH B M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Grinnell College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology
Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist. It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthro…
Maledictive Language: Arguments and Conflict
Dangerous forms of language are understood by some social groups and/or institutions to be potentially harmful to specific individuals, communities, and polities; their strategic deployment is a form of charged and conflictual action. Speech act theory and ethnographic investigations of dangerous language show that language ideologies which identify these forms and the circulation of them in a variety of contexts are rich sites of inquiry. Maledi…
Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
In this timely and important book, Diane Nelson interrogates the politics of counting in postwar Guatemala. She frames the work by exposing the duplicitous nature of numbers to both humanize and objectify individual and communities’ losses, deaths, disappearances, murders, and threats to well-being in the context of colonialism, genocide, and everyday forms of violence that saturate life for Maya people in Guatemala. She draws on three decades of…
Vigilantism
This entry defines vigilantism, situates its study in a broader field of anthropological inquiry, and discusses how vigilantism is conceptually and politically linked to notions of state formation, law, and violence. It highlights the performative aspects of displaying violent justice on social bodies as an increasingly common practice in the context of globalization
The politics of Mayan linguistics in Guatemala: Native speakers, expert analysts, and the nation
In this essay I examine the emergence and transformation of linguistic analysis as an authoritative field of knowledge in the context of competing nationalists agendas in Guatemala. I show how various social actors including missionary linguists, North American secular linguists, and Maya linguists are implicated in the struggle for authority in "science of language." I argue that in these intellectual and political struggles, the awareness and p…
Anthropologies in and of Ireland: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Institutional Locations
Ethnography and "Postconflict" Violence in the Irish Free State
Here I offer a reengagement with Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball's (Arensberg 1968[1937]; Arensberg and Kimball 1940) canonical ethnographies of rural western Ireland along with a new consideration of data the ethnographers never analyzed in their publications. I argue that epistemological debates and commitments in U.S. anthropology fueled Arensberg and Kimball's structural-functionalist orientation because of the ways this theory became embl…
The Semiotics of Collective Memories
This review outlines the conceptual foundations of collective memory research from social scientific and semiotic perspectives. It locates collective memories in publicly circulating signs, merging a semiotic orientation with Nora's (1989) notion of memory sites. It elucidates how collective memories are made, remade, and contested through circulation enabled by semiotic processes of entextualization and erasure that produce cartographies of comm…
Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence' Revisited . Walter E. Little , Timothy J. Smith
Comment on Trinch’s risky subjects: The limits and possibilities of speaking truth to power
Technologies of Telling: Discourse, Transparency, and Erasure in Guatemalan Truth Commission Testimony
This paper offers a "critical epistemological reflection" on representations of survivor testimony in the Guatemalan truth commissions. As is commonly the case with TRC work, a good deal of effort was dedicated to the recuperation of victims' voices whose experiences of violence and suffering were brutally silenced in official Guatemalan state and public discourse. In this kind of "postconflict" context, the collection of survivor testimony is pr…
Linguistic science and nationalist revolution: Expert knowledge and the making of sameness in pre-independence Ireland
This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the "revolutionary scholar" and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative …
Guatemala: Essentialisms and Cultural Politics
Maya ethnolinguistic identity: Violence, and cultural rights in bilingual Kaqchikel communities
Partial Truths and Gendered Histories: Ruth Bunzel in American Anthropology
This essay pays tribute to Ruth L. Bunzel, a pioneering woman anthropologist, marginal academician, and prolific ethnographer. It argues for a new appreciation of the multiple links tying early anthropologists to the history of our discipline by exploring these links in relation both to methodological frameworks in the past and theoretical concerns at present. This essay makes the case that the past significance and present pertinence of Bunzel's…
BlowBack: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. Neil DeVotta
The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market
This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideologica…
The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market
This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideologica…
Technologies of Telling: Discourse, Transparency, and Erasure in Guatemalan Truth Commission Testimony
This paper offers a "critical epistemological reflection" on representations of survivor testimony in the Guatemalan truth commissions. As is commonly the case with TRC work, a good deal of effort was dedicated to the recuperation of victims' voices whose experiences of violence and suffering were brutally silenced in official Guatemalan state and public discourse. In this kind of "postconflict" context, the collection of survivor testimony is pr…
The politics of Mayan linguistics in Guatemala: Native speakers, expert analysts, and the nation
In this essay I examine the emergence and transformation of linguistic analysis as an authoritative field of knowledge in the context of competing nationalists agendas in Guatemala. I show how various social actors including missionary linguists, North American secular linguists, and Maya linguists are implicated in the struggle for authority in "science of language." I argue that in these intellectual and political struggles, the awareness and p…
Ethnography and "Postconflict" Violence in the Irish Free State
Here I offer a reengagement with Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball's (Arensberg 1968[1937]; Arensberg and Kimball 1940) canonical ethnographies of rural western Ireland along with a new consideration of data the ethnographers never analyzed in their publications. I argue that epistemological debates and commitments in U.S. anthropology fueled Arensberg and Kimball's structural-functionalist orientation because of the ways this theory became embl…
Linguistic science and nationalist revolution: Expert knowledge and the making of sameness in pre-independence Ireland
This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the "revolutionary scholar" and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative …
Anthropologies in and of Ireland: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Institutional Locations
Partial Truths and Gendered Histories: Ruth Bunzel in American Anthropology
This essay pays tribute to Ruth L. Bunzel, a pioneering woman anthropologist, marginal academician, and prolific ethnographer. It argues for a new appreciation of the multiple links tying early anthropologists to the history of our discipline by exploring these links in relation both to methodological frameworks in the past and theoretical concerns at present. This essay makes the case that the past significance and present pertinence of Bunzel's…
The Symbolic Capital of Social Identities: The Genre of Bargaining in an Urban Guatemalan Market
This article examines bartering speech in a Guatemalan market as a particular type of discourse, the genre of bargaining. It also investigates marketers' uses of that discourse as facilitating a process of negotiating their identities as social actors. The article examines, first, how the invocation of the genre of bargaining orders marketers' speech into a stable and coherent discourse; second, how the genre's connections with social, ideologica…
Partial Truths and Gendered Histories: Ruth Bunzel in American Anthropology
This essay pays tribute to Ruth L. Bunzel, a pioneering woman anthropologist, marginal academician, and prolific ethnographer. It argues for a new appreciation of the multiple links tying early anthropologists to the history of our discipline by exploring these links in relation both to methodological frameworks in the past and theoretical concerns at present. This essay makes the case that the past significance and present pertinence of Bunzel's…
BlowBack: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka. Neil DeVotta
Guatemala: Essentialisms and Cultural Politics
Maya ethnolinguistic identity: Violence, and cultural rights in bilingual Kaqchikel communities
Technologies of Telling: Discourse, Transparency, and Erasure in Guatemalan Truth Commission Testimony
This paper offers a "critical epistemological reflection" on representations of survivor testimony in the Guatemalan truth commissions. As is commonly the case with TRC work, a good deal of effort was dedicated to the recuperation of victims' voices whose experiences of violence and suffering were brutally silenced in official Guatemalan state and public discourse. In this kind of "postconflict" context, the collection of survivor testimony is pr…
Linguistic science and nationalist revolution: Expert knowledge and the making of sameness in pre-independence Ireland
This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the "revolutionary scholar" and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative …
Comment on Trinch’s risky subjects: The limits and possibilities of speaking truth to power
Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence' Revisited . Walter E. Little , Timothy J. Smith
The Semiotics of Collective Memories
This review outlines the conceptual foundations of collective memory research from social scientific and semiotic perspectives. It locates collective memories in publicly circulating signs, merging a semiotic orientation with Nora's (1989) notion of memory sites. It elucidates how collective memories are made, remade, and contested through circulation enabled by semiotic processes of entextualization and erasure that produce cartographies of comm…
Ethnography and "Postconflict" Violence in the Irish Free State
Here I offer a reengagement with Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball's (Arensberg 1968[1937]; Arensberg and Kimball 1940) canonical ethnographies of rural western Ireland along with a new consideration of data the ethnographers never analyzed in their publications. I argue that epistemological debates and commitments in U.S. anthropology fueled Arensberg and Kimball's structural-functionalist orientation because of the ways this theory became embl…
The politics of Mayan linguistics in Guatemala: Native speakers, expert analysts, and the nation
In this essay I examine the emergence and transformation of linguistic analysis as an authoritative field of knowledge in the context of competing nationalists agendas in Guatemala. I show how various social actors including missionary linguists, North American secular linguists, and Maya linguists are implicated in the struggle for authority in "science of language." I argue that in these intellectual and political struggles, the awareness and p…
Anthropologies in and of Ireland: Postcolonial Subjectivities and Institutional Locations
Vigilantism
This entry defines vigilantism, situates its study in a broader field of anthropological inquiry, and discusses how vigilantism is conceptually and politically linked to notions of state formation, law, and violence. It highlights the performative aspects of displaying violent justice on social bodies as an increasingly common practice in the context of globalization
Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
In this timely and important book, Diane Nelson interrogates the politics of counting in postwar Guatemala. She frames the work by exposing the duplicitous nature of numbers to both humanize and objectify individual and communities’ losses, deaths, disappearances, murders, and threats to well-being in the context of colonialism, genocide, and everyday forms of violence that saturate life for Maya people in Guatemala. She draws on three decades of…
Anthropological Lives: An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology
Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist. It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthro…
Maledictive Language: Arguments and Conflict
Dangerous forms of language are understood by some social groups and/or institutions to be potentially harmful to specific individuals, communities, and polities; their strategic deployment is a form of charged and conflictual action. Speech act theory and ethnographic investigations of dangerous language show that language ideologies which identify these forms and the circulation of them in a variety of contexts are rich sites of inquiry. Maledi…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · History (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (4 works)