Anthropologist and linguist Mark Turin will present “Collaborations in Language: from Documentation to Resurgence” Monday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in 201 Riley Hall at Linfield College.
Turin’s lecture will focus on several partnerships he has had over the last two decades. The partnerships have been with members of historically marginalized, indigenous communities in the Himalayan region, and increasingly with a committed global community of scholars in print, on air and online. Turin will draw on long-term fieldwork in Nepal and India with speakers of Thangmi, a community whose language has long been affected by the national record in the states where it is spoken. He will also reflect critically on the decade that he has spent directing two international, interdisciplinary collaborative research initiatives – the Digital Himalaya and World Oral Literature Projects. The presentation explores issues of orality, orthography and representation.
Turin is chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program at the University of British Columbia and acting co-director of the university’s New Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. He writes and teaches on ethnolinguistics, language endangerment, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology. He is the author or co-author of four books and three travel guides, the editor of eight volumes and the co-editor of the journal “Himalaya.” He also edits a series on oral literature.
The lecture is free, open to the public and sponsored by the Program for the Liberal Arts and Civic Engagement at Linfield. For more information, contact Hillary Crane, associate professor of anthropology, at 503-883-2286, hcrane@linfield.edu.
