I have been thinking about the question of is language material and
realized that from an ethnographic perspective we would have to restate
the question? To answer this for a cultural group, we would need to
understand who is asking this question for what purpose. From a
cognitive anthropological frame, the issue would be to ascertain how
members of the group viewed language and whether, in their actions and
interactions, they recognized, acknowledged, and viewed as socially
significant the verbal, non-verbal and visual languages within their
group. If we ask the question in this manner, then we are grounding our
response to this question in the actions of members of a group. This
approach asks that we ground our argument in the evidence of the actions,
interactions and practices of members of a social group (e.g., a family,
a classroom, other institutional setting). Do we see indications that
the langauge of the group is a resource for members in particular ways,
for particular purposes, with particular persons, etc. Is posing the
question as a general state make the answer --it depends on the
theoretical frame and perspective of the analyst?
This approach is consonant with an communicative perspective that
is framed by a sociocultural as well as sociohistorical view. The issue
in part is--what is meant by language? In our paper, we will show how
the language of the classroom that occurred within an event became a
resource for students across events. Additionally, we will show excerpts
from their essays on their bilingual community that indicates that the
students saw language as a material resource and that they say
differences between mother tongue (English, Spanish) and the language of
the classroom. They saw each of these as differing in particular ways
and used for particular purposes.
On Sat, 3 Feb 1996, Steve Hardy-Braz wrote:
> Chris posted:
> Pete's father's adage, "cheap is cheap," IS corporeal, if corporeal is
> defined as "of the body." These spoken words are also material
> ("consisting of mass or matter") since we know (although we may not
> thoroughly apprehend or appreciate) that energy -- in this case sound waves
> -- does in fact have mass. The confusion arises because some material
> things (a voice, a song) seem "less material" than other material things (a
> book, an onion). What makes an onion seem more material than a song, I
> think, is that we are able to apprehend the onion with more senses than we
> can the song; we might even process the onion with all of our physical
> senses. Or, in other terms: the song seems to exist only in time; the
> onion in time and space. This is not to deny of the power of the song to
> move us to tears as readily as does the onion -- only that the onion seems
> "material" in an everyday sense in a way the song does not.
> ******************************************
> Chris,
> The group that I specialize in working with is the deaf. Speaking in
> a very broad general sense, sound waves are not (or are differently) perceived.
> Now with that in mind, a sound wave does not have mass that can be experienced
> and a song may only be percieved as a written artifact by this group. That
> artifact then is percieved not only in time but in space as well and thus just
> as "real" as your onion. Perhaps we need to state which form or from which
> perspective is a "material" thing viewed.
>
> Steve
>
> Steven T. Hardy-Braz PsyS NCSP
> School Psychologist
>