MALINOWSKI

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• MALINOWSKI
• Coral Gardens
• and
• Their Magic
• 15 gennaio 2008

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• Ethnography (???? ethnos people and ???fe??
  graphein writing) is the genre of writing that
  presents varying degrees of qualitative and
  quantitative descriptions of human social
  phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography
  presents the results of a holistic research
  method founded on the idea that a system's
  properties cannot necessarily be accurately
  understood independently of each other. The genre
  has both formal and historical connections to
  travel writing and colonial office reports.
  Several academic traditions, in particular the
  constructivist and relativist paradigms, employ
  ethnographic research as a crucial research
  method. Many cultural anthropologists consider
  ethnography the essence of the discipline

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• The linguistic problem before the ethnographer
  is to give as full a presentation of language as
  of any other aspect of culture. (p. vii)
• Who is the ethnographer?
• What is language to ethnography?
• What does M. mean by the pre-literate stage of
  language?

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• To study language out of its context is FUTILE.
• What is the function of language? (viii)
• Why does M. criticizes traditional approaches to
  language?
• Vs. Grammarians
• Vs. Phylologists
• He claims for an anthropological approach to
  language.

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• What is the role of the Anthropologist in
  studying language? (viii-ix)
• to give a full description of language as an
  aspect and ingredient of culture
• He compares the work of the anthropologist to
  that of the missionary.

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• He feels the need to present language woven into
  a continuous story ? intertextuality,
  interdiscursivity
• What are his sources?
• Other authors, scholars, researchers ? theory
  (x-xi)
• His linguistic experiences in the field (x-xi)
• The method of the ethnographer (p. 3)

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Language as Tool, Document and Cultural Reality

• language is the ethnographers most important
  tool (p. 4)
• What is vernacular?
• Try to apply Ms view to technical and scientific
  language.
• What does he mean by definition texts? (p. 4)
• What is their communicative function (Jakobson)?
• How are they constructed? (p. 5)

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• Language stands in a definite relation to the
  life of the people who speak it and to their
  mental habits and attitudes. From this point of
  view it provides us with the most important
  documents illustrating types of human behaviour
  other than linguistic. (p. 6)
• He identifies different types of texts within the
  Trobriand community magical formulae, sayings.
• They perform different functions
• they comment on activities
• they direct young to do things

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• Both lexical (antonyms) and grammatical
  (possessive pronouns) items perform a specific
  functional role ? it can be considered as botth a
  document and a tool
• Language is a means to assess mental processes ?
  there exists a relation between word and idea,
  verbal and mental
• BUT language does not simply reflect the mental
  reality of man. It is above all a cultural force
  that plays an important pragmatic part in human
  action. (p. 7)

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• Mans actions are carried out by means of a
  combination of speech and bodily activity (p. 8)
• work would be impossibile without speech.
  Speech again is meaningless without the context
  of the activity in which it is enveloped
• He introduces the relation between language and
  context of action and situation (p. 8)
• Question what is the role fo this in
  text-writing and translation as far as technical
  texts are concerned?

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• FUNDAMENTAL Ms methodology applies not only to
  the Trobriand language but also to the human
  speech as a whole. (p. 8)
• Words are part of action and they are
  equivalents to actions. (p. 9)
• Thus, Ms methodology aims to
• Correlate the study of language with that of
  other activities
• Interpret the meaning of each utterance within
  its actual context
• Define meaning in terms of experience and
  situation.

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• All types of language contain the pragmatic
  dimension. He mentions the example of magic
  formulae.
• What does he mean by magic? The sacredness of
  words.
• Language is a type of human behaviour and a
  purely conventional element (p. 10) ? words are
  used to represent conventional actions too.

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• On translation
• He opposes word-for-word translation to free
  translation (p. 10-11).
• Why is literal translation not sufficient?
• The sentence is at times a self-contained
  linguistic unit, but not even a sentence can be
  regarded as a full linguistic datum. To us, the
  real linguistic fact is the full utterance within
  its context of situation (p. 11)

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• On literal translation
• It fails because of untranslatability of words
  from one culture to another.
• There is no equivalence, no one-to-one
  correspondence between words of two different
  cultures.
• When we translate we re-create the original into
  something completely new. We do not translate
  word-for-word but we translate whole contexts
  (pp. 11-12)

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• Why are certain words untranslatable?
• Because they fit into their culture and into that
  only.
• Neither are common words easy to translate think
  of Jakobsons example of cheese.
• Different translations involve different
  contexts. Texts vary according to the context in
  which they are used.
• There are also translation difficulties with
  numbers, body parts, adverbs and conjunctions.

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• Translation is not the mere rendering of words
  and/or expressions from one language into
  another.
• The translator has to account for different
  cultural issues and systems of values

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• A. Whats your name, boy?
• B. Dr. Poussaint. Im a physician.
• A. Whats your first name, boy?
• B. Alvin.