Alessandro Duranti

 

Audio-Visual Resources

This page is designed to let students have hands-on experience in analyzing interactions. It contains sound clips, photographs, and video clips taken in different speech communities around the world. In combination with material distributed in the course (or, in some cases, available in another part of this web site), the contents of this page are designed to help make courses in linguistic anthropology an interactive experience, whereby students can practice what it means to identify some communicative phenomena and make them into objects of inquiry through the practice of inscription.

Greetings:

A series of video clips, some of them with transcripts and ethnographic notes, plus references and key concepts for the study of human greetings.

Introductions:

A series of video clips, some of them with transcripts and brief ethnographic notes, taken from a project on a political campaign. [under construction]

Verbal Art:

Some examples of verbal art performances in different languages and contexts.

Samoan Kava Ceremony:

A series of clips of a kava ceremony from a video tape of a meeting of the village council (fono) in the village of Falefâ, `Upolu,( Western) Samoa, August 1988.

Aboriginal Paintings:

An interview with Prof. Fred Myers (Dept. of Anthropology, New York University) on the culture and history of Australian Aboriginal paintings.

Children's Spaces in Samoa:

A series of color photographs taken in (Western) Samoa in 1981. They show children engaged in different activities across a variety of culturally organized spaces.

Jazz Musicians:

These are video clips taken from the course The Culture of Jazz Aesthetics (Anthropology M148a) or from jazz combo classes recorded by A. Duranti as part of a longitudinal study of the acquisition of jazz aesthetics.