Linguistic anthropology expert and part of the ERC Arctic Domus project, Dr Siragusa will speak today 24 November 2016 at 3pm in Room F61, Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen University. All welcome.
Managing Spatio-Temporal Relations Whilst Experiencing Language: Past, Present, and Future in the Vepsian Domus
Dr Siragusa will disclose how people experience relations with other beings and the territory in which they live when engaging in specific ways of speaking to anticipate future events.
Dr Siragusa will show how certain behaviours of the animals and some situated events are tightly intertwined with language use and local ontologies which surpass the spatiality of those relations and add a temporal element to them.
Through this language-oriented lens, Dr Siragusa will also demonstrate how people’s actions (including, speaking) are often the direct result of a continuous mediation with the world they live in which also encompasses individual and/or collective life experiences and trajectories.
The concepts of agency and intentionality, as allowing an opening to future possibilities, enable us to comprehend in more depth how the mediation occurs and to question established narratives on domestication, and provide a new description for the domus in/with which people dwell.
This article is based on field work conducted among Veps, a Finno-Ugric minority, in north-western Russia between 2009 and 2015, and on archival material found at the (Audio-)Archives of the Academy of Sciences in Petrozavodsk (Russia) and at the Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura (Finnish Literature Society) in Helsinki (Finland).
This talk is open to all. Refreshments will be available.
Contact: Dr Laura Siragusa (Email: laura.siragusa@abdn.ac.uk)