Dr Alex Pillen - David Parkin’s Anthropology of Language by RoyalAnthropologicalInst published on 2019-04-10T11:58:14Z Dr Alex Pillen, University College London David Parkin’s Anthropology of Language. Distinct theoretical innovation led David Parkin to carve a path for an anthropology of language in the UK. Each conceptual moment merits attention in its own right. His chapter in Bloch’s volume on political language in 1975, the notion of language as exchange in Kapferer’s ‘Transaction and Meaning’ a year later, as well as work on simultaneity in speech and the Curl lecture in 1979 on creative abuse constituted a first movement. This was followed by two paradigmatic statements, the book Semantic Anthropology in 1982 and his Political Language in the Annual Review of Anthropology of 1984. Later texts make a contribution to an anthropology of indirect semiosis: the power of incompleteness, which was published in Masquelier and Siran’s Pour une anthropologie de l’interlocution: rhetorique du quotidian (2000), and recent work on allusion that mediates between lexicon and language shadows (2015). The current development of the idea of Semiosis as Orchestration, continues a line of conceptual thought, already initiated in his early work. It is an intellectual engagement over decades, and form of revisiting both fieldsite and theory that led to unique scholarship. Not only to be briefly celebrated, but given a timeless place in our curriculum in linguistic anthropology.
