The Brilliant, Transcendent Clarity of Chauncey DeVega Applying Cone, Baudrillard, Adorno, Gordon and Postman in his Nuanced Argument about the “Kanye West.”

[The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. … The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.

I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago where the late James Cone, an intellectual titan and the father of black liberation theology, observed that some of the most difficult students to teach on questions of the color line were those who happened not to be white. Why? Because black and brown students often believe that because they were born into a certain body at a certain point in time, they have special knowledge and wisdom that makes it unnecessary for them to engage in serious study of the color line….

We see this in an America which in many ways has lost the ability to determine what is “true” and what is “fake,” and where lies are now labeled as mere “untruths” or “disagreements.” As with Trump, Kanye West is the human distillation of America’s social pathologies of greed, narcissism and a celebrity-driven culture of distraction and emptiness. Hyperreality is the state of being where these social pathologies exist, and through which they are mediated.

Ultimately, Kanye West is just one more character caught up in the orbit of the human black hole Donald Trump, in a malignant reality where the absurd is now the quotidian….]

Full article here: I love Kanye West | Chancey DeVega for SALON

 

Realities Most of Us Do not Face | Internet Access and Digital Communication on Indian Reservations

This is especially true in the Great Plains and the Southwest

The Navajo phrase for cell phone is “bil n’joobal’,” or “something you use while spinning around in circles.” The phrase is based on the description of someone spinning around with a phone, trying to get good reception.

Navajo also use the phrase “hooghan bik bil dahjilwo” to describe a cell phone, or “something you use when you run up the hill.”

[This year, the Federal Communications Commission reported that 41 percent of Americans living on tribal lands lacked access to broadband; that number leaps to 68 percent for those in rural areas of tribal lands.

In 2015, the Obama Administration instituted the ConnectHome effort, a project to bring high-speed Internet to a list of rural areas including the Choctaw Nation. Since the dawn of these efforts, the number of connected American Indians has nearly tripled.]

Relative progress isn’t enough, however, and transformative change is far from swift. Terrain, accessibility, population density and poverty are some of the reasons.

Read the full story | ARSTECHNICA

Also:

Native Americans Get Cheaper Mobile Phones

 

 

The Significance of Traditional Oral Communication | And this Can Partially Explain not Why it Happened, but How

I cannot attest to whether this rhetorical delivery was deliberately employed or not. But I agree as to how effective it can be. This delivery is intercultural, intergenerational (if you exclude certain gestures). It feels and sounds spontaneous, honest and personal. In part, it employs the good old salesman’s gigs. And it strikes that cord in us which yearns for connection and being understood and embraced without much effort. Or apology.

[His seeming incoherence stems from the big difference between written and spoken language. Trump’s style of speaking has its roots in oral culture.

Only a few of Trump’s big speeches have been scripted. At many of his rallies, he speaks off the cuff. We get a lot of fractured, unfinished sentences, moving quickly from thought to thought — what Trump calls a “beautiful flowing sentence.”

To some (or many), this style is completely incoherent. But clearly not everyone feels this way. Many people walked away from Trump’s rallies having understood — and believed — what he said.

It’s the difference between reading Trump’s remarks and listening to them in real time, University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman explained:

This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.

In other words, Trump’s digressions and rambles — or, as he says, when “the back of the sentence reverts to the front” — are much easier to follow in person thanks to subtle cues….

Many of Trump’s most famous catchphrases are actually versions of time-tested speech mechanisms that salesmen use. They’re powerful because they help shape our unconscious.

Take, for example, Trump’s frequent use of “Many people are saying…” or “Believe me” — often right after saying something that is baseless or untrue. This tends to sound more trustworthy to listeners than just outright stating the baseless claim, since Trump implies that he has direct experience with what he’s talking about. At a base level, Lakoff argues, people are more inclined to believe something that seems to have been shared.]

Read the full article | VOX

 

 

The Ogham that Wasn’t | A Unique Historical Site in SE Colorado

In one of my field research excursions in April, here in Colorado, I stumbled upon the Millennial Site, a notorious ground for academic drama, and a highly disputed site for Ogham writing. Even though beyond the scope of my research interests, I could not resist exploring it, after I requested permission by the ranch owner whose property now engulfs Millennial Site (aka Hackberry Springs, and Bloody Springs), and was granted escorted access to this unique, historically rich site. Here are some photographs from sites 1 and 2.

Panorama of Site 1 | Millennial Site | South of Ruxton, CO | @2016 Styliani Giannitsi Photography

Site 2, detail | Millennial Site | South of Ruxton, CO | @2016 Styliani Giannitsi Photography

Shallow Cave, Site 1 | Millennial Site | South of Ruxton, CO | 22016 Styliani Giannitsi Photography

Alleged depiction of the last battle fought in Colorado between US 7th Calvary and Cheyenne bands – 1868 | Site 2 | Millennial Site | South of Ruxton, CO | @2016 Styliani Giannitsi Photography

Site 1 | Millennial Site | South of Ruxton, CO | 22016 Styliani Giannitsi Photography

Colorado Millennial Site is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian archaeological site located near Ruxton in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of Colorado, sitting along the border between Baca and Las Animas counties. It is also known by its site ID, 5LA1115, and the names Hackberry Springs and Bloody Springs.^[1]

The site was inhabited from 6999 B.C. to A.D. 1900. The prehistoric cultures included Archaic and Woodland cultures and the site is significant for its rock art, village settlement, and military battle site.^[1]

The Cheyenne and U.S. 7th Cavalry had the last documented southeastern Colorado military battle with Native Americans at the site in 1868.^{[4]  [ WIKIPEDIA]}

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Some background on the Ogham controversy:

[In 1975, historian Dr. Donald G. Rickey (1925 – 2000) was investigating the site of an 1868 battle which took place between soldiers of the 7th US Cavalry and a raiding party of Cheyenne warriors at Hackberry Springs, in Colorado.

At the time, Dr. Rickey was the Chief Historian for the Bureau of Land Management (part of the US Department of the Interior), and had a personal interest in the battle in that one of the two 7th Cavalry troopers killed in the battle was his ancestor Sam Rickey.

While at the site, Dr. Rickey discovered groove marks which he initially called “spear-sharpening marks.” However, as circumstance would have it, he traveled to Scotland only a few weeks later, where he happened to visit a museum displaying the distinctive grooved writing system known as Ogham or Ogam, used by the Celts and found in throughout the British Isles, mainly in Ireland but also in England, Wales and Scotland, almost always in the form of grooves carved into stones.

He immediately suspected that the rock inscriptions he had seen in southern Colorado might be an example of this same writing system. Dr. Rickey returned to the site with other researchers over the next two years, and eventually contacted Dr. Barry Fell (1917 – 1994), a Harvard professor and the author of the controversial America BC, first published in 1976. Professor Fell agreed that the inscriptions were likely an example of Ogham, and of the older “all-consonant” variety which seems to prevail in the Americas.

Dr. Rickey submitted the site for consideration for recognition of its historic significance, but his mention of the possibility that the rock art might be Ogham elicited a swift and contemptuous response from his archaeological colleagues, as described in the short video clip above. The full text of the memos and letters between the defenders of the orthodox view of history (which does not admit to the possibility of ancient trans-oceanic travel) can be seen here.

The tone of these letters is revealing. Dr. Stuart Piggott of the University of Edinburgh (to whom the Chief Archaeologist of the National Park Service wrote upon learning of Dr. Rickey’s heretical suggestion) wrote back to say “I have just heard of this and have no doubt that it is not just the fringe but hard-core lunacy. I am astonished that anyone, particularly a historian, should have fallen for it” (see page 3 of the online pdf linked above; that pdf also contains a photograph of the inscriptions on page 6).]

Read the full article here | The Mathison Corollary

 

Speak to Me | Lakota (Sioux) Language from “Threatened” to “Moribund”

Published Febraury 21, 2016  | http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/25106/

PIERRE. SOUTH DAKOTA— Lakota Language Consortium (LLC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of the Lakota language, also known as Sioux, announced today that only 2,000 first-language speakers of Lakota remain – a decline of 66% in ten years.

Lakota, a language spoken on reservations in North and South Dakota, is one of the most well-known of America’s indigenous languages, and one of the few still spoken with a significant chance of survival. Lakota population is 170,000, but fluent speakers are a small fraction of that number.

In 2006, there were an estimated 6,000 first-language Lakota speakers. Beginning 2016, LLC counted approximately only 2,000 remaining speakers – a loss of 4,000 in just 10 years. The 66% loss in speakers equates to approximately 400 speakers lost each year.

Based on the new findings, Ethnologue, a catalogue of world languages, will now redesignate the Lakota language from “Threatened” to “Moribund”, with the special status of “Reawakening” – reflecting the community’s commitment to bringing back the language into every day use.

Ben Black Bear, a 69 year-old Lakota Elder and a first-language speaker, remarked, “I’ve been looking for good Lakota speakers, and the only ones I’ve found are older than me. But there are young people interested in learning. The challenge is getting them from ‘I want to learn’ to ‘What can I do to stop Lakota from disappearing?’”

For 10 years Mr. Black Bear has worked with the Lakota Language Consortium on numerous translation and recording projects, dubbing The Berenstain Bears into Lakota, and taking part in a language documentary, Rising Voices/Hóthaninpi, which premiered on public television in November 2015.

Despite the latest Lakota speaker count, Mr. Black Bear remains hopeful, “From the outside perspective, the language is in critical condition. But from the inside, from those of us living and speaking it, we just need to look at ourselves in a positive way to move the language forward.”

Lakota Language Consortium (LLC) is leading the revitalization of Lakota by educating the public on the issue and providing critical support to language teachers and learners. The group consists of schools and colleges across Lakota reservations, community leaders, linguists, and volunteers working together for the revitalization of Lakota.

For more information please visit Lakhota.org

Or for Rising Voices/Hóthaninpi Rising Voices

Tom Red Bird reads in Lakota to the Immersion Nest children | Lakhota.org

Red America: Why Poorer Areas Vote for Politicians Who Want to Slash the Safety Net

Ever wonder why all those folks in rural, “red” America still vote in droves for the same Republicans who brag about gutting the very social programs keeping them alive?  How someone like Matt Bevin can run a winning campaign in Kentucky based on cutting people’s access to affordable health care? How Republican governors can get away with refusing free Medicaid for their own citizens?

In an insightful article about what motivates the rural poor to vote Republican, Alec MacGillis, who covers politics for ProPublica,  took a tour through deep red America, asking the same questions. In an Op-Ed for today’s New York Times, MacGillis explains that it’s not all about guns and abortion that drives people in economically-depressed areas to vote Republican. In fact it’s something very basic to human nature, which the GOP exploits at every turn. And Democrats ignore it at their peril.

Here is the article: Who Turned my Blue State Red? | NEW YORK TIMES

 

 

 

The Sound of Silence

Patrick Otema, 15 was born deaf. In the remote area of Uganda where he lives there are no schools for deaf children, and he has never had a conversation. Raymond Okkelo, a sign language teacher, hopes to change all this and offer Patrick a way out of the silence he has known his whole life.

Identity + Moral Compass

Research on neurodegenerative diseases suggests that, more than anything else, moral traits like kindness and integrity define who we are.

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[Following up with a more detailed analysis, Strohminger and Nichols discovered that symptoms of declining morality were strongly associated with the perception that a patient’s identity had changed, while failing memory, depression, and more traditional measures of personality appeared to have almost nothing to do with a person’s identity. The only other symptom that had any discernible impact on identity was aphasia, a language impairment.] Full article here | THE PACIFIC STANDARD

MIT Claims to Have Found a “Language Universal” that Ties All Languages Together

A language universal would bring evidence to Chomsky’s controversial theories.

Although the paper only looked at 37 languages, it’s actually incredibly difficult to build these databases of language in use, which makes it a reasonably impressive sample, she said. There is a problem here, though: many of the languages studied are related to one another, representing only a few of the huge number of language families, so we’d expect them to behave in similar ways. More research is going to be needed to control for language relatedness.

This paper joins a lot of previous work on the topic, so it’s not the lone evidence of DLM—it’s corroborating, and adding to, a fair bit of past research. It’s “a lot of good converging evidence,” she said.

“There are many proposed universal properties of language, but basically all of them are controversial,” she explained. But it’s plausible, she added, that DLM—or something like it—could be a promising candidate for a universal cognitive mechanism that affects how languages are structured.     Read the full article | ARS TECHNICA UK

FURTHER READING

MODERN LANGUAGES SHOW NO TRACE OF OUR AFRICAN ORIGINS

We can’t assume that human migration affects language and genes the same way.

How India Changed the English Language

[They are in there, often unnoticed. The words that have become part of everyday English. Loot, nirvana, pyjamas, shampoo and shawl; bungalow, jungle, pundit and thug.

Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Portuguese and English words pinballed around the globe in the 16th and 17th Centuries, revealing how languages evolve over time as culture is made and remade, and people adapt to conditions around them. This is neatly illustrated by three words – shawl, cashmere and patchouli – that travel hand-in-hand from India into 18th-Century English.

Long before the British Raj – before the East India Company acquired its first territory in the Indian subcontinent in 1615 – South Asian words from languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Tamil had crept onto foreign tongues. One landmark book records the etymology of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases. Compiled by two India enthusiasts, Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India was published in 1886. The poet Daljit Nagradescribed it as “not so much an orderly dictionary as a passionate memoir of colonial India. Rather like an eccentric Englishman in glossary form.”]

Read the full article here | BBC Culture