Do You See What I Mean?: Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action [Hardcover]

Brenda Farnell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0292724802 | ISBN-13: 978-0292724808 | Publication Date: 1995 | Edition: 1st

Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains who spoke differing languages. Some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the adoption of English, but in this study Brenda Farnell documents that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture. Farnell's research challenges the Euro-American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language practices, she asserts, words and gestures are equal partners in the creation of meaning. Drawing on Nakota narratives videotaped during field research at the Fort Belknap Reservation, northern Montana, she uses the movement script Labanotation to create texts of the movement content of these performances. Using them to analyze both spoken and gestural components, she builds an action-centered theory of "deixis" and spatial orientation that reveals unexpected semantic depth in both the storytelling tradition and everyday interaction.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A major contribution to Native American studies, to cultural anthropology more generally, to linguistic anthropology, and to semiotics. . . . In one and the same book, Brenda Farnell reveals the power and precision of gesture in oral performance, makes major advances in the understanding of the storytelling process in general, and teaches us more about the world of Native Americans than we have learned in many a moon.”—James H. McNulty

(James H. McNulty )

“What is struggling to emerge is a theoretical framework in which the way that the different modalities of communication are articulated with one another can be understood. This book should be read by all those with an interest in the development of such a framework.”—Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

(Adam Kendon Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Brenda Farnell is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: The Visible and Invisible in Movement and Dance. She is coeditor of the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press; 1st edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292724802
• ISBN-13: 978-0292724808
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,265,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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