Interesting Article

[anthill626]

I found this article on the NYT website.
Source

Comments

I sent this to a few friends as well

[mehinda]

I still wish NYT had the guts to title this article, '"English, Motherfucker. Do you speak it?": Unfortunately, Yes'

[al_mcd_hunter]

Its a loose loose situation. The horrible realities of collonialism gives the white anthropologists the sad task of understanding a culture 'after the fact'. It is a lesser of two evils-type moral dillema; should they 'preserve' the elliminated cultures history or let it lie with the dead cultures and sometimes people?
Anthropology is an interesting one in itself. I am not very aware of other cultures practicing such a science. Anthropology seems to be more of an academic extension of collonialist expansion and our rapacious appetites as whites.

[wiped]

euro/american anthropology does come out of a racist tradition of colonialism, and hasn't moved far from those roots IMO, but that doesn't mean that (1) it's only used by white people to serve racist ends and (2) it's an exclusively euro/american science. anthropology, like any other science, is a tool which can be wielded by different people to serve different purposes, and it has been reappropriated by many POC to document their threatened cultures and languages, to better understand their histories, and to promote their futures. yes, white anthropologists documenting endangered languages is extremely problematic, but there are more and more "native" students of linguistics who are learning the tools of the field to document and preserve their own languages. furthermore, i'd argue that in this case there is quite a disparity between the "two evils" in question; that is, the enormous, heinous, irreversible evil of language/cultural extinction, and the lesser evil of the issues with white anthropologists working with cultures other

[al_mcd_hunter]

"but there are more and more "native" students of linguistics who are learning the tools of the field to document and preserve their own languages"

Yeh i think i see what you mean but this has very different ends to what I think of as anthropology, especially as it is about preseving your own culture. The use of it here seems merely to fight against the tide of cultural imperialism, so the practice still remains political, unlike areas of knowledge that are devoid of this and also practiced all over the world such as mathematics (as far as i know!)

Anyway I'm talking out of my depth here, just some bundled thoughts wrapped in a bag. Something interesting to look into tho...

[anjak_j]

Interesting article.

I can sum up my thoughts as a white Irish person on this with something I that was said to me once when I mentioned I spoke Irish Gaelic...

"I didn't know your country had its own language."

You only have to look at this area of the world to see how pervasive an influence the English language has had. I've lived in Wales for over 18 months now and I have never heard, even passing two people in the street, people holding an everyday conversation in Welsh, despite the fact that signs and all official literature here are bilingual.