hi I'm yo Matt I'm socially whistling mr. Kent apologist and what I would like to do in the next 20 minutes or so 15 20 minutes is to highlight one aspects of linguistic anthropology that in my view is very important theoretically as well as empirically now linguistic anthropology is of course like anthropology itself a house with very very many groups and one of these rooms really referenced or explore these days is symbolic interactionist at least it is a small trend that emerged between the late 1940s late 1960s early 1970s with people like Erving Goffman Harold
Garfinkel Howard Becker and a number of others and then later also Charles Goodwin oh good winds and a few others in which action is absolutely central so in other words what you have there is an approach to human behavior including behavior in and through language or meaning making devices as action first and foremost as action now you instantly see the theoretical importance of that in the sense that we might be looking at exactly the same data for instance a recorded conversation from a variety of perspectives usually or very often we look at those materials as
language we start analyzing the language or we start analyzing the particular ways in which language is being deployed in this particular form of interaction conversation so this is let's say very very widespread now in the tradition that I would like to highlight we would look at these data from the perspective of action all right and all the rests like resources phrases language or other senior the instruments that we know ok but also participants like their identities alright or the effects of what they do me would all be things that follow action they emerge from action
they do not precede action this in a way is a pretty radical break in the sense that for instance when we look at the conversation from the other perspective the linguistic perspective that I just outlined one of the very first things we ought to establish and we usually also establish very very quickly is this conversation is in English or in French maybe we see mixing it is in English and French or English and German or something like that but we were always instantly and as a sort of a priori define the language and from that
moment you know that thing is the basis of analysis let's say in the action perspective right in the action perspective language itself is only an outcome all right it is an effect of the human action that is being performed all right so the resources can only be defined after the fact and that also goes for the participants who's involved social roles identities and what-have-you all of that has to be seen as an effect of human action a lot of this perspective the action perspective as I call it in linguistic anthropology goes back to the work
of George Herbert meat all right one of the founding fathers of social psychology but also a very important name in in American pragmatism okay and these basic assumptions have essentially been defined by George rabbit meat and that has a number of huge effects and these effects I would like to let's say illustrate in a moment but let's first emphasize the important theoretical effect because what it is that we see here is an an entirely different approach to meaning making meaning making again would not necessarily be a factor of the combination or the intersection of resources
at language right and an individual's participants no it is a thing in itself all right and it emerges out of action now in our field at least the central notion of that is being expressed by a concept we very often use which is the concept of languaging alright so language is not an object not something that can be defined as an a priori category but it is an activity so we do language we make language all right and so language itself is not predefined that it emerges from languaging and as you know perhaps languaging has
been accompanied nowadays at least is this idea of languaging has been expressed by a variety of notions there is trans lingual ism there's translanguaging and there is also metro lingual ism and so there's a variety of labels that are now being used all of them in very many ways go back to this action perspective ok now this action perspective enables us to look at human interaction even when human interaction is non-conventional or at least even when human interaction for which we very often use a sort of once again sort of a priori that it has
to be what is that language would be the most central resource for doing interaction so even when that is not the case we are in a position in which we can look at human interaction from a viewpoint of what the those involved effectively do alright and what follows I would like to illustrate that on the basis of memes memes so internet memes and just to preface that it is my view that the social linguistic world has profoundly changed since the beginning of the 20th century sorry since the beginning of course of the 21st century with
the introduction of the web 2.0 and of course we nowadays you know with the huge phenomenon of all sorts of apps and social media many of which have become fixed ingredient of our socialistic environment we no longer just communicate offline in encounters with people of writing in the conventional ways okay we increasingly and and in an enormous proportion we also communicate online in modes of course that were not available before the the arrival of the web 2.0 so for the forms that we see online new forms of communication there might be precedence all right so
there might be things that look more or less the same alright at the same time due to its technological mediation dimension which is inevitable and of course inescapable it's an entirely new thing now memes are very interesting things in the sense that they they have emerged as one of the new genres very widely used in social media interaction now what are memes I'm sure I don't have to explain it but just very very quickly memes are usually images that are what have been manipulated all right so images like snapshots a selfie or a little video
clip or an element from that or whatever that have been manipulated in such a way that they become a message in their own right a recontextualized 3 and texturized message ok memes are non linguistic in the sense that of course many of them would have words on them like little captions and so on a song but even if there is no language in the strict sense of the term we see half synoptic labor performed by the participants because one of the interesting features of memes is that they are hyper productive alright so they they are
once they are there you would see that uptake is varies with and uptake is rarely inactive and so what you very often see is that the same image like a root image for a meme is being recycled reproduced reorganized rewritten redesigned recirculated and so on a song over and over and over again in enormous bursts of human creativity now this is meaning-making right so even if these memes have no clear or ambiguous meaning and and you know even if we should call them ludic in the sense that they are usually made in order to be
funny or in a number of cases to be shocking right so a purely and motive sort of of interactional effect as an aim all right even then you know we we would see that they are hyper productive and that they are very very quickly understood and here of course when I say understand here I think we again have to refer to this action perspective understanding from this action perspective for instance in the work of Harold Garfinkel is based on recognition on the recognizability of science so a sign like an image would be recognizable as meaning
XY or set once again the meaning does not need to be precise it can be a very open it can be a very very non transparent meaning or I'd like a very broad reference to something and then secondly all right so the meaning is there it might be an open meaning and secondly that particular sign is open to re elaboration it can be moved around it can be redesigned it can be contextualized and so on and so on in an almost infinite way all right so this this is what memes are all about they're recognizable
ok a very open so even if they're recognizable as something the ass is not a point it's a space right and within that space you would see that all sorts of other people do Senora Kleber let's say perform semiotic labor in such a way that the meme goes wild goes viral you know circulates over and over and over again and becomes like a little trend a little tradition a little intertextual unit in its own right it was very very interesting as a phenomena because we in many ways you know we see human meaning making the
construction of a semiotics system if you wish in in in the space of a couple of hours because these these waves of memes very often are grounded in in in events that have occurred very recently okay and and and so they are being produced reproduced and so on and so on over a very short period of time so they live like for a few hours online usually Twitter and then also Facebook a number of other things like Instagram okay they use or at least you know they they live for a few hours only after which
they vanish so it's like a miniature meaning a semiotic system that that we can see and that we can observe and it may teach us a thing or two that is really fundamental about human communication human social action human social interaction so how it is that we effectively produce you now let me illustrate I'm gonna illustrate it on the basis of an event oriented range of memes during the World Cup football in Russia football meaning of course soccer there was a game at one point the game between Argentina and well Argentina had to play okay
I forgot the opponent for a moment Argentina is usually a very very good football team all right and it also has one of the big superstars of international football lionel messi but they hadn't been doing too well and so in that game it was basically all or nothing they really had to win otherwise they would not qualify for the next round they would be out of the tournament so this was this was a pretty high high intensity game one of the things you need to know Argentina is a big football nation and historically also it
has produced absolutely wonderful players and one of the absolute gods in football is a man called Diego Maradona Maradona Maradona was a national player in the 80s and when when he played with the Argentine football team they became world champion in 1986 so Diego Maradona was in the stadium while this game was going on and again it was difficult game for Argentina but at one point they scored I was the owner Messi the superstar whose court and the zoomed in on Diego Maradona was in the grandstand there and he was making very very dramatic sort
of gestures ok one of the things we can see is that he of course spread his arms and then like this you know a sort of almost religious gesture of Prayer one can imagine and those images became means so here we first show the two initial the original images from the game so you see Maradona basically in two poses one with his arms open and the other with his arms basically crossed over his chest now what happened instantly so as soon as this no have to say the game was ongoing it wasn't yet finished but
these images were instantly posted to on Twitter ok and within minutes they became memes so a number of ordinary people usually people who are just computer literate all right mate these images the route images basically into highly elaborate while of course technologically you don't need much in order to elaborate it a little bit of photoshopping ok but highly elaborate new cultural material so the first example I give here is the image of Maradona which is one arm in the air who has been inserted in a replica of Leonardo's Last Supper so this is very typical
for memes they would be included alright in existing recognizable material so here's a dimension of recognizability everyone knows this painting so here is of course in the position of Jesus Christ so there was the religious dimension to his just shift or the readability recognizability again as a religious gesture alright and so he becomes Jesus the other movement so in which he has his arms over his chest and he's looking up like in prayer ok went even more viral it became the material of an enormous range of memes and of course here I can only show
you one or two examples the first example you see here and that's an example where you see Maradona in this particular position being inserted in an iconic image from the late 70s an album sleeve of the group Queen right so he's there in the position basically of the singer Freddie Mercury ok again recognizable cultural material alright and Maradona is being inserted in it and then of course you can read the expression on his face not just as an expression of religious ecstasy ok but also as an expression of fear being impressed by things being intimidated
by things and one of the things that really became very productive was a mean in which Maradona would be on a roller coaster so again his image is very simply photoshopped onto existing images of a family honor on a roller coaster for instance ok and so here's an example and as you can see the example was replicated in a number of different ways why again because the image would be inserted okay on the basis of its recognizability yes so we can insert it on grounds of a sort of intertextual if you wish or into semi
opaque connection between the expression and the gestured animation of the body language that we displaced on the one hand and then an imaginable social situation like being on a roller coaster now here of course would be really difficult to define the material that is being used here in a more precise way than for instance by saying it's existing cultural material so language for instance there's no language here no explicit language at least okay it's an image that is being used as material in a more complicated image right within a community of individuals within which these
images this at least is these these new forms of combined images are readable and recognizable as right so you see recognizability but not recognizability in the sense of you need to simply replicate it now you can do all sorts of things with it it's open recognizability okay now this is human action and here I'm gonna conclude so within linguistic anthropology you have this tradition of looking at human meaningful behavior people making sense of social situations with the material that is at their disposal alright language is one usually one of the resources that provides this material
but human meaning making of course it's multimodal these days and in an online environment it it generates all sorts of new shapes of the construction of meanings messages and semiotics systems okay and one of the things we see is that even if it's very very new so this is a new genre we this you know practitioners of those particular genres know the rules so they know exactly how to read these images and all no need to read them but also to produce them to reproduce them and create again a new thing which is called zero
mati meaning-making within an ephemeral community of online se participants active participants the identity of whom we do not even need to know so I just wanted to highlight this particular perspective it's a perspective which is very often overlooked so even when we when when we mentioned the label linguistic anthropology we would still think that linguistic would only refer to what happens in language well I just wanted to point out that within linguistic anthropology there's a long tradition a very rich tradition okay of looking at all sorts of materials that other people would address from the
perspective of language but here they are addressed as human action and human action that yields the material at least and an inquiry in human action yields a number of insights in the materials that are being used in who are using these materials how they're being used and with much finality and in that sense I think we are on the basis of these assumptions looking at the heart of social work thank you very much
