Have a Plan but be Open - Amazonian Fieldwork and Cognitive Experiments with Austin Howard

Credit: Devin Bittner – Florida State University College of Arts and Sciences ‪‪@fsuartssciences‬
Instagram: @Wienmegen
E-mail: ah23z [at] fsu.edu
Transcript:
And it's a lot of that, actually. It's a lot of kind of reconnaissance from a personal level, but really networking, connection making, etc.. So I did a lot of that and I conducted quite a few interviews where I wanted to see how things work to that stage 1. And then now I can be in the stage of looking at that and one, yes, trying to go back and do more of that because you keep wanting to go deeper, as it were, but to also see, okay, what are the patterns I'm noticing

And indeed, can I make some kind of experiment or something out of this with the data I have or previous data from another trip? Actually, I previously worked on Turkish, for instance. I did an experiment Turkish. Can I see how, for instance, these words that are supposed to show something of what they mean already in the word can indigenous peoples in the Amazon guess that about Turkish, for instance, or what ways can I manipulate that, etc.?

So, there are lots of questions that may arise, and I'm actually in that planning stage to try and see what I can do to kind of bring these two different streams together. And that's quite interesting. Also interested in the local Spanish, which is very unique and shows a lot of features of indigenous languages, but also to some extent other immigrant groups from, from Europe and elsewhere that moved there either to collect rubber, which is a very traumatic period in Amazonia, but one of intense movement, let's say, for better (not) or for worse (yes) , where a lot of people came from Europe to, become rubber lords, rubber barons, as they're called, and actually fought to some extent, a large extent, enslave indigenous people to tap rubber for them. But although a very traumatic event, did did shape a lot of how things have played out since then, of course. Right. And just general migration to fortune seeking, etc. from Europe, even, for instance, people of Jewish extraction from North Africa, etc. as well, going to places like the Peruvian Amazon.

And so it's it's a nice interactional sphere. And, I'm trying to look as much as I can into all aspects whilst going forward with some few concrete ideas. So have a plan, but be open, right? That's sort of the take home for field work.

Austin (the so-called 'budget Indiana Jones' by his students) is pursuing a doctorate in linguistics (‪‪@FloridaState‬ ).He specialises in the intersection of cognitive science, anthropology and language sciences, using fieldwork to elucidate the interaction of culture and cognition. He is an ardent fan of poetry, theatre and language-learning. Puns and all forms of humour keep his mind sharp and his spirits high. Austin is an avid collector and taster of teas and other infusions. His masters and internships were completed in the Netherlands (MA from ‪‪@radboud_uni‬ Nijmegen and subsequent research assistantship at ‪‪@leidenhumanities‬ University) and Austria (Austrian Academy of Sciences ‪‪@OEAWVideo‬ ) His recent work has taken him from the edges of Anatolia to the rainforests of the Amazon.

Thanks to The Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) and the Norm and Sibby Whitten Research Fund 2023-2024 for funding my research project, Exploring Inter-Ethnic Marriage Dynamics: A Study of Family Foundations and ‘ethnic’ entities in Iquitos, Peru:
https://salsa-tipiti.org/news/austin-...

Austin's publications:

The social lives of isolates (and small language families): the case of the Northwest Amazon
R Van Gijn, S Norder, L Arias, NQ Emlen, MCBC Azevedo, A Caine, ...
Interface Focus 13 (1),

Interpreting mismatches between linguistic and genetic patterns among speakers of Tanimuka (Eastern Tukanoan) and Yukuna (Arawakan) 2022
L Arias, NQ Emlen, S Norder, N Julmi, M Lemus Serrano, T Chacon, ...
Interface Focus 13 (1), 2022
Conflict in Interaction: Diverging Topic Trajectories and Misalignment
J Geenen, A Howard
Multimodality Studies in International Contexts, 219-240
2023
Sound Symbolism in the Turkish Tongue.
AWH Howard
2021
Language is arbitrary? I wouldn’t be Saussure: Multimodal ideophone guessability
Ru:ts Student Linguistics Journal Radboud University Nijmegen
2019
Geography of Gender and the Gender of Geography in the Roman Imagination
A Howard

#amazonia #southamerica #anthropology #linguistics #history #perú #ecuador #colombia #brazil #ethnography #indigenous #indianajones #quechua #language #diversityofthought #cognitivelinguistics #fieldwork

Listeners/viewers may also enjoy the work of Daniel Everett on the Pirahã. On my podcast, both Nick Emlen and Janis Nuckolls have discussed Quechua and Kichwa, respectively from Perú and Ecuador, both part of the larger Quechuan family, spread both before and after the rise of the Inca in the Andes, and now being spoken along the Andes but also into Amazonia.