Skip to main content

You may be using a Web browser that does not support standards for accessibility and user interaction. Find out why you should upgrade your browser for a better experience of this and other standards-based sites...

Dartmouth Home  Search  Index

Dartmouth HomeSearchIndex

Dartmouth home page
Anthropology Department
Home >  Faculty, Staff and Fellows > 

Christopher Ball

413A Silsby Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: 603-646-
Fax: 603-646-1140
christopher.ball@dartmouth.edu

I am a linguistic anthropologist with interests in various aspects of language and culture. I received my B.A. in linguistics from the University of California at Santa Barbara in1996, before taking a joint Ph.D. in linguistics and anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2007.

My dissertation, entitled “Out of the Park: Trajectories of Wauja (Xingu Arawak) Language and Culture,” is based on Fulbright funded fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu region. The Brazilian Upper Xingu has long been referred to as a multilingual area. There are languages from three major Amazonian stocks plus one language isolate spoken in the social network that defines the Upper Xingu, and many more spoken with the larger Xingu Indigenous Park in central Brazil. The roughly 350 speakers of the Wauja (Xingu Arawak) language form a distinct ethnolinguistic group living in a single circular village inside the Park and this social system. My work comprises an ethnographic and linguistic anthropological study of how this small scale society, hemmed in since the mid 1950’s by the perimeter of the Park, a massive state project in lowland Amazonia that has worked to spatially and temporally fix indigenous collectives, comes to build relationships that reach out to challenge their very isolation and to redefine those very boundaries. It is more generally about how language is at the base of the formation of the identities and differences that we recognize in social persons and social groups, and about how linguistic structure and practice intersect with cultural norms of interaction, exchange, and spatialization.

I also have research interests in Japanese and have conducted research in Japan on dialect use in discourse and cultural models of the self, interaction, and regional identity. I plan to build on such work as I develop a project exploring the connections between Buddhist environmental discourses, ritual language use, and religious pilgrimage and eco-tourism in rural Japan.

I have written and published on a variety of topics in linguistic anthropology. These reflect my broader theoretical areas of interest and include language “endangerment,” the politics of indigenous cultural representation, the sociolinguistic properties of dialect use, as well as the nominal morphology of possessives and classifiers in Amazonian languages.

Recent Publications

2006 (co-authored with Marcelo Fiorini, CNRS) Le commerce de la culture, la médecine rituelle et le Coca-cola. (Publication in French treating cultural contact in a Wauja dance performance in France,). In Gradhiva. Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

2006 Fazendo das línguas objetos: línguas em perigo de extinção e diversidade cultural. (Publication in Portuguese treating language endangerment and cultural diversity). In IPHAN – Revista do Patrimônio, special edition on intellectual property and biodiversity, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (ed.).

2005 An Automudular Approach to Classifiers in Piratapuya (Eastern Tukanoan). Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California.

2004 Dialect and Discourse in Kansai: Repertoires of Registers in Japanese Conversation. In Language and Communication, vol. 24.4: 291-435. Elsevier Press.

Last Updated: 10/9/07