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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.
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