Paja Faudree
Assistant Professor of Anthropology:
Anthropology; Affiliated faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Center for the Study and Race and EthnicityStudies
Phone: +1 401 863 2638
Paja_Faudree@brown.edu
PhD, Linguistic Anthropology; University of Pennsylvania, August 2006
Brown University Research Profile Page for Paja Faudree
Teaching
ANTH 0066L - Singing and Language
This course focuses on the relationship between music and language in cultural context. Drawing on case studies from various parts of the world, we will consider how music and language are intimately connected in culturally specific ways that affect both how music is used and what meaning people make of that music, as performers and audience members alike.
ANTH 0800 - Sound and Symbols: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
An introduction to the study of human communication, emphasizing the relationship between language and culture. Topics include theories of language as a symbolic system, language differences within society, political and ideological speech, language in schools and creative use of communication in performance, literature, advertising and mass media.
ANTH 1810 - Language and Power
This course considers how language and power relate to each other in social life. The theoretical and ethnographic texts we will read examine ways that language use and ideas about language can affect and be affected by the exercise of power. We will first consider more theoretical approaches to language and power, such as Focault's work on discursive formations and regimes of power and Bourdieu's work on language as a particular form of social capital. We will then turn to specific cases, including language policies under European colonialism and indigenous responses to them, language death and ideas about the relative power of languages, joking as a form of linguistic resistance, and language use in the ongoing "culture wars" in the United States.
ANTH 2800 - Linguistic Theory and Practice
This course provides an introduction to some of the central theoretical and methodological issues involved in the study of language and social life. We will examine theoretical approaches to language that treat it as a semiotic system, a theoretical orientation on which the vast majority of research on language in cultural context rests. We will then turn to classical areas of research on language as a structured system – covering such topics as phonetics, phonemes, and grammatical categories – but our focus on language structure will be anthropological in nature, emphasizing how linguistic structures relate to aspects of culture that have been of seminal and enduring interest to anthropological research. Topics covered will include cognition and linguistic relativity, meaning and semantics, pronouns and deixis, deference and register, speech acts and performativity, interaction, verbal art and poetics, reported speech, performance, speech communities, and linguistic ideology. The ultimate goal of the course is thus to gain a broad appreciation for the ways in which language use is at the very core of the processes by which cultural knowledge is brought to life, put into practice, and passed on.
(New Course) Language and Protest in Latin America
This course considers how linguistic difference plays a crucial role in political protest and violence in Latin America, a region with enormous linguistic diversity. In it, we will consider language concerns as a critical element in the nature and fate of popular collective action. We begin by looking at some theoretical perspectives on violence, protest, and language. Then we turn to historical and contemporary case studies in Latin America. These include how linguistic diversity was a factor in the Conquest and early colonial enterprise in central Mexico; violence and language in the rubber trade in the Amazon; the indigenous rights movement of recent decades in Ecuador; recent political mobilization and violence in southern Mexico; political violence in Guatemala in the latter part of the twentieth century and the role of language in the subsequent peace accords; and state violence and reactions to it during the Dirty War.
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