654 - Arawakan linguistic and cultural identities

17.07.2012 | 08:00 - 13:30

Coordenator 1: Rose, Francoise (CNRS, France , Lyon Cedex 07, France / Frankreich)
Coordenator 2: Seifart, Frank (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, Leipzig, Germany / Deutschland)

Arawakan (or Arawak), one of the great linguistic families in South America, continues to pose intriguing research questions for linguistics, anthrophology, and related disciplines. Due to the remarkable expansion of the family throughout much of South America and the Carribean, Arawakan people and languages have come into contact with numerous, geneaologically unrelated peoples and languages, often forming multilingual cultural areas, some of which can be considered true linguistic areas. This symposium provides a forum for dialogue between specialists on Arawakan languages and peoples. The main goal is to better characterize Arawakan languages and cultures as being made up of traits inherited from a common ancestor on the one hand, and contact with non-Arawakans on the other hand. We aim at interdisciplinary dialogue, involving linguists, historians, anthropologists and archeologists. We particularly welcome (but do not restrict this call to) proposals for papers that contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Arawakan expansion. Such contributions may be based on large-scale comparisons involving many languages or groups, but may as well be on a local scale, i.e. focusing on individual languages or groups in the context of their local contact situations and/or close genealogical relatives, from any Arawakan language or group.  

In sum, we invite papers dealing with any (and any combination of) the following topics:

- linguistic and cultural characteristics of Arawakan languages/peoples (description, comparison or reconstruction)
- Arawakan and non-Arawakan interactions
- classification: dialects, languages, subgroups, and Arawakan as a whole - Arawakan within regional cultural and linguistic areas  

Working languages are English, Spanish, and Portuguese  

Pending final approval, the following talks have been scheduled in this symposium:

Frank Seifart: Arawakan inheritance vs. areal influence: A case study on Resígaro  

Alf Hornborg: Pre-Columbian Ethnogenesis: Understanding the Arawak Expansion in Terms of Socio-cultural Processes rather than Biogeography      

Françoise Rose: Historical hypothesis on the dialectal situation of Mojeño      

Swintha Danielsen: The “valency split” within the Arawakan language family      

Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo and Manuela Fischer: Max Schmidt y la expansión Arawak: problemas y perspectivas desde la arqueología

Palavras-chaves: Arawak, anthropology, contact, linguistics, archaelogy