Research Catalog

Do you see what I mean? : Plains Indian sign talk and the embodiment of action / Brenda Farnell.

Title
Do you see what I mean? : Plains Indian sign talk and the embodiment of action / Brenda Farnell.
Author
Farnell, Brenda M. (Brenda Margaret)
Publication
Austin : University of Texas Press, 1995.

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Description
xvi, 382 p. : ill.; 24 cm.
Summary
Publisher description: Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains who spoke differing languages. Some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the adoption of English, but in this study Brenda Farnell documents that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture. Farnell's research challenges the Euro-American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language practices, she asserts, words and gestures are equal partners in the creation of meaning. Drawing on Nakota narratives videotaped during field research at the Fort Belknap Reservation, northern Montana, she uses the movement script Labanotation to create texts of the movement content of these performances. Using them to analyze both spoken and gestural components, she builds an action-centered theory of "deixis" and spatial orientation that reveals unexpected semantic depth in both the storytelling tradition and everyday interaction.
Subject
  • Indian sign language > Great Plains
  • Assiniboine Indians > Folklore
  • Folklore > Great Plains > Performance
  • Storytelling > Great Plains
  • Culture > Semiotic models
  • Folklore > Performance > Great Plains
  • Folklore > performance
  • Great Plains
  • Semasiology
Genre/Form
Folklore
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (p. [351]-374) and index.
Processing Action (note)
  • committed to retain
Contents
1. The Nineteenth-Century Legacy -- 2. Bias against the Iconic -- 3. Geographical and Historical Spaces: Assiniboine Territory and the Embodiment of Deixis -- 4. Moral and Ethical Spaces: Naming Practices and Visual Imagery in Nakota and FST -- 5. Getting to the Point: Spatial Orientation and Deixis in PST and Nakota -- 6. Storytelling and the Embodiment of Symbolic Form -- 7. The Primacy of Movement in Assiniboine Culture -- 8. Conclusions -- Appendix A. Phonetic Key -- Appendix B. Kinetic Key.
ISBN
0292724802 (alk. paper)
LCCN
^^^94021820^
OCLC
30623834
Owning Institutions
Harvard Library