Collaborations in Language: From Documentation to Resurgence

In this lecture, Dr. Mark Turin (associate professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia) discusses several key partnerships in which he has been involved over the last two decades with members of historically marginalized Indigenous communities in the Himalayan region and, increasingly, with a committed global community of scholars in print, on air, and online. Turin draws on long-term fieldwork in Nepal and India with speakers of Thangmi, a community whose language has long been effaced from the national record in the states where it is spoken, while also reflecting critically on the decade he has spent directing two international, interdisciplinary collaborative research initiatives—the Digital Himalaya and World Oral Literature Projects. Turin also explores issues of orality, orthography, and representation. This lecture is the 13th annual anthropology lecture at Linfield College. The annual anthropology lecture showcases diverse perspectives from all four subfields of anthropology.