Gunter Senft

Publications

Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
  • Senft, G. (2020). “.. to grasp the native's point of view..” — A plea for a holistic documentation of the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture and cognition. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 24(1), 7-30. doi:10.22363/2687-0088-2020-24-1-7-30.

    Abstract

    In his famous introduction to his monograph “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” Bronislaw
    Malinowski (1922: 24f.) points out that a “collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic
    narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus
    inscriptionum, as documents of native mentality”. This is one of the prerequisites to “grasp the
    native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. Malinowski managed
    to document a “Corpus Inscriptionum Agriculturae Quriviniensis” in his second volume of “Coral
    Gardens and their Magic” (1935 Vol II: 79-342). But he himself did not manage to come up with a
    holistic corpus inscriptionum for the Trobriand Islanders. One of the main aims I have been pursuing
    in my research on the Trobriand Islanders' language, culture, and cognition has been to fill this
    ethnolinguistic niche. In this essay, I report what I had to do to carry out this complex and ambitious
    project, what forms and kinds of linguistic and cultural competence I had to acquire, and how I
    planned my data collection during 16 long- and short-term field trips to the Trobriand Islands
    between 1982 and 2012. The paper ends with a critical assessment of my Trobriand endeavor.
  • Senft, G. (2020). Kampfschild - vayola. In T. Brüderlin, S. Schien, & S. Stoll (Eds.), Ausgepackt! 125Jahre Geschichte[n] im Museum Natur und Mensch (pp. 58-59). Freiburg: Michael Imhof Verlag.
  • Senft, G. (2020). 32 Kampfschild - dance or war shield - vayola. In T. Brüderlin, & S. Stoll (Eds.), Ausgepackt! 125Jahre Geschichte[n] im Museum Natur und Mensch. Texte zur Ausstellung, Städtische Museen Freiburg, vom 20. Juni 2020 bis 10. Januar 2021 (pp. 76-77). Freiburg: Städtische Museen.
  • Senft, G. (2016). "Masawa - bogeokwa si tuta!": Cultural and cognitive implications of the Trobriand Islanders' gradual loss of their knowledge of how to make a masawa canoe. In P. Meusburger, T. Freytag, & L. Suarsana (Eds.), Ethnic and Cultural Dimensions of Knowledge (pp. 229-256). Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.

    Abstract

    This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea used to construct their big seagoing masawa canoes and how they used to make their sails, what forms of different knowledge and expertise they needed to do this during various stages of the construction processes, how this knowledge was socially distributed, and the social implications of all the joint communal activities that were necessary until a new canoe could be launched. Then it tries to answer the question why the complex distributed knowledge of how to make a masawa has been gradually getting lost in most of the village communities on the Trobriand Islands; and finally it outlines and discusses the implications of this loss for the Trobriand Islanders' culture, for their social construction of reality, and for their indigenous cognitive capacities.
  • Senft, G. (2016). Pragmatics. In K. B. Jensen, R. T. Craig, J. Pooley, & E. Rothenbuhler (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (pp. 1586-1598). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect165.

    Abstract

    This entry takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic pragmatics. It discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture-specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. The entry discusses core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary view of the field, showing that linguistic pragmatics has its predecessors in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, and sociology.

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