Fwd: Boas Seminar by Professor Sonia N. Das - Wednesday, April 29, from 2:10 PM to 4:00 PM
Sonia Das
From: Marilyn Astwood <mp...@columbia.edu>
Date: Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 2:03 PM
Subject: Boas Seminar by Professor Sonia N. Das - Wednesday, April 29, from 2:10 PM to 4:00 PM
To:
On Wednesday, April 29, from 2:10 PM to 4:00 PM, at 457 Schermerhorn Extension, Professor Sonia N. Das will be giving a lecture entitled “The Longest Lament.”
A light reception will follow in the Department of Anthropology Lounge, 465 Schermerhorn Extension.
Please email disab...@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. In-person. Non-CUID holders require advance registration for campus access. Please contact Jeanne Roche at jh3...@columbia.edu.
Drawing from linguistic anthropological literatures on emotion, ritual, and disability, this talk enacts a “metalament memorialization” (Wilce 2005) to witness, comment on, or dissect at times the lament of a 58-year-old African American man named Philip. He was stopped on August 12, 2016 by the Columbia Police Department in S.C., who arrested him for a DUI, hospitalized him for an arm injury received while he was being handcuffed and moved into the police car, and sedated and involuntarily moved him to the psychiatric unit. In juxtaposing the seeming length of his lament with the qualia of evanescence indexing his alternating indifference or opposition to archival documentation, I reconstruct its generic components – first accusation, then oratory, song, chant, and narrative, and lastly joke – to paint a “hypoicon” (defined by Charles Sanders Peirce as a type of icon “without legend or label” that can be “images, diagrams, and metaphors” (1955, 105)) of the escalating sequence of anger, rage, and madness attributed to minoritized persons denied the full spectrum of affordances to the First Amendment right to “free speech.”
Sonia Das is an Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University and former Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. Her research has contributed to theoretical frameworks in studies of language/semiotic ideologies and multilingualism by analyzing how sociolinguistic factors impact the life trajectories of “linguistic minorities” in colonial and postcolonial contexts – e.g. speakers of non-standard languages like Québécois French and African American English; persons educated in non-English medium schools like Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, Indian Tamil indentured laborers, Asian seafarers; and, forthcoming, persons with psychiatric disabilities. Her first monograph, Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (Oxford 2016), was awarded Honorable Mention for the Sapir Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and examines the heritage language learning and migration experiences of Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in Montréal, Québec, navigating Anglo/Franco language policies and laws. Her second book, Stopping for Blue Lights: Language, Technology, and Policing (contract pending with University of Toronto Press), is an ethnographic and linguistic study of the semiotic technologies shaping “free speech” before, during, and after traffic stops in Columbia, South Carolina. Her third book project examines the hybrid language practices and ideologies of everyday sociality among Asian commercial seafarers encountering maritime ministries on ports and cargo ships in the midst of shifting human-machine relations.
