Piers Kelly

"The Eskayan language of Bohol in the southern Philippines has been an object of controversy ever since it came to light in the early 1980s. Written in an unusual script Eskayan bears no obvious similarity to any known language of the Philippines, a fact that has prompted speculation that it was either displaced from afar, fossilized from the deep past, or invented as an elaborate hoax. This book investigates the history of Eskayan through a systematic review of its writing system, grammar and lexicon, and carefully evaluates written and oral narratives provided by its contemporary speakers. The linguistic analysis largely supports the traditional view that Eskayan was the deliberate creation of a legendary ancestor by the name of Pinay. The study traces the identity of Pinay through the turbulent history of early 20th-century Bohol when the island suffered a series of catastrophes at the hands of the United States occupation. It was at this time that the ancestor Pinay was channelled by Mariano Datahan, a multilingual prophet who foretold that English and other languages would be abandoned and that Eskayan would one day be spoken by everyone in the world. To make sense of this situation, the book draws on theorizations of postcolonial resistance, language ideology, mimesis, and the utopian political dynamics of highland societies. In so doing, it offers a linguistic and ethnographic history of Eskayan and of the ideologies and historical circumstances that motivated its creation"--

Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines

The Last Language on Earth

Patrick McConvell

Sébastien Lacrampe

Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of 'universal kinship' whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions.

Piers Kelly

Books

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