How do societies change? This workshop brings together cultural and linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists to develop theoretical positions on the causes and nature of linguistic and cultural change. In these fields, issues having to do with contact and transformation have become central. Yet for all the discussion of globalization, modernity, hybridity, syncretism and the like, there is still little sustained theoretical work on the topic of change itself.
The workshop addresses this by bringing together scholars who in their empirical research focus on different kinds of change processes and dynamics (religious, political, economic, and linguistic), generating particular theoretical explanations. Cultural anthropologists often attend to the endurance of tradition or the nature of mixture. Linguistic anthropologists examine the role played by language(s) and their ideologies in social and political change, while sociolinguists focus on languages in contact and the role of variation in change. This workshop aims to synthesize the strengths of these fields, and contribute to the development of theories of the causes and types of cultural and linguistic change. Another goal of the workshop is to produce an edited volume on linguistic and cultural change that stimulates further work in this area. Given the importance of the topic of change in the contemporary world, the findings of this workshop will be of interest not only to anthropologists and linguists, but also to other social scientists and those with a policy background who are engaged in trying to understand social transformation.
