Doctoral Dissertation Research: Analyzing Textually Mediated Social Relations across Writing Systems

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project, which trains a graduate student in the methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, explores how social relations are conditioned and defined by the material and visual components of written texts across different societies and writing systems. Existing comparative research on textual practices focuses on alphabetic writing systems such as English, which represent individual speech sounds in sequence. The research has tended to be empirically weaker in its consideration of the world's vast array of non-alphabetic systems such as pictographic and pictographically-inclined systems, which draw on the visual resemblance of written characters to things. Investigating written texts as material, visual media will deepen our understanding of how writing and reading shape social relationships, particularly within societies that use (or once used) non-alphabetic writing. Given the increasing role of visually-rich texts in digital media throughout the world, research findings should be especially important to understanding visual design in its broadest sense, with implications for visual design practices in the U.S. and elsewhere. Through 15 months of ethnographic and archival research, Katherine Dimmery, under the supervision of Dr. Erik Mueggler of the University of Michigan, will explore whether human/material engagements can be shown to be inherently social, sharing many of the structural features of face-to-face interactions, such as having dialogic emergent qualities. Semiotic approaches to materiality have tended to analyze how materials condition human forms of sociality. To test whether this theoretical assumption holds, the project looks textual practices among the Naxi, a Tibeto-Burman ethnic minority of rural southwest China known for their pictographic writing system. The Naxi writing system (and the endangered language it documents) is important for analyzing textual practice because unlike Western writing systems build connections between orthography and speech to signify symbolically, this pictographic system establishes reference based on visual similarity (or iconicity) between orthographic elements and physical objects. Focusing on the ongoing shift of this writing towards phonetic representation of speech, the project aims to understand (1) how Naxi textual practices have been transmitted across China's "Great Divide" and into the present; (2) how increasing Western and Chinese presence in the southwest during that period contributed to phoneticization, and (3) how these changes pose problems for existing Naxi forms of sociality and personhood. The key method of this project, an elaboration of traditional ethnographic participant observation, involves repatriating copies of pre-1949 Naxi texts from an archive at Beijing's Minzu University back to residents of Baidi, a Naxi community, and pursuing collaborative translation with Baidi residents using the texts. This work should yield data on the old texts as well as on their re-integration (or not) into contemporary life. In addition, currently in-use texts will be translated, observed in use, and documented photographically page by page, ultimately to produce a database of archival and in-use texts. The project will contribute to understanding the diverse ways that written texts shape social relations, and offer lens through which to trace post-1949 social transitions among China's rural, ethnic minority populations. By making the project's database available online through collaboration with the University of Michigan's Deep Blue archive, the research contributes to preserving a detailed record for future researchers.