This volume presents a ground-breaking collection of essays inspired by the work of linguist, anthropologist and poet Paul Friedrich. The core of this collection is the dramatic and creative connection between language and culture: linguaculture. Each essay relates language at its most technical to culture in its most intangible forms.

The work represented here is based upon long-term immersion in multiple dimensions of culture, from the hallowed interiors of intellectual life to everyday encounters and observations. Balance between these two perspectives - objective and analytical systematicity on the one hand and human affect and individuality on the other - unify these works. Another specific bond is a hallmark of Paul Friedrich's method: a faithfully microscopic eye for detail combined with a panoramic vision of the cultural context as a whole. In keeping with Paul Friedrich's intellectual legacy, this collection is not grounded in, nor contained by, any single academic discipline. It is, rather, informed by a sensibility to the complex and multilayered interplay of the domains of human thought, perception and activity that we conventionally label "language" and "culture." Among the contributors to this volume are specialists in comparative literature, Slavic studies and Classics; poets, translators, literary critics, a professional singer and an avant-garde painter.

Table of Contents :

Anthropology on the Borderlines: Eclecticism and Synthesis in the Work of Paul Friedrich,1 John Attinasi

Romanticism, Meaning and Science Murray J. Leaf

Performative Symbols and their Relative Non-Arbitrariness: Representing Women in Iranian Traditional Theater William O. Beeman

The Neglected Poetics of Ideophony Janis B. Nuckolls

Sense and Sensuality in Sound Symbolic Meaning Ellen Zimmerman

Figuring out what an accent is: The short, personal history of an idea Bonnie Urciuoli

Thick Translation: Three Soundings John Leavitt

Seven Ways of Looking at Old Man Sage Jeffrey D. Anderson

Reputation and Deliberate History in Saga Iceland David Koester

Aztec Skins and Inca Bodies: An Exercise in Comparative Semiotics1 Hajime Nakatani

The Meaning of Dæl. Symbolic and Spatial Associations of the South Caucasian Goddess of Game Animals Kevin Tuite

Language and the Religion of Politics in Chiapas N. Louanna Furbee

The Tragedy of Words: Human Agency and Some Chinese Doubts Mary Scoggin

Generosity. A Story from Urban Siberia, 1990-1992 Dale Pesmen

Urban Myths and Street Children: Coping with Cultural and Environmental Hazards Clementine Fujimura

"I Know You, What You Were" The use and abuse of 'tradition' in interpreting ancient Greek poetry A. P. David

Why Did Tolstoy Hate King Lear? Katia Mitova

Translation as Interpretation: Vasily Zhukovsky's Two Translations of Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" Catherine O'Neil

Poetry and Music in the Structure of the Novel Pobezhdennye (The Defeated) by Irina Golovkina (Rimskaia-Korsakova) Maria Pavlovszky

Kafka's Sympathetic Irony. Grappling with Paul Friedrich’s double entendre1 Malynne Sternstein

Chinese Polytropes Jean DeBernardi

Verbal Art, Politics, and Personal Style in Highland New Guinea and Beyond Alan Rumsey