Typology of Signed Languages: Differentiation through Kinship Terminology

Nearly all such studies have sought to understand the linguistic constraints of spoken languages, while largely neglecting signed languages. Despite the fact that spoken languages can be classified into types, signed languages are generally assumed to be clustered all together in one type which the current study challenges. Exploring the potential for a varied typology among signed languages requires identifying patterns across a sampling of geographically distinct and historically unrelated signed languages to formulate linguistic generalizations. To that end this study adopts Greenbergs 1966 analysis of Universals of Kinship Terminology, it examines the linguistic patterns that emerge from a comparison of kinship terminology in 40 signed languages, specifying what patterns can be seen in visual-gestural languages. Findings of this study revealed that form-function mappings of specific semantic domains are constructed by different strategies including: iconicity motivated by universal human and cultural-specific traits, arbitrary elements, and linguistic economy (semantic derivation). Patterns reveal that kin terms are motivated yet contain degrees of arbitrariness, suggesting a continuum of interaction of arbitrariness and iconicity. While iconicity is undeniably pervasive in signed languages, salient properties manifested in signed kinship terminology are not universal, but instead reflect the cultural and cognitive perception experienced by deaf people within their linguistic communities. As a result iconic properties framed by language-specific and cultural specific mappings lend to variations in signs, describing the trend that signed forms\u27 phonological properties are not simply phonemic representations, but instead are phonological properties that inherently signify semantic properties. In turn, iconicity emerges as an undeniable and powerful tool of schematization used to form signs in a visual-spatial modality. Data showed some kin terms were motivated by patterns of specific semantic-phonological interdependency. These patterns identified occurrences of semantic derivation and semantic extension within language-specific sets of kin terms. Signed kin terms are formed by combinations of initialization, fingerspelling/character writing constructions, and iconic and arbitrary descriptions. However, organization of kin terms by linguistic processes may not parallel what Greenberg found in his study of spoken languages. The nature of modality clearly manifests in different ways of organizing signed languages and spoken languages; illustrated by how markedness manifests differently. The extent of linguistic phenomenon seen in the domain of kinship terminology underscores the importance of exploring semantics through studies of phonology, morphology, and grammar in signed languages. Typological analyses of signed languages contribute significantly to understanding what linguistic traits appear consistently through all languages, both spoken and signed, by revealing more about the effects of the modality-independent and modality-dependent behaviors of languages in defining language universals

An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself

The possibility of perfection: Living utopia in contemporary Mashhad

This thesis examines how overlapping legacies of ancient, medieval, modern, and finally Revolutionary Islamic and Iranian utopianism come to be experienced amidst quotidian social moments in contemporary Mashhad, the second largest city in the Islamic Republic. I argue that this legacy can be defined as a commitment to, a concern for, and a belief in, the possibility of achieving perfection or completion, not as something abstract and remote but instead as a palpable and achievable experience. Struck by my interlocutors pervasive use of the term 'complete' or 'perfect' [kamel], alongside related terminology like 'ideal' [ideal] and 'the best' [behtarin], to describe a myriad of social phenomena, these concepts became a window through which to analyse utopia as a social form as it was experienced and expressed in the everyday. Using the organising metaphor of refraction, I hold that we can sense the legacies of utopianism not necessarily as a linear or one-to-one connection to historic precedent, but rather as inheritances that run through the social life of my interlocutors, still very much alive even as they are subtle. Each chapter in this thesis explores a different way in which and is a meditation upon how this utopianism refracted through the social, beginning with cultures of exceptionalism, through wealth creation, education, sound, sincerity, and finally, time. This thesis responds to two areas of contemporary anthropological debate. The first is material that has analysed what is collectively typically referred to as the anthropology of the good, including content relating to the stuff of virtue, ethics, and the eudaimonic (e.g. Fassin, 2008; Laidlaw, 2002, 2014; Robbins, 2007, 2013). My specific intervention is to encourage us as anthropologists to conceptualise not just how our informants understood what a good life was, but what the best life was, a seemingly small, but I contend, consequential difference. Secondly, this thesis provides an alternative to pre-existing major anthropological works on Iran over the past decade (e.g. Khosravi, 2008, 2017; Mahdavi, 2009; Varzi, 2006) or so. This corpus of material has focused largely on paradigmatic concerns of resistance to the Islamist polity, particularly among youth populations, and the failure of the government to create Islamic subjects. In contrast, this thesis recognises the limitations of such approaches, and looks to go beyond them. In exploring the theme of utopia and its legacies, I make a comment not on the durability, success, or lack thereof of the Islamist government, but rather look to the impact of elements that stretch back past the Revolutionary moment into a deeper history. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork over two visits to Mashhad between 2015 and 2018, this thesis is one of the growing body of contemporary ethnographies of Iran based on research conducted outside the country's capital, Tehran, and only the second to be written in Mashhad (cf Olszewska, 2015). I conducted research predominantly among members of the middle class living in Mashhad's developing western suburbs, particularly in those regions to the west and north of Park-e Mellat, a major recreation site just to the west of the city's ring road. Much of this research took place in the homes of the families of a handful of key informants who lived in those suburbs, and bridged a gamut of informants from children, to parents, to grandparents. Nonetheless, I prefer not to not to define or delimit my work by a specific sub-community or group, following instead the theme of perfectionism as it spread out in diverse directions

Terrestrial Things: War, Language, and Value in Afghanistan

This dissertation is an ethnographic engagement with the social and political space of Afghanistan and how it has been shaped by the intensities of warfare in the last decade, with a focus on the realms of language, representation and economy. Taking Kabul as the panoramic ground of profound social and epistemological transformations, the dissertation traces a crucial shift beginning in 2011-2012, from a highly speculative war economy (a “green zone economy” that privileged the commodification of language and culture and the privatization of war, with crisis as an alibi for governmentality) to one based on equally speculative practices of prospecting for natural resources in the Afghan underground: where an estimated three trillion dollars’ worth of copper, gold, iron-ore, marble and oil & gas is presumed to lie in wait. I illustrate the nuanced epistemological concerns and political contestations that stem from an Afghan effort to distinguish between sources of violence and sources of economic value (especially in the aftermath of Kabul’s demilitarization) in a milieu where foreign militaries presuppose that civilians and insurgents cannot be distinguished, except through the medium of war-time translation and collaboration. The twin concern with generalized forms of death dealing and tragedy, on one hand, and the moral and political exigency for Afghans to distinguish between a world of appearances and one of essences (the Islamic and Quranic interpretation of zahir (exterior/surface) and batin (interior/ground), on the other, opens onto a set of epistemological concerns undergirded by several oppositions, which I argue, are central to American war making. I illustrate that the movement between these artificial binaries (Persian/Pashto and English, literacy and illiteracy, rationality and irrationality, repetition and transformation) inspires aspirational fantasy on an economic frontier and invests some Afghans (especially those who speak English and are literate) with the power of calculative reason (aql) and understanding (fahm and dânish), while condemning those who are illiterate (and sometimes those who only speak Persian and/or Pashto) to forms physical supplementarity and crisis--from literally being expendable prosthetic bodies (human body armor) to the breakdown of meaning in incestuous relations and the intensification of moral crisis. In this context, conventional writing and the felt lack of its absence illustrate for us the logic of war in more consequential ways. The belief that writing is the domain of what can be known (rationally understood) and universally applied invigorates the ideology of literate persons and war-time collaborators with shocking breadth and tenacity. It organizes antagonisms between persons and structures forms of death-dealing. I trace how the production of a binary around literacy and illiteracy produces, even in moments of technological acquisition, the retrospective fantasy that orality is not only the prior but also the locus of unfettered subversion and ignorance of the law. This misrecognition of linguistic diversity as lack comes to inform, in contexts of unprecedented transnational war-time activity, the charge that Afghans are beholden to an excessive localism that fuels the predicaments of the Afghan State and errors of judgement (such as incestuous transgressions, and suicide bombing) which would destroy society altogether. The issue of vulnerability to ideological suasion and excess emerges alongside these presuppositions. It informs the belief that the incapacity to exercise reason (due to illiteracy) renders Afghans vulnerable to diverse forms of propaganda and the inability to distinguish between the world of appearances (both technological media images and the Islamic notion of the zahir (surface manifestation)) and reality. I trace these complexities through a series of intense contact points where these oppositions come into play and determine forms of access and violence 1) in translational contexts during combat missions where linguistic transformation results in deadly misunderstanding 2) in familial contexts and contestations over property, where the failure of interpersonal and extrajudicial mediation results in mass murder 3) in courtrooms where failed suicide bombers (who did not detonate out of technological error or because they were attacked by members of the Afghan National Police) are subject to the limitations of oral testimony and to the belief that photographic evidence proves that they will repeat their crimes if released from prison 4) instances of incest that arise out of illiteracy and, when exposed, generate moral crisis 5) the production of zones of exteriority and interiority (especially in Kabul’s Green Zone) that rely on phamakological inclusion and reproduce the literal supplementarity of Afghan bodies 6) the attempt to find the “real” sources of economic value as part of a multi-national gold and mineral extraction endeavor—the continuation of an obsession with the Afghan ground that has a long imperial history from the 1800’s onwards (when it was assessed through botanical, railway and coal prospecting missions). Together, these sites and the consideration of the earthen terrain alongside the terrain of rationality and linguistic difference situate us in the midst of wartime catastrophe. They foreground the fantasy that rationalism is the sine qua non of modernism, and the belief that literacy is the basis for reflective and intellectual thought, and for being human. But what they also disclose for us is that in its absence you can (and sometimes must) die

Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future

The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses, organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security, the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics. We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.Comment: Author's copy of the book published under ISBN: 978-620-4-74421-

Analysis and views on the report of the reflection group on NATO 2030: United for a new era

During London Summit held in 2019, allied leaders had a substantive discussion, among other political and security issues, to initiate a “reflection process in order to further strengthen the political dimension of NATO. In that regard Secretary General Stoltenberg in 2019 stressed that “as the world changes, NATO will continue to change”. Going back in the past, we can notice that since its foundation in 1949, NATO has faced numerous challenges related to its own survival. All those adaptations have helped NATO to build appropriate tools and mechanisms and gain political and military strength. Today, NATO is strong, but it has to continue to adapt and respond to a changing security environment. Looking up to 2030, the need for collective defence of the Alliance to protect Europe and North America against threats to their physical security and democratic way of life is as strong as ever. Today, and in the future NATO has to strengthen its political and military adaptation by developing a capability for dealing with emerging challenging threats. To continue adapting the Alliance to this unpredictability, Allied leaders launched the NATO 2030 initiative. Today, the world does not just face one clear challenge, but multiple, complex challenges, from pandemics to infodemics, from climate change to disruptive technologies. So far, well-known threats like terrorism, in all its forms and manifestations will persist, even as new risks loom from pandemics and climate change, to the emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs) that present both dangers and opportunities for the Alliance. Fulfilling this role will require even greater cohesion and ability to act collectively against shared threats. This is a way for NATO to be in a stronger position than the others, both in the fight to protect the freedom and security of its members and in acting as an essential pillar of an open and stable international order. The initiation of the reflection process is a serious step towards the preparation of a new Alliance`s Strategic Concept that will replace the existing one from 2010 and pave the way for the development of the Alliance until 2030 and beyond

Redefining Community in Intercultural Context

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