Author Archives: Piers Kelly

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The Summer Syllabus: Best commentaries of 2020

It’s much smaller list this year, probably because of all the madness: Covid, homeschooling, a book manuscript, grant applications, illness. For all these reasons I did a lot less of my usual idle and aimless reading. The stand-out article is Married (Happily) With Issues (even though it was published yonks ago), and I loved the poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith. 

Academia

Anthropology/ethnography

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Just published

New blog post at Hiphilangsci: the return of the human in the study of writing

I have a new blog post at History and Philosophy of the Language sciences on how the study of writing is returning to human-centric practice-based framework, and why this is a good thing.

Written production generates new practices but it is also an activity that is recruited into existing social routines. These routines might be concerned with the management of labour and its products, the projection of political power, the elaboration of myth, and the performance of ritual including communications with the supernatural world. In effect, writing is a practice that is seemingly bound up in the reproduction and maintenance of social orders.

Enjoy!

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Uncategorized

Message stick news

I’ve been terrible at updating this blog this year, for obvious reasons, but I’m going to spell them out anyway as succinctly as possible: pandemic, homeschooling, book manuscript, funding applications.

A round-up of recent news:

Over and out.

This blog is rarely updated! If you want an email notification whenever there is a new post, click on the follow button right at the top ↑ that looks like this: Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 10.02.26 am  You can also use a service called Blogtrottr.

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Collection fishing

How good curatorial decisions can end up distorting a collection

In this post I wanted to reflect on a couple of my recent experiences of being led down the garden path by later additions or interventions into archival metadata. I don’t want to give the impression that I think curators and archivists are hopelessly ignorant and misguided. On the contrary, these examples illustrate the kinds of things that can go wrong when everyone is ostensibly doing the right thing. So I’m not sure if there will be any clear lessons except to emphasise the truism that interpretation is an ongoing, open-ended process fraught with danger as well as discovery.

To start with, both of these cases were affected by the fact that many collecting institutions make only a very thin layer of information available online for the public. There is no conspiracy here. The sheer person-power involved in digitising catalogues and card files is no doubt well outside of the budget range of most small- or middle-sized institutions. Even those larger museums that have managed to transfer all the hardcopy information onto spreadsheets may not have not taken the next step of turning those spreadsheets into searchable online databases.

This is why, wherever possible, it makes sense to visit museums in-person (global health crises permitting). Quite apart from being able to examine the objects themselves, it allows the researcher to compare the online information with the in-house spreadsheet, the paper card files and the catalogue volumes. Very often information is lost when it is transferred onto a spreadsheet, for example, we lose the hand-drawn diagrams, the queries in the margins and even the different handwriting styles that can tell you if more than one person added to the description.

Catalogue entries of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin

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What I'm reading

The Summer Syllabus: Best commentaries of 2019

Back in the old country after a full and challenging year. In honour of the switch to the southern hemisphere, the list returns to it’s original Summer title. There’s a lot of ‘funny’ this year. Lucky you! I’ve decided to put an asterisk next to pieces that I especially liked for those who prefer a slimmer list.

Academia

Anthropology/ethnography

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What I'm reading

When words look and feel like their meanings

I’ve finally had a good look at Jean-François Champollion’s 1824 Précis, the book in which he lays out his famous decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course, I didn’t read every last sentence of its 588 pages, and I’m even surprised that I got through its full title: Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens, ou, Recherche sur les éléments premiers de cette écriture sacrée.

But I did get a sense of his achievement, including the rivalry with other contemporary Egyptologists such as Thomas Young, and his fine attention to detail witnessed especially in the beautiful concordance tables of hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts:

As someone who is absolutely not an Egyptologist, I was also quite happy to learn a few stray things along the way. For example, that the Rosetta stone did not provide an instant skeleton key to unravel the mystery, as popularly supposed. Continue reading →

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What I'm reading

The Winter Syllabus: Best commentaries of 2018

An odd list for an odd year. I have probably spent more time frantically reading about Brexit than anything else, but I assure you there is no Brexit here because we all deserve happiness. Next year I may struggle to maintain myself. (In case you’re wondering, Bloomberg has the best commentary.)

Strangely I read almost nothing about sex that was worth including in this list. The recent Quartz piece only made the cut because, as Jason Wilson put it, it’s a “sly, deadpan masterpiece”. Also, its title is the opposite of its actual message suggesting that the editor didn’t really read it.

Meanwhile, the over-representation of articles on academia reflects both the quality of commentaries in 2018, as well as my increasing anxiety about what the research sector is really all about and whether I’m in danger of going down with the ship.

Categories are somewhat arbitrary, and many of the pieces could be under several headings at once. Debbie Cameron’s ‘Shibboleths’, for example, seems to belong almost everywhere.

Enjoy! And if you come across any great or thought-provoking writing in 2019, please send it my way.

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Just published

Insights from the new scripts of West Africa: new publication

I have a chapter ‘The Invention, Transmission and Evolution of Writing: Insights from the New Scripts of West Africa’ in the recently released volume Paths into script formation in the ancient Mediterranean, edited by Silvia Ferrara and Miguel Valério.

Most other chapters cover scripts and graphic codes of the ancient Agean, Iberia, Anatolia and Egypt. But the final section, titled Patterns and Diversity: A World of Possibilities, has a paper by Gordon Whittaker on Aztec Hieroglyphics and one by me on emergent West African scripts.

What does West Africa have to do with Mesoamerica or the ancient Mediterranean, I hear you gasp in utter astonishment? Quite simply, these are all environments where a great deal of writerly invention has happened, with isolated scripts developing along their own peculiar trajectories.

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Just published

Messianic literacy in Zomia, or Chapter 6¾

I have a paper that has just come out in its English version in a writing-themed edition of Terrain.  In the same issue there are contributions from Olivier Morin, Pierre Déléage, Cécile Guillaume-Pey, Silvia Ferrara, Ramon Sarró, Cédric Vincent, Stephen Chrisomalis, Jean Dubuffet and an interview with Stephen Houston.

The journal is exquisitely typeset, and if you have institutional access you can see the whole thing here.

My paper is “The art of not being legible: Invented writing systems as technologies of resistance in mainland Southeast Asia“.

Access a pre-print here.

I cover the histories of nine writing systems of the mainland Southeast Asian highlands, all invented between 1844 and 1959 within traditionally non-literate communities.

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