Workshop Analyzing Change: Cultural and Linguistic Models

社会是如何变化的？本次研讨会汇集了文化和语言人类学家和社会语言学家，就语言和文化变化的原因和性质发展理论立场。在这些领域中，与接触和转变有关的问题已成为中心。然而，尽管有关于全球化、现代性、混合性、融合主义等的所有讨论，关于变革本身的主题仍然很少有持续的理论工作。研讨会通过汇集学者来解决这个问题，这些学者在他们的实证研究中关注不同类型的变化过程和动态（宗教，政治，经济和语言），产生特定的理论解释。文化人类学家经常关注传统的持久性或混合的本质。语言人类学家研究语言及其意识形态在社会和政治变革中所起的作用，而社会语言学家则关注接触中的语言和变化中的作用。本次研讨会旨在综合这些领域的优势，并为文化和语言变化的原因和类型的理论发展做出贡献。讲习班的另一个目标是编写一本关于语言和文化变化的编辑卷，以促进这一领域的进一步工作。鉴于当代世界变化这一主题的重要性，本次研讨会的发现不仅会引起人类学家和语言学家的兴趣，也会引起其他社会科学家和那些从事试图理解社会转型的具有政策背景的人的兴趣。

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.