Person: Harkness, Nicholas
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Harkness
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Nicholas
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Harkness, Nicholas
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Publication The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice(Annual Reviews, 2015-10-21) Harkness, NicholasThis review addresses general anthropological understandings of practice and a technical semiotic approach to pragmatics through the concept of qualia. Qualia are pragmatic signals (indexes) that materialize phenomenally in human activity as sensuous qualities. The pragmatic role of qualia is observed through exemplary accounts of the "feeling of doing" from the ethnographic record of practice in four domains: linguistic practices, phatic practices organized explicitly around social relations, practices organized around external "things," and body-focal practices. Attention to qualia enables anthropologists to consider ethnographically what is continuous semiotically across and within practices-from communication to embodiment. The article concludes with a discussion of praxis in relation to practice and pragmatics and offers suggestions for future research on qualia in the areas of awareness, language, and ritual.Publication Introduction: QUALIA(SAGE Publications, 2013) Chumley, Lily Hope; Harkness, NicholasThis special issue proposes that the semiotically theorized concept of 'qualia' is useful for anthropologists working on problems of the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Qualia are experiences of sensuous qualities (such as colors, textures, sounds, and smells) and feelings (such as satiety, anxiety, proximity, and otherness). The papers in this issue, first presented in a conference in honor of Nancy Munn and her groundbreaking book, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (1986), offer ethnographic accounts of the discursive, historical, and political conditions under which sensations come to be understood as being sensations of qualities – the qualia of softness, lightness, clarity, pain, stink, etc. – and in which those qualia are endowed with cultural value, whether positive or negative. The papers in this issue demonstrate that qualia are not just subjective mental experiences but rather sociocultural events of 'qualic' – and qualitative – orientation and evaluation. These papers thus provide models for the analysis of experience by calling into question what counts for social groups as the senses, materiality or immateriality, interiority, embodiment, or exteriority.Publication Vowel Harmony Redux: Correct Sounds, English Loan Words, and the Sociocultural Life of a Phonological Structure in Korean(Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing), 2012) Harkness, NicholasThis paper examines an ideology of standard pronunciation and spelling of English loan words in South Korea through the lens of Korean vowel harmony. I focus specifically on the alternation between an older Japanese-style ‘a’[a] and a newer Korean-style ‘ŏ’[ɔ] for the mapping of mid-vowels from English to Korean. The opposition between ‘a’ and ‘ŏ’ also figures into the dichotomy of vowel classes between ‘yang’ or ‘light’ vowels and ‘yin’ or ‘dark’ vowels in Korean vowel harmony. This opposition is pervasive in Korean's rich stock of denotationally iconic words (e.g. onomatopoeia), where ablaut between vowel classes produces semantic and pragmatic contrasts. I suggest that this latter structure of phonological opposition has an influence on speakers’ perceptions of vowel difference and associated values in English loan words, despite an overarching ideology of standard pronunciation that is based on assumptions about phonetic fidelity.Publication Culture and Interdiscursivity in Korean Fricative Voice Gestures(Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing), 2011) Harkness, NicholasThis paper explores the cultural significance of a type of audible gesture in Korean speech that I call the Fricative Voice Gesture (FVG). I distinguish between two forms of this gesture: the reactive FVG, which serves as a self-standing utterance that signals personally felt intensity, and the prosodic FVG, which can be superimposed upon an utterance as a form of intensification. Based on an ethnographically informed analysis of interviews, Christian sermons, and advertisements for soju, a Korean spirit, in South Korea, I view the interdiscursive link between reactive and prosodic FVGs in terms of the ongoing cultural revalorization of the sound shape. I focus in particular on the shift from harsher to softer FVGs—and their omission altogether—according to different, but related, paradigms of social differentiation such as class, gender, and age.Publication Softer Soju in South Korea(SAGE Publications, 2013) Harkness, NicholasThis paper explores the ascendancy of 'softness' in South Korea as it is experienced through the qualia of one of Korea’s most important social rituals: drinking soju. I combine an analysis of ethnographic evidence with widely-distributed advertisements to show how the experience of an abstract quality, softness, is made concrete by the cultural-semiotic renderings – and genderings – of alcohol consumption in various sensory modalities, including gustation, audition, kinaesthesis, and states of overall drunkenness. I introduce the concept of 'qualic transitivity' to account for the cross-modal perception of qualia as instances of the same quality. I argue that dramatic shifts in the qualia of soju and its consumption are emblematic of a higher-order change in how the ideal relationship between liquor and gender is being reconceptualized in contemporary South Korean society.Publication Anthropology at the Phonosonic Nexus(Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing), 2011) Harkness, NicholasPublication Qualities, Qualia, and Qualisigns: The Case of Softer Soju in South Korea(Elsevier, 2011) Harkness, NicholasPublication Encore!: Homecoming Recitals in Christian South Korea(Muse - Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) Harkness, Nicholas"Homecoming Recitals" (kwiguk tokch'anghoe) in South Korea are events in which singers of European-style classical music, after having studied and worked professionally abroad, return home and are integrated into the social and musical life of Seoul. This article explores what appear to be blatant contradictions in the key elements of the recital. Although the recitals are presented as public events and the singers as professionals, the audience consists almost entirely of persons related to the singer through kinship, school, or church. And although the recitals consist of secular art and operatic music, they almost always end with an encore featuring a Christian hymn or song. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in the churches and colleges of music in Seoul, I explain how these seemingly contradictory elements, in fact, work together in the ritual function of the recital, which I argue is to manage the transition from "abroad" to "home" by producing transformative effects for both performer and audience.Publication Transducing a Sermon, Inducing Conversion(University of California Press, 2017) Harkness, NicholasThis paper is an analysis of the final sermon of Billy Graham’s 1973 Crusade in Seoul, South Korea, when he preached to a crowd estimated to exceed one million people. Next to Graham at the pulpit was Billy Jang Hwan Kim, a preacher who, in his capacity as interpreter, translated Graham’s sermon verbally and peri-verbally—utterance by utterance, tone by tone, gesture by gesture—for the Koreanspeaking audience. I examine the dynamic pragmatics (for example, chronotopic formulations, deictic calibrations, voicing and register effects, and indexical dimensions of entextualization) by which a sermonic copy across linguistic codes became an evangelical conduit between Cold War polities. In so doing, I demonstrate how the scope of intertextual analysis can be expanded productively from the narrow translation of denotation across codes to the broader indexical processes of semiotic ‘‘transduction’’ across domains of cultural semiosis.Publication A bottleneck in the plenum(HAU, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016) Harkness, Nicholas