Into the COLAverse – Episode 23: Anthony K. Webster

Welcome to into the verse A podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama. As we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It’s my absolute pleasure and honor to be here with Anthony Webster, professor in the Department of Anthropology here with us at UT Austin who focuses on ethno poetics or verbal artistry, especially among Navajo’s. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you. Thank you for, for having me. So Anthony to share with us our listeners your journey. You know how we all have, you know that maybe that moment or a series of moments when something kind of triggered or set us on the path that has led us to gosh, all the research and this, this passionate interest in what we do in our particular areas of expertise. Can you share your journey with us, Anthony? Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s, it’s interesting in some ways studying Navajo poetry was not, was not my original intention and I’ll, I can say something about that. in a minute. But my interest in language and in, in indigenous native issues really be came about it when I was was young. My, my parents were, were very committed to to having my brothers and I think about things and be aware of the, the world around us. And and my, my father was interested in, in indigenous issues since the seventies and the early eighties when, when a number of things were going on. And he was very, he was very much about making sure that my brothers and I understood that that native peoples existed now in the present and not what we were seeing in in westerns and and on TV. And, and so he, he really instilled that kind of knowledge of, of, of something of the world around us in that respect. My mother was very interested in literature and poetry and had written some poetry when she was younger and she really encouraged my brothers and I to, to be avid readers and to, to be interested in you know, all kinds of things. And, and for me, poetry and, and literature were also ways to think about language. And I was very interested in language and the way people used language and the ways that it, it created the light and, and all of those kinds of things. And so when I went, I started my undergrad degree at the University of Maine. And I, I took a class with, Richard Emerick, who was a, an anthropologist who had worked with the Havasupai and, in, in the, the southwest, the Grand Canyon area. And, and I always, I had known something about anthropology but was taking that class that really kind of inspired me to, to, to think that anthropology might be the thing I’d, I’d be interested in before that I’d moved from a theater major to an English Lit major. And following the money, I decided on an anthropology major would be a, a really nice thing to do. And, and then I took a class with Sandy Ives who was a folklorist. And, and it was in that class that we read some Barry Tolkien who was a, a who had a textbook on folklore. But he’d also worked with Navajos on Navajo language and culture things. And, and so II I got interested in that and then I ended up transferring to Purdue. I’m originally from Indiana. And, and I, I took classes with Marine Anderson who really encouraged me to, to think about linguistic anthropology. She herself was a linguistic anthropologist and I, and I took classes with Jack O Waddell and, oh, Michael Watson, all of whom really were very encouraging to me. And when I decided to go to graduate school, they were very excited and, and relatively pleased I think. And so I, I did my my ma at, at New Mexico State and I worked with Scott Rushworth on Chia and Mescalero Apache. And I did language documentation stuff. And I was, I got interested in ethno poetics and, and interested in the way that people tell stories, the kind of organizing structure of, of those kinds of things. And, and so I did my, my master’s thesis on, on discourse particles in Chela Apache on, on how they organized that is the, the little things like ans and the, and, and butts and things like that, that structure a narrative and I, and how they worked in a and in, in Apache. And then when I decided to do my dissertation, I, I applied to the University of Texas. And I, I wanted to because I was interested in, in speech play and verbal art and, and, and the pleasure that language can, can, can give us and, and Joel Scherer was, was very much interested in those things. And Tony Woodbury, who still teaches at, at ut both of them were inter had worked on Yup in Tony’s case and Kuna in in Joel’s case. And, and so I, I ended up at the University of Texas for graduate school during my dissertation. And I had originally wanted to, to do a dissertation looking at continuity and change in mescal and Chia Apache verbal art. And that ended up not being a possibility for, for reasons that on, on the Melero reservation, it just didn’t seem like a good time to do a dissertation project. So then I was, I was really left without AAA dissertation project and I, I ended up going up to the Navajo reservation and, and Mescalero chia are related to linguistically Navajo. They’re Southern alphabet and languages, they’re totally related languages. So, so the fact that I end up doing Navajo stuff is not a, a huge jump in so far as the Apache stuff kind of introduced me to Southern Athabaskan languages, which are a very interesting language family. And, but I went up to the Navajo Nation and I was up in Shiprock, which is way up in the, the north part of New Mexico and the reservation. And I was talking to a linguist named Clay and I was, I was explaining the kinds of things I was interested in and I had mentioned poetry to him and he, he was like, hang on a second. and he, he, he ended up calling this Navajo on the phone and, and telling him who I was and what I was interested in. And, and he, and then Clay told me he’s like, you know, this Navajo guy who I think you should talk to, he’s in window rock, he’s at the Navajo Nation Inn. And he said, if you can get down there before he leaves he’ll, he’ll talk to you. And, and so it’s, it’s a bit of a drive from, from window rock to Shiprock and, and like, but II, I drove down there and it was Wexley Jim, is a poet who writes in Navajo. He would go on to be Vice president of the Navajo Nation and he and I sat and talked probably for a couple of hours and it was in that conversation that I, I figured out my dissertation project would be to, to look at contemporary Navajo poetry read and, you know, written and performed by, by Navajos. And so I, I then drove back to Austin, Texas. And I, I told my advisor Joel, I was like, this is the project that I’m going to do and and Joel who was very good about these things, he was like, that’s great. It’s a great project and it’s an even better project than you were originally going to do. And so that’s, that, that’s how I ended up you know, doing Navajo poetry for my dissertation. And now 23 years later, II, I still seem to be doing it. Yeah, that makes absolute sense. Also given the first, you know, your first, one of your first book, major book publications, the 2009 explorations in Navajo poetry and poetics. But before we jump into some of the kind of details and, and some of, you know, this great range of, you know, incredible books you’ve published. Tell me what, you know, for the lay person. What, like, what is linguistic anthropology. And many of us may have heard of Franz Boas. and the importance of his work. but, you know, in a, in a nutshell, what is linguistic anthropology? And why does it matter? Yeah. I mean, so linguistic anthropology is a curious thing. It’s the smallest of the sub field of anthropology and, and it, and Franz Boas was an important figure in the kind of creation of linguistic anthropology. and linguistic anthropology. The way that it is now is, is very much interested in how people use language and for various kinds of reasons in poetry, in greetings in, in leave takings in oratory and speech making. But also in the ways that, you know, language can, can reproduce certain kinds of racist assumptions, gender assumptions and things like that, all those kinds of things. There’s AAA relationship between linguistic anthropology and, and socio linguistic. I would say the emphasis is slightly different for linguistic anthropology. At least the, the way that I think of it, it’s, it’s people using language. And so language is a way to think about people and culture. In socio linguistics. It, it’s, it’s people using language. But the question is about language and language is kind of the at the, at the forefront. And I, I know if there was a sociolinguistic here they might disagree with that. So, I apologize but, but it’s interested in, in the ways that people use language in, in all kinds of ways. But for, for various kinds of purposes, yeah. And so important, especially if we are all working in our different ways to generate knowledge and for future generations, that’s a holistic humanistic kind of knowledge, right? All encompassing and not leaving folks out as we know. That has been the case in the past. And why your work with Navajo poetry in particular is so, so absolutely important. Putting writers and artists at the forefront, let me ask you while we’re, while I’m on that topic, Ethno poetics and Navajo poetry, this is, is obviously something really like a big focus for you. It’s very important to your work to, to us reading your work to the Navajo that are making this work. You even, you know, there’s a, in one of your pieces you taught you, you help us understand interlingua, but tell us, take us on this journey, this maybe small journey of yours. really fascinating beautiful journey in and through Navajo poetry. Yeah. So I’ll, I’ll say something about ethno poetics and then, and then something about Navajo poetics. So some of the, the earliest stuff that I read in, in, in anthropology, at least in linguistic anthropology were, were by people like Del Heims and and Dennis Ted Lock. And they were very much interested in, in, in poetics and in poetry in the ways that language, languages are organized to, to do poetic kinds of things. And in particular, in the, the things that might not otherwise get noticed in, in thinking about language. Because so much focus is often on, on content, on referential and, and not enough on the ways that language kind of of does other kinds of things, plays with things and, and creates, you know, these kinds of effective kinds of, of senses as well. And, and so ethno poetics, if at one point could have been thought of as the literatures of other people. And over time, my own thinking of it is that it’s, it’s a way, it’s more of a way of understanding poetry. It’s, it’s the ethnography of poetic practices. And, and this was in influenced greatly by my advisor Joel Scherzer and this notion of a discourse centered approach to language and culture, which he felt that the thing that people should look at and not everybody but, but some people anyway, should look at is, is forms of speech, play and verbal art and not as, as, as something on the way to something else, but as, as something in its own right, that gives people a great deal of pleasure, a great deal of satisfaction that people are rather proud of. and, and that really, you know, is a high value kind of thing for people. And 11 understands it ethnographically. And that, I mean, that, that attitude really, it spoke to me and it, it’s, it’s been something that’s been, you know, at the top of my, my mind for a long time. And so when I, when I went out to, to do work with, with Navajos, concerning their, their poetry, I, I wanted to, to see what was going on in, in the Navajo poetry and also what was going on in the, the poetry that’s written in, in English, the poetry that’s written in Navajo, English which is a, a distinctive variety of English open on the reservation and, and the ways that things like novel, which is a kind of code mix the way of combining to my buddy, right? To take a Navajo shit and my and, and add to it to buddy and to see how these kinds of things were being done. And so things like pun turn out to be really, really important for some poets. Wexley jim, a lot of his poetry is about punning and, and he, he and puns in Navajo, it’s not this or that, it’s this and that simultaneously. And, and so that you, you hold these two or more because good poems may not just have two things about them. You hold them simultaneously and you contemplate their relationships and, and puns. So puns do certain kinds of work, they prompt thinking and that’s a good thing in, in, in a kind of Navajo philosophy that people have explained to me. And, and so some of the puns, you know, work because of these kinds of punning. But punning occurs all over the place. People, you know, people that I know like to pun and they like to play with language both within Navajo and across languages. So God is a good pun because it’s, it’s both a deity in say the Western tradition. But it’s also a juniper tree in Navajo. And so, you know, God has this nice kind of valency. It fits in two codes simultaneously and, and one can think about that, right? And there are good jokes about God and Christmas trees and one can, one can imagine how those things go. And, and so punning became a kind of important kind of thing. And the other thing about punting is that it, it doesn’t tell you what to decide. It, it, it’s ambiguous and it, it leaves that up to you. You’re your own boss in a sense, you have to come to these things on your own. And that is something that, that many Navajos explained to me that you, you shouldn’t be bossy with people, you should let them make their own decisions. And part of the point of puns and end of poetry and literature and this isn’t just in Navajo is to let people figure things out on their own to, to take them to a place and give them enough information where they can, can kind of make decisions, moral decisions as it were. And many of Rex Jim’s homes are, are moral. But, but he’s not alone in that many, many of the Navajo poets. And I think poetry is a good way of expressing certain kinds of or presenting moral options to people without forcing it on them. And so, so punning became an interesting thing, Opon sound symbolism, which is the, the way that, you know, language is relate, evoke the, the movements and, and sounds of things in the world. And so, you know, Navajo has things like a, you know, but to make a sucking sound or a kissing sound, that’s how it goes. And so so to look at those kinds of, of poetic devices in Navajo and then also to see what, what got used, what gets transferred into English, what doesn’t get transferred into English. And so a lot of my early research was, was really about that relationship between what worked in, in Navajo poetry and what kinds of things might have been transferred into to English language, poetry or were not transferred into English poetry. And, and so so, you know, and so those were the kinds of things I began to, to, to look at and, you know, and people, people like the, the punning stuff, I mean, they, they like to tell me puns and they liked when I would mispronounce things to, to tease me a bit about about unintentional puns as it were amazing. And of course, you co edited a book, a volume on the Legacy of Del Hines. And importantly, there you talk about the, you know how we can understand more adequately conveying culturally, particular ways of speaking that shape oral discourse and text artifacts. But also the problem of translation, not just, you know, across languages, but time space cultural frames of reference, et cetera. So translation. And the another in an interview I read you talk about preferring to use processes of atonement. Maybe we can, you can share a little bit about this. Yeah, I mean, so translation became an important kind of thing because it there are always all kinds of ways to think about translation. And, and, and luckily over the course of, of, of those centuries, lots of things have been written about translation. And so there have been lots of, of, of ways of thinking about it and, and for me, because because I, you know, I came to, to do the work and, and English was my dominant language and, and really, I had to work with people for them to explain to me what was going on in the Navajo versions. And I, and that was in some ways, some of the most enjoyable work that I did Mr Mitchell, Black Horse Mitchell and I would spend hours sitting in his home just talking about the language Navajo language and how things might mean and, and how they would mean if they were slightly different. And, and so it, it occurred to me that one thing to think about as translation is a kind, a kindness. You know, I know and it’s true that that translation can be a, a traitor, right? That translation can have a violence to it as well. But there’s also a kind, it can be a kindly kind of gesture, a way of trying to move something from one language into another. And so, so part of it was, you know, because the way that I worked with people, people often would, you know, were trying to explain things to me. And so one thing that you’ll see in a lot of the stuff that I write is I, I have those transcripts of those of, of Mr Mitchell or Wexley Jim, for instance, explaining to me how these things work in, in Navajo. And I it seemed like that was a good way to, to keep that kindness as well to recognize the the intellectual input really of, of the the Navajos I was working with. And then this question of attunement, it seemed to me, right? That because puns and things like that because there’s so much talk in, in Navajo among some people about sound and, and the relationships of sound that that part of it has to, to think about and people would say this. So they would, they would say, well, that word sounds like this word and, and that turns out to be important in how you might want to interpret the poem because words that again, puns words that sound alike aren’t randomly. So, and that they, they could inform a kind of interpretive kind of practice. And so to think about those kinds of things to kind of get attuned to that kind of sensibility was, was something that I felt was, was an important kind of way of, of doing translation and, and also making the process of translation visible. I mean, it’s also the case since you’ve looked at some of my stuff that I also analyze the linguistic forms in the, the the papers as well because I want to show my work and I, and, and to show the kind of constituent structure of Navajo, which is very different than, than English. But I also want to yield the floor at times and, and let Navajos explain things to me because really that was one of the key ways of, of coming to know stuff as an anthropologist is that you go into a situation and you don’t know very much and people are kind to you and they, they try to explain things to you and help you and you come to learn because because of that and, and, and to make that whole kind of process visible was also something that I was very, very interested in trying to. Yeah, there’s I mean, there’s all these kind of wonderful threads throughout your, well, your that form your world view. And in fact, in a interview, I read that centers on your intimate grammars and of course, intimate, you know, very pointedly kind of directing us toward your worldview, which is a worldview of kindness learning. But also in that interview of really listening and the kind of reflexive self awareness that comes of that. And you mentioned there of course, that, you know, while we can never fully understand one another, we can try to understand our fellow human beings and at the same time, recognize our limits and so doing really listening. Tony, tell me about that. I, I mean, it’s, it seemed, it seemed to me that, that I as a, as an anthropologist I II I didn’t know much and, and that people, you know, really were, I mean, it’s, it’s difficult to explain in the sense of that. There’s so much images about anthropology and, and native peoples and my experience were, were largely positive. Even when people were teasing me and giving me a hard time, they were, they were trying to help me and, and, and, and to be aware of that, that people were wanted, you know, wanted me to be a better human being. I mean, there, there’s a paper I wrote, where I talk about this about Black Horse Mitchell. I mean, he’s, it and I go through a number of transcripts of conversations we had and he, he’s trying to explain to me what it is to, to live a moral life for me. I mean, he’s, he, he’s doing that for me. because he wants, he wants, you know, he wants good things for me and you, you know, after you, you, you encounter that kind of stuff, you want to be responsible to people, you want to acknowledge that as well. And, and, and to, you know, to, to get to, to, to recognize it and, you know, and II, I don’t wanna say, I, I’ve always been a good listener and I do feel at times I’m a slow learner. but but, but over time as you reflect on these things, you do begin to get a sense of, of, of what, what people might possibly have been trying to tell you and things like that. And I did want to say something about the, the intimate thing because it was Orlando White who’s a wonderful poet, a Navajo poet. And he, you know, he said that language is like a companion, you know, you travel with it, you know, you get to know it on the, on, on your trip and, and sometimes it can surprise you sometimes it frustrates you, sometimes it bores you. but it’s, it’s your companion, you know, and, and, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve always loved that metaphor because I, it, it, it’s true. I mean, in the sense of it, it, it is, there is this thing both with, in my own relationship to English. Right. I, I continue to learn more about it just as I continue to learn more and more about Navajo and things like that, you brought up a couple of you know, extraordinary poets, Wexley Jim, Black Horse Mitchell. There are others in intimate grammars that you also you know, put a, you know, if you will put a spotlight on, tell me Gloria Emerson, for instance, Esther Berlin and other women Lauren to who was incredibly important to me. She was the after, after Wexley Jim, she was the first, the second Navajo poet II I met and she, I mean, here’s this strange young white guy, you know, essentially like, hey, I’m here to study Navajo poetry and, and she was like, OK, and and she, you know, she introduced me to people, you know, she let me follow her around, you know, she, I, I videotaped her performing, you know, interviewed her many times and, and she, she was just, you know, an incredible mentor to me in, in so many ways. She’s also currently the, the Navajo nation poet laureate. And and so, but yeah, I’m sorry, but she was incredibly important after Berlin, who I’ve gone on to do things with editing the, the Dana Reader with Gloria Emerson, whose, whose life is just amazing from her time at Harvard and Palo Ferrier, you know, working for the State of New Mexico to coming back to the reservation and her, she’s, she’s not just a poet, she’s a magnificent artist. Her, her paintings are just really, really quite amazing. You know, they’re just, yes, I could talk about these people for a long time. One of the Yeah. No, absolutely. And so, so important for us, you know, oh yeah, 11 other really important part of this work. And I know a part of your, your teaching and your own way of being in the world is to show ways of connecting. And of course, you know, older generations of Navajo poets connecting with young Navajos. and Navajo language can you share with us some of some maybe surprises or something there in your work? I mean, it’s been interesting. So the way that, that, you know, when, when I first went out to, to do research out there in, in 2000 Lucy Tapao was incredibly well known and, and every, almost everyone I talked to knew who Lucy Tapao was. She’s an amazing poet. She was the first poet laureate of the, of the Navajo Nation. And, and really a lot of the younger poets, you know, really looked up to her. She was a role model for, for all kinds of, of people for all kinds of young poets and, and the like, and over time, right? I mean, not that she’s diminished, but so many other poets have now also become well known. And so Sherwin Bitsy, who was, you know, relatively young when I was doing fieldwork, he has now been such a mentor to, to people like Jake Skates and to younger Orlando White to a number of younger poets who have come up and, you know, and he has really been someone who, you know, younger poets have now begun to look up to and, and he is, has done, you know, taken on that role as well as is as Laura to through being the, the poet laureate of the Novel Nation as has actor Berlin with the, the editing of the, the, the book together. And so a lot of that, you know, a lot of the, the making sure other young Navajos come along and, and, and are, are find a venue for, for their poetry has been something that, you know, it’s, it’s really impressive to see that by, by older Navajo’s poets, you know, it started with Lucy Tapao, but each generation seems to have a dedication to the next generation and the generation below that as well about, you know, making sure that, that Navajo poetry continues and, and so that’s been a really important kind of thing, I think as well. To see some of the, the ways that poetry moves. Right. It, it, there, there are 22 poets now. youtube was not a thing that existed. It’s, it’s difficult to imagine a world without it. But, but at one point there was a, with no youtube and now there are youtube poets. I try to explain to, to my students that I had tape recordings, actual tapes because the digital revolution had not completely hit yet. But you see youtube poets, you see a number of online venues, there’s a lot more, there are a lot more venues now through online venues that didn’t exist before. I mean, one of the things about the Navajo Nation is that it’s isolated and, and getting around can be quite difficult because it’s a, it’s just a, a very large area and, and not a lot of people on the, on the reservation. And, and so, being able to, to do poetry events, you know, via, you know, Zoom and, and Skype and, and whatnot has been a really on Facebook has been a really kind of powerful way to, to get their voice is out, but also to, to get a new kind of audience that might not otherwise have, have ever been able to see them perform because again, if you only perform on the Navajo Nation, it’s a relatively small audience that you’re going to get. But if you can perform in, in, in other kinds of venues, the, the, the window just gets wider and wider as you are, there’s, you talk about, in an article you published on, on, this young poet, Kay,, on ling lingual Life Histories. and maybe we’ve already in a way, maybe you’ve already traced that for us. But what exactly is that lingual life history? Yeah. So, so there’s a way of thinking about language that and again, to, to use Orlando’s metaphor as a companion. And lingual life histories are interested in one’s life story as it relates to, to languages. So, when did you first start speaking English? When did you first start speaking Navajo, what other kinds of languages were you introduced to? What when you know, how did you learn to write all kinds of things like that? And, and it was, it’s a kind of humanistic kind of approach because it, it rather than think about sociolinguistic variables that does somebody use, you know, an R or is there r deletion or something like that? It, it traces the person over the course of their life and it thinks about their relationship to language and to the, the, the wider society as well. And so for me, you know, Paul Kroger was the book that I had read this in, and his book and, and it, it seemed like an interesting kind of, of thing to do to talk to people about their, their life, their life and its relationship to language and, and, and as it turns out a lot of, a lot of the, the poets that I talked to, they wanted to tell that story, they wanted to tell that story about, about Navajo and about English, especially because in 2000, when I was doing research out there, a number of things were occurring that made the Navajo language, especially salient as, as a topic, right? There was this English for the Children proposition that was occurring out on the Navajo nation. It was for Arizona. So it was the Arizona part of the Navajo nation, which essentially meant to cut back on bilingual education to only one year. And, and many, many Navajos were very concerned about this because bilingual education is one way in which to, to teach the Navajo the Navajo language. There’s was a recognition that younger people were not necessarily learning the language, certainly at a rate that would guarantee its persistence. And so there was concern about the language among Navajos. And and so there was so it was a topic that that was, was, was was of interest to people. And and so people, when I would talk to them, some people would want to tell me that kind of story and, and Kay that we, it was a really, for me, it was a very moving kind of, of conversation. you know, and she told me a great deal about, about her life and about how she had gotten interested in, in the, the language, how she got interested in poetry, why she wrote poetry and, and, you know, and her own kind of desire to, to be a force for a positive change in the world. And she saw a world that had changed, but not for the good as, as, as, as she said, and that, you know, and, and so tracing that out and seeing the ways that she talked about these things and how poetry connected with that, the way that her grandmother had, you know, had, had encouraged her, had, had found paper for her right on and things like that. And so that, you know, became, for me, it was a very moving kind of, of, of conversation that I had with her and it, you know, to, to go back to something you had said at the beginning, it was a good lesson in, in memory and in reminding and that she clearly had things she wanted to tell me and clearly my kinds of questions were able as your questions have prompted me have prompted me to remember things and I, I had prompted her to remember things as well, and that she, she wanted to, to tell about those things and, and to, to, to say something and that, and, and so a lot of what we do as anthropologist is, is talk to people and, and in our questions remind them of things and, and that they can then explain to us and things like that. And the memory work for that seemed to me to be very interesting. Hm. Yeah. Absolutely. Tony, as we kind of begin to wind this down, I was thinking, well, so much right now with you taking me on this journey. But, you know, hip hop of course, and poetry, the poetics and of I, you know, hearing Little Mike and Funny Bone and res dogs. Right. Hard Jo’s Sterling Hard, Joe’s Coc created series. Yeah. So yet again, youtube, but hip, you know, poetry in places that sometimes even today people don’t understand it to, to be. Right. No, absolutely. I mean, so when I was, when I was out there and then the, the first book I talk about Mystic and Shade who were, who were two Navajo rappers. And they, they, they rapped in Navajo. They would not have said that they were fully fluent in the language. But but they, they, they worked with their grandmother on the, the writing of the lyrics. and, and that was just the kind of marvelous kind of interject generational kind of, of healing kind of work, right, of grandmother getting involved in, in the artistry of, of, of, of her, her grandson. And, and so, absolutely, you the, you know, there’s a, there are a number of, of, of Navajo rappers and people who are very interested in hip hop and things like that. Wexley Jim always says if people are using the, the language, that’s great because, you know, I mean, there are still not just among in, in my world but also among Navajos, there are some people who, who, who might not be completely happy with that kind of thing. because, you know, it’s, it’s different and, and all that kind of thing. But, but the truth is, and this is a point that an anthropologist, a Malay scholar Bernie Perley always likes to make he calls these emergent vitality, places of delight and possibility and, and hip hop and rap and all those are emergent vitality. Their poetry is another one. Well, these places of delight and possibilities for a language, right? If all you want from a language is to be able to say the stuff that was said in the past, that’s no language. You know, the language needs to, to continually have vitality and that means finding new places and new excitement. And so I, you know, II I think that all those places are incredible where, where the language is used in film in movies and and, and anywhere that, you know, on youtube, anywhere that the, the language can be used, I think it’s an emergent vitality. It’s a place of possibility. Speaking of emerging or emergent vitality. What is on the proverbial beds stand of Tony Webster? What’s grabbing your attention these days? What, what am I reading? Well, I mean, so I, I, one is I’m rereading some of Dennis Headlock. So that’s not a terribly exciting thing. But, but he, he translated the Papa V. he was very interested in, in this thing called dialogic Anthropology, which, which I have long been interested in. And so I’ve been, I’ve been rereading a bit of, of, of Dennis Dennis Ted Lock’s work right now. I read the novels that I’m reading right now are by Henry Green, who is a English modernist novel. And he, he wrote dialogue novels and, and I find, I find those the dialogue novel to be, to be fascinating. I, you know, given my own kind of interest in, in anthropology and the use of transcripts and things like that. The, the, the novels in their structure are, are I, I find to be AAA youthful way one, they’re very funny. And he too loved the pun and II, I must concede that the puns are, are fascinating to me in all kinds of ways, but they’re also structurally, they’re, they’re, they’re very interesting to me as well. And so those are, I mean, those are some of the things, you know, I’m also reading graduate student papers and things like that. So, yes, the emergent vitality of the, the phd dissertations. And well, my goodness, Tony, you have taken us on quite a journey, inter puns navajo poetics, lingual life histories, intergenerational healing words and works emergent vitality. Thank you, Anthony for gifting us your time and your work. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. This is a lot of fun

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