Drawn from the Ground
Sound, Sign and Inscription in Central Australian Sand Stories

Provides a multimodal analysis of women's sand stories from Central Australia, showing how speech, sign, gesture and drawing work together.

Jennifer Green (Author)

9781107028920, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 May 2014

286 pages, 130 b/w illus. 10 colour illus. 1 map 14 tables 15 music examples
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.56 kg

'This tour de force draws the study of a language in a totally new direction. Through her close study of Central Australian women's storytelling traditions - and this investigation is steeped in the insights of decades of deep linguistic and cultural immersion - Jennifer Green shows how much we gain in semiotic understanding when we reintegrate the fractured family of our communicative modalities. Speech, chant, gesture but also a particular Central Australian tradition of dynamic drawing on specially-prepared sand surfaces, are all turned to the task of heightening narrative intensity, and the book tackles the challenge of reuniting all these channels analytically, in a way that fully captures the experiential vividness of the storytelling. The publisher, Cambridge University Press, is to be commended on including several strikingly sumptuous colour plates that give some feel for the visual richness of the sand-drawing genre.' Nicholas Evans, Australian National University, Canberra

Sand stories from Central Australia are a traditional form of Aboriginal women's verbal art that incorporates speech, song, sign, gesture and drawing. Small leaves and other objects may be used to represent story characters. This detailed study of Arandic sand stories takes a multimodal approach to the analysis of the stories and shows how the expressive elements used in the stories are orchestrated together. This richly illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication. It adds to the growing recognition that language encompasses much more than speech alone, and shows how important it is to consider the different semiotic resources a culture brings to its communicative tasks as an integrated whole rather than in isolation.

1. Introduction
2. Sand stories as social and cultural practice
3. Catching a move as it flies: multimodal data collection
4. Lines in the sand
5. Body-anchored and airborne action
6. Ordering, re-drawing and erasure
7. Vocal style in sand stories
8. Crossing boundaries.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Linguistics [CF]