Journal articles on the topic 'Bodo languages Bodo languages Bodo languages Extinct languages'

Bodo Language is phonetically rich language but it is not analysed systematically and scientifically still now. So each and every parts of language is to be studied with the help of modern equipments for find out the accurate results. In the age of Information Technology where the Information Technology (IT) is threading the entire into a Global Village with knowledge as the prime currency and sole differentiator, development of appropriate access technology take part vital role for gaining the information. Especially for India, with its multi-lingual requirements and not so fortunate achievements in terms of overall literacy, development of speech technology in each of its recognized language demands utmost attention. Moreover, development of such Speech Technologies in Indian Languages, with their core dependence on linguistic and cultural ethos, need to be developed largely in India. From the present analysis and study of Bodo vowels spectrograms, it is seen that the lower frequency regions for almost all vowels are very clear. It is a very uncommon characteristic observed in case of the Bodo vowel utterances in comparison with other local languages of Assam. So this will help the speech researcher’s on Bodo Language in various directions in future.

Abstract: Tribals hold all rituals and functions as a community and those include putting up a mandap. Teksingh Tekam, a scholar of Gondi language and culture, says, “Early in the morning, six or seven men leave for the forest in four bullock carts. The literature departments of some universities have included tribal literature in their curricula for purposes of study and research, but that too has been largely perfunctory – and this when Bodo and Santhali languages have been given the status of Scheduled Languages. Residential schools for tribal students have come up right from villages in the interior to cities but little has changed on the ground for the Tribals. Starvation, exploitation, displacement and mass killings continue. To understand Tribal Literature, we will first have to classify it on the basis of ethnic and linguistic diversities and geographical extent. Tribal Literature can be broadly defined as the literature of the ancestors, which, despite being in different languages and dialects, has an all-India character. Tribal Literature is thus multilingual and multicultural. Culture and traditions are often the products of the place of residence. India, with its wide geographical diversity, has given birth to many different cultures. The geographical and climatic conditions of Gondwana (the area of central India where Gond Tribes are found), Bhilanchal and northeastern states are so different that a difference in lifestyle and food is inevitable. Keywords: Bodo and Santhali, Gond, tribality, literature, Issues, Challenges

Unity in diversity is one of the most distinctive features of Indian civilization. From Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari, every region portrays different customs, cultural traditions, and mother tongues. India is a country of multiple languages and ancient scripts. According to the 2011 census report, 1950 mother tongues were spoken/in use in India. Under Article 344 of the Indian Constitution, only 15 languages ​​were initially recognized as the official language. The 21st Constitution Amendment gave Sindhi the official language status. Based on the 71st Constitution Amendment, the Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri languages were also included in the above list. Later, by the 92nd Constitution Amendment Act, 2003, four new languages ​​Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, and Santhali, were included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Thus, now 22 languages ​​have been given the status of official language in the Indian Constitution. The total number of people speaking these 22 languages ​​in India is 90%. Apart from these 22 languages, English is also the official language and is also the official language of Mizoram, Nagaland, and Meghalaya. In all, 60 languages ​​are being taught in schools in India. There was an excellent response to the call for papers for Special Issue on Language Documentation and Archiving of DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology (DJLIT). A total of about 13 Papers were received for the special issue. Based on the review and relevancy of the particular theme, seven papers have been selected for publication in the special issue on Language Documentation and Archiving.

Language grows, evolves and develops over a period of time. Reading through old English writings even the native speakers of today would struggle understanding them. No language (including Bodo) is exempt from this fact. According to Edward Sapir an American Linguist, Language contact is one of the main reasons behind such change in a particular linguistic community. Darwin says that ‘languages tended to change in the direction of having shorter easier forms, and that it could be explained by natural selection.’ My close observation lead me to discover that there are numerous English ‘loan words that the ‘Bodos’ use in their conversations. This is a case not only of one linguistic community but of most North East Indian linguistic communities; we can’t deny the fact that English Loan words have found great usage in our conversations, TV shows, songs, films and functions. This practice has to a certain extent ushered in some changes in contemporary Bodo linguistic community. Edward Sapir talks about how one linguistic community borrows vocabulary from another in the process of cultural and social interaction; this he says has been a common phenomenon among linguistic communities in the history and continues to prevail as a common practice till today. In my paper I discuss the causes of such a practice and their possible pros and cons with special reference to Contemporary Bodo linguistic community.

Kok-Borok is the native language of the Borok people in the Indian state of Tripura and its neighbouring areas of Bangladesh. The aim of the present study is to capture the typological analysis of causative constructions of Kok-Borok, a language which belongs to the Bodo sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Our study shows that the most remarkable aspect of the causative constructions in Kok-borok is that in double causatives, the causative rI 'give' has been reduplicated in order to express 'to make somebody to do by employing a third party', which shows the language Kok-Borok's unique features if we compare this language with the other South-Asian Tibeto-Burman languages. The findings of mixed causatives show that both periphrastic and morphological devices have been employed in Kok-Borok to convey the meaning of causative constructions. Key Words: Causatives; Lexical; Morphological or Periphrastic Causatives; Kok-Borok.DOI: 10.3329/dujl.v2i4.6902Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics Vol.2(4) August 2009 pp.115-137

With invaluable help from and in close co-operation with colleagues from around the world, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature project at the University of Oxford has compiled, lemmatised and made publicly available a large body of Sumerian literature. Building a corpus of literary compositions originally written on clay tablets in the cuneiform script, and dating back nearly four thousand years, poses special challenges, not least with regard to mark-up and automatic processing of data. Some of these challenges are discussed in this paper together with issues relating to the fact that Sumerian is a language isolate and lacks resources we take for granted when working with other languages, modern or extinct, such as a standardised sign list and a comprehensive dictionary.

It has been claimed that there is a global Third Way (TW) debate. Giddens (2001: 1) writes that, ‘Across the world left of centre governments are attempting to institute third way programmes – whether or not they favour the term itself. ‘ He claims that there are self-declared third way parties in power in the UK, New Zealand, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, among many other countries. Similarly, according to Blair (2001), the ideas associated with the TW are still the wave of the future for progressive politics. From Latin America to Europe to parts of Asia, TW politics or ‘progressive government’ is exerting a huge influence on global politics. The TW is seen as a trailblazer for a new global social policy, a new model for a new millennium (e.g. McGuire, 1998/9). One of the main blueprints for the new politics (Giddens, 1998) has been translated into many languages. A number of international meetings in Paris and Florence have discussed the TW. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder issued a joint paper, ‘The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte’ (Blair and Schröder, 1999) that was drafted by Peter Mandelson and Bodo Hombach. Hombach's book has been translated into English as ‘The New Centre’ (Hombach, 2000), with a preface by Tony Giddens and an introduction by Mark Leonard.

Indonesia is known as the country "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" that means unity in diversity also symbolizes the unity of the NKRI which is strong and sturdy even though it consists of different backgrounds. Ethnic language is one type of diversity that Indonesian have. In heterogeneous societal structures, language clashes are an unavoidable phenomenon especially in big cities. Language attitudes are tested especially in groups of teenagers. If the speech community does not have a strong language attitude, it will certainly have an impact on language retention. One of the ethnic groups that experienced in this phenomenon was the Batak Toba ethnic group as the urban people in Batam. The aim of this study is to describe the occurrence of the understanding of the Batak Toba adolescents in Batam City in terms of lexicon mastery related to body parts. To get the data on the level of understanding of respondents, as many as 45 lexicon data were tested through a questionnaire to respondents aged 12-18 years who numbered 50 people, and the results were further described. The results showed that there was a decrease in understanding in the group of adolescents towards the body language lexicon of the Batak Toba language. The majority of respondents only heard of the lexicons but did not know the references. This is evidence of the gap in ethnic language understanding between parents and adolescents. This understanding gap is a result of the lack of learning or use of ethnic language in the family. If this condition is then left alone, it is certain that the lexicon will become extinct because it will disappear from the entity's understanding of the speaker.

The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamese spoken in the eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a North-Eastern state of India, therefore Assamese and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different North-Eastern states of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (seeEthnologue, Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the Eastern district of Sibsagar and later in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in the year 1846 published a monthly periodicalArunodoiusing the variety spoken in and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam (which roughly comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like /ɹ/ deletion, which is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent times.

The main approaches to semiotic inquiry today contradict the idea of the individual as a separate and self-sufficient entity. The body of an organism in the micro- and macrocosm is not an isolated biological entity, it does not belong to the individual, it is not a separate and self-sufficient sphere in itself. The body is an organism that lives in relation to other bodies, it is intercorporeal and interdependent. This concept of the body finds confirmation in cultural practices and worldviews based on intercorporeity, interdependency, exposition and opening, though nowadays such practices are almost extinct. An approach to semiotics that is global and at once capable of surpassing the illusory idea of definitive and ultimate boundaries to identity presupposes dialogue and otherness. Otherness obliges identity to question the tendency to totalizing closure and to reorganize itself always anew in a process related to ‘infinity’, as Emmanuel Levinas teaches us, or to ‘infinite semiosis’, to say it with Charles Sanders Peirce. Another topic of this paper is the interrelation in anthroposemiosis between man and machine and the implications involved for the future of humanity. Our overall purpose is to develop global semiotics in the direction of “semioethics”, as proposed by S. Petrilli and A. Ponzio and their ongoing research.

<p class="Body">Negara Indonesia memiliki kepulauan yang sangat luas dari daratan sampai pegunungan. Wilayah dalam kepulauan Indonesia terdapat flora dan fauna serta mikroba yang bermacam-macam. Habitat hewan di Indonesia mulai mengalami kepunahan, ini terjadi karena rusaknya habitat tempat tinggal hewan tersebut. Seiring dengan kepunahan hewan langka di Indonesia dan minimnya pengetahuan anak akan hewan-hewan langka khas daerah Indonesia serta kurangnya media pengenalan hewan langka. Maka penting dibuat game edukasi pengenalan hewan langka berbasis Android agar pengetahuan anak-anak dan masyarakat tentang hewan langka semakin meningkat. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode pengembangan sistem <em>agile </em>dan model UML <em>(Unified Modelling Language).</em> Tujuan dalam penelitian ini yaitu membangun sebuah <em>game </em>edukasi pengenalan hewan langka berbasis android yang memberikan edukasi sambil bermain dan dapat diakses melalui <em>smartphone. </em>Pembuatan game edukasi menggunakan <em>construct2 </em>menjadi lebih mudah karena memiliki <em>tools </em>yang khusus dirancang untuk pembuatan <em>game. </em>Berdasarkan pengujian aplikasi <em>game </em>edukasi pengenalan hewan langka ini dapat membantu memperkenalkan hewan langka kepada masyarakat khususnya pada anak-anak, dengan perolehan presentasi penilaian pengujian sebesar 93,21%.</p><p class="Body"> </p><p class="Body"><em><strong>Abstract</strong></em></p><p class="Judul2"><em>The country of Indonesia has very wide islands from land to mountains. Areas in the Indonesian archipelago have diverse flora and fauna and microbes</em><em>. Animal habitats in Indonesia are beginning to become extinct, this occurs because of the destruction of the habitat where the animals live. Along with the extinction of rare animals in Indonesia and the lack of knowledge of children about rare animals typical of the Indonesian region and the lack of media for the introduction of rare animals</em>. <em>So it is important to make an Android-based rare animal recognition education game so that children's knowledge and society about endangered animals increases.</em><em> This study uses the agile system development method and the UML (Unified Modeling Language) model. The purpose of this study is to build an educational game for the introduction of rare animals based on android that provides education while playing and can be accessed via a smartphone. Making educational games using construct2 is easier because it has tools specifically designed for game creation. Based on the testing of this rare animal recognition educational game application, it can help introduce rare animals to the public, especially to children, with the acquisition of test rating presentations at 93.21%.</em></p><p class="Body"><em><strong><br /></strong></em></p>

Abstract Abstract 5114 BACKGROUND Thalassemia syndromes are a heterogeneous anemia caused by mutation affecting globin chains of the hemoglobin molecule. It is estimated that the average life span of Rabhas (tribal population of North Bengal, Jalpaiguri) range from 42 – 45 years. This raised a concern that they are perishing due to some genetic disease. Hence Screening Camps were conducted to identify the reason. Rabha is a little known Scheduled Tribe community of West Bengal. Assam now renamed to Asom is a North-East India state of India with its capital at Dispur. The Rabha people are mainly found in the jungles of Jalpaiguri. West Bengal is a States and territories of India in eastern India. With Bangladesh, which lies on its eastern border the state forms the ethno-linguistic region of Bengal. Jalpaiguri is the largest district of North Bengal, covering an area 6,245 sq.km. It is situated between 26 16' and 27 0' North latitudes and 88 4' and 89 53' East longitudes and Cooch Behar district. Cooch Behar is a district of the state of West Bengal, India, as well as the name of the town which gives its name to the district. The whole area of Eastern and Western Dooars, may be termed as the cradle land of the Rabhas. The Rabhas belong to Indo-Mongoloid group of people and have similarities with other members of Bodo. Bodo may stand for: *Bod A city in Norway* An ethnic community in India: the Bodo people*The Bodo language spoken by them. group such as Garo (tribe). The Garos are a tribe in Meghalaya, India, and Mymensingh District, Bangladesh, who call themselves Achik. Kachari. The Kacharis are the most widely spread tribe in northeast India. They are said to be the earliest inhabitants of the Brahmaputra Valley. Mech (tribe), Koch. Our objectives were- Awareness among the tribal population through talks and documentaries and discussions with community leaders with demonstrations at village level. The goal of thalassemia screening is to identify the carrier status among Rabha populations, to control the birth of affected children thus eradicating thalassemia among them & to save one of the oldest tribe from being extinct. MATERIAL & METHODS At first an Awareness Programme was held among the Rabhas & then with the written consent peripheral blood was collected for thalassemia screening test. The screening age lies between 10 – 35 years. Firstly, NESTROFT (Naked Eye Single Tube Red Cell Osmotic fragility Test) was performed for spot detection. This was followed by CBC (Complete Blood Count) & HPLC (High performance Liquid Chromatography) for confirmation. Molecular Analysis of every sample was done using ARMS PCR. All together 277 individuals were screened. Of which 119 (43%) were HbE carrier & 110 (40%) were HbE homozygous. Rest of them was normal. The carrier & homozygous status was confirmed by performing ARMS PCR. The sensitivity of NESTROFT in this case was 95 %. CONCLUSION Thus the percentage of HbE carrier & HbE homozygous is very high among the Rabhas. But one thing is to be noted that their % of haemoglobin is very high. This might be one of the reasons that they do not require blood transfusion during their life span. It is spreading like a rapid fire due to consanguineous marriage among them. This is one of the reasons for the early mortality. In our project of Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India we'll complete carrier status detection of total Rabha population (11,000) within 3 years. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

The paper gives a survey of verbs of falling in Tigrinya (an Ethio-Semitic language spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia). The employment of each verb related to the situation of falling down is illustrated with phrasal examples. The Tigrinya data is further compared with Geez, a closely related extinct language. A special subsection deals with metaphorical use of the basic verb ‘to fall’ in Tigrinya. Tigrinya possesses one basic verb of falling, wädäḳä, which is applied to describe the downward movement of a solid object through the air or a loss of vertical position of a vertically oriented object. Falling of a solid, heavy object, either through the air or, less typically, along an oblique surface, can also be referred to by a special verb ṣädäfä. In all situations deviating from this default situation of falling in Tigrinya, special verbs are employed. Thus, the verbs tägälbäṭä ‘to be overturned, to topple’ or tägämṭälä ‘to be turned over’ are used to describe the situation of toppling, overturning which does not involve physical falling from a higher level to a lower one. Detachment of an object which had been fi rmly fi xed to another object, is usually denoted by the verb moläḳä ‘to slip off ; to become detached’. Falling to pieces of buildings or other built structures is described by the special verbs färäsä ‘to collapse, crumble, to fall’ or ʕanäwä ‘to collapse’ (but ṣädäfä can also be used in such contexts). Detachment of parts of body or plants due to natural reasons is denoted by the special verb rägäfä ‘to fall off (leaves), to break off , break loose (fruit, leaf), to shed a coat (livestock)’ (although the physical falling which is caused by such a detachment can well be described by the verb wädäḳä ‘to fall’). Furthermore, with respect to teeth, a special verb goräfä ‘to lose milk teeth, to have one’s tooth pulled out’ is used, with the possessor of the tooth encoded as the subject, and the tooth itself, as the object. Downward movement of liquids is denoted by a wide range of verbs, such as wäḥazä ‘to fl ow’, näṭäbä ‘to fall in drops, to drop (water), to drip (water)’, fäsäsä ‘to be spilled, poured (out) (water, grain, etc.), to fl ow (liquid, stream), to run (water), to fall (water)’, ṣärär bälä ‘to ooze, exude’, läḥakʷä ‘to drip, run (water along a wall after leaking through a roof), lo leak, to seep, fi lter through (intransitive)’. The verb wärädä ‘to descend’ is also used to describe the movement of liquids from a higher level to the lower. Spilling of granular material is denoted by fäsäsä ‘to be spilled, poured (out) (water, grain, etc.)’. Rolling down is denoted by the verb ʔankoraräyä/ʔankoraräwä ‘to roll’. Downward movement in water is described by the verb ṭäḥalä ‘to sink, to submerge’. Intentional losing of vertical position is described by the verb bäṭṭ bälä ‘to lie down’,and intentional movement from a higher level to the lower is described by wärädä ‘to descend’. The metaphors of falling include the employment of the verb wädäḳä to describe an abrupt, unexpected (and often unpleasant) change. This involves decrease in a measure, loss of interest, the destruction of a social power, arriving of a sudden calamity. A separate group of metaphorical employment is the verb wädäḳä as the standard predicate of such nouns as “lottery” and “lot”, presumably by extension from the situation of dice falling to the ground. Finally, death in battle is also denoted by the verb wädäḳä. The Geez cognate of wädäḳä likewise functions as the basic verb ‘to fall’, whose employment is very similar to, although not identical with, its Tigrinya equivalent. Similarly, Geez ṣadfa does not display any signifi cant diff erence from Tigrinya ṣädäfä in its semantics and usage.

Abstract Background Ethnozoological knowledge is less documented than ethnobotanical. With this field study, we aim to record and analyze the Riffian Berber knowledge about the use of animals in traditional human and veterinary medicine. Our research question is what is their knowledge of ethnozoological practices? Methods We performed semi-structured interviews with local inhabitants in Riffian vernacular language. The reliability of the sampling effort was assessed by a rarefaction curve. Data were compared with previous studies in order to determine the geographical and historical extensions of described uses and possible conservation implications for the species used. Results We obtained information regarding 107 ethnozoological uses based on 197 use reports. Among the 31 species used, mammals were most frequently cited. Diseases related to the traditional medicinal system were most frequently treated with these resources, as well as those of the respiratory, digestive, and musculoskeletal systems. Thirty percent of uses are associated with magico-religious practices. Only three of the species used are threatened at the global level, two of them extinct in the study area, indicating low potential damage to regional biodiversity from current practices utilizing native animals. Within modern Morocco, Riffians have continued practicing ethnozoological uses anathema to Islam, like the consumption of animals considered impure (dogs, jackals, wild boars, and hyenas). Conclusions The use of primarily mammalian species and of many animal body parts is likely related to the Berber belief in homology between the area of the human body in which the ailment occurs and the corresponding animal body part. These findings unveil the nature of ethnozoological practices, highly linked to folklore and culture-bound conditions, and lacking in the Western empirical rationale for nearly one third of reported uses. The consumption of animals considered impure according to Islam was probably initiated before the conquering of the Maghreb by Arabs in the seventh century and was maintained through the secular isolation of Riffians in mountain areas. This can reflect traditional healing habits being maintained over thousands of years.

I Usually, when reading or literature is being discussed, the contents of that discussion (like themes, symbols, poetic means, etc.) are focused. The humanities or academic criticism have rarely drawn their attention to the material media of literature. However, in recent years some of the conversation concerning literature has shifted the focus from contents to the material side. It has been a matter of working in a good cause: this conversation has been aroused by digital culture and its fearsome threat to print culture and books in general. It is evident that digitalization has given rise to a certain rhetorical system among the defenders of the traditional book and print. These are easily distinguished in discussions dealing with the advantages and favoured traits of print and book. This kind of traditionalist argumentation is based firstly on the claimed interruption and deep differences between print culture and digital culture. Secondly, it emphasizes the emotional and sensual factors of reading and tends to adore books as objects, and – third – by doing that, it also takes a somewhat nostalgic or mystifying approach to reading fiction. Because inventing neologisms is always amusing, this rhetorical system could be called intimism. The new word is coined from ‘intimacy’ and ‘intimate’, because the print-defending arguments always reduce their main idea to thoughts of close, warm, private, safe, and familiar nature of reading. Intimism wants to see the “traditional” culture in opposition to the “new” culture that threatens to destroy the print culture and even literacy. It sees print as the language of culture and civilization, which is under threat of becoming extinct. It is questionable, though, whether print culture needs advocates in the first place. It is possibly the most victorious and pervasive innovation throughout human history and shows no signs of fading or collapsing whatsoever. When I claim that intimism attaches nostalgic and mystifying approaches to print, the point is not to nullify the value of subjective reading experiences or the inexplicable features always present in reading. Also, I am not “defending” digitalization. Rather, I am aiming to highlight some tropes cast at reading as an act, and see how reading printed books is figured rhetorically. Intimism bases its argumentation on the thought of deep interruption between print-orientated culture and digitalization. Cultural periods (orality, print, digital) are not clearly consecutive, but overlapping. Orality has lived side by side with print, and will live with and in digital culture too. There’s plenty of resemblances and residues to oral culture in digital forms of communication. Print culture is deeply entangled with digital culture, technologically as well as content-wise. Book-printing is so utterly digitalized that only thing in the production process of books that is not digital is the book itself. Furthermore, it is not fair to treat the existing digital literature as one “lump”. Electronic literature is divided in different categories. Digitalization of (already) printed literature – conserving classic literature and making it electronically available – is very different from genuinely digital texts, new literature published as a digital file (to be read from computer screen or hand-computer) or texts that take full advantage of digital opportunities, such as interactivity, linking, updating, programming, multimedia, or internet. These sorts of “originally digital” texts base their logic of functioning and textual dynamics on digital technology – thus being impossible to print. Digital text is not a clear-cut object in the same way we can think print is. In short, electronic text is fluent; print is static. According to Jay David Bolter, “all information … in the computer world is a kind of controlled movement” (Bolter 31). Electronic text can be transported into thousands of computers simultaneously; it can be renewed, updated, or destroyed from a distance. Text on the computer screen is one possible instantiation of the coding we do not usually associate with the text “itself”. What is the equivalent for coding of the text in print? The physical appearance of the text does not identify itself in the same way with the reading surface as in print, where the text is literally pressed into the surface making these two inseparable. II William Gass, among many others, sees the charm of the book connected very closely to the charm of the physical, material nature of book. Gass argues that We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together. For Gass, digital texts are texts without bodies. They wander endlessly in the digital space, restless, so that they seem to be like textual ghosts (and maybe therefore be fearsome?). Gass sees digital texts as pale shadows of their printed forerunners. Words on paper patiently wait to be reread, but words on a screen are transient, “they only wait to be remade, relit” (Gass). The very essence of the book lies in its material body, which keeps its lines “safely together” and identifies its contents with the medium, the beloved paper object. In this light, Amy Tan’s formulation is significant. (Her comments were adopted from Koskimaa 2000. This TV panel discussion with Tan, Harold Bloom and Dick Brass is yet to pin down.) She said that books, unlike electronic texts, are charmingly sensual. The term sensual can be understood in two ways, which are both interesting from the standpoint here. When we read, books as objects are in permanent contact with our senses. Sight, feeling, and even hearing are important factors in reading, the first mentioned crucially so, with smelling or tasting more rare (even though some hard-core biblio-fetishists enjoy sniffing their loved ones). Secondly, sensual can be understood as in sentence “her lips are sensual”. Sensual in this meaning connects reading with something that is both emotional and aesthetic: emotional, because it is hardly definable; simultaneously unattainable, but clearly present in its internality. Something present only for me. “Aesthetism” claims that reading (and specifically reading book) is in itself aesthetic deed – some sort of modelled cultural act. Treating books and print as if they had human characteristics, in other words to anthropomorphise them, seems to be typical to this manner of speaking. Books consist of two crucially human denominators – body and soul. The bond between the book and its reader resembles to friendship. Books love us almost as much as we love them. They are “even less replaceable than a person”. They supply “warmth of the word”, as Gass puts it, almost like you’d have a close friend next to you to share your feelings. And, is not the previously-mentioned sensuality also closely connected to carnal pleasures? These argumentation lines both entangle contents and subjective experiences with a certain medium, the printed book. They evaluate form with content by claiming that a medium an sich has positive impacts on the message. Intimism makes reading an external ceremony of cultivation to which certain feelings can be attached. W.J. Ong has described writing as internalized technology (Ong 81-83). We could now reverse this thought – intimism externalizes the subjective and private value of reading into acceptable reading of printed book. It thus technologises the internal, inexplicable and obscure core of reading. III In a digital context, according to Gass, reading itself cannot shape the book like in print, where an avid reader leaves traces and marks on the body of book. This makes electronic text impersonal, distant to the reader and, in a way, overdetermined by the technology it’s based on. This overdetermination is something that makes us irritatingly conscious of the technological ground we are working on when we are reading an electronic text. Technology pushes itself through to the fore from between the lines, it makes itself extremely present, more present than with reading in the technology of print, or so it feels to us. The printed book seems to be more able to efface, to obscure, its technological nature. We are so used to the book as a form of presentation, that we can easily ignore its technological and material bases. Maybe the feeling of absence makes for the high feeling of presence in the technology of print and book? As intimism foregrounds the material aspects of literature, which are usually backgrounded, some writers have underlined this material paradox by hoisting the very technology of book and print, even revelling in it, and throwing the medium of the book, the machine of literature, usually so lame and tame, in your face. This kind of overdetermination of the technology of the printed novel begins at least in the Baroque period or with Laurence Sterne, traversing through the nouveaux roman and American metafictionists such as Barth, Federman, and Sukenick. For intimism, print is an intimate technology. It is a seemingly paradoxical concept, because usually technology is thought to be something formal or external. The intimist argumentation projects contents into the form, and unlike the mentioned authors who fool around with our literal automatisms, it takes a moral, restrictive and colonizing stance to reading and its technologies. Note Based and re-written on the paper held in Baltic Ring: International Writing and Reading Seminar, 11.- 13. April 2002, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. References Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Laurence Erlbaum, 1991. Gass, William H. “In Defense of the Book.” Harper’s Magazine November 1999: 45-51. Koskimaa, Raine. ”King-efekti ja kirjallisuuden sähköinen tulevaisuus.” Nuori Voima 4-5, 2000. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word. 1982. London: Routledge, 1988. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Joensuu, Juri. "Intimate Technology?: Literature, Reading and the Argumentation Defending Book and Print." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/02-joensuu.php>. APA Style Joensuu, J. (Jun. 2005) "Intimate Technology?: Literature, Reading and the Argumentation Defending Book and Print," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/02-joensuu.php>.

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. 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