Abstract: A statistical experimental approach for studying relationships between animated entities in the Baʿlu Cycle of ʾIlimilku
By Vanessa Juloux, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University
American Oriental Society Meeting 2017
Saturday March 18th afternoon - ANE IV, Bunker Hill Room
Omni Hotel, California Plaza, 251 South Olive Street, Los Angeles
How can the relationships between animated entities (AE) in a narrative corpus be measured? As part of my doctoral thesis, I propose a new methodology for ethno- anthropological purposes. Based on the philosophy of action from Donald Davidson, and Gertrude Anscombe’s concept of intention, I set up variables to measure the relationships between AE. They are divided into two mains groups: 1) objective: verbal lexemes, specific verbal taxonomies, names of AE, spheres (outside, inside), roles (active, passive), as well as contexts; and 2) subjective (in other words, to be left to the interpretation of researchers): types and levels of emotions (e.g. anger, joy), types of intentionality, levels of desire (1 to 5), the consequences of action (entity, entity and other(s), other(s)). From all these quantified data (extracted from texts encoded in e.g. XML-TEI), various statistical calculations were made. The results may however be difficult to understand without visualization graphics, according to certain key variables of interest: e.g. diagram of verbal frequency data for each AE, proxemics inspired by the anthropologist Edward. T. Hall. Such a statistical approach is not a substitute for scholarly interpretation of narrative corpus but it should rather be considered as an experimental tool which highlights the relationships between AE, and complements conventional research methods; notably for studying deontic power, such as described by John Searle, or whether showing an individual marker of behaviour (agency: to identify social gender), the statistical results should be re-framed within socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. Furthermore, this approach challenges the scientific achievements about the capacity and the implication of major animated entities such as ʿAnatu in the corpus studied.