James M. Wilce, Ph.D.
Professor
(B.A., Azusa Pacific College; M.Div., Fuller Theological Seminary; M.A., Claremont Graduate School; Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles 1994)
Linguistic anthropology, the ethnography of communication, globalization, medical discourse, madness, self and emotion, embodiment, verbal art, semiotics, Islam;
Dr. Wilce, a linguistic anthropologist, studies language and social interaction in relation to medicine and psychiatry. His ethnographic research began in Bangladesh, forming the basis of his first book—on sickness, gender relations, power, and resistance as manifest in genres of complaint. His early focus on forms of madness and familial coping in those rural settings has given way to a critical focus on psychiatric discourse and the history of psychiatry. More broadly, Wilce studies language and emotion, the subject of both of the books he has under contract, to be completed this year. He is a globally acknowledged expert on lament—spontaneous improvised crying songs—lecturing in
Wilce has brought to NAU an externally funded speaker series, Language Across the Univers(ity) (http://www4.nau.edu/anthro/anthropology/anthro_ling/ling_anthro/poster.htm), which is having a great impact on our graduate program, our faculty, the administration, and the whole community.
Wilce’s publishing activities center not only on his own books and articles but his work as editor of the only viable book series focusing on ethnographic monographs in linguistic anthropology today, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture. The appearance of Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s Hidden Life of Girls as the first book in the series establishes Wilce and the series as absolutely central to the discipline of linguistic anthropology today.
Contact Information:
Dr. James M. Wilce, PhD
Office: Bldg 98D, Rm 101E
Phone: (928) 523-2729
Email: James.Wilce[at]nau.edu
Current Research and Applied Projects
Language and Emotion
Dr. Wilce’s current research projects focus on language and emotion. He is currently analyzing language and emotion in a small body of recordings he has collected. Examples include: 1) publicly circulating laments by Shia Muslims, 2) video footage collected during two trips to Finland (summers of 2003 and 2005), when he participated in a Finnish lament workshop and collected a professional DVD produced by a participant in a similar workshop, and 3) videotapes of a UCLA-approved research project, of an assertiveness training/conflict prevention program for elementary school children. Wilce is analyzing the last set of tapes in collaboration with his graduate students in the newly created course, Linguistic Anthropology Lab. Analysis of the
Wilce is beginning a new research project that extends his long-term work on lament—spontaneous improvised crying songs—a topic on which he is one of the world’s recognized experts (see his December 2006 Current Anthropology article), and links it to a vision of culture as something conscious and intentionally manipulable rather than unconsciously inherited. The project centers on the revival of lament in
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