The painter's eye, the painter's voice: Language, art and landscape in the Gija world

Eva Schultz-Berndt, University of Manchester, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

Project Details:

Major Documentation Project. Duration: 2008-2011. £125,290

Project Summary:

The goal of the project is to document significant aspects of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural and cultural world of the Gija, with a focus on the mythological, historical and ecological knowledge associated with sites depicted in artists' paintings, and on the language used to describe paintings, dance and song performance. The results will be a corpus of 60 hours of fully annotated texts recorded on audio or video, and a lexical database of 4,000 entries incorporating photographs and sound, which will also include lexical information from earlier recordings of Gija made by the main researcher, Frances Kofod.