Bruce Mannheim
Mailing address:
Department
of Anthropology
1020 LS&A
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48109-1382
USA
(734) 763-4259
e-mail: 
Bruce Mannheim, Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, is a leading linguistic anthropologist, specializing in Quechua, once the language of the Inka and now the most widespread Native American language family. He is author of The language of the Inka since the European invasion (1991) and editor of The dialogic emergence of culture (1995) and is completing books on Quechua poetry and narrative. His most recent research is a historical study of Quechua texts as indices of national formation.
Professor Mannheim is a past Guggenheim fellow, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, and was twice a fellow of the Institute for the Humanities at Michigan. He was director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan from 1997-1999, and is currently President of the Society for Latin American Anthropology.
"My
research is motivated by a theoretical orientation that places language at the
center of culture and social relationships, on the one hand, and approaches
language as infused with social and cultural contingencies on the other. Culture
is located within structured semiotic practices—semiotic practices that are
jointly produced in face-to-face interaction but constrained by more broadly
shared, patterned interpretive conventions. These vary from the commonplace,
such as grammatical patterns and other mundane social practices, to specialized
practices, such as ritual language and verbal art. Moreover, the formal
properties of patterns constrain both the stability of linguistic and cultural
systems and the ways in which they change ; they disseminate through genres (for
example, narrative) and even across media (song text and cloth textile). Much of
this research has been developed through sustained work in Southern Quechua, the
language of the Inkas, spoken today by millions in Peru and Bolivia (with
closely related languages spoken across the Andean region)."
Workshop on social conflict and pragmatics in the Andean region
Quechua language study at UM and the Quechua summer program
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