
Throw Your Voice
Suspended Animations in Kazakhstani Childhoods
Meghanne Barker(Author)
Cornell University Press
Published on 15. August 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
234 pages
978-1-5017-7646-5 (ISBN)
Description
Throw Your Voice is a story of loss and recovery. It relates how children placed in a temporary care institution make sense of their situations. Moving between a Kazakhstan government children's home, Hope House, and the Almaty State Puppet Theater, Meghanne Barker shows how children, and puppets, as proxies, bring to life ideologies of childhood and visions of a rosy future. Sites and stories run in parallel. Framed by the narrative of Anton Chekhov's "Kashtanka," about a lost dog taken in by a kind stranger, the author follows the story's staging at the puppet theater. At Hope House, children find themselves on a path similar to Kashtanka, dislodged from their first homes to reside in a second.
The heart of this story is about living in displacement and about the fragile intimacies achieved amidst conditions of missing. Whether due to war, migration, or pandemic, people get separated from those closest to them. Throw Your Voice examines how strangers become familiar, and how objects mediate precarious ties. She shows how people use fantasy to mitigate loss.
The heart of this story is about living in displacement and about the fragile intimacies achieved amidst conditions of missing. Whether due to war, migration, or pandemic, people get separated from those closest to them. Throw Your Voice examines how strangers become familiar, and how objects mediate precarious ties. She shows how people use fantasy to mitigate loss.
Reviews / Votes
Anthropology as a whole has largely focused on adults, so many anthropologists will find the book a refreshing exploration of children's lived experiences, including their play and fantasy worlds. The book's writing style is accessible and at times lyrical, with more technical semiotic analysis and references reserved for the footnotes. Ultimately, Barker's work exemplifies how, even without taking language as its primary object, linguistic anthropology's interpretive approach can illuminate the aesthetic, material, and intimate processes through which social relations are made and sustained.(Linguistic Anthropology)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Ithaca
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
23 b&w halftones - 23 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5017-7646-5 (9781501776465)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
08/2024
Cornell University Press
€0.00
Available for download
Person
Meghanne Barker is Lecturer in Education, Practice and Society at the UCL Institute of Education and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is an editor of Semiotic Review.
Content
Introduction
1. Getting Lost
2. Meeting a Strangwer
3. Jumping Through Hoops
4. Getting Comfortable
5. Losing a Friend
6. Going Home Again
Coda
1. Getting Lost
2. Meeting a Strangwer
3. Jumping Through Hoops
4. Getting Comfortable
5. Losing a Friend
6. Going Home Again
Coda