Indiana University Cinema Bloomington, IN
David Stringer
Associate Professor of Second Language Studies, Indiana University
Baraka— Bio-cultural diversity across planet Earth
Program Description
Linguist and anthropologist David Stringer links the conservation of Earth's many indigenous cultures to the conservation of our natural world.
Presented At
Indiana University Cinema Bloomington, IN
Film Synopsis
Shot in 25 countries on six continents and presented without words, Baraka knits together stunning footage to create what director Ron Fricke calls "a guided mediation on humanity,"and shows how the world is interconnected by the tragedy and vibrancy of life.
Baraka is a unique, beautiful, genre-breaking film that stimulates reflection on cultural and spiritual diversity, as well as fragility and resilience in the natural world. It conveys the beauty of human diversity and the dangers of environmental destruction in images and music, without dialogue. Since its initial release, this film has been widely recognized as an unconventional, uplifting, mind-expanding reflection on the human condition, as well as a masterpiece of 65mm cinematography.
About the Speaker
Associate Professor David Stringer holds an undergraduate degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Manchester, where he specialized in Latin American literature. During this time, he spent a year studying anthropology at the University of Quindío, Colombia, and at PUC in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He taught English as a Foreign Language in Valencia, Spain; Verona, Italy; and Nara, Japan, before pursuing graduate studies in linguistics at the University of Durham. He spent another four years in Japan teaching linguistics and English language at Mie University. In 2006, he joined the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University and was promoted to tenure in 2012. Stringer's main research area is the acquisition of syntax and lexical semantics with a particular interest in universal aspects of word meaning that play a role in grammar across languages. Other areas of research interest include World Englishes (especially in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa), language attrition (in joint work with Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig), and biocultural diversity (linking language revitalization in indigenous cultures to the conservation of ecosystems).