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Saturday, October 01, 2005
Linguistic Environments
The dictionary definitions of loot, find, and forage are as follows (American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition): Loot: 1) Valuables pillaged in time of war, spoils. 2) Stolen goods. Find: 1) To come upon, often by accident; meet with. 2) To come upon or discover by searching or making an effort. Forage: 1) Food for domestic animals; fodder. 2) The act of looking or searching for food or provisions.
Perhaps the most obvious and well-known example of the use of the terms “looting” and “finding” occurred in a set of news photographs published by the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) in which citizens are shown carrying goods through chest-deep water. The assumption is that these good were acquired in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and without compensation to the vendors. Much was made of the usage of the two terms to describe what is happening in the photographs. There are only two apparent differences in the photos: the AP image is of one black male while the AFP image is of two light-skinned individuals. While the AP image uses the term “looting” to describe the scene, the AFP image describes the activity as “finding.”
This is just one many accusations of media bias in the wake of Katrina and as mentioned above, perhaps the most representative. A September 29th piece in the International Herald Tribune describes looting as varying “from basic thievery to foraging for the necessities of life.” The use of the term “foraging” in this context is more neutral than the use of “looting” and “finding” in the images described above. If one is to come to a relatively objective conclusion about a perceived media racial bias, one must consult the commonly-accepted dictionary definitions and their usages in a given linguistic environment.
Linguistically, it is hard to infer much from a short photo caption. The terms forage, find, and loot all have to do with acquiring something material. Broadly speaking, two are legal while one (looting) is against the law. They therefore they have different connotations and meanings when used in similar contexts, such as wading through chest-deep water with a bag of items. One would not describe a person walking off with a loaf of bread in a time of extreme circumstance such as Hurricane Katrina as “looting.” Similarly, an individual walking off with a television set when an entire town is flooded and without power cannot be considered finding when viewed in the context of the situation. It may indeed be the case that someone comes across a television by happenstance while searching for food, but to walk off with the television crosses the linguistic divide between a contextually-based definition of “finding” and one of “looting.”
Originally submitted as an exercise for Anthropology 3610: Linguistic Anthropology
University of South Florida
Posted by Will at October 1, 2005 01:20 PM in Papers and Essays