WP110 David Parkin in interview: Anthropology, language & diversity

David Parkin was Professor of African Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London until 1996, and then Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford until 2008, when he retired and became Emeritus Professor at Oxford and Honorary Fellow at SOAS. In 2009, he became Research Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in G?ttingen, Germany, focusing on medical and sociolinguistic processes of diversification.
This interview was conducted on Wednesday 5th June 2013 at the first international conference on Language and Superdiversity held at the University of Jyv?skyl?, Finland. At this conference, David gave the opening keynote lecture ‘Revisiting Cultural Concepts through Cycles of Keywords and Phrases’ (see WP164 in this series), and this interview was intended to explore the comparisons between David?s earlier work on language practices in multiethnic, multilingual urban contexts in Africa, and contemporary perspectives on urban language and superdiversity. You can watch the video itself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtKjB3rBUH8.