Overview

How many words do we use in a day? How many of them are actually necessary to convey the flow of our thoughts? And how many could we do without, if we were to fast, abstain from using words? This book examines the power of words. It explores the links between communication, language and identity, arguing for a certain gravity to the practice of speech, for offering only meaningful words to the people we talk to. We are the words we hear and utter, we are the words we think, and Anna Lisa Tota invites us to use “eco-words” to change the world we live in: “This book is a proposal to myself and to you, dear Reader, an invitation to change together: while you read and while I write, bridging the temporal and spatial gap that separates us and makes it impossible for us to help each other”. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the everyday practice of communication. It will also be useful to scholars and students of sociology, emotion, memory, body studies, philosophy, aesthetics, communication studies, psychology, and linguistics.

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9781032560007

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Reviews

""Anna Lisa Tota's volume, Eco-Words: The Ecology of Conversation, offers a perspective, or rather, a multisensory perception that penetrates the different layers of natural, social, and individual reality. It captures the subtle complexity of tacit correspondences, interrelations, and references of meaning. The multiplicity of perspectives and levels of analysis in this volume corresponds to an approach that reveals the permeability of distinctions and the inadequacy of rigid and unidimensional categorizations in the critical understanding of both objective and subjective reality."" Ludovica Malknecht, Università Europea di Roma, Italy. Published in journal ""Trauma and Memory” rivista online. ""Eco-words: The Ecology of Conversation is a book, difficult to define once and for all, more flower-like than knife-like, but certainly, like nothing in the world. Suppose I unconventionally begin this review, playing with the title of William Saroyan’s famous short story. It is because it reminds me of Anna Lisa Tota’s style to open every chapter with quotation(s) from famous ancient and modern philosophers, sociologists and intellectuals, writers and poets, religious and spiritual teachers and thinkers. But more substantially, it is the most direct possible entrance into her eloquently written and theoretically informed book whose focus is more on empathic understanding than on rigidly rational knowledge per se; it abounds with instructive examples, literary and film plots, old-time sayings from various cultures, Eastern parables and defence “katas”; touching human stories, personal experiences or heard and retold memories about relations between parents and children in different stages of their life; between spouses, present and ex; between generations, reproducing continuously wrong patterns of communication; a small but rich in insights book, source of wisdom and practical advice, a kind of a concise toolkit for learning to speak meaningfully and avoid toxic words, to present ourselves in harmony with our identity, and fi nally to recognise and overcome our traumas by outgrowing the past."" Svetlana Hristova, ""What if Plants Could Talk? On the Possibility of an Anthropology of Communication"". https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1248124

"""Anna Lisa Tota's volume, Eco-Words: The Ecology of Conversation, offers a perspective, or rather, a multisensory perception that penetrates the different layers of natural, social, and individual reality. It captures the subtle complexity of tacit correspondences, interrelations, and references of meaning. The multiplicity of perspectives and levels of analysis in this volume corresponds to an approach that reveals the permeability of distinctions and the inadequacy of rigid and unidimensional categorizations in the critical understanding of both objective and subjective reality."" Ludovica Malknecht, Università Europea di Roma, Italy. Published in journal ""Trauma and Memory” rivista online."

Author Information

Anna Lisa Tota is Vice-Rector of the University Roma Tre in Rome, Italy and Full Professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture at the Department of Philosophy, Communication, and Performing Arts in the same university. Among her publications is the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (edited with Trever Hagen, Routledge, 2016).

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