About

Nicholas Harkness is the Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. His research aims to understand and explain the role of language, communication, conceptualization, and other semiotic processes in the formation and transformation of social groups. At Harvard, he organizes the Roman Jakobson Symposium and serves as the Principal Investigator for Artificial Intelligence in South Korea: An Interdisciplinary Study. Harkness's long-term ethnographic research in South Korea has focused on language, music, and religion within the context of Korea's massive engagement with Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries. This research has resulted in publications that contribute to three foundational anthropological problematics. The first is a comprehensive and analytically robust theorization of "voice," linking phonosonic processes at the level of bodies and sounds to broader social "voicings" across semiotic events of speech and song, culminating in his book Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (2014). The second is an investigation of glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues," which develops a multidimensional ethnographic explanation of speech behavior at the limits of language, presented in his second book, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (2021). The third is the development of a distinctively anthropological approach to the problem of "qualia," theorizing the sensuous aspects of social life at the limits of current semiotic paradigms. Harkness's scholarship and teaching have been recognized by numerous awards, including the Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, an honorable mention for the Francis L. Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology, the Richard Saller Prize for the Most Distinguished Dissertation in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University. He has also received major grants and fellowships from prestigious organizations such as the Social Science Research Council, the National Humanities Center, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Humanities
• Linguistics
• Visual arts
• History
• Literature
• Epistemology
• Theology
• Art

Selected publications

• Michael Silverstein

  Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society held at Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This biographical memoir commemorates the life, work, and professional legacy of eminent linguistMichael Silverstein (1945-2020), who was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008.

  PublisherDOI

• Qualia, categorias semióticas, verdade sentida: remática, pragmática, simbólica

  Estudos Semióticos · 2022 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Philosophy

  É um truísmo sócio-científico, e também um problema, que as verdades sentidas “imediatas” dos indivíduos façam parte de uma semiótica “dinâmica” dos grupos sociais e, portanto, devem ser investigadas como tais. Qualia, cuidadosamente formulados como fatos de primeiridade, disagregam e esclarecem partes desse problema. Os fatos de primeiridade se tornam uma categoria semiótica metodologicamente viável a partir da reformulação, feita de acordo com o interpretante, do Triângulo de Peirce de 1903 referente aos dez tipos de signos. Este rearranjo diagramático revela o domínio da remática, estendendo-se continuamente dos sinais remáticos simbólicos mais familiares, que são os legissignos, aos qualia entendidos como casos limite de semiose nos quais a própria mediação semiótica parece estar suspensa no (e pelo) imediato estético. O rearranjo diagramático também acentua os qualia como culturalmente emergentes: sedimentos de vasta escala e operações de semiose que enganosamente guardam pouca semelhança com o seu processo de produção. Um exemplo de calibração sônica, cinestésica e visual dá respaldo à discussão.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2. The Limits of Language

  2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 2 moves to the ritual epicenter of glossolalia in South Korea, the Yoido Full Gospel Church, to develop the analytical assertion of this book: glossolalia should be conceptualized as cultural semiosis that is said to contain, and therefore be justified by, an ideological core of language, but in fact is produced at the ideological limits of language. The analysis proceeds by looking at how the language-ideological features of glossolalia intersect in mass events of group prayer, where glossolalia and cacophony combine to impose limits on "normal" linguistic functions (namely, denotation, prosody, participant roles, and social indexicality) while reinforcing ideological commitments to language itself. However, the ritual teleology of these imposed limits generates an experience of virtual language that exceeds the limits of "normal" speech and produces the sensuous intensity of spiritual contact.

  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The human throat is a narrow, muscular passageway with three critical functions: breathing, swallowing, and vocalizing. Students of human evolution since Darwin have observed that the anatomy of the human throat which made possible the human capacity for speech also seems to have increased the risk of choking. The throat—this miraculous bidrectional conduit of intercourse between the interior and the exterior—is an open system, always subject to interference and penetration despite its anatomical mechanisms of self-containment and defense. Closure is always temporary and unsustainable; full closure is mortal.The throat's functional trinity materializes in glossolalia as the sensations of inhaling, drinking, and the flowing of speech. Glossolalia exploits the openness of the throat, extending from the throat's functional anatomy, via speech, to the systemic openness of language itself. At the problematic core of glossolalia is the promise of language's unique function: denotation. Glossolalia systematically suppresses denotation, focusing pragmatic energy on language's ideological limits, and exposing as fragile any claims to language's autonomy by revealing its inseverable semiotic continuity with the plenum of the social.

  PublisherDOI

• Qualia

  The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology · 2020-11-09 · 4 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Qualia (singular, quale) are cultural emergents that manifest phenomenally as sensuous features or qualities. The anthropological challenge presented by qualia is to theorize elements of experience that are semiotically generated but apperceived as non‐signs. Qualia are not reducible to a psychology of individual perceptions of sensory data, to a cultural ontology of “materiality,” or to philosophical intuitions about the subjective properties of consciousness. The analytical solution to the challenge of qualia is to consider tone in relation to the familiar linguistic anthropological categories of token and type . This solution has been made methodologically practical by conceptualizing qualia, in Peircean terms, as “facts of firstness” or firstness “under its form of secondness.”

  PublisherDOI

• 4. Fusion and Force

  University of Chicago Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • History
  • Art

  Abstract Chapter 4 demonstrates how the logic of glossolalia is present in the Korean Christian emphasis on evangelism and revivalism. I analyze the final sermon of the American Evangelist Billy Graham's 1973 "crusade" in Seoul, South Korea, when he preached to a crowd estimated to have exceeded one million, the largest crowd ever amassed for a Graham event. Next to Graham at the pulpit was Jang Hwan "Billy" Kim, a Korean Baptist preacher who, in his capacity as interpreter, translated (and matched) Graham's sermon verbally and peri-verbally—utterance by utterance, tone by tone, gesture by gesture—for the Korean-speaking audience. For observers of this legendary event, one Christian's voice seemed to be filled with the speech of another, and both voices seemed to be fused together by the work of the Holy Spirit. The analysis reveals the dynamic pragmatics by which a verbal copy across linguistic codes became an evangelical conduit between Cold War polities, paving the way for the movement of the Word—and the Holy Spirit—from speaker to speaker, from code to code, from country to country, from heaven to earth. Their collaborative manipulations of utterance and agency provide important clues for understanding the semiotic force of glossolalia in South Korea.

  PublisherDOI

• Glossolalia and the Problem of Language

  2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Revelations

  2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 5 investigates the value of glossolalia as a medium of intimacy, privacy, and secrecy for South Korean Christians. Informants often described glossolalia as a secret language with God or speech that allows the prayerful to share secrets with God. By speaking in tongues, Christians can confess and repent publicly without being heard—by friends and family, by strangers, or by the devil. The combination of socio-spiritual contact and verbal concealment afforded by glossolalia sits at the intersection of two competing models of semiotic circulation in the church. One, the gospel, fuses propositional truth with ideal social relations across contexts of action and interaction. The other, gossip, competes with the gospel by traveling through different routes of circulation, forging different kinds of social relations, and producing alternative truths. As a moral system of secrecy, glossolalia regulates not merely what is or should be a secret, but also who may have access to it, how this access is achieved, the mechanisms by which access is controlled, and the routes and extent of circulation. In these highly determined complexes of secrecy, semiotic underdeterminacy is the very arena in which the capacity and privilege to speak privately to the deity is unevenly distributed.

  PublisherDOI

• 6. Deception

  2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3. Feeling the Same Thing

  2020-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 3 investigates Korean Christian conceptualizations of "the Word" as something that seems to circulate—to "move"—in order to illuminate the ideological grounds for explaining the sense of a shared experience of the Holy Spirit. Focusing closely on the cultural conceptualization of the Word in contemporary South Korea, the chapter shows how theological assertions of two pastors who lead two of the largest churches in Seoul conceptualize in denominationally different ways (Presbyterian and Pentecostal) the relation of utterances to agents in order to make claims about the behavior of the Holy Spirit in Christian communities. The chapter shows how the logic of glossolalia is embedded in the more mainline Presbyterian model, and rises to the surface in the Pentecostal model, as emphasis shifts from the linguistic mediation of social contact in Christian fellowship to the linguistic mediation of contact with the Holy Spirit en masse.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Howard Gardner

  1 shared

• Lily Chumley

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Edward Sapir Book Prize by the Society for Linguistic Anthro…