What is the relationship between discourse and the motion of culture, that is, how culture (as social learning) passes through space and time? Does the shape of discourse vary in significant ways with different types of cultural motion - especially those associated with "tradition" versus "modernity"? What might the implications of such a correlation (or lack of correlation) be as regards our conception of language?

In my earlier research, I was concerned with discourse in the context of tradition, especially with the discourse contained in (and moving along with) myths in Brazilian Indian communities. Here emphasis is placed on learning received from the past (a myth one has heard one's parents tell, for example), and on passing that learning on into a future (by re-telling the myths to one's children, for example). This is the essence of an idea of tradition - transmitting semiotic forms one has learned from an earlier generation to a following one. In this paper, I will look at just how similar distinct tellings of what is understood as the "same" myth are. How closely paralleled in the replication of linguistic forms (actual words, phrases, intonation contours, and the like) is the replication of myths? In what measure does meaning pass through paraphrase, and in what measure through repetition?

However, I have also turned my attention in the last decade to the analogous problems in contemporary Euro-American culture, where emphasis is placed on newness rather than tradition. Looking at the modern-day equivalents of myths, such as films and novels, I have been asking: just how different are they from one another? Are they more different than two tellings of the "same" myth in Amerindian Brazil? If they are significantly different, what are the implications of this for the nature of discourse in these two cases? If they are not, are the ideas of modernity and tradition really a kind of false consciousness superimposed on discursive realities?

Answers to such questions would seem to have implications for the construal of language itself, which we will, hopefully, explore in our discussion. Is language itself everywhere the same thing, or might it be different kinds of things?