Introduction:

Anthropology and linguistic anthropology

1. One of the founders of American anthropology was attracted to the study of language
by his experience among the Eskimos and the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest
Coast. He argued that one could not really understand another culture without having
direct access to its language.
Boas’s interest in American Indian languages was transmitted to his students, some of
whom, like Edward Sapir, went on to make important contributions not only to
American Indian linguistics but to the study of language in general. More importantly,
however, Boas’s view of the necessity of language for human thought and hence for
human culture became a basic thesis of American cultural anthropology in the first half
of this century.
Methodologically, this view of the role of language in culture meant that linguistic
systems could be studied as guides to cultural systems. In Boas’s case, his fascination
with language led to the publication of numerous volumes of ethnography almost
exclusively based on recorded “texts,” that is, transcriptions of what (usually bilingual)
key informants would recall about past traditions, including ceremonies, art, etc. These
transcriptions were sometimes done by Boas himself, at other times directly by his key
informant.
While transcribing native texts and translating them, Boas became fascinated by the
different ways in which different languages classify the world and the human
experience. He used this observation as another argument in favor of cultural relativism
– the view that each culture should be understood in its own terms rather than as part
of an intellectually or morally scaled master plan, in which the Europeans or those of
European descent tended to be at the top.
2. In the same years in which Chomsky’s generative grammar was becoming popular in the
USA, two other important programs were also launched: the ethnography of
communication and urban sociolinguistics.
Through his own qualitatively oriented work and his collaboration with Charles Ferguson
in South Asia, John Gumperz criticized the notion of ‘language’ as used by linguists, and
introduced the notions of variety, and linguistic community or speech community. In the
same years, Dell Hymes launched a call for a comparative study of communicative
events to capture the ways in which speaking is a cultural activity and should be studied
as such. His collaboration with Gumperz produced a new paradigm in linguistic
 anthropology, one in which researchers were expected to study both knowledge and
use of languages through ethnographic methods (Gumperz and Hymes 1964). The
object of inquiry was no longer the grammars of indigenous languages, but
communicative events and contextual variation within and across speech communities.
Although Hymes stressed the need to see linguistics as part of anthropology and insisted
on the name ‘linguistic anthropology’ over ‘anthropological linguistics,’ he also helped
defined a domain of inquiry that was in many ways independent of both linguistics and
the other subdisciplines within anthropology. Whether intended or not, this effort
resulted in a type of linguistic anthropology that was much less preoccupied with
grammatical description and linguistic reconstruction than the one practiced by the
previous generations, and more focused on the performance of language and
consequently its aesthetic and political dimensions. This emphasis on the actual use of
language allowed for great progress in the understanding of the cultural organization of
speaking, but left scholars in other fields worrying about linguistic issues that were still
central to anthropology, such as language evolution. While Chomsky was leading an
antibehavioristic ‘cognitive revolution,’ Gumperz and Hymes were trying to develop a
paradigm in which language behavior could be fully explored as social activity. In this
perspective, the notion of communicative competence was central.
3. A more recent effort toward the definition of context is Elinor Ochs’s (1996) model for
the construction of social identities, which is based on a number of situational
dimensions established through language use: social acts, activities (a sequence of two
or more acts), and affective and epistemic stances. The 1990s saw a rethinking of the
concept of context in part due to: (a) a renewed awareness of the role of theory and
methodology in defining the difference between the message and its context (Duranti
and Goodwin 1992); (b) the influence of a number of theorists from other disciplines
(e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Clifford
Geertz, Paul Ricoeur); (c) the use of the concept of ideology in trying to understand how
speakers conceptualize what constitutes appropriate and interpretable language; and
(d) the introduction and wider adoption of new recording technologies (e.g., video,
digitized images), and their implications for the definition of what constitutes an
empirically adequate representation of speaking or, more broadly, communication.
4. Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin (1984) defined it as (a) the process of getting
socialized through language and (b) the process of getting socialized to language, and
offered some specific directions for research. By applying an anthropological reading to
prior work on language acquisition, they reframed it as embedded in culturally specific
expectations about the role of children and adults in Western societies and, particularly,
in white middle-class families. Using their discovery that neither one of the two speech
communities they had studied (i.e., in Papua New Guinea and in Samoa) have a register
corresponding to what is known as ‘baby talk’ or ‘motherese,’ Ochs and Schieffelin not
only demonstrated that simplification in talking to infants, contrary to what was
suggested by some linguists and psycholinguists, is not universal, but also, and more
importantly, that simplification in talking to infants correlates with other forms of
accommodation to children, and local conceptualizations of children and their place in
society.
Language socialization is conceptualized as a neverending process because
speakers never stop learning Linguistic Anthropology new ways of using language, for
example in school, at work, in church, at play. Among the various forms of ‘secondary
socialization,’ literacy has occupied an important role in linguistic anthropology. The
work of Shirley Brice Heath (1983) has been very influential in showing the benefits of
an ethnographic study of literacy practices in the home, where children are exposed to
literacy in ways that may or may not be precursors of the type of activities they will
encounter in school.
In the 1980s the writings of Mikhael Bakhtin (and one of his alter egos, Valentin
Voloshinov) were particularly influential for their conceptualization of meaning as a joint
activity, the attention given to coexisting styles and voices within the same ‘text,’ and
the identification of both centripetal (toward unity and standardization) and centrifugal
forces (away from unity and standardization) in language use. The notion of a unitary
language then becomes both empirically and ideologically suspect because it hides from
us the inequality inherent in any linguistic system, as well as the potential and actual
aesthetic effects of the juxtaposition of multiple voices and coexisting language
varieties. Bakhtin’s work inspired a number of linguistic anthropologists including Jane
and Kenneth Hill (1986), who introduced the notion of syncretic language to describe
the mixing of grammars that takes place in contemporary Mexicano (Nahuatl) (see Code
Switching: Linguistic). Even when speakers are no longer considered bilingual, some
aspects of their ‘lost’ language and its cultural contexts are maintained, sometimes in
occasional code switches and in a variety of other hybrid constructions. It is the task of
the researcher to find out what survives of the old code and under what conditions it
reappears in spoken or written discourse. Communities differ in the extent to which
they recognize the presence of alternative ways of speaking. Ideological positions based
on linguistic purism, enforcement of national identity, and control over ethnic
boundaries play an important role in the types of language varieties that are supported
or oppressed (Schieffelin et al. 1998)
The study of speaking as a cultural practice cannot be made without encountering the
issue of how language can be used to control the action of others. A number of
contributions within linguistic anthropology have dealt with this issue. Building on
Goffman’s notion of ‘face work’ and Grice’s conversational maxims, Penelope Brown
and Stephen Levinson (1987, first published in 1978) presented a theory of politeness as
a set of strategies based on rational principles used to mitigate ‘face threatening acts.’
(see Politeness and Language). In this theory, language plays a crucial role in mediating
differences in power between speakers. Other approaches have stressed the lack of
control that speakers have over their linguistic resources. For example, the analysis of
traditional oratory by Maurice Bloch defined it as a coercing system within which
speakers could only reproduce the existing power relations. Earlier work on language
and gender also uncovered some of the implications in linguistic codes and linguistic
routines that are responsible for defining female speakers not only as different, but as
weak, unassertive, or submissive (see Language and Gender). More recent work has
questioned some of these findings, at least as generalized statements about women,
and stressed the importance of careful analysis of face-to-face encounters. Marjorie H.
Goodwin (1990) found the girls in her study as assertive and confrontational as boys.
But she also discovered that there were some differences in the interactional strategies
used by boys and girls. Among girls, offenses were constructed out of reported deeds,
and especially reported speech, by absent parties (in the so-called ‘he-said-she-said’
sequences). As researchers improve their understanding of the subtle functioning of
different language varieties (e.g., codes, dialects, registers, genres, styles) in the
definition of social identities (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity), they unveil the active roles
that speakers play in adapting existing linguistic resources to their interactional goals,
and their ability simultaneously to index multiple social worlds and their associated
identities (Hall and Bucholtz 1995, Zentella 1997). The power of new technologies in the
definition of persons and their rights was a central theme of Michel Foucault’s historical
analysis of the development of asylums and other institutions that dealt with health in
France. In a similar vein, but using detailed analysis of face-to-face encounters in which
participants communicate through talk, gestures, and the use of material artifacts,
Charles Goodwin (1994) identified a series of interpretive procedures (e.g., ‘coding,’
‘highlighting’) which use particular types of inscription techniques to constitute what he
calls ‘professional vision.’