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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
  • Cited by 27
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139342872
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139342872
Collection:
Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics
Subjects:
Linguistic Anthropology, Sociolinguistics, English Language and Linguistics: General Interest, Anthropology, Language and Linguistics
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics
Information

Book description

The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.

Reviews

‘Masquerading under the humble rubric of a 'Handbook', this stunning collection of original essays juxtaposes many of the central senior figures of linguistic anthropology with an impressive array of younger voices - including the editors themselves - shaking the mix further by sometimes unexpected but always provocative conjunctions of themes and expertise. It presents fresh evidence for why theoretical advances stemming from a preoccupation with language now inform the best of current anthropological thinking more widely. The collection not only spans an impressive range of linguistic and transdisciplinary topics, but also reflects the main centers of research and discovery in modern linguistic anthropology.’

John B. Haviland - University of California, San Diego

‘This extraordinarily stimulating book is a thoughtfully composed collection of fresh perspectives on five major themes in the anthropology of language.’

Anthony C. Woodbury - University of Texas, Austin

'Continuing the excellent Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics series … the editors have assembled a superb line-up of contributors who represent the diversity of perspectives within linguistic anthropology … the limited scope of each chapter helps to narrow focus and provide depth. Used in conjunction with a textbook or additional readings, specific chapters could be profitably used in upper-level undergraduate courses. Graduate students and professionals will appreciate the index and comprehensive bibliographies provided with each chapter … Summing up: highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.'

E. Pappas Source: Choice

'The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology is an intellectually stimulating and wide-ranging compilation that is sure to spark discussion on its vision of the field. In many ways, it offers a rebuke of what the editors see as the weaknesses of linguistic anthropology, as the introduction notes that the contributors to the volume include ‘scholars who take their linguistics as seriously as their anthropology’, who use methods ‘far beyond ethnography and descriptive linguistics’, and who ‘study processes far beyond the historical and the cultural.’

Adrienne Lo Source: Journal of Sociolinguistics

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • Part IV - Community and social life
    pp 481-598
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the evolution of the ideas that connect linguistics with the modeling of prehistory and focuses on particular topics to illustrate the practical working out of their interactions. It begins with some of the contrasting opinions about the relationships between linguistics and archaeology, and in particular the negative views of some archaeologists. The chapter explores some of the main topics that have been the subject of debate, in particular claims about numerical classification of languages and the processes of language diversification. It considers the genesis of writing, for which there is considerable epigraphic evidence but which can also be documented ethnographically and the evolution of gender registers, something clearly present in Sumerian but also the subject of contemporary descriptions. The chapter takes on one of the most controversial issues, the proposed synthesis of linguistics, archaeology, and DNA evidence to generate new hypotheses about prehistory.
  • 19 - Poeticsand performativity
    pp 485-515
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter presents a battery of concepts, distinctions, terminology, and questions that are common currency among philosophers of mind and language who think about intentionality. It sketches a systematic, interlocking set of commitments regarding the relations among these concepts and distinctions, which underwrites a distinctive set of answers to some of the most important of those questions. There are two distinctions to keep in mind by the term intentionality, the distinction between practical and discursive intentionality, and the distinction between propositional and representational intentionality. Practical intentionality is the sort of directedness at objects that animals exhibit when they deal skillfully with their world. Discursive intentionality is that exhibited by concept-users in the richest sense. It is obvious that there can be practical intentionality without language. The capacity to make propositionally explicit claims and have conceptually contentful thoughts is intelligible only in the context of implicitly normative social linguistic practices.
  • 20 - Ritual language
    pp 516-536
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter emphasizes the diversity of local interpretive norms as well as putatively culture-specific ideas about the relative transparency or opacity of other minds. It deals with a quick review of some of the ways in which intersubjectivity has been conceptualized before turning to sketch the structures of interaction through which it is constituted. The human form of intersubjectivity, centrally involves joint attention and shared intentionality thus allowing two or more individuals to focus on the same object while simultaneously attending to the attention of the other. A series of positions within architecture of intersubjectivity: same turn/first position, transition space, next turn/second position, third position is identified. These are arranged serially as positions within an unfolding course of talk and their organization reflect then the fact that understanding, in interaction, is not static but in a certain basic sense emergent. The chapter discusses issues of cross-cultural diversity and species-uniqueness.
  • 21 - Oratory, rhetoric, politics
    pp 537-558
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The social situation that is built into human language includes only the communicating parties themselves, the reciprocal relations between them, and their mutual relations to an open-ended range of other possible objects to which they may attend. A related difference between language and other animal communication systems is that language allows for interaction which is much more fully dialogical. As pointed out by Benveniste, a related difference between human language and bee communication lies in the potential of language for relayed transmission of messages. This chapter describes a number of features of language and human social relations in abstract terms. It identifies a set of features which are common to all languages and which build into them a primordial social situation. The chapter exemplifies the way in which those features are used in discursive interaction, and the difference they make for triadic interaction when speech is involved.
  • 22 - Language and media
    pp 559-576
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Any account of social action presupposes an ontology of action whether this is made explicit or not. This chapter reviews the problem of defining and analyzing action in interaction, and to propose a solution. It describes three dimensions of contrast in the analysis of action. A first point is that both purposive action and non-intentional effects can be seen as ways to do things with words but, as we shall see, they differ in many respects. Second, there is a need to distinguish explicit from primary in action. And third, one can need to distinguish between the constitution of action, on the one hand, and the ex post facto description of action, on the other. The chapter describes the components and types of action in interaction. It discusses two case studies: how it is that actions are recognized and thereby consummated, both by participants in social interaction and by analysts.
  • 23 - The speech community and beyond
    pp 577-598
  • Language and the nature of the social aggregate
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Tools for the comparative study of social interaction are divided among different disciplines, and so a proposal for undertaking this project means assembling an eclectic toolkit. The cross-cultural comparative study of conversation has commenced only recently, but new advances suggest that we may be poised for a period of new emphasis and discoveries in this area. This chapter assembles a set of tools and best practices from across different disciplines. It aims to aid students of language and culture in pursuing a new paradigm of ethnographic, cross-cultural, field-based studies of social interaction. The chapter highlights some of the challenges raised by the prospect of cross-linguistically comparative interaction studies, as well as the diverse approaches developed across the social sciences to meet these challenges. Studying conversation across cultures means taking a perspective on social interaction that is committed to linguistic as well as anthropological insights.
  • Part V - Interdisciplinary perspectives
    pp 599-733
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter summarizes the complex relationships between linguistic and speaker biological diversity, on one hand, and the influence of paradigms derived from evolutionary biology, the science of diversity par excellence on understanding language, on the other. An important class of models derived from the principle that associations between genetic and linguistic diversities are related through shared history is represented by attempts at explaining the origins and spread of the major language families, such as Indo-European and Austronesian. The proposal that Indo-European was spread by early farmers expanding from one of the origins of agriculture is only a particular case of a more general language-farming co-dispersal process which purports to explain the distribution of several major language families around the world. The classic approach to the investigation of the genetic foundations of language and speech, predating the advent of modern molecular techniques and the understanding of the complexities of genome.
  • 24 - Linguistic anthropology and critical theory
    pp 603-625
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Speech-act theory's view of speech as social action at first inspired linguistic anthropologists, but later became a foil for defining their own approach to language. In subsequent decades the study of the poetic function was extended to a wider range of discursive practices, including forms of face-to-face conversation. Tannen was among the first to study systematically poetic performativity in conversational encounters. A recent attempt to address the performativity problem can be found in the stance literature. The poetic function involves a species of performativity that operates by means of emergent likenesses and differences among chunks of text. Verbal taboos appear as the apotheosis of a folk analysis of performativity wherein the pragmatic efficacy of discourse is felt to be localized in words and expressions. The indefeasibility of verbal taboos thus contrasts with the greater defeasibility of explicit performatives.
  • 25 - Linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology
    pp 626-643
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter sketches out the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language and the social world. It discusses a number of works published in the last two decades, and draws on a variety of examples of ritual speech from societies in the Americas, the Pacific, South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on anthropological and historical research on Amerindian languages. The chapter defines and problematizes five domains that inform many known forms of ritual language in different societies: parallelism and repetition; representation and mimicry; enaction and personification; authority; and reflexivity and indeterminacy. These domains follow a path from discrete linguistic phenomena to broader forms of articulating and expressing beliefs through linguistic performances. These five domains arguably have a close ideational relationship with various forms of collective linguistic intentionality embedded in ritual language.
  • 26 - Sociolinguistics
    pp 644-660
  • Making quantification meaningful
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the concept of rhetoric within anthropological studies of oratory and political practice. In making appeals to rhetoric, anthropologists and others find themselves deploying concepts taken from a vast corpus of language theorizing and usage categorization produced since at least the European re-appropriation of Greek and Roman rhetoric sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. The language ideology model focuses specifically upon notions of strategic language use that inform people's actions, agencies, and the emergence of new sociocultural and political forms. The extraordinary Michele Zimbalest Rosaldo was among the first anthropologists of rhetoric and oratory to come to this understanding, but not without first falling under the spell of a narrow view of rhetoric. The ethno-epistemology of the new megarhetorics of political language that characterize so much of modern political practice around the world was quite otherwise in the Tamil twentieth century.
  • 27 - Language and archaeology
    pp 661-685
  • State of the art
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Materiality in some form often becomes the basis for analytically distinguishing language from media for many theorists, even when these scholars disagree over the basic definitions. This chapter focuses on the materiality of the medium itself, aspects such as entextualization, participant structure, and remediation. By turning to materiality, one can begin to focus on some aspects of entextualization as a process in which the ways in which a text is a material form is integral to how a text can be separated from its context and integrated into other contexts. The chapter discusses analyses that result when one takes mediated communication to be the opposite of immediacy, when the central analytical dichotomy is between mediated communication and co-presence. It also focuses on materiality has the potential to transform who or what counts as a mediator, framing in unexpected ways the roles humans and non-humans might play in mediating communication.
  • 28 - Language and biology
    pp 686-707
  • The multiple interactions between genetics and language
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on three particular concepts, community, culture, and the public. It examines some of the early and polemical work on the speech community. The chapter traces its theoretical and political implications out to work in practice theory, on the one hand, and issues of language and broader-scale imaginings of groups on the other. Linguistic anthropologists share with sociolinguists the concern for a notion of a speech community as a real group of people who share something about the way in which they use language. The chapter focuses on the concept of speech community as it developed in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. It describes the notion of the speech community from sociolinguistics to practice theory, in more general terms the concept can also be traced to a wider historical and philosophical tradition in various branches of language research.

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