Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (review)

As this is the first volume of a new series, it seems appropriate to quote from the statement of the editor and publisher concerning the series’ perspective: ‘Each text provides a selection of classic readings together with contemporary works that underscore the artificiality of subdisciplinary definitions and point students, researchers, and general readers in the new directions in which anthropology is moving’ (ii). Of the twenty selections Alessandro Duranti has included in this reader, ten were originally published between 1956 and 1984 and ten between 1991 and 2000.

What considerations guided D in choosing the twenty papers of this reader? A clue can be gained from the titles of the four parts into which the reader is divided. The two ‘classical’ papers in Part 1, ‘Speech community and communicative competence’ (39–146), are John J. Gumperz’s ‘The speech community’ (1968) and Dell Hymes’s ‘On communicative competence’ (1972). These papers place the speakers of languages within speech communities that instill in them specific language skills and provide them with the contexts in which these skills are then meaningfully employed. The focus in Part 2, ‘The performance of language: Acts, events, and activities’ (147–257), is on performance. The pivotal papers here are Richard Bauman’s ‘Verbal art as performance’ (1975) and ‘Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American speech acts’ by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (1972).

‘Language socialization and literary practices’ (259–358) is the theme of Part 3. The leading article in this section is Elinor Ochs and Bambi B. Schieffelin’s ‘Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications’ (1984). The message of this article is that ‘the process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring sociocultural knowledge are intimately tied’ (292). The other three chapters deal with secondary language socialization through the use of reading and writing. The power of language is the subject of Part 4 (359–464). The leading article and earliest of all the contributions is Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ‘The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language’ (1956). If this paper is to be taken as one of the ‘classical’ texts, one wonders why a piece by Edward Sapir was not added or substituted; after all, Whorf was very much influenced by Sapir and, captivating as Whorf’s articles may be, he tended to overstate his case.

Among the most recent studies included in this reader, D’s ‘Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings’ (1997), Jane H. Hill’s ‘Language, race, and white public space’ (1998), and Benjamin Bailey’s ‘Communication of respect in interethnic service encounters’ (1997) may be of particular interest.

Selecting a representative sample from the hundreds of articles dealing with the many aspects of linguistic anthropology is a task no two editors would agree on. D has chosen to define the field rather narrowly. For example, no chapter of this reader deals with nonverbal communication, communication among members of other species (in order to compare the design features of human language with communicative behaviors of other animals), language origins, or the use of linguistic data for reconstructing protocultures. The inclusion of such additional topics, however, would have made this already large volume somewhat unwieldy.

Preceding the twenty papers is an introductory chapter by the editor—‘Linguistic anthropology: History, ideas, and issues’ (1–38 and 465–79 [references]). It is a meticulous overview of linguistic anthropology, with special reference to the papers of this anthology but also touching on the history of the field in the United States.