Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (review)

Voices of Modernity is a unique and singular book. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have crafted a wide-ranging and far-reaching work based on years of meticulous research that should be read closely by anyone with an interest in the emergence of "the folk," "folklore," and "folkloristics" in modernizing Europe. The authors demonstrate that ideological notions of "language," "tradition," and "verbal art" were as important as notions of "science" in the development of European modernity and in modernity's twinning of rationalism and nationalism.

In some sense, the volume is an extended conversation with Bruno Latour. Bauman and Briggs argue that language/tradition is a missing third term in the separation of nature/science from society/politics in Latour's "cartography of modernity" (p. 299). That is, new senses of language and language use, as well as new senses of who could claim proper access to these newly defined linguistic practices, enabled a modern European sense of modernity. They also powered the engines of inequality—social, geographic, and temporal—that naturalized this modernity as the triumph of rationalism. Following on Latour's insights, the authors show how a purified idea of language, constituted as separate from either nature or society, enabled the generation of a multitude of hybrids—founded largely in varying positions on the nature and power of tradition (sc. "intertextuality") in sociocultural life.

Bauman and Briggs trace this history from Francis Bacon to Franz Boas, weaving a story that travels from England to Germany to the United States. A concluding chapter shows how some of the ideological issues are still operating in social and political debates today—for example, the controversies over English-only education and Ebonics. The specter of cosmopolitanism hovers over the entire journey. The brightest signposts marking the route are John Locke and Johann Gottfried Herder, with a large supporting cast of philosophers, philologists, antiquarians, linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists. The authors admit that their approach is eclectic: "In selecting particular examples, we have not focused on the traditional historiographic task of tracing explicit lines of historical influence" (pp. 17–18). The authors do not attempt a full history of modernity and language—nor could they in the span of 321 pages. The book's eclecticism contributes to its many successes, including a number of unique and important insights, as well as to some of its lesser moments.

Voices of Modernity is organized in two broad sections. The first, occupying two-thirds of the volume, presents an idiosyncratic history of European and American thought about the role of language and tradition in drawing distinctions between "modern" and "premodern" or "nonmodern" societies. Following an introduction that lays out the primary themes of the book, the authors begin with a discussion of Francis Bacon's and John Locke's attempts to separate language from the vagaries of discourse. Here we see a founding move of modernity as the authors envision it: a field of social inequality based on differential signifying practices. Locke, in this sense, founded modernity by discovering a purified concept of language that rationally mediated between the real world and the concepts that arose from its observation. Under this scheme, access to truth was asymmetrically distributed to those who had mastery of a particular form of rational discourse: "Maintaining a rigid one-to-one correspondence between sound and meaning is, according to Locke, requisite for communication" (p. 37). This properly transparent use of words mapped onto social distinctions of class and gender. Indexicality, rhetoric, discourse, and poetics: these all fall away from this purified notion of "language."

This purification of language acts as the departure point for the authors' discussion of multiple approaches to issues of language, society, and Otherness in modernizing Europe. Successive chapters treat various...