A companion to linguistic anthropology (review)

The current book is the first in the ‘Blackwell companions to anthropology’ series and is definitely a commendable start. The volume is divided into four parts: ‘Speech communities, contact, and variation’, ‘The performing of language’, ‘Achieving subjectivities and intersubjectivities through language’, and ‘The power in language’.

Immediately following the table of contents are six pages with brief abstracts of each chapter of the book. This is followed by a concise preface by Duranti (xiii–xiv) and the acknowledgments. Biographical notes on each contributor appear just before the opening of Part 1.

The book contains twenty-two chapters authored by professionals working in the various subdisciplines that make up the burgeoning field of linguistic anthropology. The wide range of topics covered by the chapters is staggering. It includes discussions of speech community, codeswitching, sign languages, gesture, poetry, music, socialization, identity, misunderstanding, madness, religion, and agency, among other topics. One of the chief merits of this volume is its inclusion of articles on older topics such as speech communities, language contact, and language ideologies, alongside others such as the music of language, language and madness, agency, and gesture, which seem to constitute the future of the field. This is echoed by Duranti in his preface: ‘Each chapter is intended to present a topic, with a related set of issues and generalizations, that will help readers understand the intricacies of a particular tradition of inquiry and acquire a sense of where it is leading in the near future’ (xii). Generally, the articles are well written and clear enough for readers who are unfamiliar with the topics.

Each chapter ends with a list of references, but there is also a comprehensive bibliography of over 2,000 entriesat the end of the book (518–605). Researchers in linguistic anthropology may take advantage of it as a type of one-stop source for references.

This work further helps to concretize the place of linguistic anthropology as a serious subdiscipline of inquiry. It is an extremely good reference not only for linguists, but also for anthropologists and other social scientists who are interested in this aspect of the discipline.