Looked at one way, Duranti's hefty edited volume could be construed as one massive speech act that performatively attempts to crystallize “linguistic anthropology” as a discipline. Twenty-two chapters, many of them written by leading lights in the field, are grouped into four sections: “Speech communities, contact, and variation,” “The performing of language,” “Achieving subjectivities and intersubjectivities through language,” and “The power in language.” Many chapters, however, are so richly conceived their content cross-cuts these groupings. The authors have been charged with crafting an introductory account of their assigned topics, which they do for the most part with success, pitching their arguments to appeal to readers ranging from advanced undergraduates to scholars seeking an entrée into new intellectual territory. The ambitious reader who covers the entire volume can extrapolate a portrait of how the discipline has come into focus over the past three decades or so under the influence of certain key scholars (Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Elinor Ochs, Michael Silverstein, and Kathryn Woolard, to name but a few). And all readers will emerge informed about the tools linguistic anthropology offers to understand how selves and social worlds are negotiated through language.
Linguistic anthropology overlaps with and sometimes draws upon the work of sociolinguists such as William Labov, symbolic interactionists such as Erving Goffman, and conversation analysts such as Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. Yet the chapters in this volume remind us both explicitly and implicitly of the ways in which linguistic anthropologists have pushed beyond the boundaries of these approaches. Mary Bucholtz & Kira Hall (“Language and identity”), for instance, instruct us that pace the correlation approaches in variationist sociolinguistics, status and identity are interactionally negotiated and situation-specific rather than fixed attributes of individuals or groups. Charles Goodwin & Marjorie Harness Goodwin's chapter on “Participation” takes us beyond Goffman's original model of “footing,” which, while inspiring as a point of departure, operates with typologized categories of speaker and hearer roles that do not account for the ways in which interlocutors build speech situations together. And in Elizabeth Keating & Maria Egbert's chapter on “Conversation as a cultural activity,” we see how the analysis of conversation is enriched by a broad, ethnographically informed definition of “context,” looking beyond the immediate stream of talk to the cultural ideologies that inform the micro-management of discourse and the social relationships that emerge from it.
In this volume we are also repeatedly reminded of the ways linguistic anthropologists have challenged Western folk ideologies of language as a referential instrument that transparently conveys the meaning intended by the speaker. The indexical functions of language are discussed in very sophisticated terms by authors such as Asif Agha (“Registers of language”), Kathryn Woolard (“Codeswitching”), and Bucholtz & Hall (“Language and identity”). The theme of language as social action arises in chapters by Duranti (“Agency in language”), Don Kulick & Bambi Schieffelin (“Language socialization”), and Webb Keane (“Language and religion”), among others. And numerous chapters allude to the Bakhtinian model of language as a heteroglossic phenomenon that affords meanings not controlled by the individual.
Of course, linguistic anthropologists preoccupy themselves with language not for its own sake, but as a means of getting at broader anthropological concerns. Power is one such theme, important enough that its appearance is not restricted to the chapters Duranti has grouped under that heading. The contention of much of this work is that language is not merely a reflection of social hierarchy, but often the very medium through which social inequality is instantiated and contested. Susan U. Philips's exceptional chapter (“Language and social inequality”) discusses the stigmatization and valorization of particular linguistic features in settings ranging from classrooms to colonized nations. Power also figures in Niko Besnier's richly wrought chapter on “Diversity, hierarchy, and modernity in Pacific Island communities,” as in his discussion of how authority in Polynesian and Melanesian governance is both elaborated and challenged through language. Paul Kroskrity (“Language ideologies”) offers a succinct genealogy of the linguistic anthropological study of “thoughts about language,” thoughts that are of course generally tied to the political and economic interests of particular social groups. And Marcyliena Morgan enlivens the controversial concept of “speech communities” through a discussion of the “symbolic, market and exchange value of varieties and styles” within and between groups of speakers (p. 5), exploring how insiders and outsiders are linguistically marked in ways that have consequences for their power.
Many authors use this forum as a means not only to summarize the state of the art in the discipline, but also to elaborate their own theories and discuss their research. Paul B. Garrett (“Language contact and contact languages”), for instance, illuminates the dynamics of contact-induced language change through a case study based on his own work in St. Lucia. Duranti (“Agency in language”) develops a model of agency in which he suggests an analytical separation between agency's performative realization (which itself can be divided into two subtypes, “ego-affirming” and “act-constituting” agency) and its grammatical encoding. Elinor Ochs, appropriately enough, divides her chapter on “narrative” into a series of originally conceived “lessons” (ending with a “coda”), extracting the “universal narrative dimensions” (269) that tend to underlie linguistic representations of life events. Kulick & Schieffelin draw upon the work of British discursive psychologists (such as Michael Billig) to suggest that we explore not only the power of language to socialize predictable behaviors, but also its ability to construct what they call “bad subjects” through attention to “not-said or the unsayable” (358). And Giorgio Banti & Francesco Giannattasio (“Poetry”) usefully offer us the category of “poetically organized discourse” that extends beyond standard notions of “poetry” to allow the heightened symbolic impact of other kinds of discourse to be subject to the kinds of analysis inspired by Roman Jakobson.
A book like this aspires to be an authoritative guide to a discipline, so it will inevitably meet with questions about why it foregrounds certain themes and not others. Some of these fascinating chapters discuss only one facet of a much broader issue in the field. Why, for instance, do we see two chapters on embodied language (John Haviland's “Gesture” and Barbara LeMaster & Leila Monaghan's “Variation in sign language”) but none focused on communication in other media such as those emergent from the digital age? Marianne Mithun's chapter on diversity in North American Indian Languages is revelatory, but why does no chapter synthesize the debates inspired by the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? Why are we offered a chapter on “Literacy practices across learning contexts” (Patricia Baquedano-López) but not one focused more broadly on the historical debates on orality versus literacy? And why do we not see chapters dedicated to other major themes in linguistic anthropology, such as gender, globalization, colonialism, ethnolinguistic nationalism, and language death? Still, it is hard to come away complaining too vociferously, for all the chapters mentioned and other, more idiosyncratic or specialized ones (such as James Wilce's “Language and madness,” Steven Feld, Aaron H. Fox, Thomas Porcello, & David Samuels's “Vocal anthropology,” and Benjamin Bailey's “Misunderstanding”) open thought-provoking avenues for analysis while offering a valuable lens into a discipline that has cast its net widely. (The additions I entertain, furthermore, would push the volume beyond the thousand-page mark.) This reader, then, is grateful for not only the impressive accretion of analysis in this tome but also the general bibliography at the end of the text, itself a voluminous resource. I expect many linguistic anthropologists will pick and choose chapters from this volume for inclusion in their syllabi, and many of us will also find our work moved forward by the valuable efforts of our colleagues represented in these pages.
