This volume aims at being an anthropological linguistic compendium, focusing on the close relations between culture and language use. It presents an anthology of the latest interdisciplinary studies involving anthropology and linguistics (especially pragmatics), because “Linguistics without anthropology is sterile; anthropology without linguistics is blind” (1). In the introduction, rather than providing detailed summaries of each chapter, the editors provide an overview of the major pioneers of this field, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The volume has three parts. The first offers a general understanding of the traditions of anthropological linguistics; the second covers the development of pragmatics from Firthian linguistics as the initial steps towards cross-cultural/intercultural work; and the third describes various methods of data collection.

In the paradigm of anthropological linguistics, the editors lay much emphasis on Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is considered the pioneer of the “pragmatic grounding of language” (5), and Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of “modern cultural anthropology” (6). Humboldt's theory of language is justified in this volume as a pragmatic theory in which the notion of the “act of speaking” is central, with a concentration on the interrelationship between language, culture, and cognition. For Humboldt, “language is a system of signs or an ‘organism’ which organizes speech and is itself organized and reorganized through the repeated acts of speaking and understanding, through the continued intellectual work of the interlocutors” (179–80). Bronislaw Malinowski—as the founder of modern cultural anthropology with great influence on subsequent researchers such as Raymond Firth—took “language ‘in its primitive function’ as a mode of behavior/action, rather than as a countersign of thought” (7) and emphasized understanding utterances within their “context of situation.” Although his concept of “phatic communion” fails to be fully defined, he is still regarded as the founding father of the concept.

Franz Boas, one of the founders of American structuralism, set up a solid foundation for an ethnographic approach towards language studies and saw language as “a symbolic form through which culture becomes accessible to study” (8). Influenced by Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the famous linguistic principle known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In addition to these brief introductions to the anthropological linguistic approach, the book also describes a variety of data-collection methods used in ethnography, such as questionnaires, interviews, fieldwork, and participant observation.

Turning to pragmatic research, John Firth seemed to adopt the initial steps into the field, but the strengthening of pragmatics was not brought about without the speech act theory of John Austin and John Searle. Several chapters of the book cover interdisciplinary work in pragmatics, such as cognitive anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, and developmental pragmatics. Two case studies—one on honorifics and the other on aisatsu, a Japanese term that means ‘dialogue, exchange of words or question and answer’ (19)—are included to raise the awareness about more specific intercultural pragmatic studies.