Reviewing a handbook of linguistic anthropology is, among other things, an opportunity to consider the argument it makes about the nature of its topic. This book describes itself as offering ‘a broad survey of linguistic anthropology that offers insights into the relationships between language, cognitive processes, and cultural patterns, as well as the critical theoretical and methodological issues in the field today’. Bonvillain divides linguistic anthropology into four overarching themes: ‘Language and cultural productions’, ‘Language ideologies and practices of learning’, ‘Language and the communication of identities’, and ‘Language and local/global power’. While some of the chapters contribute primarily to the breadth of the text (providing thorough overviews of the topics they cover), others engage in critical theoretical interventions. As such, it is thoroughly informative in some ways, and at the same time inevitably incomplete in others.

The collection is prefaced with an introductory chapter by Bruce Mannheim on the ‘Intertwined traditions’ that have shaped the contemporary study of language, including not only linguistics and anthropology, but also psychology and cognitive science. Mannheim draws an intellectual family tree that defines the theoretical roots of this volume's understanding of the discipline (with focus on the insights of Franz Boas, Dell Hymes, John Gumperz, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mikhail Bakhtin), and establishes as central to the handbook a critical reflexivity about the ideologies and political economic contexts that inform our own definitions of language, the practice of our research, and the conditions of scholarship. Later chapters include a recurring theme calling for attention to the structural phenomena that have shaped our understandings of what language is and how it can/should be studied, as well as to our own roles in (re)producing popular and powerful understandings of how it works in the world. Bonnie McElhinny's chapter on language and political economy makes especially strong use of this frame of analysis, as she illustrates how the conditions of the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first century in various parts of the world have defined the questions we ask, the methods of study, and the ideas that are received as valid. From a different angle, Kathleen C. Riley, following Bakhtin, directly interrogates the implications of the elusive and highly artificial nature of ‘languages’ (or varieties, or codes, or any of the other terms we might use to circumscribe a particular set of semiotic resources and ways of speaking), which never really exist outside social (including academic) conceptions of them. Joan Pujolar, likewise, offers an explicit articulation of an idea that runs beneath the surface of much of the book—the terms we use to describe social phenomena are themselves also part of the phenomena, such that community, integration, and even language become operational tools rather than mere descriptors of the social world (returning the meta-considerations of linguistic anthropology to the Whorfian roots that are pulled out and analysed in the early chapters of the text).

Bonvillain's sense of linguistic anthropology is profoundly political and rooted in the particular contributions that the field can make to not only understanding, but also solving, problems of social inequality, marginalization, and discrimination that characterize the contemporary global human experience. In contrast to another recently published handbook in the field (Sidnell, Enfield, & Kockelman Reference Sidnell, Enfield and Kockelman2014), this text centres questions of power, ideology, and political economy, while giving less attention to poetics and performance, functional linguistics, and depictions of cultural diversity. The sheer amount of space devoted to the section on local/global power reveals the emphasis placed on this concern. In both this section and the section on identity, however, the placement of some of the articles under these analytical categories forces an interpretation of their topics that is not always immediately apparent in the authors’ presentations of them. For example, while the discussions of d/Deaf communities and ‘deafnicity’ are fascinating identity-rooted components of Richard J. Senghas’ essay on ‘Sign languages and communicative practices’, they are not the only, or even the main, ways in which Senghas demonstrates the importance of these embodied actions for linguistic anthropology. Both this chapter and the following (Riley's discussion of ‘New and emergent languages’) could be more provocatively placed in conversation with the chapters on ‘Language and cultural productions’, engaging with the question of what constitutes language in ways that include, but are not overly circumscribed, by identity and power. In addition, while several chapters make reference to the concept, the absence of a direct in-depth treatment of the ideology and practice of literacy was surprising, as the complex social conditions that inform written text are uniquely addressed by linguistic anthropologists.

Many of the authors offer a definition of linguistic anthropology that is characterized primarily by its methodological and theoretical lens. Linguistic anthropology is understood to be fundamentally ethnographic, involving participant observation, as well as the use of discourse analytical and interactional sociolinguistic methods, in ways that always attune to the points of contact between micro and macro scales, and to context in the deepest possible sense. The contribution by Elaine W. Chun & Adrienne Lo emphasizes the presence, even the foregrounding, of the listening subject who plays a role in shaping the meanings of utterances and communicative events. This point emerges as a sophisticated contribution that linguistic anthropology makes to the theory of communication and meaning, both in general and in specific manifestations of language as grounded in particular sociocultural fabrics. The most in-depth engagement with the question of what makes linguistic anthropology unique, however, comes remarkably late in the book, in John Conley's description of the limited number of linguistic anthropological studies of legal discourse. This paucity, however, helps to demonstrate what, specifically, linguistic anthropologists bring to the table in their analysis. With the markers of ethnography (most centrally, participant observation), and the attention to two thematic ideas—legal discourse as cultural practice, and the implications of ideology to the power within these discourses—linguistic anthropology offers a multi-level, culturally rooted approach. As Conley points out, this approach is not necessarily limited to linguistic anthropologists, but while ‘linguistic anthropologists look at the world [in these terms], others rarely do’ (397).

In the absence of an overarching editorial statement about the constitution of the field, I am, as a reader, trying to identify the definitions being put forward based on the holistic picture the book provides. From that perspective, then, it is difficult to reconcile the approach taken by some of the articles with this view of the discipline. These include Sabine Stoll's analysis of language acquisition in different cultural settings, Mary Jill Brody's methodological description of interactive discourse, and two of the chapters on language endangerment and revitalization (by Andrew Cowell, and by Julie Brittain & Marguerite MacKenzie). These contrast with other chapters, often on directly related topics, that make clear how a focus on diverse cultures or on language and social roles is not exactly the same thing as doing linguistic anthropology. It is possible, of course, to develop a view of the discipline that broadens its boundaries in this way, but in the context of other texts that present such rich views not only of what language is and what can be done with it, but also of how it comes to have, make, and change meanings within social groups, these approaches that discuss languages, communities, and speakers as relatively stable and identifiable concepts feel more limiting.

This is a text that highlights language and its social meaning not as topics of esoteric theoretical consideration, but as an area of study that matters deeply to understanding and bettering human life. This motivation presents itself repeatedly in the call that answers the question, asked of each contributor, to consider the next steps that linguistic anthropologists should take with respect to their individual topics—to do more of it, and to do it more widely, in more places. A somewhat unfortunate aspect of the text is the disproportionate focus on examples from Western countries, and from the United States in particular. While the examples from within those contexts are quite diverse in other ways, this further illustrates the need to expand linguistic anthropological work to better apply the insights about, for example, racialization, to a wide range of social contexts of race. Linguistic anthropology remains a small discipline, sometimes a forgotten subfield within anthropology, sometimes an awkwardly inserted component of sociolinguistics programs and courses. And yet, its particular approach, as these essays make clear, brings substantial value to the table and contributes insights that we know are merely scratching the surface of what can be known about how language and social life are interconnected. This book does its job not only in presenting the state of the art in the field, but also, hopefully, in contributing to defining a set of research trajectories that would cover the discipline well into the next century.