Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), 2004: Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.Society for Linguistic Anthropology. n.d. About the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (accessed 7 July 2010).
Historical development Linguistic anthropology emerged from the development of three distinct paradigms that have set the standard for approaching linguistic anthropology. The first, now known as "anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation of languages. The second, known as "linguistic anthropology," engages in theoretical studies of language use. The third, which has been developed over the past two or three decades, studies issues from other subfields of anthropology with linguistic considerations. Though they developed sequentially, all three paradigms are still practiced today.Duranti, Alessandro. 2003. Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms. Current Anthropology 44(3):323–348.
First paradigm: anthropological linguistics
The first paradigm, anthropological linguistics, is devoted to themes unique to the sub-discipline. This area includes documentation of languages that have been seen as at-risk for extinction, with a particular focus on indigenous languages of native North American tribes. It is also the paradigm most focused on linguistics. Linguistic themes include the following:
Grammatical description Typological classification Linguistic relativity
Second paradigm: linguistic anthropology The second paradigm can be marked by reversing the words. Going from anthropological linguistics to linguistic anthropology, signals a more anthropological focus on the study. This term was preferred by Dell Hymes, who was also responsible with John Gumperz for the idea of ethnography of communication. The term linguistic anthropology reflected Hymes' vision of a future in which language would be studied in the context of the situation and relative to the community speaking it. The new era would involve many new technological developments, such as mechanical recording.
This paradigm developed in critical dialogue with the fields of folklore on the one hand and linguistics on the other. Hymes criticized folklorists' fixation on oral texts rather than the verbal artistry of performance. At the same time, he criticized the cognitivist shift in linguistics heralded by the pioneering work of Noam Chomsky, arguing for an ethnographic focus on language in use.
Hymes had many revolutionary contributions to linguistic anthropology, the first of which was a new unit of analysis. Unlike the first paradigm, which focused on linguistic tools like measuring of phonemes and morphemess the second paradigm's unit of analysis was the "speech event." A speech event is defined as one with speech presented for a significant duration throughout its occurrence (ex., a lecture or debate). This is different from a speech situation, where speech could possibly occur (ex., dinner). Hymes also pioneered a linguistic anthropological approach to ethnopoetics. Hymes had hoped that this paradigm would link linguistic anthropology more to anthropology. However, Hymes' ambition backfired as the second paradigm marked a distancing of the sub-discipline from the rest of anthropology.Bauman, Richard. 1977. "Verbal Art as Performance." American Anthropologist 77:290–311. .Hymes, Dell. 1981 Breakthrough into Performance. In In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. D. Hymes, ed. Pp. 79–141. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Third paradigm: anthropological issues studied via linguistic methods and data The third paradigm, which began in the late 1980s, has redirected the primary focus on anthropology by providing a linguistic approach to anthropological issues. Rather than prioritizing the technical components of language, the third paradigm has anthropologists focus on studying culture through the use of linguistic tools. Themes include:
investigations of personal and social identities shared ideologies construction of narrative interactions among individuals
Furthermore, similar to how the second paradigm used new technology in its studies, the third paradigm includes the heavy use of video documentation to support research.
Areas of interest Contemporary linguistic anthropology continues research in all three paradigms described above:
Documentation of languages Study of language through context The study of identity through linguistic means
The third paradigm, the study of anthropological issues through linguistic means, is an affluent area of study for current linguistic anthropologists.
Identity and intersubjectivity A great deal of work in linguistic anthropology investigates questions of sociocultural identity linguistically and discursively. The linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick has done so in relation to identity, for example, in a series of settings, first in a village called Gapun in northern Papua New Guinea.Kulick, Don. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. He explored how the use of two languages with and around children in Gapun village: the traditional language (Taiap), not spoken anywhere but in their own village and thus primordially "indexical" of Gapuner identity, and Tok Pisin, the widely circulating official language of New Guinea. ("indexical" points to meanings beyond the immediate context.)Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. In Meaning in Anthropology. K. Basso and H.A. Selby, eds. Pp. 11–56. Albuquerque: School of American Research, University of New Mexico Press.
Speaking the Taiap language is associated with one identity: not only local but also "Backward" and an identity based on the display of hed (personal autonomy). To speak Tok Pisin is to index a modern, Catholic identity, based not on hed but on save, an identity linked with the will and the skill to co-operate. In later work, Kulick demonstrates that through certain loud speech performances in Brazil called um escândalo, Brazilian travesti (roughly 'transvestite') sex workers shame clients. The travesti community, according to the argument, ends up at least making a powerful attempt to transcend the shame the larger Brazilian public might try to foist off on them, again by loud public discourse and other modes of performance.Kulick, Don, and Charles H. Klein. 2003. Scandalous Acts: The Politics of Shame among Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes. In Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power. B. Hobson, ed. Pp. 215–238. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In addition, scholars such as Émile Benveniste,Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in general linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press. Mary Bucholtz and Kira HallBucholtz, M., & Hall, K. 2005. Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Benjamin Lee, Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press. Paul Kockelman,Kockelman, Paul. 2004. Stance and Subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(2), 127–150. and Stanton WorthamWortham, Stanton. 2006. Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press. (among many others) have contributed to understandings of identity as "intersubjectivity" by examining the ways it is discursively constructed.
Socialization In a series of studies, the linguistic anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin addressed the anthropological topic of socialization (the process by which infants, children, and foreigners become members of a community and learn to participate in its culture) by using linguistic and other ethnographic methods.Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi Schieffelin. 1984. Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications. In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion. R. Shweder and R.A. LeVine, eds. Pp. 276–320. New York: Cambridge University. Ochs, Elinor, and Carolyn Taylor. 2001. The “Father Knows Best” Dynamic in Dinnertime Narratives. In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. A. Duranti, ed. Pp. 431–449. Oxford. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. They discovered that the processes of enculturation and socialization do not occur apart from the process of language acquisition, but that children acquire language and culture together in what amounts to an integrated process. Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that baby talk is not universal and that the direction of adaptation (whether the child is made to adapt to the ongoing situation of speech around it or vice versa) is a variable that correlated, for example, with the direction it was held towards a caregiver's body. In many societies, caregivers hold a child facing outward as to orient it to a network of kin that it must learn to recognize early in life.
Ochs and Schieffelin demonstrated that members of all societies socialize children both to and through the use of language. Ochs and Schieffelin uncovered how, through naturally occurring stories told during dinners in white middle-class households in Southern California, both mothers and fathers participated in replicating male dominance (the "father knows best" syndrome) by the distribution of participant roles such as protagonist (often a child but sometimes mother and almost never the father) and "problematizer" (often the father, who raised uncomfortable questions or challenged the competence of the protagonist). When mothers collaborated with children to get their stories told, they unwittingly set themselves up to be subject to the process.
Schieffelin's more recent research has uncovered the socializing role of pastors and other fairly new Christian converts among the Bosavi community of the Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea.Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1995. Creating evidence: Making sense of written words in Bosavi. Pragmatics 5(2):225–244.Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli Literacy: A Chronology of Influences. In Regimes of Language. P. Kroskrity, ed. Pp. 293–327. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2002. Marking time: The dichotomizing discourse of multiple temporalities. Current Anthropology 43(Supplement):S5-17.Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2006. PLENARY ADDRESS: Found in translating: Reflexive language across time and texts in Bosavi, PNG. Twelve Annual Conference on Language, Interaction, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006. Pastors have introduced new ways of conveying knowledge, new linguistic epistemic markers, and new ways of speaking about time. According to Schieffelin, the converts struggled with and largely resisted parts of the Bible that speak of being able to know the inner states of others, such as the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 2, Verses 6–8.
Ideologies