neighborhood. By analyzing “situated activities” such as arguments, storytelling, and gossip, Goodwin shows how the children’s relationships and values are reflected in and shaped by their conversations. Her meticulously transcribed conversations (over 200 hours of tape recordings) provide evidence for the complexity of children’s social worlds. They also demonstrate the necessity of situating any analysis of language and gender (or any other social dimension of difference) in actual contexts, for when this sort of study is undertaken, Goodwin notes, stereotypes about so-called “female” speech patterns fall apart (Goodwin 1990:9). Boys and girls do not use language in two completely different ways, Goodwin discovered, but rather interact in same-sex and mixed-sex groups using complex, overlapping sets of linguistic practices. In studying phenomena such as gender differences, therefore, Goodwin argues, it is essential to look closely at actual conversations, for “talk itself is a form of social action, so that any rigorous account of human interaction must pay close attention to the detailed structure of talk that occurs within it” (Goodwin 1990:2).
Bonnie Urciuoli
The focus of Bonnie Urciuoli’s (1996) ethnography, Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class, is “language prejudice” – the ways in which Puerto Ricans in New York City’s Lower East Side experience, accept, or resist the judgments that they and others make about what constitutes “good” and “bad” language, whether Spanish, English, or a mixture. There is a “political economy” of language, Urciuoli argues, the workings of which she explains as follows: “[T]he ways in which people formulate, value, and use words, sounds, phrases, and codes are constituted through power relations: bureaucratic, economic, racial, and any combination thereof” (1996:4). The boundaries between Spanish and English can be clearly demarcated or fuzzy, depending on the context. When the socioeconomic class of the speakers is similar, as when Lower East Side Puerto Rican men are playing basketball with their English-speaking African American neighbors, shifting between Spanish and English (“code-switching”) occurs more fluidly and comfortably, for example, though the ways in which this happens differs according to gender, Urciuoli finds. In contrast, when there is a stark difference in socioeconomic class, race, or ethnicity between speakers, Urciuoli notes, the boundaries between Spanish and English are strictly enforced, so little if any code-switching occurs, for example, in interactions between Puerto Ricans and white social workers, even when those social workers may speak some Spanish. Language use is therefore an important part of unequal social and economic relations, Urciuoli maintains, as it both reflects and sometimes reinforces differences in status.
Alessandro Duranti
Alessandro Duranti (1994) explores language use in a very different part of the world. His ethnography, From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village, analyzes political rhetoric in the local village council (fono) and shows how speechmakers’ seemingly apolitical, technical choices of grammatical markers can have important political ramifications. Duranti argues persuasively that a close look at the micro level of grammar – at one tiny Samoan grammatical particle in particular – offers important insights into how “the choice of specific linguistic framings for people’s actions, beliefs, and feelings does not simply reflect existing power relations, it also constitutes them” (1994:139). In other words, how people describe their actions, beliefs, and feelings – how they frame them linguistically – both influences, and is influenced by, the power dynamics of the community. Just as the title of Duranti’s book indicates, a grammatical analysis, when situated in actual social contexts, can lead to a better understanding of both grammar and politics.
Kathryn A. Woolard
Kathryn A. Woolard’s book, Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia (2016), also investigates the intersections between language and politics. In particular, Woolard builds on decades of her own research to ask how a language acquires authority in the eyes of the public. In Singular and Plural, Woolard demonstrates that ideologies of authenticity (in the case of minority languages such as Catalan) and anonymity (in the case of dominant languages such as Spanish in Spain) provide common routes to linguistic authority. Both authenticity and anonymity are underpinned by an ideology of “sociolinguistic naturalism,” which views languages as inherently linked to identities and visions of truth. Woolard argues, however, that Catalan speakers are gradually moving toward innovative linguistic practices that challenge these naturalist ideologies (2016:300). The book therefore provides a case study of changes in Catalan linguistic practices, identities, and ideologies over time and a more general theoretical framework for analyzing language ideologies that can be used in other contexts.
James M. Wilce
James M. Wilce’s (1998) ethnography, Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh, looks closely at “troubles talk,” or complaints, including the special genre of laments (improvised crying songs) in Bangladesh. The “eloquence in trouble” of Wilce’s title has two meanings: Bangladeshis who resort to laments to describe their suffering are often quite eloquent; and these sorts of laments are becoming less and less common, and therefore represent a genre in trouble – that is, in danger of disappearing. Wilce’s interest in medical and psychological anthropology leads him to pay special attention to the laments of people others label “crazy.” In so doing, Wilce demonstrates how laments are more than just lengthy, monologic complaints; instead, they are esthetic performances and social interactions during which labels can be both attached and resisted by the performer and the audience members, and realities can be “officialized” (1998:201). A focus on linguistic practices such as laments sheds light not only on the experiences of particular individuals’ sufferings, Wilce argues, but also on broader cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate ways to speak and act, especially for Bangladeshi women.
What these six very different ethnographies have in common is their insistence that (1) language must not be studied in isolation from social practices or cultural meanings, and (2) questions about social relations and cultural meanings can best be answered by paying close attention to language. The remainder of this book presents a detailed case for each of these two assertions.
Key Terms in Linguistic Anthropology
In order to provide readers with some tools they can use to approach linguistic anthropology, I have chosen four key terms that provide insight into the socially embedded nature of language and the linguistically mediated nature of social life: multifunctionality, language ideologies, practice, and indexicality. These terms draw upon an array of theoretical approaches from within the field of linguistic anthropology and beyond. As a rule in this book I try to avoid jargon, but linguistic anthropology is no different from other fields such as chemistry or art in having developed a set of specialized terms in order to refer efficiently and accurately to important concepts.
The terms that I have chosen here are “key” in two ways: first, they are central to the main areas of research in the discipline, and second, they can provide readers with important keys to understanding the social nature of language because they come from the social and linguistic theories that have had the greatest influence on current scholarship in the field. Like the terms that are defined in Duranti’s (2001) edited volume, Key Terms in Linguistic Anthropology, the four terms defined below identify some of the features that unify the discipline and will therefore provide common points of reference as we consider specific topics and areas of study within the field.
Multifunctionality
In the mainstream view of language that is very common in the United States, language is thought to be a way to report events or to label objects or concepts. (Views of the main purpose of language can be quite different elsewhere
