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Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language
Language, Culture, and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology
Language, our primary tool of thought and perception, is at the heart of who we are as individuals. Languages are constantly changing, sometimes into entirely new varieties of speech, leading to subtle differences in how we present ourselves to others. This revealing account brings together eleven leading specialists from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and psychology, to explore the fascinating relationship between language, culture, and social interaction. A range of major questions are How does language influence our perception of the world? How do new languages emerge? How do children learn to use language appropriately? What factors determine language choice in bi- and multilingual communities? How far does language contribute to the formation of our personalities? And finally, in what ways does language make us human? Language, Culture and Society will be essential reading for all those interested in language and its crucial role in our social lives.
324 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2006
42 people want to read
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August 30, 2021
You think there would be plenty of common ground between the linguistic anthropologists and the mainstream linguists (who typically study just grammar). And yet it seems the two groups generally talk past one another, or else they just ignore each other’s work completely. Linguistics is sadly entrenched in a universalist framework, taking from anthropology a key idea like the psychic unity of mankind, but not much else. Anthropologists on the other hand see all language as embedded in webs of traditional ideas and ritualized practices, those kinds of things that the common folk might be able to talk about. Such folk are generally not aware of their language’s patterned grammatical structure, a structure which is in any case difficult to perceive from inside one’s own patterned grammatical structure. Indeed, the plain folk are generally not talking about esoteric points of grammar when they speak about language. But it doesn’t matter. Anthropologists are content to view language as a semiotic system wrapped in a dense network of contexts: pragmatic-indexical, status-hierarchical, aesthetic-artistic, and perhaps the most important context of all, the historical matrices where symbols and situations meet. We anthropologists can study language without focusing just on grammar, in other words.
Language, Culture, and Society, the 2006 volume of articles collected by Jourdan and Tuite, takes a multi-faceted approach to the language-culture nexus, sampling many of the contemporary styles of linguistic anthropology. I found half of these papers to be inspiring, the other half being not so much wrong as just dull. The treatments of linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), variability in language acquisition contexts, ethnopoetics, and cultural aspects of language emergence and change appear to me to be the most interesting and promising research programs under development in Language, Culture, and Society.
Linguistic relativity
The paper by Leavitt and the one by Brown tackle the issue of linguistic relativity, a frequently accepted doxa of anthropologists, but a heresy to generativists. Certain traditions of associating language with thought are as old as the hills, or at least as old as Plato’s nominalist Ideas in the West. And there are of course analogs to linguistic relativity to be found in romanticism and empiricism. Leavitt takes a more modern position (attributed to Boas and Jakobson) which avers that while each and every language will let you say anything you wish to say, there are always differences between languages in terms of which functional distinctions in a particular language are obligatory, which are optional, and which appear to be missing from the language tout court. It is also true (as argued by Silverstein) that languages differ in their inventories of indexical or shifter elements. These are linguistic elements that change their reference depending on the time (tense/aspect) and place (many nuances of spatial deixis) of the utterance, who is speaking and who is listening (person), the epistemic commitment to the utterance’s denoted state of affairs (negation, mood and modality), even what social distinctions are made, for example, by the choice of pronoun (as in tu-vous, tu-usted, ni-nin), etc. In fact, shifters link the text of the said to the context of the saying, dividing up reality differently by projecting spatio-temporal and social indices differently, depending on the language and relative to the situation.
Brown, too, looks at linguistic relativity, but from the more psychological and less philological vantage point of cognitive anthropology. Her work focuses on method, providing a much tighter schema to be employed when linking language to thought. By approaching language as a resource, as a product, and as a process, anthropologists can now devise ways of correlating specific habitual forms of language with certain recurring ideas. Both Leavitt and Brown advance beyond Sapir’s and Whorf’s unfortunate fits of hyperbole (‘kaleidoscopic flux’) to bring linguistic anthropology to a better place.
Variability in language acquisition contexts
The paper by Ochs and Schieffelin provides abundant evidence that language acquisition can take place in radically different socio-familial contexts, again depending on culture. In America, parents typically conform to the baby rather than the other way around, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson described in ‘Self Reliance’ (1841): ”Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it….” To the Kaluli of New Guinea this is madness. How can a baby learn to speak if all it hears from adults is baby talk? The Kaluli have no baby talk register, and the babblings of their babies are ignored rather that expanded into whatever the adult or child caretaker guesses the baby is trying to say. In Samoa, nobody in fact talks to the very young, yet they manage to learn Samoan anyway, just by listening and paying attention to social and symbolic cues.
Ethnopoetics
When most people think of language as a cultural tradition, they are likely to summon up ideas about literature and poetry, those being how people typically learn about ‘language’ in school. Linguistics rebels against this image of linguistic humanism (and prescriptivism) by concentrating on the modeling of situationally decontextualized algorithms of syntax or phonology. But then there are linguistic anthropologists like Friedrich, who reincorpoate a humanist insight when observing human language, examining how irony and tropes, both of which are transgressions of everyday rules of speech, permeate the aesthetic and cognitive fabric of a culture. People certainly speak using algorithms, and they classify the objects around them semantically, but for Friedrich the ‘interanimation’ of the system depends on the linguistic system being creatively used and modified on a case by case basis.
In a task like translation, there are two poles to consider: the invariant human universals and the culturally embedded particulars. If we just translate a text’s meaning in terms of the humanly universal, then we get the proper sense in the translation but not any of the flavor of the original source. If we translate close to the source, by porting over into the translation all the nuances in meaning and musical sounds of the original, we are likely to concoct a cacophony, a meaningless mess of a translation. Like its kindred science ethnography, translation must bridge this paradox, making the strange familiar while keeping enough of that strangeness to maintain a faithfulness to the text’s original sociocultural, pragmatic, and cognitive particulars. For Friedrich, even ‘hard’-science scientists rely on tropes like metaphor and synecdoche in order to express what has never been expressed. What other choice do they have? And since the poetical is often a transgression of ordinary language, it always has the potential to be politically charged as well.
Cultural aspects of language emergence and change
But is language really this open-ended and plastic? Well, in crisis situations like slavery and colonialism, this open-ended nature of language might be the only chance a victim has to survive. Jourdan’s contribution takes a rather less demoralized look at pidgins and creoles, which are the kinds of languages that rise up phoenix-like from disastrous language loss. Picture yourself in a place where nobody speaks your language, and you speak none of theirs. And you are not free to leave. What do you do? Well, in many times and places, a new community (even one created at gunpoint) must create a new language. This pidginization is empowering for a speaker who is otherwise powerless, and as Jourdan argues, pidginization is the beginning of a counter-hegemonic linguistic tradition that lives on as a creole. The phenomena of pidginization and creolization are the products of historic tragedies, but the human response to these tragedies has always been both creative and world changing for those who must speak and understand, and help to grow, a new language.
In a much less drastic and far more general way, language is changing around us all the time. Tuite’s contribution reminds the anthropologist of the utility of some linguistic mainstays such as feature decomposition. While summarizing the history of linguistics, Tuite shows how features were essentially discovered on the road to Grimm’s Law (giving alternations like pisk/fish, pater/father, prius/first which emerge through lenition of the initial stop into a fricative), and he again reminds anthropologists of the value of a linguist’s formal rigor for structural or cognitive analysis. Finally, Tuite brings the volume to a close by advocating a mixed methodology for linguistic anthropologists: we need, on the one hand, both formal and desubjectivised analysis, and on the other hand, we need to interpret the subjective side of written or spoken patterned behavior, using hermeneutics to scan the horizon for glimmers of meaning from an alternate time and place. And culture.
I only summarized a sampling of the papers here. Your choices might be entirely different from mine. The volume on the whole is well worth reading, much better than the reader put together by Duranti. I would recommend pairing Jourdan and Truite with the textbook by Foley called Anthropological Linguistics. The latter covers the language/culure nexus more broadly, and looks at topics like human evolution and ethnography of speaking, both of which are not really included in Jourdan and Tuite. Finally, as a converse to what I just wrote, Language, Culture, and Society goes deeper than Foley’s book by following a dozen threads down to the depths of their significance.
Language, Culture, and Society, the 2006 volume of articles collected by Jourdan and Tuite, takes a multi-faceted approach to the language-culture nexus, sampling many of the contemporary styles of linguistic anthropology. I found half of these papers to be inspiring, the other half being not so much wrong as just dull. The treatments of linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), variability in language acquisition contexts, ethnopoetics, and cultural aspects of language emergence and change appear to me to be the most interesting and promising research programs under development in Language, Culture, and Society.
Linguistic relativity
The paper by Leavitt and the one by Brown tackle the issue of linguistic relativity, a frequently accepted doxa of anthropologists, but a heresy to generativists. Certain traditions of associating language with thought are as old as the hills, or at least as old as Plato’s nominalist Ideas in the West. And there are of course analogs to linguistic relativity to be found in romanticism and empiricism. Leavitt takes a more modern position (attributed to Boas and Jakobson) which avers that while each and every language will let you say anything you wish to say, there are always differences between languages in terms of which functional distinctions in a particular language are obligatory, which are optional, and which appear to be missing from the language tout court. It is also true (as argued by Silverstein) that languages differ in their inventories of indexical or shifter elements. These are linguistic elements that change their reference depending on the time (tense/aspect) and place (many nuances of spatial deixis) of the utterance, who is speaking and who is listening (person), the epistemic commitment to the utterance’s denoted state of affairs (negation, mood and modality), even what social distinctions are made, for example, by the choice of pronoun (as in tu-vous, tu-usted, ni-nin), etc. In fact, shifters link the text of the said to the context of the saying, dividing up reality differently by projecting spatio-temporal and social indices differently, depending on the language and relative to the situation.
Brown, too, looks at linguistic relativity, but from the more psychological and less philological vantage point of cognitive anthropology. Her work focuses on method, providing a much tighter schema to be employed when linking language to thought. By approaching language as a resource, as a product, and as a process, anthropologists can now devise ways of correlating specific habitual forms of language with certain recurring ideas. Both Leavitt and Brown advance beyond Sapir’s and Whorf’s unfortunate fits of hyperbole (‘kaleidoscopic flux’) to bring linguistic anthropology to a better place.
Variability in language acquisition contexts
The paper by Ochs and Schieffelin provides abundant evidence that language acquisition can take place in radically different socio-familial contexts, again depending on culture. In America, parents typically conform to the baby rather than the other way around, just as Ralph Waldo Emerson described in ‘Self Reliance’ (1841): ”Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it….” To the Kaluli of New Guinea this is madness. How can a baby learn to speak if all it hears from adults is baby talk? The Kaluli have no baby talk register, and the babblings of their babies are ignored rather that expanded into whatever the adult or child caretaker guesses the baby is trying to say. In Samoa, nobody in fact talks to the very young, yet they manage to learn Samoan anyway, just by listening and paying attention to social and symbolic cues.
Ethnopoetics
When most people think of language as a cultural tradition, they are likely to summon up ideas about literature and poetry, those being how people typically learn about ‘language’ in school. Linguistics rebels against this image of linguistic humanism (and prescriptivism) by concentrating on the modeling of situationally decontextualized algorithms of syntax or phonology. But then there are linguistic anthropologists like Friedrich, who reincorpoate a humanist insight when observing human language, examining how irony and tropes, both of which are transgressions of everyday rules of speech, permeate the aesthetic and cognitive fabric of a culture. People certainly speak using algorithms, and they classify the objects around them semantically, but for Friedrich the ‘interanimation’ of the system depends on the linguistic system being creatively used and modified on a case by case basis.
In a task like translation, there are two poles to consider: the invariant human universals and the culturally embedded particulars. If we just translate a text’s meaning in terms of the humanly universal, then we get the proper sense in the translation but not any of the flavor of the original source. If we translate close to the source, by porting over into the translation all the nuances in meaning and musical sounds of the original, we are likely to concoct a cacophony, a meaningless mess of a translation. Like its kindred science ethnography, translation must bridge this paradox, making the strange familiar while keeping enough of that strangeness to maintain a faithfulness to the text’s original sociocultural, pragmatic, and cognitive particulars. For Friedrich, even ‘hard’-science scientists rely on tropes like metaphor and synecdoche in order to express what has never been expressed. What other choice do they have? And since the poetical is often a transgression of ordinary language, it always has the potential to be politically charged as well.
Cultural aspects of language emergence and change
But is language really this open-ended and plastic? Well, in crisis situations like slavery and colonialism, this open-ended nature of language might be the only chance a victim has to survive. Jourdan’s contribution takes a rather less demoralized look at pidgins and creoles, which are the kinds of languages that rise up phoenix-like from disastrous language loss. Picture yourself in a place where nobody speaks your language, and you speak none of theirs. And you are not free to leave. What do you do? Well, in many times and places, a new community (even one created at gunpoint) must create a new language. This pidginization is empowering for a speaker who is otherwise powerless, and as Jourdan argues, pidginization is the beginning of a counter-hegemonic linguistic tradition that lives on as a creole. The phenomena of pidginization and creolization are the products of historic tragedies, but the human response to these tragedies has always been both creative and world changing for those who must speak and understand, and help to grow, a new language.
In a much less drastic and far more general way, language is changing around us all the time. Tuite’s contribution reminds the anthropologist of the utility of some linguistic mainstays such as feature decomposition. While summarizing the history of linguistics, Tuite shows how features were essentially discovered on the road to Grimm’s Law (giving alternations like pisk/fish, pater/father, prius/first which emerge through lenition of the initial stop into a fricative), and he again reminds anthropologists of the value of a linguist’s formal rigor for structural or cognitive analysis. Finally, Tuite brings the volume to a close by advocating a mixed methodology for linguistic anthropologists: we need, on the one hand, both formal and desubjectivised analysis, and on the other hand, we need to interpret the subjective side of written or spoken patterned behavior, using hermeneutics to scan the horizon for glimmers of meaning from an alternate time and place. And culture.
I only summarized a sampling of the papers here. Your choices might be entirely different from mine. The volume on the whole is well worth reading, much better than the reader put together by Duranti. I would recommend pairing Jourdan and Truite with the textbook by Foley called Anthropological Linguistics. The latter covers the language/culure nexus more broadly, and looks at topics like human evolution and ethnography of speaking, both of which are not really included in Jourdan and Tuite. Finally, as a converse to what I just wrote, Language, Culture, and Society goes deeper than Foley’s book by following a dozen threads down to the depths of their significance.
May 31, 2011
helpful, thanks!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews