Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality

Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language

by Richard Bauman, Charles L. Briggs

This study asserts that conscious development of new ways of thinking about language had a crucial role in modern history, particularly the discovery of how differences between languages legitimated social inequalities. It claims that savages and ancients were judged alike because they used language similarly, in contrast to modern Europeans who used disciplined language in scientific, philosophical and legal projects.

Genres: Anthropology, Linguistics, Language, Folklore

376 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1999

Reviews

[Dafna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a magnificent undertaking by Bauman and Briggs: by historicizing ideas about language and discourse, they are trying to understand the roots and consequences of modernity. They start from Latour’s proposition that modernity attempts to keep the realms of nature and society separated and thus engages in various practices of purification: however, such practices often fail to bring a promised result and often end up producing various nature-society hybrids. However, Bauman and Briggs also qualify Latour’s insights: they focus on “the epistemological work of purification” (p.5) and make language their main focus. They proceed with a discussion of two rather different views on language that originated in the 17th century: Baconian and Lockean. If for Bacon, it was simply impossible to salvage natural language (language was always already polluted by virtue of being social) and he thus advocated that philosophers come up with a new philosophical grammar and language, Locke assumes a different view. For Locke, there is hope for natural language: we need to understand that words are abstract and arbitrary; then, by using mathematics as a model for language, we can dehistoricize and decontextualize language. Language, for Locke, can become helpful in scientific endeavors if one forgoes intertextuality, dialogism, and metadiscoursivity and works on their speech: an ideal speaker is rational and disinterested and prefers monologism. In the Lockean view, thus, one’s speech is an icon of one’s interiority: whether one is a modern subject or not. The authors then proceed to discuss antiquarian and philological activities undertaken by various advocates of modernity. Though if antiquarians were most interested in collecting (“salvaging”) “traditional lore,” philologists were most concerned with textuality: with creating standardized texts, commenting and interpreting them and thus authorizing these texts. According to the authors, these avenues of antiquarianism and philologism contributed to creating a figure of an “expert,” a “specialized intellectual” of modernity (p.127). In the next chapters, Bauman and Briggs discuss the origins of nationalism, creation of “folklore,” and how various expressive works of the past came to be entextualized, decontextualized, and recontextualized in order to create a narrative of historic (national) continuity, while also permitting experts to create a traditional/modern divide by, for instance, postulating a difference between orality and literacy, between poetry and philosophy, between a passionate and a rational ways of speaking. If for some philosophers, “traditional” ways of speaking occupied a lower place in the hierarchy of genres, Herder contributed to rethinking such an approach by postulating a link between Volk and language and revaluing the ways of speaking that belong to lower strata. Bauman and Briggs finish the book by discussing Boasian (utopian) project and construction of culture: they point to the importance of texts for Boasian anthropology and how text-centered anthropological ideas of culture often are.

Though at times reading Voices of Modernity can be profoundly depressing and unsettling, this book will not lose its importance any time soon. This book brings up the need to examine contemporary ideas about language and speaker, because quite too often a failure of a certain person to “speak properly” continues to be taken as an icon of this person’s lack of rationality and unwillingness to be a modern subject.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an in-depth analysis of some of the most important ideologies about language that have shaped our conceptions of modernity. The authors pull from history, textual analysis, social theory, and anthropology to analyze the language ideologies of a few key figures in the making of modernity, including Bacon, Locke, Herder, Jacob Grimm, and Franz Boas. While it is dense and very academic in tone, there's a lot of valuable information and insight in this book for anyone who's interested in modern history, linguistics, or anthropology.

[Mike Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paradigm shifting read! The book is dense, very dense. Definitely for the Phd or advanced grad student. It's a tough read but rewarding.