Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication. Originally published in multiple volumes over a period of several years, beginning in 1911. Chapters by Boas and many of his students and colleagues follow, each devoted to a particular Native American language. Widely regarded as the first major work of linguistic anthropology in the American tradition, the Handbook begins with a classic, enduringly influential introductory essay by Franz Boas that makes a compelling case for the ethnographic study of the world’s languages. The chapters examine a wide range of culturally specific speech acts, events, and genres, ranging from greetings to jokes to narrative performances.īoas, Franz, ed. Press.Ī broadly influential collection of studies from several of the founding figures of contemporary linguistic anthropology and allied disciplines. Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. Among the clearest expressions of this programmatic endeavor are Hymes 1964, Gumperz and Hymes 1972, and Bauman and Sherzer 1974.īauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. Beginning in the 1960s-partly in response to the emerging generativist paradigm in linguistics-Dell Hymes and colleagues, particularly John Gumperz, took crucial steps to organize and consolidate a broad-based program of research in which language would continue to be regarded as, fundamentally, a social and cultural phenomenon, inseparable from the contexts of its use and the lives of its speakers. Boas’s student Edward Sapir, and likewise Sapir’s student Benjamin Whorf, upheld this commitment and developed it in innovative new directions their key works (see Sapir 1993, Sapir 2005, and Whorf 2012) are the basis for the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which has provided the orienting framework for successive generations of highly productive research agendas its implications continue to be explored, discussed, and debated. Franz Boas, often called the “father” of American anthropology, made the study of language and language use central to the newly emerging discipline, as seen in his Handbook of American Indian Languages (see Boas 2002). The works included here represent significant moments in the emergence and consolidation of linguistic anthropology as a distinct field of study over the course of the early to mid-20th century. Many of the field’s most influential article-length works have been reprinted in the volumes shown below under the category Comprehensive Edited Collections a great many more are to be found in the publications shown under the category Journals. This bibliography focuses on linguistic anthropology in the American tradition and on material published in book form. Through their analyses of discursive formations, processes of symbolic domination, and numerous other language-mediated aspects of social life, linguistic anthropologists have contributed substantially to anthropological understandings of such issues as nationalism and transnationalism, ethnicity, social inequality, state formation, Gender and Sexuality, colonialism and postcolonialism, governmentality, capitalistic expansionism, and the full range of globalization phenomena. The study of language and other aspects of communicative practice, broadly construed, are therefore considered to be crucial to understanding virtually all aspects of human society and culture, from the most intimate of face-to-face interactions to the workings of complex institutions to such global phenomena as transnational migration. Linguistic anthropologists take as axiomatic the proposition that language is the primary symbolic medium through which humans apprehend, conceptualize, engage with, participate in, and thereby co-construct their worlds. Linguistic anthropologists are committed to exploring and understanding the enormously varied ways in which humans use language, along with all of the other communicative resources at their disposal (such as gestures, eye gaze, spatial configurations, and material objects), to create, sustain, and shape the worlds in which they live. Most linguistic anthropologists have degrees in anthropology and identify primarily as anthropologists, though they may also have extensive training in linguistics. Along with archaeology, biological anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology is one of the four traditional subdisciplines of anthropology in the American tradition. Linguistic anthropology is a field of study devoted to the mutually constitutive relationships among language, culture, and society.
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