ANTHROPOLOGY

Anthropology Project

Anthropology Project

Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of socio-cultural processes.

As Duranti (2003) has noted three paradigms have emerged over the history of the sub-discipline.

Anthropological linguistics

The first paradigm was originally referred to as "linguistics", although as it and its surrounding fields of study matured it came to be known as "anthropological linguistics" (Bauman, 2007). The field was devoted to themes unique to the sub-discipline — linguistic documentation of languages then seen as doomed to extinction (these were the languages of native North America on which the first members of the sub-discipline focused) such as:

* Grammatical description,

* Typological classification (see typology), and

* The unresolved issue of linguistic relativity (associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf but actually brought to American linguistics by Franz Boas working within a theoretical framework going back to European thinkers from Vico to Herder to Humboldt). The so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is perhaps a misnomer insofar as the approach to science taken by these two differs from the positivist, hypothesis-driven model of science. In any case, it was Harry Hoijer (Sapir's student) who coined the term (Hoijer 1954; see also Hill and Mannheim 1992).

Linguistic anthropology

Dell Hymes was largely responsible for launching the second paradigm that fixed the name "linguistic anthropology" in the 1960s, though he also coined the term "ethnography of speaking" (or "ethnography of communication") to describe the agenda he envisioned for the field. It would involve taking advantage of new developments in technology, including new forms of mechanical recording (Hill, 2002).

A new unit of analysis was also introduced by Hymes. Whereas the first paradigm focused on ostensibly distinct "languages" (scare quotes indicate that contemporary linguistic anthropologists treat the concept of "a language" as an ideal construction covering up complexities within and "across" so-called linguistic boundaries), the unit of analysis in the second paradigm was new — the "speech event." (The speech event is an event defined by the speech occurring in it — a lecture, for example — so that a dinner is not a speech event, but a speech situation, a situation in which speech may or may not occur.) Much attention was devoted to speech events in which performers were held accountable for the form of their linguistic performance as such (Bauman 2007, Hymes 2005).

Hymes also pioneered a linguistic anthropological approach to ethnopoetics.

Hymes had hoped to link linguistic anthropology more closely with the mother discipline. The name certainly stresses that the primary identity is with anthropology, whereas "anthropological linguistics" conveys a sense that the primary identity of its practitioners was with linguistics, which is a separate academic discipline on most university campuses today (not in the days of Boas and Sapir). However, Hymes' ambition in a sense backfired; the second paradigm in fact marked a further distancing of the sub-discipline from the rest of anthropology.

Anthropological issues studied via linguistic methods and ...