Linguistic Anthropology

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

In this chapter, I offer examples of ethnographic approaches to discourse, focusing in particular on how linguistic anthropologists have engaged and expanded upon the concepts and theoretical tools offered by Goffman and Bakhtin. This includes attention to how Goffman unpacks interactional participant roles, how his concept of footing has been critical to recent interest in stance, and also how speakers linguistically shift in and out of registers. Drawing on Bakhtin, discourse analysts have turned to explore the productive concepts of genre, intertextuality, voicing, and chronotopes. Ethnographic discourse analysis connects levels of discourse and context and relies on specific methodological strategies to capture the dynamic ethnographic and sociopolitical contexts within which language is located and to which it contributes and responds.

how the individual participants define their own and each other's age categories and how, as a result of these age categories, they relate to one another. The model based on communication accommodation theory provides a valuable tool for this type of analysis, in that it focuses on communicative attuning-strategies adopted by the interactants to increase or decrease social distance.

This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

As the "linguistic turn" in anthropology continues to exert its influence on the field, three recent volumes offer additional insights and explanations as to the role of language in the enactment and interpretation of identities. Informed by poststructuralist thought, which sees identities as fluid, contextually situated, and negotiated in interaction, these publications emphasize the importance of scrutinizing how specific linguistic practices contribute to the construction and maintenance of both individual and community boundaries. Each volume illustrates how people in diverse settings manage to construct palpable, continuous, and coherent self-narratives in the face of shifting political landscapes and increased global migration.

The old Apache man, Nick Thompson, pointed with his lips to a low ridge that runs behind his home in an easterly direction away from Cibecue Creek. "That is a good place," he says. "These are all good places. Goodness is all around." (pg. 65).

City's Spanish Harlem, is an inspired example of what she terms "anthropolitical linguistic" analysis. While borrowing from the theoretical and methodological repertoires as well as activist stances of a wide variety of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, she nonetheless presents a powerful and synthetic perspective uniquely her own.

In this article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa critique appropriateness-based approaches to language diversity in education. Those who subscribe to these approaches conceptualize standardized linguistic practices as an objective set of linguistic forms that are appropriate for an academic setting. In contrast, Flores and Rosa highlight the raciolinguistic ideologies through which racialized bodies come to be constructed as engaging in appropriately academic linguistic practices. Drawing on theories of language ideologies and racialization, they offer a perspective from which students classified as long-term English learners, heritage language learners, and Standard English learners can be understood to inhabit a shared racial positioning that frames their linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness. The authors illustrate how appropriateness-based approaches to language education are implicated in the reproduction of racial normativity by expecting language-minoritized students to model their linguistic practices after the white speaking subject despite the fact that the white listening subject continues to perceive their language use in racialized ways. They conclude with a call for reframing language diversity in education away from a discourse of appropriateness toward one that seeks to denaturalize standardized linguistic categories.

WARD GOODENOUGH (1957) has proposed that a description of a culture-an ethnography-should properly specify what it is that a stranger to a society would have to know in order appropriately to perform any role in any scene staged by the society. If an ethnographer of Subanun culture were to take this notion seriously, one of the most crucial sets of instructions to provide would be that specifying how to ask for a drink. Anyone who cannot perform this operation successfully will be automatically excluded from the stage
upon which some of the most dramatic scenes of Subanun life are performed.To ask appropriately for a drink among the Subanun it is not enough to know how to construct a grammatical utterance in Subanun translatable in English
as a request for a drink. Rendering such an utterance might elicit praise for one's fluency in Subanun, but it probably would not get one a drink. To speak appropriately it is not enough to speak grammatically or even sensibly (in fact some speech settings may require the uttering of nonsense as is the case with the semantic-reversal type of speech play common in the Philippines. Our stranger requires more than a grammar and a lexicon; he needs what Hymes (1962) has called an ethnography of speaking: a specification of what kinds of things to say in what message forms to what kinds of people in
what kinds of situations.

The article argues that a fuller consideration of voicing phenomena clarifies the nature of processes whereby registers of language expand, change, or remain constant in the socialized competence of language users. The first half of the article describes the semiotic processes whereby voicing effects are recognized or identified by interactants. The second half discusses the role of discursive voices and figures in large-scale sociohistorical practices involving registers. The overall goal is to show that the social existence of registers depends on the semiotic activities of language users, particularly those characterized in this article as matters of "alignment." [voice, registers, footing, stereotypes, discourse analysis]. Roles alignment across speaking turns: Tropes of sports announcer speech in English.

© Miehael Stubbs 2002 Editorial Offiees: 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 UF, UK Tel:+44 (0)1865 791100 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148-5018, USA Tel: +1 781 388 8250 The right of Miehael Stubbs to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in aeeordanee with ...

This is a major contribution to the contemporary discussion of material religion and the anthropology of Christianity. Published in a book series on the anthropology of Christianity, (ed. Joel Robbins) Webb Keane presents new theoretical pathways for several interrelated topics, written in a rich and provocative manner. From a historical perspective Keane investigates the dynamic relations and boundaries between words, material things and subjects. He uses the context of the colonial missionary encounter of the Dutch in Indonesia as a frontier to highlight how Euro-Americans have understood themselves to be modern and construed the Other of modernity (p.6). The specific attention given to Calvinism lies in its peculiar role in the history of Euro-American capitalism and political thought, Keane argues. In order to capture practices involving words and things, Keane introduces as key concept the notion of semiotic ideology: 'like language ideology, then, semiotic ideology is a reflection upon, and an attempt to organize, people's experiences of the materiality of semiotic form. Not only language, but also music, visual imagery, food, architecture and gesture and anything else that enters the actual semiotic practice functions within perceptible experience by virtue of its material properties' (p.21). Notwithstanding this broad definition, Keane concentrates on language, material things and agency. By focusing on materiality of social imaginaries, the interconnectedness of ideas and material domains become visible, Keane argues. In the missionary encounter, and particularly in conflicts surrounding practices of religious conversion, the dynamics of contrasting semiotic ideologies at play within a particular context is highlighted. It is in this confrontation that the discourse of the fetish emerges, questioning the basic assumptions about what beings inhabit the world, what counts as possible agents and what not. Keane articulates his theoretical framework by taking doctrine seriously: they are not only about the world, they function often in practical and concrete terms, within the world. The notion of purification of Bruno Latour, understood as part of a modern project of separating domains of signs and things, of creating boundaries between objects and subjects, is taken up by Keane to explain Protestant missionaries' attempts to dematerialize religion. But purification is also applied by Keane to discuss the concept of agency: in the missionary encounter important practices that foster particular kinds of self-consciousness about agency have emerged, and the modern vision of a self that must be abstracted from material and social entanglement is induced. Keane positions Calvinist semiotic ideology as part of a larger historical process that has led to the narrative of modernity. Protestantism converges with the subjective dimensions of the idea of modernity as moral progress and the idea of disenchantment as definitive secular modernity in two ways: by locating certain kinds of agency in persons, according a special value to agency, and by modifying religion primarily into a matter of concepts. But Keane stresses, following Latour, that purification processes are never fully successful and do create hybrids because of the inescapable materiality that semiotic forms induce. High ideals and ideologies cannot exist socially or be transmitted without some kind of embodiment and consequently generate new semiotic forms. Human subjects cannot free themselves from the practices through which they are embedded in the world of other people.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Learning explores various sociohistorical paradigms as instantiated over multiple timescales of student identity formation. Wortham traces the progress of several students over one year in the Paideia program at Colleoni High School. The text focuses on drawing connections between curricular themes, student cognitive achievements, and the emergence of individual identity. Wortham contends that academic learning and social identification are inseparable and must be addressed jointly in instructional theory.

As the use of qualitative inquiry increases within the field of social work, researchers must consider the issue of establishing rigor in qualitative research. This article presents research procedures used in a study of autoethnographies that were written regarding the experience of being Jewish. In this project, the researchers utilized reflexivity, audit trail, triangulation by observer, peer debriefing, member check and prolonged engagement in order to manage the threats to trustworthiness as discussed by Padgett (1998). Implications of the project suggest that research procedures utilized by qualitative researchers to establish rigor are an important way to increase our confidence that the voice of the participants is heard, therefore fitting the mission of the social work profession.

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

The field of language and sexuality has gained importance within socioculturally oriented linguistic scholarship. Much current work in this area emphasizes identity as one key aspect of sexuality. However, recent critiques of identity-based research advocate instead a desire-centered view of sexuality. Such an approach artificially restricts the scope of the field by overlooking the close relationship between identity and desire. This connection emerges clearly in queer linguistics, an approach to language and sexuality that incorporates insights from feminist, queer, and sociolinguistic theories to analyze sexuality as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. These intellectual approaches have shown that research on identity, sexual or otherwise, is most productive when the concept is understood as the outcome of intersubjectively negotiated practices and ideologies. To this end, an analytic framework for the semiotic study of social intersubjectivity is presented.

form, here called bivalency. It further considers the ambivalent and simultaneous messages that are communicated in linguistic contact zones, and speakers' simultaneous claims to more than one social identity. There can be analytical advantage in comparing the frequencies, functions, and relationships of these different forms of simultaneity in different political economies of language contact. I n spite of long-standing protests from sociolinguists, bilingualism and multilingualism traditionally have been cast not only in popular belief but also in social and linguistic theoretical perspectives as anomalous, marginal, and in need of explanation. Suzanne Romaine, in her book Bilingualism, observed how odd it would be to encounter one entitled Monolingualism, given the degree to which the monolingual is taken for granted as the normal human condition (1989:1). Modern linguistics is an unlikely fish to discover that water. The monolingual point of view has so dominated the Western intellectual tradition that it has been invoked by minority-language partisans, often themselves bilingual, in many language conflicts. For example, the first director of language policy in newly autonomous Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8(l):3-29.

ciolinguistics texts as applied anthropology is in introductory anthropology texts. The news concerning the enlightenment sociolinguistics has provided is good. The news about language problems in society, not so good. For example, attempts to reduce culture clashes between schools and communities by using communication ethnography in educational contexts (e.g., Heath 1983) have been discouraging. This is a fine book. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, who usually do research on, and keep up with, only a few areas covered by Fasold, should read it. As noted, it is more than simply a summary of work found elsewhere, and it includes sustained, clear, highly useful discussions of topics not found in other introductions.

This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other.

the mass mediation of communities that are large, shifting, and somewhat intangible, like those that extend across cities, regions, and nations. When we look at the communications that emanate from mass media, we see that, like most other forms of speaking, they are preceded and succeeded by numerous other dialogues and pieces of language that both implicate them and render them interpretable. Such is the social life of language-as an abundance of scholars have repeatedly argued-to be imbricated in innumerable webs of connection with other utterances (Bakhtin ,1986, indexically linked to past and future speech

The contributors largely agree that there was continuity between pre-language and the emergence of language. Where to find channels of continuity becomes the problem. They eschew looking to some one thing but, rather, see language resulting from a convergence of physical and cognitive developments in the context of expanding social life. They note that monkeys and apes are cognitively capable of learning social relationships and attributing them to one another and learning instrumental relationships that link goals with actions that use instruments. This leads to "a key hypothesis: the internal representation of language meaning in the brain derives from the primate representation of social situations" (Worden, p. 153). An obvious question concerns the emergence of phonologically discrete speech sounds by which, in their various combinations, humans create vocabularies. It is difficult to see this capacity as being selected for to this end in the first place. Nor can one see articulated human speech as simply an elaboration of primate calls. Rather, it must have resulted from changes in the vocal tract that were adaptations to erect posture and which incidentally resulted in articulatory capabilities. Once there, these capabilities began to be exploited to make a variety of different sound sequences that could be used to communicate wants and feeling states in social interaction. Naming things as an adjunct to gesturing would naturally accompany