SIL Electronic Book Reviews 2003-024
URL: http://www.sil.org/silebr/silebr2003-024
Linguistic anthropology
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. 398. hardback $80.00, paper $29.00. ISBN 0521445361 (hardback), 0521449936 (paper).
Reviewed by Wesley M. Collins
SIL International and the Ohio State University
There is no question about linguistic anthropology being good anthropology. It is part of how Boas conceived of the four fields. The question that arises is, is it good linguistics? Duranti doesn’t specifically answer that question but he asks some others that may be equally compelling and that may, for him, obviate asking the first question. Is syntax really autonomous? Is there any such thing as a homogeneous speech community? Is there anything gained by describing the grammar of a supposed “idealized speaker”?
In this book, Duranti presents linguistic anthropology (hereafter “l/a”) as an interdisciplinary field which studies language in context. He says that the concern of l/a is with “language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.” As a resource it is used to communicate; but also it tells much about the categories, the priorities, the relationships, and worldview of a culture. At the same time, language is a tool used by speakers to bring that worldview into being and to enforce (force and reinforce) the economic, gender, political, and class relationships among the speakers. Language is an action. Whereas for formal linguists the object of study is language competence—that which is inside the head of the idealized speaker—for linguistic anthropologists the object of study is the subject, the speaker who acts in the real world and who epitomizes variation between groups, among individuals, and even in his/her own speaking practices. Chomsky finds variation “uninteresting” and outside the scope of real linguistics. Anthropologists (and sociolinguists) find it to be the very core of communicative competence.
Duranti claims that sociolinguistics is the social science to which l/a is most akin. The basic differences are historic. Sociolinguists have dealt more with quantitative data; linguistic anthropologists with qualitative. Sociolinguists have tended to study urban variation (à la Labov), while linguistic anthropologists study rural communities (Boaz, Margaret Mead, et. al.). Finally, sociolinguists talk mostly to linguists with whom they share an interest in how to represent linguistic competence, since it is “language” that expresses social variability. On the other hand, linguistic anthropologists dialogue most often with other anthropologists with whom they share a fixation on culture. Duranti claims that it is this orientation to culture that makes linguistic anthropologists different from sociolinguists; and as an anthropologist himself (Duranti is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA), he spends an entire chapter on differing views of culture.
From there he turns to ethnography that he sees as the heartbeat of anthropology.
Ethnography is an interpretive act and as such should be turned on itself to increase the richness of descriptions, including an understanding of the conditions under which description itself becomes possible.
This is the quintessential postmodern view of the anthropological enterprise, where the ethnographer’s own views and agenda are made explicit, rather than leaving them to the readers’ imaginations. This is what Duranti means when he says that ethnography involves a “playful element” (p. 86), where one includes or excludes, admits or assumes context as relevant from his/her perspective at the moment. It certainly is easy to see why Chomsky would have all of this fall beyond the pale.
Duranti commits a chapter to each of the following: Formal linguistics, Speech Act Theory, and Conversation Analysis, each of which he claims is very helpful, but that they eliminate too much of what he considers to be crucial context. Drawing on contributions from each of these sciences, he then gives a thorough analysis of a Samoan greeting ritual by discussing speakers and recipients, spatial relations and areas of prestige within the house, peripheral participation by those in the house, the positions and path taken through the house by the main players, the overlapping of adjacency pairs (for example, “How are you?” “I’m fine!”) in the greeting discourse, a study of the actual words exchanged, the register and style of language used, and the (assumed) intentions of the greeters and the one greeted.
He leaves largely undiscussed in the book the idea of universals, linguistic or otherwise, but he seems to side with Benjamin Whorf who believed that “the structure of any language contains a theory of the structure of the universe” (p. 58). And since each culture is distinct, the idea of universals is moot.
Duranti cites over 650 authors and over 1,000 books and articles. He has a vast grasp of the field and is himself a respected anthropologist and published ethnographer. He is respectful of the contributions of other disciplines, but he prefers to see them all serve under the umbrella of ethnography rather than to turn the tables and make ethnography a part of any of the other disciplines. But the original question still holds. How good is the linguistics done by anthropological linguists? Duranti would say that it is (or could be) at least as good as the linguistics done by formal grammarians, but with the benefit of knowing where speakers’ sentences and discourses and word choices have come from. In this, Duranti would agree with the idea immortalized in the title of Pike’s Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior (1967). Not only is syntax not autonomous—neither is language.
For fieldworkers who might read the book, I recommend chapter 6 on traditional linguistics and discourse studies. He says that when we talk, we do not merely communicate a sentence meaning, but a meaning related to who we are, who we think we are, our perception of the event, and an entire world of social and historical meaning. Much of this is in the unspoken context of which only part is encoded in the message itself. So discourse study is important.
There also is a short section on translation starting with a quote by Bronislaw Malinowski, who suggests, “the apparently paradoxical and yet perfectly plain and absolutely true proposition that the words of one language are never translatable into another” (p. 154). His point is that since words are not mere abstract meanings, but symbols for social and material interconnections, no amount of detail can pull together all the relevant elements of the full setting, but we try. Then Duranti spends the rest of the book developing an ethnographic viewpoint that takes into account not only what is said, but also the social context, environment, worldview, assumptions, and the speech community’s ways of relating the use of language with action. In other words, no translation is a perfect overlay of the original, but rather an approximation.
Also of interest to field workers is an appendix where Duranti gives practical tips on both audio and video recording of cultural interaction. It is excellent as are the bibliography and the two indexes by subject and name.
Duranti comes back again and again to the fact that good ethnography—and therefore good linguistics, good anthropology, and good translation—is only possible by the researcher’s living with the group, speaking the language, laughing, crying, playing, solving problems, being angry together with them—in short by living out as full a participation as possible. Only then can we begin to understand another culture. This book is a good and highly recommended reminder.
References
Pike, Kenneth L. 1967. Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior. The Hague: Mouton.