An Historical Perspective on Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology

Introduction A recent review of a several popular textbooks in cultural anthropology has confirmed my suspicion that there is a significant gap between what linguistic anthropology means to me and what it means to my colleagues in cultural anthropology (and probably in other sub-fields as well). One easy explanation of this gap would be to say that the authors of these textbooks are simply uninformed of what linguistic anthropologists have been doing in the last 2025 years. But this could be easily shown to be only partly accurate. For one thing, in at least some of the chapters I have examined so far, sections are often dedicated to recent debates, such as Ebonics, or topics such as language and gender, which show that our colleagues in cultural anthropology do follow at least some of what goes on in our field. Furthermore, the criticism might be unfair because most of the chapters on language I have examined seem conceived as a mini-introduction to linguistics rather than to linguistic anthropology. This is shown by the considerable space usually occupied by basic information on language structure (e.g. phonology, morphology, syntax) and the coverage of topics like animal communication, typically found in introductory linguistics textbooks (but not as part of mainstream linguistics or contemporary linguistic anthropology). Finally, it would be too easy to blame cultural anthropologists for this gap without seriously considering the possibility of failure on the part of linguistic anthropologists to communicate more effectively across disciplinary boundaries. I believe that to the extent to which we are committed to a holistic view of anthropology, we should provide teaching tools and accessible review pieces for our colleagues in other fields. My efforts in this direction in the past have been rewarded and I think we should continue to provide useful surveys, introductions and encyclopedia entries. But I also think it is important to provide an historical analysis of major theoretical and methodological trends. Stephen Murray's American Sociolinguistics: Theorists and Theory Groups (1998) is a step in this direction, but the author's lack of terminological rigor and his reluctance to synthesize movements and trends beyond the work of small groups make it difficult to use, especially by non-specialists.