Anthropology and Linguistics

Over the last few decades, the anthropological study of linguistic structures, genres, and activities in private and public settings has redefined the goals and boundaries of what ‘linguistics’ means for the social sciences and anthropology in particular. The ‘linguists’ in today’s anthropology departments – or ‘linguistic anthropologists’ as they are known in the United States and Canada – are not only different from most of their colleagues in linguistics or language departments but also they are different from the linguistic anthropologists of two or three generations ago. One of the main differences is the theoretical and methodological shift from the study of linguistic structures as manifestations of a common code (or grammar) to the study of language as a socio-historically defined resource for the constitution of society and the reproduction of cultural meanings and practices. The current trend, then, could be seen as a continuation of what a little over two decades ago I called ‘a linguistics of the human praxis’ (Duranti 1988a). The term ‘praxis’ in this case was meant to recognize the interest within the Ethnography of Communication (Hymes 1964; Gumperz and Hymes 1972) for the use of language in the conduct of social life: that is, for what language does for, to, and through speakers. This focus has not changed and it is safe to say that an anthropologically informed linguistics is a linguistics that starts from the assumption that language plays a key role in how society is organized and reproduced. What has changed over the last few decades is that linguistic anthropologists have rendered more nuanced their use of some key notions taken from linguistics, philosophy, and social theory. In this chapter I will focus on three such notions: namely, performance, indexicality, and agency. I will show that their use in the analysis of speaking allows linguistic anthropologists to clarify how the details of linguistic structure participate in the constitution of particular aspects of the social context, including events, acts, stances, and identities. Throughout the chapter, I show that the attention to linguistic structure and linguistic performance can provide us with important analytical tools for understanding how acts, persons, and activities are connected. This connection is crucial for the fabric of social life and for the managing of social action.