What is materiality? And is it of a different order from semiosis? In this commentary I reflect on the place of materiality—that quality of material phenomena—and materialization—the processes by which such qualities are actualized in social life—in Matthew Hull’s brilliant book, Government of paper (GoP). The analytic materiality is central to Hull’s ethnography, both theoretically (it informs...

Johannes Fabian’s contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist; a linguistic anthropologist; a partisan and critic of the “Writing Culture” moment in U.S. anthropology; a folklorist and student of popular culture; a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists; a theorist of time, memory, and alterity; and now something of a hacker. Two b...

Linguistic ethnography provides insight into how communication occurs between individuals and institutions, while situating these local actions within wider social, political historical contexts (Copland & Creese, 2015) has proven to be a particularly effective tool for developing our understanding of individuals’ lived multilingual realities (see Unamuno, 2014) societal multilingualism. Turnin...

In this paper, we propose a method for ”linguistic ethnography” – a general mechanism for characterising texts with respect to the dominance of certain classes of words. Using humour as a case study, we explore the automatic learning of salient word classes, including semantic classes (e.g., person, animal), psycholinguistic classes (e.g., tentative, cause), and affective load (e.g., anger, hap...

This paper surveys the most important frameworks of analysis that could assist the ethnographer in detecting the functional mechanisms of such items as ‘elaboration of identity’ or ‘change of identity’. The relationship between speech and social class is also discussed and a model of ethnographic research is provided. The main argument is that research in the ethnography of communication presup...

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depend...