Alessandro Duranti introduces linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field that studies language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice. The theories and methods of linguistic anthropology are introduced through a discussion of linguistic diversity, grammar in use, the role of speaking in social interaction, the organization and meaning of conversational structures, and the notion of participation as a unit of analysis. Linguistic Anthropology will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students.
It's a decently written textbook, but it has the dry density of an intro textbook trying to cover a lot of ground in not very deep detail.
As a writer, it has a lot of interesting perspective of the role of conversation in society, and the social ramifications of saying certain sorts of things. It gave me a lot of interesting perspectives of language as action, and that's neat. But it still took me 6 months to get through it.
What a funtastic linguistic anthropology textbook. A thrill a minute. Actually, I'm not being sarcastic; I just really love the topic. The chapter on theories of culture was particularly interesting. He kind of has to phone in the chapter on ethnographic methods, so if you aren't in school and looking for that, I recommend Bernard's "Research Methods in Anthropology." That's what we read here.
Muito bom. Uma pena que quem estuda texto, interação e discurso no Brasil geralmente ignora as contribuições da antropologia linguística, as convergências são assustadoras.
This book was not written for the layman. Of course it wasn't, it's a textbook. I still found it worth reading. After about the third chapter I began getting a sense of what was going on. This was research for me as I'm making the protagonist of the novel I'm now writing a linguistic anthropologist. As such, boy was it informative! I haven't looked up the definition of this many words since reading the early (Tennessee) works of Cormac McCarthy. So, if you're up for a challenge and are interested in the subject, I recommend this work.
This is my introduction to linguistic anthropology, the sub-discipline that studies what people use language for. It collects articles published over the last forty years, organized around four concepts: speech communities, "ways of speaking," language socialization, and language ideologies. I'm guessing that the concepts don't exhaust the discipline, but are only a few of the most important ones that could have been chosen. I particularly liked the sections on ways of speaking and language ideologies. In particular, Judith Irvine's article "Formality and Informality in Communicative Events" is a model of unambiguous word choice that I wish was more typical of writing in the social sciences and humanities. There is a good mix of abstract concepts and detailed examples, often within the same article.
A reader of Linguistic Anthropology constructed for Linguistic Anthropologists. wrongly I picked this up looking for an 'introduction to...' - also quite United States centred.