Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader

Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics

by Alessandro Duranti (Editor), Parker Shipton (Series Editor)

Linguistic A Reader is a comprehensive collection of the best work that has been published in this exciting and growing area of anthropology, and is organized to provide a guide to key issues in the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.

Genres: Linguistics, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Language, Academic, College, School

544 pages, Paperback

First published September 3, 1993

Reviews

[Acturi]

This is a textbook.

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.

[Adam]

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.

[Theo]

Muito bom. Uma pena que quem estuda texto, interação e discurso no Brasil geralmente ignora as contribuições da antropologia linguística, as convergências são assustadoras.

[Michael]

If I remember correctly, I think I liked just about every chapter.

[Maisa]

This book is part of why I became a linguistic anthropologist, especially the excerpt from Whorf, insurance assessor/intellectual extraordinaire.

[Jan Notzon]

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.

[Dionysius the Areopagite]

Great revisiting on last touches of the Werke

[Faith Golden]

Very stimulating. Engaging and easy to follow.

[Silvio Curtis]

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.

[Megan]

Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, 1) (2001)

[Melody Violine]

baru baca bab pertama aja, haha (curang)
ternyata Antropologi Linguistik menarik juga~

[Borislav Gueorguiev]

Nice textbook as all Cambridge textbooks li linguistics

[Eliana Nieto]

Great compilation!

[Tasha]

A reader of Linguistic Anthropology constructed for Linguistic Anthropologists. wrongly I picked this up looking for an 'introduction to...' - also quite United States centred.

[Tú]

a must-read for every linguist. Very clearly and intellectually written.