Duranti-Language As Culture

Language as Culture in U.S.
Anthropology: Three Paradigms

Author(s): AlessandroDuranti
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 44, No. 3 (June 2003), pp. 323-347
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003
2003 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2003/4403-0001$3.00
Language as Culture
in U.S. Anthropology
Three Paradigms1
by Alessandro Duranti
The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of

distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be
made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas,
was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description,
and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm,
developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event.
Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it
marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology.
The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with
the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the
study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Although each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal
of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the
discipline.
a l e s s a n d r o d u r a n t i is Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Calif. 900951553, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1950, he was
educated at the University of Rome (Laurea in Lettere Moderne,
1974) and the University of Southern California (Ph.D., in linguistics, 1981). He has taught at the University of Rome, Pitzer
College, and the University of California, San Diego, and has
been a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National Universitys Research School for Pacific Studies (1981) and UCSDs Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (198384). His research interests include agency and intentionality, oratory,
Samoan language and culture, and the culture of jazz aesthetics.
Among his publications are From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Samoan Village (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Linguistic Anthropology:
A Reader (London: Blackwell, 2001). The present paper was submitted 1 ii 02 and accepted 1 viii 02.
1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University

of California at Berkeley, Emory University, and the Universita` di
Padova. I thank the participants in those events for their comments
and suggestions. I also benefited from detailed comments on an
earlier draft by Niko Besnier, Dell Hymes, Adrienne Lo, Sarah Meacham, Elinor Ochs, and four anonymous referees for current anthropology. Any remaining errors, misinterpretations, or omissions are, of course, solely mine.
The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is

not a unified field but a set of distinct and often not fully
compatible practices of analyzing and theorizing about
linguistic phenomena. The differences among these practices can be made sense of through the identification of
three historically related paradigms, each of the later
ones reducing the influence and appeal of the one before
it but not completely replacing it. The peaceful coexistence of several paradigms may have been aided by the
avoidance of public confrontation and reciprocal criticism in print. At the same time, the lack of an internal
debate among practitioners of different paradigms has
made it difficult to systematize the theoretical claims
made over the past century about the nature of language
as a cultural resource and as a social practice. Furthermore, the absence of clear statements on what constitutes an anthropological view of language is partly responsible for the isolation that students of language as
culture have suffered with respect to anthropology and
linguistics. Current anthropological views of language as
culture cannot be easily adopted or challenged by those
in other fields (e.g., linguistics, psychology, sociology) or
other subfields within anthropology (e.g., archaeology,
sociocultural or biological anthropology) because they
are usually implicit rather than explicit and scattered
across case studies rather than condensed in clear synthetic statements. There is therefore a need to reexamine
the history of the study of language in anthropology in
the United States, where the Boasian view of language
as an integral part of and simultaneously a window
onculture continues to be an argument for the inclusion of linguistic analysis in anthropological training.2
In an earlier discussion of the different names for the
study of language as culturelinguistic anthropology,
anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguisticsI argued that rather that being synonyms
these labels correspond to different theoretical and methodological orientations toward their object of inquiry
(Duranti 2001a). In this article I will go one step farther,
adopting the notion of the paradigm shift as a heuristic
device for making sense of the dramatic changes that
have taken place in the way in which language is studied.
The idea of a paradigm shift is of course derived from
Kuhns (1962) work on scientific revolutions, but in contrast to Kuhn I am assuming that the advent of a new
paradigm need not mean the complete disappearance of
the old one. (He himself expressed doubts as to whether
all the social sciences have paradigms like the ones he
identified in physics [p. 15].) As I use the term here,
paradigm is historically bound (i.e., the product of a particular set of practices of doing and promoting science)
but does not necessarily die out when a new one appears.
In fact, old and new paradigms can coexist and continue to influence each other through what Peter Galison
(1999) has called trading zones, in which scientists
2. Because of space limitations, I will not review other traditions,
for example, British and French anthropology (on the role of linguistic analysis in British anthropology, see Henson 1974; Hymes
1970:253).
323

324 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003
with different beliefs can coordinate their respective efforts and exchange goods (e.g., information). For physics,
Galison gives the example of laboratories. In the study
of language use, laboratories (e.g., the Language Behavior
Research Laboratory at the University of California at
Berkeley) professional organizations (e.g., the Society for
Linguistic Anthropology [SLA] and the Society for the
Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas
[SSILA]), and journals have made it possible for scholars
to come together around shared interests (e.g., a particular topic, a language, or a linguistic area) and exchange
useful information despite differences in theoretical assumptions and methods.
Furthermore, although individual researchers are very
important in establishing a new paradigm or undermining the credibility of an established one, a paradigm as
I define it here does not necessarily coincide with an
individual scholars research program. It is possible for
one or more individuals to be ahead of a paradigm or
to switch back and forth between different paradigms.
When we examine the history of the study of language
as culture in the United States, we realize that the relationship between paradigms on the one hand and individual researchers and research groups on the other is
complex and problematic, with individuals or groups not
always in control of their own assumptions and the theoretical and methodological implications of their work
or not always willing to fully commit to one paradigm
over another. Hence the need for historical understanding of our present situation.
For the purpose of this discussion I will provide the
following working definition of paradigm: a research
enterprise with a set of recognizable and often explicitly
stated (a) general goals, (b) view of the key concept (e.g.,
language), (c) preferred units of analysis, (d) theoretical
issues, and (e) preferred methods for data collection. This
definition identifies paradigms as clusters of properties
established on the basis of explicit statements and interpretive practices in the study of language. In what
follows, I will identify the period and intellectual climate
that favored the emergence of different paradigms and
briefly describe the work of the scholars who were responsible for establishing them. What follows is not
meant to be a comprehensive review of the literature in
linguistic anthropology and related fields in the past century. I have chosen instead a relatively small number of
writers and trends as exemplary of the paradigm shifts I
am positing.3
Inevitably, surveying a long period in the history of a
discipline within the constraints of a journal article
forces one to be sketchy and thus to risk simplification
even where complexification might be more rewarding.
3. My interest in paradigm shift here is related to but different in
focus from Stephen O. Murrays (1993, 1998) study of the importance of intellectual and organizational leadership for the development of a number of disciplines including sociolinguistics, ethnoscience, and anthropological linguistics. In contrast to Murray,
who focuses on a sociological account of leadership, group formation, and marginalization, I have concentrated here on general
theoretical and methodological trends.
I hope to show that this risk is warranted by the gain of

a few insights into a field of inquiry that is neither unified nor chaotic in its approaches and contributions.
The First Paradigm

The first paradigm was established toward the end of the
19th century as part of the Boasian conception of a fourfield anthropology in which the study of language was
as important as the study of culture, the archaeological
record, and human remains. It is impossible to understand the establishment of this paradigm without an appreciation of the role played by the Bureau of Ethnologylater renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology
(BAE)and its first director, John Wesley Powell
(18341902). It was Powell who supported the young
Boass study of Chinook and other American Indian languages and commissioned what then became the Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas 1911a; see
Darnell 1998a; Hymes 1970:24951; Stocking 1974; Voegelin 1952).
Powell supported linguistic fieldwork in the belief that
by collecting vocabularies and texts from American Indian languages it would be possible to reconstruct their
genetic relations and thus help in the classification of
American Indian tribes, something that was of great interest to the Bureau of American Ethnology as a U.S.
government institution (Darnell 1998a). Although Boas
became skeptical of the possibility of a direct correlation
between language and culture (and certainly rejected any
correlation between language and race), he documented
Native American languages and cultural traditions that
seemed on the verge of disappearing because of European
colonization (a practice that later became known as salvage anthropology). Through his writing and teaching,
he broadened the scope and raised the standards of linguistic fieldwork, which before him had consisted of the
compilation of vocabulary lists and the occasional collection of myths and legends. He also transmitted to
some of his studentsEdward Sapir and Alfred Kroeber
in particulara passion for the details of linguistic description and the conviction that languages were an important tool not only for fieldwork but also for the study
of culture, especially because the categories and rules of
language were largely unconscious and thus not subject
to secondary rationalizations (Boas 1911b). It is, then,
from Boasian theory and practice that the view of linguistics as a tool for cultural (or historical) analysis developed. This principle was meant to sanction the central role played not only by language but also by language
experts in anthropology. However, by the third generation after Boas this principle had been transformed into
a service mentality whereby the linguists justification
for working in an anthropology department was to help
cultural and social anthropologists to do their jobs. Not
everyone accepted this second-class status, and some
scholars either migrated to linguistics departments or
encouraged their students to do so. (Sapir, for example,
apparently advised his students to get their Ph.D.s in

d u r a n t i Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology F 325
linguistics [Darnell 1998b:362].) In my view, this was

possible because with the first paradigm the linguists in
anthropology departments and those in other departments shared a great deal in terms of theory and methods. Thus, Sapir made important contributions to historical and typological linguistics and to phonological
theory, for example, with his argument in favor of the
psychological reality of the phoneme (Sapir 1933, 1949).
It is significant in this connection that Leonard Bloomfieldthe most influential American linguist of the first
part of the 20th centuryand Sapir had a cordial, albeit
competitive, relationship (Darnell 1990): they shared a
passion, grammatical patterns. Although a scholar like
Sapir transcended his grammatical interest to venture
into the study of culture (Sapir 1949a, 1994; Silverstein
1986), the prevalent professional identity of those working under his mentorship was expert on the grammar of
particular languages. Despite their wider anthropological
training, these linguists conceived of language as an
autonomous entity whose logic was sui generis and
therefore required special tools.4 Consequently, training
in phonetics and morphology was stressed above
everything else. This was the cultural capital (Bourdieu 1985) of linguists working within the first paradigm.5 By the 1950s, however, this expertise was no
longer easy to sell to anthropologists, and we find the
heirs of Boas and Sapir bending over backward trying to
justify having at least one of their own in an anthropology department (Voegelin and Harris 1952:326):
In most universitiesthose in which no separate
linguistic department existsthe anthropology faculty should include a scholar whose competence includes the modern technical developments in linguistics. Where separate linguistic departments
already exist, the anthropology department would
still have to include instruction in anthropological
linguistics given by a scholar who could enjoy the
position of a liaison officer between anthropology
and linguistics.
In the same article, Charles (Carl) Voegelin and Zellig
Harris (both of whom were part of Sapirs group at Yale
[Darnell 1998b:362]) seem torn between pride in their
technical knowledge (i.e., their ability to provide descriptively adequate grammatical accounts of any language) and a desire to avoid scaring off cultural anthropology students with subject matter that might seem too
4. The work of Chomsky now seems to me the ultimate development, the perfection, as it were, of the dominant trend of linguistics in this century. It is the trend that motivated much of
Sapirs work, and that informed the recurrent efforts under his influence to relate language to culture. Briefly put, the trend is that
toward the isolation of language as an autonomous object of study.
And it has been around that separation that modern linguistics has
developed as a profession. The degree of separation, and the basis
for it, however, have varied (Hymes 1983:339).
5. If a school has budgeted only one semester for linguistics, about
the best the instructor can do is to give a general course containing
about three lectures on consonants, three on vowels, one on tone,
three on phonemics, three on morphology, two on syntax, and one
on general background (Pike 1963:321).
difficult to master in the short time allocated to it in

anthropology departments (p. 326, my emphasis):6
The importance of relating anthropological training
to technical linguistics is that the latter brings to
the former a few necessary but not too difficult
techniques for exploring culture. Cultural studies
without linguistic consideration tend to be narrowly
sociological rather than broadly anthropological. On
the other hand, ethnolinguistic studies essayed by
anthropologists innocent of technical linguistic
training tend to be amateurish.
The exclusive preoccupation with grammatical structures is also evident in a text entitled Anthropological
Linguistics: An Introduction, written by Joseph Greenberg and published in 1968 in a series edited by Harris
and Voegelin. A cursory view of its table of contents
reveals a subject matter dramatically different from that
found in contemporary textbooks (e.g., Duranti 1997, Foley 1997) and readers (e.g., Blount 1995, Brenneis and
Macaulay 1995, Duranti 2001b):
I. The Nature and Definition of Language
II. Linguistics as a Science
III. Descriptive Linguistics
IV. Grammatical Theory
V. Phonology
VI. Linguistic Change
VII. Types of Language Classification
VIII. Synchronic Universals
IX. Diachronic Generalization
X. Higher-level Explanations
To see Greenbergs book as an introduction to the
study of language from an anthropological perspective
means to accept at least the following two assumptions:
(a) language is culture (and therefore one can claim to
be doing something anthropological by analyzing grammar) and (b) descriptive (including typological, historical)
linguistics is the guiding discipline for linguists in anthropology departments (and elsewhere), determining
both the units and the methods of analysis. The latter
assumption is implicit in the choice of the term anthropological linguistics, which became popular in the
1950s and can be read as an indication that its practitioners identified primarily with linguistics and only secondarily with anthropology. (David Sapir [1985:291]
made this claim unequivocally regarding his fathers intellectual interests.) If we take the description and classification of languages based on their lexicons and grammatical structures to be the major goal of this paradigm,
the series editors choice of Greenberg to produce an introductory text in the 1960s makes sense given his important contributions to historical (1963a) and typological (1963b, 1966) linguistics. These are areas that
continue to be of great interest to anthropologists in
6. As Voegelin (1961) later suggested, the term ethnolinguistic
is here used pejoratively and in contrast to anthropological linguistics. It must be understood as referring to cross-linguistic comparisons done by cultural anthropologists.

other subfields, given that linguistic reconstruction can

provide evidence (sometimes before the archaeological
record is available) for migration and contact (e.g., Kirch
1984).
Furthermore, Greenbergs work was seen by some anthropological linguists, among them Sapirs student
Mary Haas (1978:12122), as providing an alternative to
the new paradigm in formal linguistics, Chomskys
(transformational-) generative grammar. Contrary to
Chomsky, who was at the time concentrating mostly on
English and advocating the need for students to work
only on their native languages (in order to be able to rely
on their own native intuitions), Greenberg promoted the
study of as many languages as possible and was therefore
viewed as an ally by descriptive and field linguists. But
the exclusive concentration on grammar, together with
the rapid growth of independent linguistics programs and
departments in the United States, had a negative impact
on those who identified themselves as anthropological
linguists. Nonlinguists in anthropology departments
started to question the need to have their own linguists
in light of the existence of another department on the
same campus devoted to the study of language. At the
same time, the focus on grammatical description and the
commitment to the grammatical and textual documentation of languages that were on the verge of becoming
extinct (Moore 1999) encouraged the identification of the
field of anthropological linguistics with largely atheoretical descriptions of non-Indo-European, previously unwritten languages. Before becoming a negative stereotype
among those outside the subfield, this narrow view of
anthropological linguistics was explicitly articulated by
some of its leading scholars. For example, Harry Hoijer
(1961:10) defined anthropological linguistics as an area
of research which is devoted in the main to studies, synchronic and diachronic, of the languages of the people
who have no writing, and Carl Voegelin (1961:680)
stated that anthropological linguistics was meant to reveal the subject matter of previously unknown languages
and was in general more descriptive than other linguistic
fields (pp. 67374).
It was this fascination with adequate description of
the grammatical patterns of non-Indo-European languages, especially those spoken by North American Indians, that produced the most lasting theoretical issue
of this paradigm: linguistic relativity, also known as the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Hill and Mannheim 1992).
The hypothesis was that languages provide their native
speakers with a set of hard-to-question dispositions (e.g.,
to hear only certain sound distinctions, to favor certain
classifications, to make certain metaphorical extensions)
that have an impact on their interpretation of reality and,
consequently, on their behavior (as in Whorfs [1941] example of the empty gasoline drums falsely judged to be
less dangerous than full ones). The linguistic-relativity
issue generated a considerable amount of discussion,
which has continued over the years (Koerner 1992), but
until the 1980s it remained closely identified with this
paradigm and as such of little interest for those who
embraced the second.
The general features of the first paradigm can be summarized as follows:

Goals: the documentation, description, and classification of indigenous languages, especially those of North
America (originally part of salvage anthropology).
View of language: as lexicon and grammar, that is,
rule-governed structures, which represent unconscious
and arbitrary relations between language as an arbitrary
symbolic system and reality.
Preferred units of analysis: sentence, word, morpheme, and, from the 1920s, phoneme; also texts (e.g.,
myths, traditional tales).
Theoretical issues: appropriate units of analysis for
comparative studies (e.g., to document genetic classification or diffusion), linguistic relativity.
Preferred methods for data collection: elicitation of
word lists, grammatical patterns, and traditional texts
from native speakers.
The Second Paradigm

The second paradigm is more closely identified with the
names linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics.
As often happens in science, it developed out of a series
of fortuitous circumstances that included, in addition to
the already mentioned growth of linguistics departments
on U.S. campuses, the simultaneous appointment of two
young and energetic professors at the University of California at Berkeley and the birth of quantitatively oriented urban sociolinguistics.
Whether or not Chomskys program for linguistics
was, as claimed by Newmeyer (1986), a revolution,
there is no question that the rapid growth of linguistics
departments in the United States in the 1960s coincided
with the enthusiasm for Chomskys new approach,
which seemed to combine the rigor of the hard sciences
(by building quasi-mathematical models) with an unprecedented openness toward the content of mental phenomenaa type of data previously excluded by behaviorists (see DAndrade 1995:815). But Chomskys
preference for models based on native speakers intuitions and descriptions of what people know about language (competence) over what they do with it (performance) also implied the exclusion of a wide range of
potentially interesting phenomena from the field of linguistics. A few young scholars seized this opportunity
to provide alternative views of language and new methods for studying it.
The early 1960s saw the emergence of sociolinguistics
and an approach called the ethnography of communication (initially the ethnography of speaking). Both
of these perspectives emerged or at least first found fertile ground in Northern California. In 1956 John Gumperz was hired to teach Hindi at the University of California at Berkeley after returning from fieldwork in India
(Murray 1998:98), where he had studied language contact
and multilingualism using ethnographic methods such
as participant observation in addition to more traditional
survey techniques (e.g., questionnaires). The new ap-

pointment gave him an opportunity to collaborate with

Charles Ferguson at Stanfordthe two had first met in
India (Murray 1998:97)and organize a session at the
annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association the contributions to which were published as
Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional,
Social, and Functional Variation (Ferguson and Gumperz
1960). Ferguson and Gumperzs introduction to the collection revisited earlier concepts in dialectology and diachronic linguistics and introduced the notion of variety (replacing the older term idiolect), thereby
establishing the foundations of what was later called
sociolinguistics (Labov 1966:21; Murray 1998:111).
When Dell Hymes arrived at Berkeley (from Harvard) in
1960, he began a collaboration with Gumperz that linked
his interest in speaking as a cultural activity with Gumperzs interests in social dialects and linguistic variation.
Hymess original call for an ethnography of speaking
(1962) was thus extended to what was presented as a
more general field, the ethnography of communication, in two collections: a special publication of the
American Anthropological Association called The Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz and Hymes
1964) and a collection entitled Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz
and Hymes 1972). Few if any of the contributors to these
publications would have called themselves ethnographers, and even fewer could have qualified as ethnographers of communication in a strict sense of the term,
but the collections worked as manifestos for a way of
studying language that was in many ways radically different both from earlier versions of anthropological linguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics and from
Chomskys increasingly popular transformational-generative linguistics. In Hymess introduction to the 1964
collection we find a clear statement of some fundamental features of the new paradigm; it is argued that (1)
language must be studied in contexts of situation (a
term borrowed from Malinowski 1923), (2) study must
move beyond grammatical and ethnographic description
to look for patterns in speech activity, and (3) the
speech community (as opposed to grammar or the ideal
speaker-hearer) must be taken as a point of departure.
Whereas the reference to the speech community was an
obvious connection to Gumperzs research interests and
methods, the other two features were at the core of Hymess own vision of an ambitious comparative program
for the study of speech activities or communicative
events, later renamed speech events (see Hymes
1972a). These features were the foundations for the establishment of the new paradigm. They gave those who
adhered to it an identity of their own, separate from linguistics (they were not competing for the same territory,
grammar) but also, in part, less dependent on the approval of the rest of anthropology.
At around the same time, Hymes edited a monumental
collection of essays and extracts entitled Language in
Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistic Anthropology (1964a), in which he gathered a wide range of materials on cultural and social aspects of language use and
language structure.7 In this effort he was not only trying

to define how language should be studied but also promoting what became a new perspective represented by
his preference for the term linguistic anthropology8
over anthropological linguistics (Hymes 1963a, b,
1964b). Reacting to the identification that earlier scholars had felt with linguistics, Hymes argued for a distinctively anthropological perspective to be realized
within rather than outside of anthropology departments.
He wrote that departments of anthropology must themselves exercise responsibility for some of the linguistic
knowledge their students need by accepting a division
of intellectual labor with respect to that knowledge
(1964b:xxiii):
(1) It is the task of linguistics to coordinate knowledge about language from the viewpoint of language.
(2) It is anthropologys task to coordinate knowledge
about language from the viewpoint of man. Put in
terms of history and practice, the thesis is that there
is a distinctive field, linguistic anthropology, conditioned, like other subfields of linguistics and anthropology, by certain bodies of data, national background, leading figures, and favorite problems. In
one sense, it is a characteristic activity, the activity
of those whose questions about language are shaped
by anthropology. Its scope is not defined by logic or
nature, but by the range of active anthropological interest in linguistic phenomena. Its scope may include problems that fall outside the active concern
of linguistics, and always it uniquely includes the
problem of integration with the rest of anthropology. In sum, linguistic anthropology can be defined
as the study of language within the context of
anthropology.
With its emphasis on the need to study language within
anthropology, this was one of the clearest statements of
what I am calling the second paradigm.
In this paradigm, to study language from an anthropological perspective meant either to (1) concentrate on
those features of language that needed reference to culture in order to be understood and therefore had to be
studied with the help of ethnographic methods (e.g., participant observation) or to (2) study linguistic forms as
part of cultural activities or as themselves constituting
an activity, as in Hymess (1972a) notion of the speech
event, to be understood as an event defined by language
use (e.g., a debate, a court case, an interview). This paradigm broke with the narrow definition of language
found in most departments of linguistics (where language was understood as grammar) and at the same
7. Originally the collection, to be coedited with Harry Hoijer, was
meant to be about research on language and culture in American
Indian communities, but when Hoijer withdrew from the project
Hymes decided to expand it to language and culture more generally
(Hymes, personal communication, December 4, 2000).
8. The term linguistic anthropology is probably older than anthropological linguistics, given that it was used in the late 19th
century by Otis T. Mason (see Darnell 1998a) and Horatio Hale (see
Hymes 1970:249).

time identified new ways of thinking about language as

culture. Whereas sociocultural anthropologists tended to
see language as a tool for describing or enacting culture,
adherents of the second paradigm were trained to see the
very organization of language use as cultural and thus
in need of linguistic and ethnographic description.
But the implicit promise of a paradigm in which the
questions were defined by anthropology was not entirely
fulfilled. Hymess program had an ambiguous relationship with cultural anthropology as it moved into the
latters territory (e.g., with the ethnography of ritual
events) without managing to produce a volume of empirical research that could either compete with or more
fully complement sociocultural anthropologists steady
stream of monograph-length ethnographies. Joel Sherzers (1983) Kuna Ways of Speaking: An Ethnographic
Perspective was the exception rather than the norm. The
program also lacked obvious connections with biological
and archaeological anthropology, especially because of
its exclusion of evolution. Although Hymes himself had
discussed the evolution of language earlier in his career
(Hymes 1961), none of his students did so. This separated
adherents of the second paradigm from anthropologists
who were pursuing a universal and evolutionary explanation of certain domains of human languages, especially
in the lexicon (e.g., Berlin 1975, Berlin and Kay 1969,
Witkowski and Brown 1978). Despite the explicit adoption of an evolutionary agenda9 and an antirelativistic
stance (contrary to the Boasian legacy), contributions
such as Berlin and Kays (1969) comparative survey of
color terminology shared more features with the first
paradigm than with the second. At the methodological
level, Berlin and Kay continued to rely, as did Sapir and
the scholars who called themselves anthropological linguists, on informant work to elicit linguistic forms (i.e.,
lexical items) instead of documenting the use of such
forms in specific speech events. At the theoretical level,
they continued to interpret linguistic relativity as pertaining to linguistic classification (first paradigm) rather
than extending it to the realm of linguistic activities as
suggested by Hymes (1966) (second paradigm). Finally,
the absence from their work of contextual variation is
incompatible with the second paradigm, which is built
around the notion of variation (Ferguson and Gumperz
1960) and communicative (as opposed to strictly linguistic) competence (Hymes 1972b). Berlin and Kays basic theoretical assumptions and methods have remained
unchanged (see Kay and Maffi 2000), and they coexist
with a radically different tradition for the study of categorization (e.g., Goodwin 1997) that they do not engage.
For similar reasons, the second paradigm shares very
little with the new ethnography or ethnoscience of the
1960s, later known as cognitive anthropology
(DAndrade 1995). Despite the inclusion of Gumperzs
9. Languages which possess few color terms . . . are invariably
spoken by peoples which exhibit relatively primitive levels of economic and technological development. On the other hand, languages possessing rather full color lexicons are characteristically
spoken by the more civilized nations of the world (Berlin 1970:
14).
article on multilingual communities in Tylers Cognitive

Anthropology (1969) and Frakes work on types of litigation in Gumperz and Hymes (1972), for the most part
the second paradigm breaks with the Boasian tradition
of conceiving culture as a mental phenomenon, tending
to neglect issues of knowledge in favor of performance (Bauman 1975, Hymes 1975)10 and solidifying a
lasting connection with folklore (e.g., Bauman 1992). It
was Gumperz who in the mid-1970s returned to a more
cognitive view of culture, exploring the implications of
the philosopher Paul Grices (1957, 1975) work on meaning and implicature for a theory of code switching and
cross-cultural (mis)communication (Gumperz 1977,
1982). However, given his focus on interaction and the
emergent qualities of interpretation, his approach was
also oriented toward performance.
A reading of the literature produced in the 1960s and
1970s by Gumperz, Hymes, and their respective students
and associates shows that in those years the intellectual
connections for adherents of the second paradigm were
not with anthropology but with a number of alternative,
nonmainstream research programs in other subfields, including Erving Goffmans study of face-to-face encounters, Harold Garfinkels ethnomethodology, and William
Labovs urban sociolinguistics. In the late 1960s the convergence of Goffman, Labov, and Hymes at the University of Pennsylvania helped create an intellectual climate
in which the study of language as used in social life
gained momentum. A similar impetus was experienced
on the West Coast, where William Bright, a former student of M. B. Emeneau and Mary Haas at the University
of California at Berkeley, in 1964 organized a conference
at the University of California at Los Angeles (on sociolinguistics) that included students of language
change, language planning, language contact, and social
stratification in language use (Bright 1966).
For about a decade there was a strong identification
between the ethnography of communication and the new
field of sociolinguistics. This identification is seen in a
number of initiatives, among them (1) the inclusion of
William Labovs work in Gumperz and Hymess collections, (2) the adoption of sociolinguistics as a term
including the ethnography of communication (see Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication [Gumperz and Hymes 1972] and Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach
[Hymes 1974]), (3) the inauguration of the journal Language in Society, and (4) Hymess choice of Labov and
Allen Grimshaw (a sociologist) as his associate editors
for that journal, suggesting that, having shifted to the
universitys School of Education, he was no longer relying exclusively on anthropology for institutional or intellectual support.
10. It is no surprise that Frake is included in Gumperz and Hymess
(1972) collection. His articles on how to ask for a drink in Subanun
and how to enter a Yakan house (Frake 1972, 1975) show an approach to reading the human mind that focuses on enacted classification and as such is more concerned with social action and
context than that of any of the other contributors to Tylers (1969)
collection.

Looking at the books and articles that established the

second paradigm, one cannot but be struck by the absence of linguistic relativity as a topic or issue. More
generally, between the early 1960s and the late 1970s the
issue of the relationship between language and mind
dropped out of the research agenda of adherents of the
second paradigm. The few who continued to be preoccupied with linguistic relativity were Whorfs critics, for
example, Berlin and Kay, who were operating with theoretical presuppositions (innatism, universality) and a
methodology (elicitation with no recording of spontaneous speech) alien to adherents of the second paradigm.
As Kay became more interested in syntax and prototype
semanticsand moved out of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley to join
the department of linguistics on the same campusand
Berlin continued his own work on ethnobotanical classifications and sound symbolism (e.g., Berlin 1992), interest in relativity continued to decline in the 1970s and
1980s (to resurface in the 1990s: e.g., Gumperz and Levinson 1996, Lucy 1992). This decline was linked to another important change: language was no longer a window on the human mind as it had been for Boas and his
students. Rather, it was primarily a social phenomenon,
to be studied not in the isolation of one-on-one informant
sessions but in the midst of speech events or speech
activities (see, e.g., Basso 1979, Bauman and Sherzer
1974, Gumperz 1982, Sherzer 1983). Even when semiexperimental techniques (e.g. interviews, questionnaires), were used, the goal was to document and make
sense of linguistic variation across speakers and events
(e.g., Gal 1979) rather than of worldview or perception
of reality.
Starting in the mid-1960s, linguistic anthropologists
and sociolinguists were united not only in their attention
to language use but in their lack of interest in the psychology of language. The second paradigm established,
in other words, a study of language divorced from psychology and, for many, antipsychological at a time when
Chomsky was claiming closer ties between linguistics
and psychology (e.g., in his early argument that linguistics should be thought of as part of psychology) and cognition as opposed to behavior was becoming the key
word in U.S.-made psychology. This distance from the
cognitive revolution had at least two effects. One was
that adherents of the second paradigm stopped looking
outside of linguistic anthropology narrowly defined (and,
especially, stopped deferring to linguistics) for questions
to ask and issues to address. Instead, this was a period
of self-assertion in which linguistic anthropologists
worked hard at establishing their own agenda and reinforcing a positive group identity. The other was that the
lack of interest in cognition per se separated adherents
of the second paradigm from the cognitive anthropologists of the 1960s who were looking at language as a
taxonomic system and at linguistic analysis as a guiding
methodology for the study of culture-in-the-mind. This
intellectual separation represented exactly the opposite
of Hymess original goal, the integration of linguistic
anthropology with the rest of anthropology. In the 1970s,
sociocultural anthropologists discovered discourse,

but the idea of culture as textas in Geertzs (1973) influential essay Thick Descriptiontended to be credited to European philosophers (e.g., Derrida, Gadamer,
Ricoeur) rather than to linguistic anthropologists.
At the theoretical level, with a few exceptions, the
second paradigm was characterized by a general reluctance to challenge either the rest of anthropology or linguistics. Beyond Hymess writings about communicative
competence, with their explicit criticism of Chomskys
notion of competence (Hymes 1972b), most researchers
were busy identifying ways in which language use was
culturally organized across social situations. When theories were discussed, it was usually to show that they
were too Western-oriented to account for the ways in
which language was conceived and used elsewhere, for
example, in the case of Elinor [Ochs] Keenans (1977)
Malagasy counterexamples to Grices maxim be informative and Michelle Rosaldos (1982) attack on the
epistemological foundations of speech-act theory based
on her fieldwork among the Ilongot. In the second paradigm, generalizations were rare; scholars did very little
comparison, and even when comparisons were made
(e.g., in Judith Irvines [1979] essay on formal events) it
was to show that a commonly accepted analytical concept (e.g., formality) was problematic across speech communities and contexts.
A notable exception to this general trend was Penelope
Brown and Stephen Levinsons (1978) study of linguistic
politeness, which presented a well-articulated, empirically verifiable theory based on Goffmans (1967) notion
of face and on Grices theory of meaning as based on
the recognition of the speakers intentions (1957) and his
cooperative principle (1975). Brown and Levinson supported their rational-choice model with a wide spectrum
of examples collected in India among Tamil-speakers
(Levinson 1977) and in Mexico among Tzeltal-speakers
(Brown 1979) and assembled from the literature on English and other languages (Malagasy and Japanese in particular). Despite the fact that they shared credentials
with adherents of the second paradigm (they had been
trained in anthropology at the University of California
at Berkeley, studying with John Gumperz and a number
of others), their theory did not generate much interest
among anthropologists. It was much more popular
among discourse analysts and pragmaticians working
outside of anthropology. The absence of attempts by anthropologists to test their theory or even comment on it
(Hymess [1986] critical remarks were an exception) suggests a general avoidance of open criticism from within
the field and/or a lack of interest in universalizing
models.
The features of the second paradigm may be summarized as follows:
Goals: the study of language use across speakers and
activities.
View of language: as a culturally organized and culturally organizing domain.
Preferred units of analysis: speech community, com-

municative competence, repertoire, language variety,

style, speech event, speech act, genre.
Theoretical issues: language variation, the relationship
between language and context.
Preferred methods for data collection: participant observation, informal interviews, audio recording of spontaneous language use.
Consolidation of the Second Paradigm and

Further Developments
In the 1980s, the second paradigm was strengthened by
a considerable output of publications and projects. Several of Hymess and Gumperzs former students had by
then secured jobs at various universities and started to
train their own students. Those who had positions in
anthropology departments with graduate programs were,
at least in principle, in a better position to solidify the
second paradigm than those who were in exclusively undergraduate programs or in linguistics departments.
When, in 1983, as a consequence of the reorganization
of the American Anthropological Association (to avoid
increased federal taxation) into separate sections, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) was founded, it
not only sanctioned the importance of the study of language within American anthropology but also constituted an implicit recognition of Hymess vision of the
subfieldas shown by the preference for linguistic anthropology over anthropological linguistics. (Hymes
was AAA president that year and lobbied for the establishment of the section, although he was not present at
its first business meeting.) The identification with linguistics which had characterized adherents of the first
paradigm continued to be strong among a number of SLA
members, especially among the students of American
Indian languages who in 1981 had formed their own association, the Society for the Study of the Indigenous
Languages of the Americas (SSILA).
In the 1980s there were also new intellectual developments. Some of these were expansions and refinements of established directions, but others were ideas
and projects that took inspiration from theoretical and
methodological perspectives outside of the second paradigm. I will here briefly review four main foci of interest: (1) performance, (2) primary and secondary language
socialization, (3) indexicality, and (4) participation.
Whereas 1 and 2 were more closely tied to Hymess writings and compatible with his original program, 3 and to
some extent 4 were inspired by other work, often outside
of anthropology and linguistics.
1. Performance. Starting in the mid-1970s, the notion
of performance was extended from language use (e.g.,
Chomsky 1965) and language as action (e.g., Austin 1962)
to the form of speech itself and the implications of speaking as a product that often required special skills and was
routinely subject to evaluation for its aesthetic, expressive, or stylistic dimensions (Hymes 1972b, Tedlock
1983). This perspective had some of its roots in folklore
and the study of verbal art (Bauman 1975, 1977; Hymes

1975; Paredes and Bauman 1972). The term creativity,
used by Chomsky to refer to the native speakers ability
to generate a potentially infinite number of sentences
out of a finite set of elements, was thus redefined and
extended to other realms on the assumption that speaking was an essential element of social life. The simultaneous discovery by some social anthropologists (e.g.,
Bloch 1975) of the potential role of speaking in status
negotiation and conflict management established political rhetoric as a rare trading zone in which linguistic
and sociocultural anthropologists could meet to solve
common problems (e.g., Brenneis and Myers 1984, Watson-Gegeo and White 1990). In the 1990s this work expanded and became linked with the work on performativity in connection with the definition and negotiation
of gender identity (Hall 2001).
2. Primary and secondary language socialization. The
acquisition of language became a major subject of investigation in the 1960s and 1970sthe Journal of Child
Language was started in 1974 to join journals in psycholinguistics and developmental psychology that focused mainly on adult language (Crystal 1974). Simultaneously, the acquisition of communicative competence was identified by Hymes and his students (e.g.,
Sherzer and Darnell 1972) as an important part of the
ethnographic study of language use. Little empirical
work was, however, being done on the basic issues of
the second paradigm. Despite the efforts of interdisciplinary groups such as the one organized by Dan Slobin
at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid1960s, the early attempts to produce ethnographically
informed acquisition studies were not very successful
(Duranti 2001a:2324). The situation radically changed
in the 1980s when, in an article in a major collection in
cultural anthropology, Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin
(1984) identified language socialization as a bridge between anthropology and language development, viewing
it as both socialization to language (the missing part in
linguistics and psycholinguistics) and socialization
through language (the taken-for-granted part in cultural
anthropology). On the basis of their work among Samoans (Ochs) and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea
(Schieffelin), they described current research on language
acquisition as informed by local theories of mind and
society and sketched out a program of study integrating
methods developed in developmental psychology (longitudinal studies) with methods developed in cultural
anthropology (ethnography). Their claim that baby
talk (a feature of Motherese) was not a universal was
only the tip of the iceberg for a model of socialization
to be documented by fieldworkers around the world (see
also Ochs and Schieffelin 1995). One of the most promising outcomes of this line of research has been the adoption, extension, and refinement of Ochs and Schieffelins
insights to language contact situations (e.g., Duranti and
Ochs 1997, Garrett 1999, Kulick 1992, Rampton 1995,
Schieffelin 1994, Zentella 1997).
Language socialization is a lifelong process, and for
this reason a distinction is sometimes made between

primary and secondary socialization. Among secondary

socialization processes, the one that has attracted the
most interest has been literacy. In this area, Shirley Brice
Heaths (1983) pioneering research in three communities
in the piedmont Carolinas was exemplary for its critical
view of the literacy-orality dichotomy (see also Rumsey
2001) and the focus on literacy events. Her main point
was that socialization to reading and writing was not
isolated from other types of socialization, including socialization to perform verbally and participate in events
in which narratives are produced. Heaths work complemented earlier accounts of the skills required in mainstream schools (Cazden, John, and Hymes 1972) and was
followed by other research projects on literacy and
schooling from an ethnographically based cross-cultural
perspective (see Besnier 1995, Collins 1995, Schieffelin
and Gilmore 1986, Street 1984).
3. Indexicality. Philosophers including Immanuel
Kant, Charles S. Peirce, and Edmund Husserl have long
recognized that there are different types of signs, some
of which do not stand for something else (e.g., an idea)
but acquire meaning on the basis of some spatio-temporal (or memory) connection with another phenomenon
or entity. The meanings of such sign expressions can be
arrived at only by taking into consideration the circumstances under which they are used. Typical examples
include so-called deictic terms such as the English demonstratives this and that and personal pronouns such
as I and you. For example, the (first person singular) pronoun I changes meaning according to who is speaking
or, rather, according to the character that the speaker is
impersonating at any given time (Goffman 1981 [1979]).
Using Peirces terminology, we can say that the English
I is an index. An anthropological study of language cannot but be interested in such expressions, given the
power that they have in defining what are ultimately
socially constructed cultural categories, for example,
speaker/sender/author versus listener/addressee/audience. Earlier studies of indexical expressions were based
on linguistic forms in idealized situations, but as fieldworkers started to examine language use in culture-specific contexts they realized that every expression is indexicalthat is, needs reference to a context to be given
a culturally adequate interpretation (see also Garfinkel
1967).
Starting in the mid-1970s, expanding on Peirces and
Roman Jakobsons work, Michael Silverstein began developing a program that made indexicality the cornerstone for the study of language as culture. In an article
published in 1976 entitled Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description, he outlined a distinction
between presupposing indexes (this in this table is too
long) and entailing or creative indexes (e.g., personal pronouns such as I and you) to be understood as occupying
a continuum from context-dependent to context-constituting. Silverstein also used the notion of indexicality as
a way of rethinking linguistic relativelyin this sense,
a good portion of his writings can be seen as a bridge
between the first and the second paradigm. His concern
with relativity became more apparent in a number of
subsequent publications in which he criticized speechact theorists for focusing only on the creative uses of
language that correspond to lexical categories (e.g., verbs
of saying, doing, etc., that is, performative verbs in J. L.
Austins terminology) (e.g., 1977) and identified the limits of metalinguistic awareness (a term that evokes Jakobsons [1960] metalinguistic function) (2001 [1981])
an important question for anthropology because it determines the extent to which ethnographers can rely on
native accounts. Over the years, Silverstein has expanded
his framework to include what he now calls metapragmatic functions of linguistic expressions (1993), that is,
the range of expressions that refer to what language does
(i.e., its pragmatic force). Silversteins work on indexicality has been adopted, extended, and modified to some
extent by a number of his former students (e.g., Agha
1998, Hanks 1990).
4. Participation. Although one of the components of
Hymess (1972a) speech-event model was participants,
including speaker or sender, addressor, hearer or receiver
or audience, and addressee, these categories were fully
analyzed only in the late 1970s. An important contribution in this area was the above-mentioned article by
Goffman on footing(1981 [1979]), which incorporated
or at least evoked the notion of indexicality and Bakhtins work on reported speech as first made known
through the translation of V. N. Volosnovs writings
(1971). Goffman introduced the notion of the participation framework as the combined configuration of participation statuses (author, animator, principal, hearer,
overhearer, bystander) activated by the use of a particular
linguistic form. Some of his students applied or extended
this analysis. Susan Philips (1972) used the notion of
participation in her work on classroom interaction to
understand the scholastic performance of Warm Springs
Indian children. Marjorie Goodwin (1990) elaborated on
the participation framework with her notion of the participant framework, which includes an understanding
of speakers and hearers respective monitoring as illuminated by conversation analysis (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff,
and Jefferson 1974). Related to this line of research is the
study of the role of the audience in determining the shape
and meaning of utterances (e.g., Bauman 1986; Duranti
1988, 1993; Duranti and Brenneis 1986; C. Goodwin
1981).
The 1980s were years of intense rethinking and paradigm shifting within anthropology at large. The new
critical anthropology epitomized by Clifford and Marcuss (1986) Writing Culture questioned some of the epistemological and political foundations of the discipline,
anthropologists rights to acquire knowledge in certain
socio-historical conditions, and the ability of the discipline to survive on the same assumptions that had supported the Boasian project. The postmodern shift highlighted alternative voices and points of view, bringing
identity or, rather, its postmodern crisis to center stage.
As the very notion of culture came under attack for
exoticizing the Other, many anthropologists found
themselves searching for new ways to represent their
ethnographic experience. In this intellectual climate, lin-

guistic anthropology, with its long tradition of collecting

and analyzing texts, was suddenly seen as a possible ally
in thinking about the politics of representation. It was
around this time that the job market started to open up
again for linguistic anthropologists. Some anthropology
departments felt the need to rethink language in a
broader perspective and realized that linguistic anthropology could be part of a new dialogue.
At the same time, perhaps because formal linguistics
and quantitative sociolinguistics seemed untouched by
the identity crisis that was sweeping the social sciences,
students of linguistics interested in the social context of
speech became sensitive to the role of language in establishing gender, ethnic, and class identities. These students could look to linguistic anthropology for inspiration and a community with similar concerns, and some
of them became part of the cohort that made possible
another paradigm shift.
The Third Paradigm

In the late 1980s and the 1990s there was a revival of
social constructivism that went beyond the second paradigms interest in variation and the role of language in
constituting social encounters. Interactional and audience-oriented approaches supported the idea that many,
if not all, utterances are produced by speaker-audience
fine-tuning within genres or types of interaction (e.g.,
Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson 1996, Silverstein and Urban 1996) and that language is only one of the semiotic
resources for the production of both propositional content and indexical values (e.g., Farnell 1995; C. Goodwin
1994; Hanks 1990; Haviland 1993; Streeck 1993, 1994).
A number of gender theorists adopted the term performativity (Butler 1990) to highlight the creative and socially binding potential of any utterance in the cultural
and interactional construction of identities (e.g., Livia
and Hall 1997, Hall 2001). Gender and other identities
have thus been described as invented, improvised, and
at the same time located within culture-specific activities that give them meaning (e.g., Bucholtz, Liang, and
Sutton 1999). The focus of research has recently moved
away from language forms or activities per se toward
symbolic domination (Gal 2001[1995]:424).
Although not always explicitly recognized or theorized, temporality has come to play an important part in
these studies, whether in the form of the moment-bymoment constitution of conversational exchanges or of
the historically situated understanding of particular linguistic practices (e.g., Hanks 1987). There has been an
effort to develop analytical constructs and methods of
data collection that can capture language as it moves
through time and space. Improvisation has thus become
a legitimate focus of research (Sawyer 1997). The study
of narratives, at first confined to interview situations
(e.g., Labov and Waletzky 1966), has entered the more
spontaneous domains of speakers lives, providing researchers with the opportunity to see beyond structural
organization (Bamberg 1997, Ochs and Capps 1996) and
propose a model based on a few key dimensions of narrative as a cooperative activity (Ochs and Capps 2001).
The relation between language and space has become
a focus of attention not only in terms of the indexical
properties of speech but also in terms of the spatial prerequisites for verbal interaction and the linguistic recognition of the way in which human bodies are used in
the establishment of hierarchical or oppositional identities (e.g., Duranti 1992a, M. H. Goodwin 1999, Keating
1998, Meacham 2001, Sidnell 1997).
Whereas the first paradigm was characterized by a conceptualization of language as grammar and took linguistics as its point of reference and the second paradigm
established an independent research agenda with a focus
on variation and speaking as organizing culture and society, contemporary developments seem to move in a
new direction. Many scholars of the current generation,
including some of Gumperzs and Hymess students and
their students students, often adopt theoretical perspectives developed outside of anthropology or linguistics,
such as Giddenss structuration theory, Bourdieus practice theory, Bakhtin and Volosinovs dialogism, and Foucaults insights on knowledge and power. A good example of this trend is the recent literature on language
ideology (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998, 2000). In the work of a number
of established scholars previously immersed in the second paradigm, language ideology is more a perspective
than a topic and as such invites the study of unexplored
phenomena while reorganizing previously collected and
analyzed data (e.g., Irvine 1998, Kroskrity 1998, Philips
1998).
Those currently working on language identity, interaction, narrative, and ideology share a strong desire to
use language studies to reach out to other disciplines.
Whereas the second paradigm saw the development of a
research agenda related to but independent of those of
linguistics and anthropology, the third paradigm, dealing
with theoretical concerns that came from elsewhere, has
a better chance of reconnecting with the rest of anthropology as Hymes proposed in the 1960s. The interest in
capturing the elusive connection between larger institutional structures and processes and the textual details of everyday encounters (the so-called macro-micro
connection) has produced a new wave of projects that
start from a concern for situating ones work in the context of larger theoretical issues and an abandonment of
the assumption that language should be ones only or
main preoccupation. In contrast to earlier generations of
students who started from a fascination with linguistic
forms and languages (in the first paradigm) or from their
use in concrete and culturally significant social encounters (in the second), students today typically ask questions such as What can the study of language contribute
to the understanding of this particular social/cultural
phenomenon (e.g., identity formation, globalization, nationalism)? The formulation of this type of question
conceives of language no longer as the primary object of
inquiry but as an instrument for gaining access to complex social processes (Morgan 2002). Whereas Hymes ex-

pected ethnographers of communication to concentrate

on what was not being studied by ethnographers and
grammarians (language use in social events often constituting the bulk of what one might call the social),
for many young scholars today linguistic anthropology
is a tool for studying what is already being studied by
scholars in other fields, for instance, race and racism (e.g.,
Trechter and Bucholtz 2001). More influenced by and
attuned to what happens in the rest of anthropology,
adherents of the third paradigm aim at fulfilling the goal
of a linguistic anthropology as part of anthropology at
large while claiming special access to language as the
indispensable medium for the transmission and reproduction of culture and society. The features of the third
paradigm may be summarized as follows:
Goals: the use of linguistic practices to document and
analyze the reproduction and transformation of persons,
institutions, and communities across space and time.
View of language: as an interactional achievement
filled with indexical values (including ideological ones).
Preferred units of analysis: language practice, participation framework, self/person/identity.
Theoretical issues: micro-macro links, heteroglossia,
integration of different semiotic resources, entextualization, embodiment, formation and negotiation of identity/self, narrativity, language ideology.
Preferred methods of data collection: socio-historical
analysis, audiovisual documentation of temporally unfolding human encounters, with special attention to the
inherently fluid and moment-by-moment negotiated nature of identities, institutions, and communities.
The Persistence of Earlier Paradigms

At least in the traditions I have been discussing here,
paradigms do not die. As new ones are born, the old ones
can survive and even prosper. Throughout the 1990s, the
first paradigm continued to be visible in a number of
publications, including the journal Anthropological Linguistics and William Brights Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics. Brights series features two books
that fit squarely within the first paradigm: Cecil H.
Browns (1999) comparative study of loanwords in Native
American languages and Richard Feinbergs Oral
Traditions of Anuta, a Polynesian Outlier in the Solomon Islands (1998), which consists of 15 pages of introduction and 233 pages of Anutan texts with English
translation. There are several features that qualify Feinbergs book as a good example of the kind of salvage
anthropology practiced by Boas and some of his collaborators (e.g., George Hunt) at the beginning of the 20th
century. The texts are monologic and elicited precisely
for the purpose of transforming oral history, perceived
as on its way to extinction, into a written record. As we
find out from Feinbergs candid description of the methods he used (1998:7), the stories collected in the early
1970s were transcribed with techniques that closely resemble those used by the anthropologists hired by the
Bureau of American Ethnology before the invention of

the portable tape recorder.
Conclusions
While linguists in the first half of the 20th century could
already claim to have established the legitimacy of the
scientific study of language as an independent and sui
generis system, linguistic anthropologists working in the
second half of the century could just as easily claim to
have brought language back where it belonged, namely,
among human beings concerned with their daily affairs.
Next to the earlier view of language as a rule-governed
system in which everything fit together (a` la Saussure)
and could be represented via formal and explicit rules,
in the 1960s language came to be viewed not as a window
on the human mind but as a social process whose study
belonged to anthropology as much as to linguistics.
Rather than working with native speakers to elicit linguistic forms (whether in the form of isolated words or
as coherent narratives), those committed to or trained
within the second paradigm became interested in documenting and analyzing actual language usage. Through
their studies of performance, primary and secondary language socialization, indexicality, and participation, researchers acquired a more sophisticated understanding
of the dynamic relationship between language and context (Goodwin and Duranti 1992), and a new generation
of scholars took as a point of departure not linguistic
forms but the social constructs (e.g., hierarchy, prestige,
taste) and social processes (e.g., formation of self, speech
community, or even nationhood) that they helped
constitute.
As the object of inquiry increased in scope and complexity (e.g., from grammar to language in context), the
area of expertise of each researcher did not necessarily
increase proportionally. Researchers adopting or socialized to a new paradigm did not necessarily know more
than their intellectual ancestors, nor did they control an
area that encompassed earlier approaches. Instead, they
were more likely to have expertise in new areas and
methods or interests in phenomena that had not been
part of earlier research agendas. For example, whereas in
the first paradigm training in grammatical analysis (e.g.,
phonology, morphology, syntax) and historical reconstruction was a requisite, with the advent of the second
paradigm this training became less common, and it was
left to the individual researcher to decide whether to
acquire it. Thus, although the development of each new
paradigm has helped to expand the study of language as
culture, some areas of research interest and expertise
have been abandoned. It is more and more difficult to
find linguists coming out of anthropology departments
who have a good background in phonology, morphology,
syntax, and semantics, as well as in diachronic linguistics and elicitation techniques (i.e., working with native
speakers to write grammars). The diversity of background and expertise has thus created a wider gap between linguists in linguistics departments and those in

anthropology departments. At the same time, the widening of the concept of language and the adoption of
analytical concepts used by sociocultural anthropologists and scholars in other disciplines has made linguistic
anthropology in principle, and often in practice, more
appealing to a broader audience within anthropology.
There has been an increase in the number of linguistic
positions in anthropology departments in the United
States, and there has been a new flow into the field of
students with no formal training in linguistics but a
commitment to language, discourse, or, more broadly,
communication as a central locus of social life. These
are the individuals who not only support a better dialogue between linguistic anthropologists and sociocultural anthropologists but can also be spokespersons for
the importance of language experts within anthropology departments. This new linguistic turn in anthropology is reflected in the latest reorganization of the
AAA, whose by-laws now call for a linguistic seat on
its executive board and all its major elected committees.
It seems telling that, in this new climate, two linguistic
anthropologists have been elected president of the AAA:
Jane Hill (199799) and Donald Brenneis (200103).11
Gone are the days when the practice of linguistics within
anthropology seemed a relic of the Boasian tradition
doomed to extinction. Most anthropologists (with the
exception, perhaps, of those attracted by Chomskys
metaphor of language as an organ) now seem convinced
that they have little to learn from the type of linguistic
analysis conducted in most linguistics departments and
that it is wise for anthropology departments to have language experts of their own.
I suggest that this revival has been possible partly because of linguistic anthropologists ability to project an
image of themselves as empirically oriented fieldworkers
who have more important things to do than argue with
one another (or with those in other subfields). Furthermore, researchers have had no difficulty moving back
and forth from one paradigm to another without confronting (or being confronted by others regarding) their
own epistemological, ontological, and methodological
wavering. In addition to the differences already outlined.
I will here briefly mention some other areas of incompatibility or lack of agreement across paradigms.
1. With a few exceptions (e.g., Ochs 1985), grammatical
descriptions continue to be written (sometimes even by
researchers otherwise working within the second or the
third paradigm) as if the criteria for descriptive adequacy
assumed by Boas and Sapir (first paradigm) had never
been challenged. This means that grammars and grammatical sketches of all kinds of languages, including
those in contact situations, are being presented primarily
to satisfy the needs of typological linguistics, as if no
claims had been made in the past 50 years about the
importance of contextual variation and about language
11. Jane Hill is a linguist whose work speaks to issues of relevance
to the other three fields, and Donald Brenneis is known as both a
linguist and a sociocultural anthropologist (he was the editor of the
American Ethnologist from 1990 to 1994).
as an activity (second paradigm) or there had been no

breakthrough in the study of the interplay between grammar and interaction and grammar and narrative activity
or the ideological underpinning of grammatical description.
2. Languages are still sometimes being identified with
their grammars, even though those working within the
second and the third paradigm have worked hard at
showing that a language is much more than that.
3. Data collection is rarely discussed and even less
often contested. Researchers continue to rely on the
methods of earlier paradigms, using, for example, recollection or handwritten notes on verbal exchanges witnessed by the researcher despite the evidence that we
cannot rely verbatim on participants accounts of what
was said or done on a given occasion without an audio
or video recording of the interaction. Considering that
researchers in other subfields, especially sociocultural
anthropologists, continue to use naked observation and
handwritten notes as their main methods for data collection, a thorough discussion of methods for data collection would put linguistic anthropologists in the uncomfortable position of having to challenge the adequacy
of a great deal of anthropological research.
4. Criteria for transcription are rarely mentioned, despite the fact that there are differences across (and sometimes within) paradigms not only in transcription conventions but also in the accuracy with which speech is
transformed into a visual record. The phonetic transcriptions of adherents of the first (and sometimes the second)
paradigm, for example, do not typically include pauses
or the interruptions and back-channel cues produced by
the interviewer/researcher. Despite the work done in the
second and third paradigms on talk as an interactional
achievement, transcripts are often still cleaned (i.e.,
edited) to provide clear linguistic examples. At the same
time, the use of standard orthography by adherents of
the second and third paradigms has its own problems.
The fact that those working in the three paradigms do
not share a standard for transcription makes the use of
data collected by others problematic.
5. The rational model of communication implicit in
the work of philosophers such as Paul Grice and John
Searle has been repeatedly criticized and challenged by
researchers (myself included) who find some common
assumptions on the notion of the person and the role of
individual intentionality problematic. However, with a
few exceptions (e.g., Stroud 1992), not much has been
said about the fact that such a model underlies a good
deal of the work done by some of our own colleagues
(e.g., the notion of intent is very important in Gumperzs work on miscommunication and seems implicit
in much of the research on code switching), and no alternative models have been clearly outlined beyond the
specifics of the reconstructed local views on self and
responsibility (e.g., Rosaldo 1982).
6. The experimental and quantitative method sometimes used for cross-cultural comparison (e.g., on color
terminology or the linguistic encoding of space) is at odds
with the (more common) use of a few (relatively) con-

texualized examples to make general claims about local

or universal discursive strategies.
The avoidance of public debates in which to confront
these and related issues in the study of linguistic practices has prevented potentially difficult exchanges
among colleagues, but it has had its price. It has kept us
from developing general models of language as culture
that might be adopted, rejected, challenged, criticized,
modified, or built upon. For this to be possible we would
have to come to terms with our differences not just so
as to eliminate them or to proclaim a winner among the
possible alternative paradigms but so as to reach a level
of clarity that would invite more researchers, from anthropology and elsewhere, to enter into a dialogue with
us as partners.
Comments
laura m. ahearn
Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, N.J. 08903, U.S.A.
([email protected]). 5 xii 02
Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms is an extremely timely piece. Linguistic anthropology in the United States, having undergone
some major shifts in recent years, is ripe for an assessment such as Durantis. Although some scholars might
take exception to Durantis periodization or characterization of the three paradigms, such debate has the potential to be quite productive. As Duranti notes, there
has been a remarkable lack of internal debate among
linguistic anthropologists conducting very different
kinds of research, and this has been both a blessing and
a curse. A respectful yet vigorous discussion of the theoretical and methodological foundations of linguistic
anthropology would be healthy both for the subfield and
for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. The six
areas of incompatibility or lack of agreement across
paradigms identified by Duranti provide an excellent
starting point for such a discussion.
As I read Durantis article, I found myself wondering
whether paradigm was the best term to use for these
trends in the intellectual history of linguistic anthropology. Certainly it serves the purpose of getting the
conversation started, but it is also interesting to consider how the use of other terms might enable us to
think differently about the same trends. How would it
change our understanding (if at all) if Duranti had used
the term school instead? Alternatively, what would
it do to the article if the three paradigms were instead
labeled thesis, antithesis, and synthesis? While
any of these labels would stimulate debate in interesting ways, I am partial to thinking about them in terms
of Raymond Williamss dominant, residual, and
emergent forms of culture. If we used these terms,
we could situate our analysis of the cultural and intel-
lectual history of our subdiscipline in the context of

theories of social change more broadly. It would also
then be clear why elements of Durantis three different
paradigms can often be present at the same historical
moment.
In terms of the most recent developments this article
describes, whether because of modesty or disingenuousness Duranti underemphasizes the important role
he himself has played in consolidating the fields third
paradigm. He has been steadily redefining linguistic
anthropology for some time now through his various
publications, including most notably the excellent textbook Linguistic Anthropology (1997) and the readers
Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (2001b) and Key
Terms in Language and Culture (2001c). As part of the
debate that this article will inevitably trigger, we might
consider what is at stake (politically, intellectually, personally) in this redefinition of one of anthropologys
four subfields. As someone very much in favor of many
of the trends Duranti notes in the third paradigm, I
would nevertheless like to see at least some attention
given to how and by whom linguistic anthropology is
redefined and/or consolidated and how and by whom a
new canon is constructed, if indeed that is what is
happening.
Finally, I would like to underline what I consider to
be two of Durantis most useful points. First, it does
seem to be true that linguistic anthropology is increasingly viewed as indispensable to sociocultural anthropology because more and more linguistic anthropologists are investigating questions of concern to that
subfield. Yet I would not like to see linguistic anthropology devolve into a mere tool or sub-subfield of sociocultural anthropology, for, as Duranti has demonstrated in this article and elsewhere, it has a unique
intellectual history, one that is well suited to a discipline that can stand on its own even as it contributes
significantly to other subfields of anthropology, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Second, in support of this latter view of linguistic
anthropology, I believe that it is essential to provide
linguistic anthropology graduate students with a good
background in formal linguistics. As Duranti notes, it
is becoming more and more difficult to find Ph.D.s
coming out of anthropology departments who have expertise in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. While acquiring such skills will be challenging,
especially now that linguistic anthropologists are also
expected to demonstrate thorough knowledge of the
most recent debates in social theory, I would argue that
graduate students in linguistic anthropology should be
urged to acquire at least a basic grounding in typology
and formal grammatical analysis. Such familiarity will
only enrich this increasingly vibrant field.
In conclusion, Duranti has written an important,
thought-provoking article that deserves to be vigorously debated.

jenny cook-gumperz and john gumperz

School of Education, University of California, Santa
Barbara, Calif. 93106, U.S.A. 19 xii 02
In this ambitious critical review of linguistic anthropology Duranti is breaking new ground in tackling a field
that until the past decade had shown little inclination
to reflect on its own basic premises. Social anthropology,
its sister discipline, has a long tradition of critical selfreflection and public debate (Leach 1966 [1961], Clifford
and Marcus 1986, Geertz 1988). Although their field was
recognized by Boas around the turn of the century as a
distinct constituent of what we now call four-field anthropology, linguistic anthropologists have always been
few, and until the past decade or so few have participated
in anthropologys public debates (Lucy 1993, Silverstein
and Urban 1996). By providing a framework for the long
trajectory of historical reassessment, Duranti both reminds the discipline of its beginnings and raises some
important issues of current and future directions.
Duranti uses Kuhns notion of paradigm as an organizing concept to highlight the complexes of ideas that
distinguish what he sees as three paradigms of research.
These three, he argues, have dominated the entire century, so that as a new set of concerns emerges and becomes established, earlier practices are replaced. The
first paradigm was dominated by a concern with historical origins that saw grammatical description and linguistic reconstruction as tools in the recovery of a nations past. Language and culture were seen as
interdependent since they served similar ends. The second paradigm stepped aside from these concerns to focus
on the study of language and context as structurally independent but related entities. This approach gave rise
to a new interest in detailed studies of language practices
and the cultural variability of activities of speaking. Both
of these paradigms are by now seen as part of history,
the first of general anthropology and the second as foundational for the then new subfield of sociolinguistics.
However, as Durantis discussion shows, this paradigmatic exclusivity has been only partial. Many important
research issues, such as Berlin and Kays work on color
and its offshoots in ethnoscience, bridge the two
paradigms.
The third paradigm, while it deepens and widens the
range of cultural and social events under investigation,
at times risks abandoning detailed linguistic analysis in
favor of discourse and rhetorical study as sufficient to
uncover the politics of language use. In this way, it
seems, each new paradigm rejects the previous one in
order to highlight its new ideas. We would argue that,
while the notion of paradigm is useful in revealing
historical continuities and discontinuities, Kuhns approach gives a sense of structural containment to the
flow of ideas that to those living with them appear much
more fluid and overlapping. As a consequence, it is easier
to see the existence of paradigms in past work, from the
position of an heir to and archivist of a tradition, than
in the process of creation of new work. Duranti himself
points out, sometimes with apparent surprise, that much
of the work that he considers important overlaps the

paradigms, especially the second and third. He is aware
that in the third it is precisely the carryover of the detailed work on language in use that is becoming deepened by the new work on the relationships of language
and institutional structuring, with the study of linguistic
ideologies and language socialization.
Therefore, rather than think of these three research
traditions as paradigms in the Kuhnian sense, we suggest
another way of thinking about rapidly changing scientific fields. The historian of science Gerald Holton (1973)
uses the idea of thematic imagination to reconcile
what others see as a deep division between classical and
quantum-theory approaches to physics. He particularly
looks at how ideas can coexist and strengthen each other
as part of a broader conceptual universe. One such overarching theme that runs through all of linguistic anthropology from early Boasian work on myth through
the study of speech events to the more recent Bakhtinian
dialogism has been the study of narratives and narrativity as cultural text and cultural performances. This
theme connects the whole century, albeit, as Duranti
points out, with changing technical and technological
emphases. The focus on themes enables us to capture
such similarities and theoretical relationships and encourages us to look at what, over time, keeps us together.
regna darnell
Department of Anthropology, University of Western
Ontario, London, Ont., Canada N6A 5C2 (rdarnell@
uwo.ca) 12 xii 02
Duranti identifies three paradigms for the study of language in relation to culture as consecutive but coexisting
within contemporary American anthropology, although
his preference for the 1990s paradigm shift to social constructionism is never in doubt. My own experience confirms the existence of these paradigms, but I assess their
consequences somewhat differently. As a graduate student in the late 1960s I suffered considerable guilt over
my lack of interest in the descriptive-linguistics agenda,
embracing a more theoretical model of language as symbolic form instantiated in social action. I agree with Duranti that the ethnography of communication of my professional generation sought autonomy from both
anthropology and linguistics, but for me the line between
his second and third paradigms remains blurred. From
the beginning, I assumed that our attention to language
would produce better sociocultural research and theory.
As a teacher of anthropology and the sole linguist in my
department, I opted for language and culture rather than
descriptive linguistics in the single required semester
course. My students assumed that all languages were
written down and that someone would speak English
anywhere they might carry out fieldwork. Language as
handmaiden to ethnology had to earn its keep as a way
of getting at the nature of social order rather than as a
tool for dealing with linguistic diversity in the field.
I have no regrets. In retrospect, however, this approach

allowed sociocultural anthropologists to dismiss linguistic anthropology as merely method, to adopt piecemeal many of its insights without necessarily identifying
them as linguistic. I believe that the relative eclipse of
linguistics or linguistic anthropology in many departments is due primarily to the success of this strategy of
Durantis third paradigm. This most endangered quadrant of our traditional Americanist four-square discipline
may have ceded its claim to autonomy too quickly.
In my role as historian of Americanist anthropology,
I have long mused over the disproportionate influence
of a small number of linguistic anthropologists over the
discipline as a whole. Duranti cites two recent American Anthropological Association presidents who are
linguistic anthropologists: I note that Jane Hill crosses
into cultural as well as biological anthropology and Don
Brenneis is difficult to identify solely as linguistic or
cultural anthropologist. My own explanation tends toward the rhetoric of continuity within the three variants of linguistic anthropology. Because we are not contentious among ourselves, moving comfortably across
both the subdisciplines of anthropology and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, linguistic
anthropologists are often identified as effective mediators and synthesizers. The seminal role of Edward Sapir in the Rockefeller-sponsored interdisciplinary social
science of the interwar years provides an early exemplar; Sapir persuaded his colleagues that Chicago sociology and psychology/psychoanalysis were not in
conflict but explored different sides of a single coin (his
metaphor). He had moved beyond descriptive and historical linguistics as handmaidens to ethnology into the
psychological reality of the phoneme and the theory of
culture.
Duranti argues that the theoretical insights of linguistic anthropology under the third paradigm can be
realized only if practitioners acknowledge the gulfs between the paradigms and criticize, at least by implication, the assumptions of the descriptive-linguistic
and ethnography-of-communication paradigms. The recent decision of the descriptive linguists (SSILA) to
meet solely with the Linguistic Society of America, although it has pragmatic motivations, also ensures that
the first paradigm will be increasingly separate from
the other two, as well as from anthropology. I regret
the absence of SSILA colleagues from the AAAs Society
for Linguistic Anthropology and deplore the consequences for the study of language within anthropology.
Without reciprocal cross-over to linguistic training and
primary professional identity, linguistic anthropology
may lose the advantage Duranti sees for the study of
language/discourse/performance. I am reminded of the
uniqueness of our subdiscipline every time I hear the
termdiscourse casually bandied about by sociocultural anthropologists who cannot imagine doing a microanalysis of particular discourses, not to mention by
Foucault and other theorists for whom the term provides an analytic abstraction characterizing whole eras
across time and space. An increasing job market does
not necessarily preserve this historical legacy in Amer-
ican anthropology (although I share Durantis delight

that it is occurring). Durantis examples, moreover, persuade me that the Boasian critique of premature generalization through ethnographic counterexamples has
continued to characterize the second and third paradigms. The ethnography part of the equation remains,
to my mind, the key to studying both language and
culture, albeit with arguably new conceptual tools such
as ideology, narrative, and identity.
dell hymes
Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia,
P.O. Box 400120, Charlottesville, Va. 22904, U.S.A.
([email protected]). 6 xi 02
Duranti has taken the lead in developing linguistic anthropology both as part of the AAA and as a field with
a named journal. His picture of it in this article as a set
of distinct practices, of overlapping paradigms, makes a
great deal of sense. I should like to add some bits of
information and raise a few questions.
The first descriptive paradigm had a broadening of
work of its own. George Trager, H. L. Smith, and others
added dimensions: paralinguistics, kinesics (Ray Birdwhistell), psychiatric interviews (Hockett). The concept
of communication was sometimes invoked.
After World War II, influence identified with Bloomfield appeared dominant, associated with minimal interest in meaning. Some, like Hoijer, identified also
with Sapir. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was part of an
argument in linguistics itself about attention to
meaning.
In the late 1950s ethnoscience, connecting linguistics
and anthropology, was prominent at Yale (Lounsbury,
Conklin, Frake) and at Harvard (Frake, Romney). Frake
and Romney were subsequently at Stanford (also
DAndrade) and I at Berkeley, but the ethnography of
speaking grew out of a paper on cross-cultural aspects
of personality that I was invited to write while still at
Harvard. To be sure, there was a link to having been at
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 195758. In sum, the East played
some part. And for some time Chicago has.
The second paradigm involved interest among the
social sciences in structural linguistics and language.
Sociolinguistics became a central term. Charles Ferguson, a student of child language, national language
planning, and much else, persuaded the Social Science
Research Committee to establish a Committee on Sociolinguistics with anthropologists, sociologists, and
psychologists as members. I recall being invited by political scientists at Minnesota in this period to talk and
contribute to a book. A few years earlier Bert Kaplan had
invited me to contribute a paper on linguistic aspects of
studying personality cross-culturally.
Such conjunction was active at Berkeley in the
1960s, with Susan Ervin-Tripp (psychologists), John
Searle (philosopher), John Gumperz (at first in South
Asian languages), Erving Goffman (sociologist), myself

(anthropologist), and others. Gumperz took much of

the lead. Ethnomethodology was an element (Goffman
had me serve on Harvey Sackss dissertation committee, and I knew Harold Garfinkel from having been a
graduate student at UCLA [195455]). At Penn a little
later Goffman was instrumental in the formation of a
Center for Urban Ethnography, which helped bring Bill
Labov. Folklore, anthropology, and linguistics were
involved.
Duranti is quite right that paradigms can coexist and
may not coincide with individual programs. One dimension of this has to do with a sense of obligation to those
with whom one has studied. Efforts to sustain and renew
Native American languages are an example. Those who
have knowledge of a language or language family may
be among the few who do. Work of the sort in the first
paradigm may be a moral obligation, whatever else ones
interests.
As for the ethnography of speakings ambiguous relationship with cultural anthropology, I never thought
of it as separate. The use of language is a necessary part
of cultural anthropology. Are we to think of cultural anthropology as ignoring speech? It is hard to see the speech
event as really a new unit. Is it not a way of focusing
attention on the verbal aspect of things already studiedrituals, family meals, etc.?
There has been some connection with archaeology; for
example, my paper Linguistic Problems in Defining the
Concept of Tribe (1968) is used by some.
Preference for linguistic anthropology hit me at
Berkeley. David Mandelbaum asked me to write on anthropological linguistics for the book he coedited, The
Teaching of Anthropology (Hymes 1963b). I suddenly
thought, If linguistics is the head word, some will marginalize it as part of linguistics. Linguistic anthropology is part of anthropology, hence the term in my
article.
Oral narrative ought not to be overlooked. On the one
hand, it gives anthropologists insight into life in our own
society and elsewhere (see Hymes 1996:pt.3; Ochs and
Capps 2001). On the other hand, it connects the first
paradigm with the upsurge of cooperation with Native
American communities in preserving and restoring indigenous language use. Often this takes the form of making available materials taken down generations ago (e.g.,
making Hoijers Navajo texts available electronically
[Eleanor Culley] or bringing out, as it were, Haida texts
taken down by Swanton a century ago [Robert Bringhurst]). And recognition in narratives of implicit form,
lines and sets of lines, found by now in dozens of languages, suggests that grammar is not the only dimension
of language deeply rooted in human nature.
Such a range of comments is possible only because
Duranti knows and synthesizes so much of both work
and social contexts.
a l a n ru m s e y
Department of Anthropology, Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National
University, Canberra, A.C.T. 0200, Australia
([email protected]). 20 xii 03
Durantis discussion should provide a useful introduction for newcomers to a range of problems and approaches that have been pursued under the rubric of linguistic anthropology in the United States. He points out
that his use of the term paradigm shift to account for
developments in this area over the past 120 years is
slightly different from Kuhns in that he assumes that
the advent of a new paradigm need not mean the complete disappearance of the old one. Another, more basic
difference concerns the notion of paradigm itself. Durantis version of this notion presupposes that distinct
paradigms are commensurate and that incompatibility
or lack of agreement across paradigms presents a problem that can be resolved if we come to terms with our
differences and reach a level of clarity about them that
would invite more researchers . . . to enter into a dialogue
with us as partners. But even with respect to the hard
sciences, where one might expect the observational data
to provide a more definitive basis for such clarification,
Kuhn argued that that was not the way science had actually developed. Kuhn invented the concept of paradigm shift precisely in order to account for this finding
that the normal scientific tradition that emerges from
a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often
actually incommensurate with that which has gone before (1970 [1962]:103). For Kuhn, the differences between successive paradigms are both necessary and
irreconcilable.
Fortunately for the state of linguistic anthropology, the
loose congeries of problems and methods which Duranti
describes as paradigms do not live up to that designation
in Kuhnian terms. Indeed, it seems to me doubtful that
Durantis first and second paradigms need involve incompatible views of language at all, any more than do,
for example, phonetics and syntax as subdisciplines of
linguistics proper. It seems to me telling in this regard
that Dell Hymes, one of the originators of the ethnography of communicationand hence of Durantis second
paradigmhas in addition to his work in that area never
stopped doing straightforward descriptive linguistics and
grammatical analysis of the kind that belongs firmly
within Durantis first paradigm. The same goes for many
other linguistic anthropologists who were trained in the
sixties, seventies, and eighties. It is true that researchers
views of language structure tend to vary according to
their views about how language functions in relation to
other aspects of human social life, but few if any ethnographers of speaking or Labovian sociolinguists have
attempted to dissolve the notion of grammar entirely
or the need to main a level of analysis which treats it as
at least a semiautonomous formal system, without
thereby denying its status as an interactional achievement both in everyday acts of language use and in the
long term as languages change over time. Exemplary in

this regard is the work of Duranti himself, whose outstanding studies of language and politics in Samoaaptly characterized by the title From Grammar to
Politics (1994)have been grounded in both detailed ethnography and rigorous grammatical analysis of verbatim
transcriptions of Samoan oratory and disputation.
I share Durantis concern about the fact that, notwithstanding the burgeoning of linguistic anthropology
over the past 1015 years, fewer and fewer graduate students in the field are getting the kind of linguistic training that would enable them to undertake studies of this
kind. Even if ones research issues are not primarily
about language per se but treat it as an instrument for
gaining access to complex social processes, ones ability
to do so will be impoverished if one lacks a rigorous
analytical grasp on the presumed instrument. Consider in this regard what Duranti takes to be the prime
example of his third paradigm, namely, the recent literature on language ideology. While it is true that very
little of the recent literature he cites on this topic engages with matters of language structure, this represents
a considerable departure from the early work of Michael
Silverstein (1979) on this topicwhich I think most of
the writers cited by Duranti would agree is foundational
to their ownand indeed from much of Silversteins
more recent work on the same topic. For Silverstein a
good deal of the interest in linguistic ideologies has always been in how they refract and misrecognize aspects
of language structure and in turn impact upon it in ways
that may actually shape the course of language change
(as for example in the loss of the pragmatically charged
grammatical distinction between second person singular
and plural in 18th-century English or the development
of a gender-neutral singular indefinite use of they in
late-20th-century nonsexist English [see Rumsey 1990
for other examples]). In light of these kinds of example,
I would agree with Duranti that there is much to be
gained through closer engagement among people working in all three of his paradigms not only to clarify differences among them but because the second and third
can be enriched by renewing and reinvigorating their
connections to the first.
debra spitulnik
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, 1557
Pierce Dr., Atlanta, Ga. 30322, U.S.A. (dspitul@
emory.edu). 17 i 03
While Duranti provides a very informative and insightful
discussion of the major trends in linguistic anthropology
over the past century, his focus on distinct paradigms
plays down important continuities across this period. In
effect, this limits his ability to clarify what is at stake
for linguistic anthropology, a position that he has been
very forthright about in other venues (1997, 2001b). In
addition, Duranti gives only brief attention to the socalled Sapir-Whorf hypothesis despite the continued salience of this concept outside the subdiscipline. Finally,
although he touches on the troubling issue of linguistic
anthropologys being construed by nonpractitioners as

overly technical, it would be advantageous to engage this
moreasking why it is the case and what solutions can
be proposedboth to further an understanding of our
intellectual history and to enhance the recruitment of
students and dialogue with colleagues.
These topics may have been secondary in importance
to Durantis goal of producing an intellectual history
(which he does with great elegance and depth), but their
exclusion leaves me wonderingto adapt a phrase from
Hymeswhen we are going to break through into dialogue. Hymes (1975) speaks of a breakthrough into performance with regard to the way a speaker switches
from talking about a tale to the authentic performance
of a tale. For the question at hand, the concern is breaking through into authentic dialogue not so much about
the place of linguistic anthropology as about the place
of theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous
approaches to communicative practice in contemporary
anthropology. This means a breakthrough into a different
kind of relationship analogous to that achieved by the
pronominal breakthroughs in the Russian novels analyzed by Friedrich (1966), from whom Hymes draws his
inspiration. Like the pronominal shift from second person plural (vous) to second person singular (tu), it means
a shift from the formal and distant to the more familiar
and engaged.1
The issue of dialogue does loom large in Durantis
piece, but for the most part it is talked about rather than
realized. His conclusion places responsibility for the lack
of dialogue on the shoulders of linguistic anthropologists, but I think this is an overstatement. Linguistic
anthropologists can speak with greater clarity and with
larger signposts regarding what is at stake and where they
are building bridges. But dialogue needs receptive addressees, colleagues who provide feedback and who help
move discussion to new levels, and these are hard to find
given the prevailing subdisciplinary and topical division
of labor and the pressure to publish for peers.
Linguistic anthropology is not a unified field, but it
does have some commonly held theoretical views and
practices. Many have been consistent over time. Two
obvious ones are the importance of learning a field language and the importance of collecting language data,
understood broadly as anything from eliciting text to
recording naturally occurring speech, for a variety of research aims. As for a general model of language as culture, there is a clear shared sense that language is structured and structuringthat it is a cultural practice both
deriving from and helping to constitute society and culture. Linguistic phenomena have unconscious character
(as Boas argued) as well as regularities of communicative
practice and certain persistent features of reference
(Sapir 1949b [1931]:104) that function in the production
1. One direct attempt can be found in Fabians (2002:775) argument
for a language-centered anthropologyunderstood . . . as anthropology that conceives of research as communicative and mediated
above all by language. Also see Mannheim and Tedlock (1995),
Spitulnik (2002), and Urban (1996).

of shared meaning or some approximation of it. Well

before the linguistic anthropologists of Durantis third
paradigm started thinking about practice theory and performativity, Sapir articulated this view: While we often
speak of society as though it were a static structure defined by tradition . . . it is only apparently a static sum
of social institutions; actually it is being reanimated or
creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts
of a communicative nature which obtain among the individuals participating in it.
Focusing on this dynamism of language and communicative practice is one way of deepening the so-called
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The core idea is that it is not
just language-as-system (especially language-as-categorization-system) that shapes worldview and the horizons
of the meaningful within a given culture or speech community but also daily habits of communicating analogous to what Whorf (1941) called the habitual grooves
of talking. Because these habits are embedded within
specific contexts and institutions (e.g., the mass media,
education, families, courts, marketplaces, and the practice of anthropology), there is room for a fourth paradigm
in which identification as a linguistic anthropologist is
less important than placing the ethnography of communication at the center of any anthropological project.
Durantis article provides a rich history of the scholarship that moves us in this direction.
teun a. van dijk
Departament de Traduccio i Filologia, Universitat
Pompeu Fabra, La Rambla 32, 08002 Barcelona, Spain
([email protected]). 9 xi 02
Durantis presentation of the three paradigms of the
study of language and anthropology in the United States
is useful not only for anthropologists but also for discourse analysts. Indeed, one source of modern discourse
analysis coincides with the second paradigm described
by Duranti, namely, the study of communicative events
by Hymes, Gumperz, and others in the ethnography of
communication. In fact, it was roughly in the same period (196474) that other developments took place that
can be interpreted as historical foundations of discourse
studies and as paradigm breaks with formal (structuralist
or generative) linguistics, such as text grammar, semiotics, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and the psychology of text processing. In other words, the paradigm
shift in anthropology is part of a much more general
international movement in which interest has shifted
from socially context-free formal grammar or fixed or
elicited data to the more dynamic properties of talk,
spontaneous everyday interaction, speech acts, strategic
processing, nonverbal communication, and social context, that is, to actual language use and discourse.
However, what was an oppositional paradigm has now
become a dominant one both in anthropology and in
much of discourse studies. As was earlier the case for
structuralism in linguistics and anthropology, such domination usually brings its own forms of inclusion and
exclusion. Thus, the virtually exclusive interest in spontaneous talk unfortunately relegated the study of text
to the study of literature, semiotics, postmodern philosophy, mass communication studies, or the psychology
of text processingas if writing and reading were less
interesting aspects of language, communication, and culture than conversations. Besides everyday talk, we have
everyday newspaper reading, among a host of other communicative practices, and both need our explicit attention in anthropology and discourse studies.
There is another, even more fundamental form of exclusion, again both in linguistic anthropology and in
much of discourse and conversation studies: the study
of cognition. There is a widespread misunderstanding, if
not prejudice, that identifies cognition with an individual and therefore nonsocial approach to language and
discourse. This is the case in ethnomethodology, ethnography, and sociolinguistics as well as in much critical
discourse analysis. Duranti mentions cognitive anthropology only in passing, and although this may not be the
best example of an integrated study of cognition, interaction, and social context in anthropology and discourse
studies, a study of language and discourse without an
explicit cognitive basis is empirically and theoretically
reductionist and hence inadequate. Ignorance of cognitive and social psychology, artificial intelligence, and related disciplines leaves a prominent gap precisely where
a link must be construed between societal structures,
social situations, and interactions, on the one hand, and
the structures and strategies of text and talk, on the
other. Social situations, interactions, or context as such
cannot possibly influence discourse (and vice versa)
without a sociocognitive interface. And, as is obvious in
the relevance of the study of knowledge, attitudes, social
representations, and ideologies, cognitions may be as social as they are mental. In sum, cognition, especially
social cognition, is too important and too interesting to
be left to psychologists, and as much as social scientists
and discourse analysts can and should learn from them,
they should learn from a more sociocultural approach to
language and discourse.
Some of what was lacking in the second paradigm in
linguistic anthropology (and much of discourse studies)
has been recovered or given new interest in the third
paradigm described by Duranti. Unfortunately, apart
from mentioning some issues (such as narrative, ideology, gender, racism), he does not detail this current paradigm as much as the second. This may be because the
third paradigm is just beginning in anthropology or because unfortunatelybecause of space limitationshe
has had to limit himself to the United States. The fact
is that much of this work is being done in discourse
studies (and related studies such as womens studies and
ethnic studies), especially in Europe, South America, and
other parts of the world, often within a prominent ethnographic or cultural context that makes it directly relevant to anthropology. As is also the case in conversation
analysis, much of this work reintegrates some of the
macro categories earlier banned from interactional
studies in sociology and anthropology, such as the role

of institutions, groups, power, and domination. Indeed,

gender, race, and ethnicity, as well as the close integration of much talk and text with organizations and institutions, require both a local, micro approach and a
global or macro approach that links discourse to the processes of societal reproduction and change. Both in linguistic anthropology and in discourse analysis, the consequent double integration of the local and the global
and of the cognitive and the social means a real break
with previous paradigms.
Reply
a l e s s a n d ro d u r a n t i
Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.A. 10 ii 03
Language is so ubiquitous in human affairs that we can
never talk too much about it. Yet, in the consolidations
of the social sciences in Europe at the beginning of the
20th century, language tended to be taken for granted or
reduced to the mere expression of already formed
thoughts and social processes. The founders of anthropology in the United States, however, thought otherwise,
and from the very beginning, by conceiving of language
as culture they made it into a crucial resource for understanding how the social and the psychological could
come together in human culture. The result was the constitution of linguistics as a subfield of anthropology (a
development unparalleled outside of North America).
My article is an attempt to reconstruct the history of a
then-revolutionary idea and its realization over the past
100 years by adopting a modified (and operationally more
precise) notion of paradigm. I am pleased (or, I should
say, pleasantly surprised) to see that my conceptualization of such a history is largely shared by the commentators, who have generously provided additional information and, in some cases, raised some challenging
issues. There is much to be learned from Hymess historical footnotes and clarifications, Darnells reflections
on her own experience, and van Dijks expansion of the
discussion to text analysis in other disciplines. Some
commentators have also examined the premises and potential implications of some of my choices, offering alternative perspectives (e.g., allegedly unseen connections) or criticism of my interpretation. I have here
organized what I see as the commentators main concerns in terms of four questions: (1) Is paradigm the
right choice (Ahearn, Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz), and
have I used it correctly (Rumsey)? (2) How sharp is the
distinction between paradigms, especially between my
second and third (Darnell)? (3) Did I overlook some relevant information and, in particular, possible points of
continuity across paradigms (Darnell, Cook-Gumperz
and Gumperz, Spitulnik)? (4) Are the paradigm shifts I
identified for the study of language as culture in the
United States of more general relevance, for example, to
parallel shifts taking place in Europe and elsewhere in
discourse analysis (van Dijk)? I will address these four

questions in order:
1. Is paradigm the right choice, and have I used it
correctly? There is always a risk in adopting a concept
that comes from a different tradition. It is even riskier
when we fiddle with it and stretch it to fit a set of data
for which it was not designed as I have done. But I believe
that the risk is warranted for two reasons. The first is
that there is considerable confusion within and outside
of anthropology regarding the nature of the anthropological study of language. The oscillation mentioned in the
article among a number of labels, including linguistic
anthropology, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, and ethnolinguistics, is only the most superficial and yet telling example of the widespread lack
of clarity as to what constitutes linguistic research from
an anthropological perspective. Further evidence of confusion can be inferred from the typically partial and often
clumsy attempts to represent the linguistic subfield
(or the study of language) in sociocultural anthropology textbooks. I felt that it was time to come to terms
with the fact that perhaps those of us inside the subfield
had not been communicating to those outside as effectively as we thought we were. I then realized that to
address this issue I needed a notion that by its very nature
would force us to think in terms of broad trends rather
than particular notions or hypotheses. The popular notions of paradigm and paradigm shift seemed to me
the perfect candidates; they could force us to think in
terms of the major features of our research projects.
Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz are right when they write
that Kuhns approach gives a sense of structural containment to the flow of ideas that to those living with
them appear much more fluid and overlapping. (Their
proposal to adopt Holtons themata is a bit cryptic
given that his model is not considered an improvement
on Kuhns by most historians of science.) But my whole
point was to find a way to go beyond our own experiential
closeness to intellectual matters in order to reveal what
we ordinarily do not perceive. Paradigms are good for
helping us think about questions we often do not ask,
for example: Do we all have the same goals, units of
analysis, object of study, methods, etc.? And if we dont,
what does it mean for the enterprise? The choice of other
terms would have taken me in a different direction. For
example, the term school (mentioned by Ahearn)
would not have allowed me to move at the general and
abstract level I was aiming for. Given the need to be more
ethnographically based and author-specific, it would
have been difficult if not impossible to reach any kind
of interesting generalization that could be challenged.
The second reason for adopting Kuhns notion is that
it is intimately tied to the question of (in)commensurability. I found this idea appealing because I had been
feeling for quite some time that, once we start digging
deeper, we might find considerable disagreement among
colleagues on what constitutes an appropriate way of
studying language from an anthropological perspective.
It was the hidden incommensurability that I found interesting and tried to make explicit. Pace Rumseys read-

ing, I never suggested that we should be looking for one

shared or Ur-paradigm or that differences could be easily
reconciled. Perhaps my call for a dialogue at the end
of the article was misplaced and potentially misleading.
I should then qualify it by saying that the call was never
meant as a call for an ecumenical outcome. I take dialogue to mean the possibility of understanding, which
may imply the recognition (as well as the achievement)
of either agreement or disagreement.
Finally, I should reiterate that, contrary to what CookGumperz and Gumperzs summary of my claims might
lead one to believe (as a new set of concerns emerges
and becomes established, earlier practices are replaced),
I do not think that a new paradigm completely replaces
the old one. As I have tried to demonstrate, there are
scholars who continue to work with theoretical concepts
and methods that are characteristic of the first paradigm.
2. How sharp is the distinction between paradigms?
As with any other form of narrative accounthistory is
no exceptionI am quite aware that I was an important
agent in the construction of the historical realities I have
been trying to depict. It is sufficient to read Murrays
(1998) discussion of what he calls (in the title but not
throughout his book) American sociolinguistics to
find a historical account based on some of the same
sources I evoke that is somewhat different from mine.
At the same time, I believe that there is sufficient evidence that something quite dramatic happened in the
1960s with the birth of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication and something equally dramatic happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s with
the influx of new conceptual tools and the wider availability and adoption of new recording technologies.
Of course, there is no question that the closer we are
to a given set of practices, the more difficult it is to see
them in historical terms. Only in the future might we
be able to see the third paradigm (or some variant of it)
as something as distinct as the first and the second.
3. Did I overlook possible points of continuity across
paradigms? The answer to this question relates to criteria for establishing continuity. The use of the same
term, for example, does not mean that its meaning (extensionally or intensionally) is the same. Thus, Darnells
suggestion that we all share ethnography, for example,
is appealing, but I am not sure that ethnography means
the same for all of those engaged in it, especially as more
and more students are encouraged to work in their own
communities and engage in urban (or suburban) fieldwork that often forces them to live the contradictions
of an alienated native self or of a privileged fieldworker
on the way to acquiring a professional multiple-personality disorder. Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz mention
narrative and narrativity. It is difficult for me to see
the narratives recorded by Boas as the same thing as
the narratives collected and analyzed by Ochs and Capps
(2001). They are both texts, but they were produced,
recorded, and analyzed in such different ways that their
similarities rapidly vanish as we expand the notion of
teller to include the work done by participants in the
narrative event. Finally, Spitulnik brings up the so-
called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a possible source of

continuity across paradigms. This is the most challenging of the three proposals for a thematic link across paradigms because the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has almost
mythical proportions in the public imagination. Together with the evolution of language (a topic that most
linguists tend to avoid), the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a
must in anthropology textbooks and in introductory
books on language and culture. But the semantic-indeterminacy problem is here even more serious than for
ethnography and narrative given that, as Spitulnik
knows (see her use of the qualifier so-called), there
never was a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, unless we take for
it Hoijers (1954:93) rarely quoted informal and very general definition: The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more
significantly, as a way of defining experience for its
speakers. The problem, of course, is where to go from
there. One of my theses has been that the second paradigm did not focus on the issue of the relation between
language and experience because its practitioners saw it
as too closely associated with a psychological orientation
toward communication and culture. Linguistic relativity, however, came back with Lucys (1992) experimental
work and the Lucy-inspired research carried out in the
Language and Cognition Group directed by Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
But it is hard to see this line of research as part of either
the second or the third paradigm. This work speaks to a
series of concerns (e.g., in cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology) that have been largely ignored or
avoided by the writers I reviewed in my article. The 1991
Wenner-Gren Symposium Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Gumperz and Levinson 1996) opened up the
discussion of linguistic relativity to interactional dimensions that are closer to the second and third paradigms. This was done by the inclusion of researchers
strongly associated with the third paradigm (e.g., William
Hanks, John Haviland, and Elinor Ochs). To these contributions one might add Michael Silversteins work,
which I discuss in the article. But the bottom line remains the same. The recurring interest in what people
call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or linguistic relativity) is no proof of continuity across paradigms, given
that each paradigm has either embraced or rejected linguistic relativity on the basis of distinct presuppositions
of what it is and how one could build upon it.
4. Are the paradigm shifts I identified for the study of
language as culture in the United States of more general
relevance? This possibility was also raised by psychologists in the audience when I presented an earlier draft
of the article at the Universita` di Padova in October 2000.
In the printed version I purposely left out my own speculations in this direction because I felt that I did not
have the data and the expertise to venture into other
fields, but this is a worthwhile project for others to pursue. After all, many of the writers I mentioned were or
are part of wider networks of scholarship extending to
other disciplines and other countries. One in fact might

see van Dijks comments as the beginning of a widening

of the discussion by a major figure in another field,
namely, discourse studies. His complaints about what is
typically left out of the analysis in linguistics and anthropology not only underscore the privileging of certain
contexts for analysis (e.g., spontaneous talk), which is to
be expected, but also remind us that text itself is one
of those key terms that can be interpreted very differently across disciplines and, I would add, across paradigms. I suspect that a study of how the term text has
been interpreted and used in the humanities and social
sciences would be an equally exciting exercise, although
it would be difficult to justify the same temporal restriction to the 20th century given the ancient hermeneutical
traditions from which our contemporary notions of
text derive.
Ahearn, always a perceptive writer, brings out a fear
that many linguistic anthropologists have but rarely expressthe fear of being assimilated to sociocultural anthropology and thus losing their identity through the
forfeiting of their specificity. This is the flip side of William Labovs original wish that sociolinguistics might
disappear once linguistics agreed to see language as a
social phenomenon (that this has not happened is both
an indictment of linguistics narrow-mindedness and a
validation of Labovs and other sociolinguists efforts to
develop sociolinguistics into a vibrant independent
field). The question then arises why we should worry
about being assimilated. Shouldnt we, on the contrary,
welcome such a possibility, to be seen as a validation of
our work or as the mainstreaming of our concerns? The
problem is not in the future, which cannot be predicted,
but in the past. Everything we know from our earlier
experiences warns us that an anthropology without a
distinct group of language specialists is likely to be an
anthropology with a nave understanding of communication. We have seen it happen already. When anthropology departments decide not to have a linguistic subfield, thinking that they dont need one, their students
tend to take language for granted, identifying it with a
vague notion of discourse. It is for this reason that we
need to sharpen our historical, theoretical, and methodological understanding of what it means to study language as culture. We owe it first to our students.
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Language as Culture in U.S.

Anthropology: Three Paradigms

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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of

1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is

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324 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 44, Number 3, June 2003

I hope to show that this risk is warranted by the gain of

The First Paradigm

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