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This book investigates the vigorous and inspiring linguistic philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Many English-speaking authors speak of a ‘Humboldtian tradition’ and associate Humboldt's name with research into linguistic relativism and the work of Whorf. But few scholars quote Humboldt's writings, and those who do, often prove only that they fail to perceive the great scope of his work and that they are incapable of seizing the essential principles of Humboldt's ethnolinguistic project. Hegel, Chomsky, Crystal and Habermas all try understand Humboldt through the prism of their own approach to language and ideas. The present work, tries to set the record straight, and to demonstrate why Humboldt's linguistic philosophy will take us much farther than the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Humboldt's work lays down a challenge to philosophy, which has difficulty in taking into account language as it is created and maintained in the world. At the same time, it represents no less of a challenge to approaches to language which seek to step over individual writing and speech, and speak of ‘language’ in abstraction, or seek the deeper structures of cognition. Humboldt takes us back to the origin of language, speech. His concept of language is supra-subjective. Individuals become individuals through language, through conversation in linguistic communities. At the same time Humboldt takes us back to languages in all their diversity. Finding something universal in that diversity, and something essentially specific in each facet of the universal faculty of language is the twin force of Humboldt's vast synthesis of empirical findings.

All communication involves acts of stance, in which speakers take up positions vis-à-vis the expressive, referential, interactional, and social implications of their speech. This book brings together contributions in a new and dynamic current of academic explorations of stancetaking as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. Drawing on data from such diverse contexts as advertising, tourism, historical texts, naturally occurring conversation, classroom interaction, and interviews, leading authors in the field of sociolinguistics in this volume explore how linguistic stancetaking is implicated in the representation of self, personal style and acts of stylization, and self- and other-positioning. The analyses also focus on how speakers deploy and take up stances vis-à-vis sociolinguistic variables and the critical role of stance in the processes of indexicalization: how linguistic forms come to be associated with social categories and meanings. In doing so, many of the authors address critical issues of power and social reproduction, examining how stance is implicated in the production, reproduction, and potential change of social and linguistic hierarchies and ideologies. This volume and its introduction both map out the terrain of existing sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research on stance, synthesize how it relates to existing theoretical orientations, and identify a framework for future research.

All too often, anthropologists study specific facets of human migration without guidance from the other subdisciplines (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics) that can provide new insights on the topic. The equivocal results of these narrow studies often make the discussion of impact and consequences speculative. In the last decade, however, anthropologists working independently in the four subdisciplines have developed powerful methodologies to detect and assess the scale of past migrations. Yet these advances are known only to a few specialized researchers. This book brings together these new methods in one volume and addresses innovative approaches to migration research that emerge from the collective effort of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds. Its chapters present a comprehensive anthropological exploration of the many topics related to human migration throughout the world, ranging from theoretical treatments to specific case studies derived primarily from the Americas prior to European contact.

This book is an ethnography of labor mobility and its challenges to the idea of the nation. Using the example of francophone Canada, it examines how social difference (race, ethnicity, language, gender) has been used to sort out who must (or can) be mobile and who must (or can) remain in place in the organization of global circulation of human and natural resources. It argues that “francophone Canada” can best be understood as an ethnoclass category that has embedded francophones into specific forms of labor mobility since the beginnings of European colonization, even as their social difference has been constructed as national in the interests of gaining political power. The result has been an erasure both of francophone mobilities and of their contribution to the rooted community that lies at the heart of the idea of the nation, and of francophone capacity to resist economic marginalization and exploitation. By following French Canadian workers back and forth between eastern and central Canada and the frontiers of the Canadian northwest, the work explores how contemporary forms of labor mobility make it increasingly difficult for national structures and discourses to produce the francophone nation. It follows the ideological tensions between language as a skill and language as a marker of belonging. It contributes grounded evidence of how the globalized new economy challenges the nation-state, and how mobilities and immobilities are co-constructed.

Nowhere in Britain is more closely associated with a form of language than Liverpool. Yet the history of language in Liverpool has been obscured by misrepresentation and myth–making, and narratives of Liverpool's linguistic past have scarcely done justice to the complex history that produced it. This book presents an account that challenges many of the forms of received wisdom about language in Liverpool and presents an alternative version of the currently accepted history. Ranging from the mid–eighteenth century to the present, it explores evidence from a host of different sources including the first histories of Liverpool, a rare slaving drama set in the port, a poor house report that records the first use of ‘Scouse’ (the dish), nineteenth–century debates on Gladstone's speech, the ‘lost’ literature of the city, early to mid–twentieth century newspaper accounts of Liverpudlian words, idioms and traditions, little–known essays which coined the use of ‘Scouse’ to refer to the language of Liverpool, aspects of popular culture in the 1950s and 60s, the Lern Yerself Scouse series, and examples drawn from contemporary literature. In addition the analysis draws on recent developments within the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology — particularly with regard to the study of language and identity and the relationship between language and a sense of place — in order to provide a radically new understanding of ‘Scouse’ in terms of its history, its representation, and its contemporary social and cultural significance.

This collection sketches the use of the term rapport within the fields of anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Rather than leave the term uncritiqued or simply conceptualized as a type of positive social relationship that needs to be formed between researcher and consultant before research can begin, the book invites us to: (1) think about how rapport has been constructed within a number of these disciplines, (2) see rapport as an emergent co-constructed social relationship that is built during situated multimodal encounters, and (3) see the interpretation of such social relationships as requiring a reflexive approach that historicizes semiotic resources and social relations. In reimagining rapport, readers are invited to reflect on the idea of rapport as theory, meta-methodology, and methodology.

In Critical Christianity, Courtney Handman analyzes the complex and conflicting forms of sociality that Guhu-Samane Christians of rural Papua New Guinea privilege and celebrate as “the body of Christ.” Within Guhu-Samane churches, processes of denominational schism—long relegated to the secular study of politics or identity—are moments of critique through which Christians constitute themselves and their social worlds. Far from being a practice of individualism, Protestantism offers local people ways to make social groups into sacred units of critique. Bible translation, produced by members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a crucial resource for these critical projects of religious formation. From early interaction with German Lutheran missionaries to engagements with Summer Institute of Linguistics to the contemporary moment of conflict, Handman presents some of the many models of Christian sociality that are debated among Guhu-Samane Christians. Central to the study are Handman's rich analyses of the media through which this critical Christian sociality is practiced, including language, sound, bodily movement, and everyday objects. This original and thought-provoking book is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology and religious studies.

This book analyzes gendered forms of language use in several different gay male subcultures. The subcultures considered include drag queens, radical faeries, bears, circuit boys, barebackers, and leathermen. The chapters include ethnographic-based studies of language use in each of these subcultures, giving special attention to the ways in which linguistic patterns index forms of masculinity and femininity. In each case, speakers combine linguistic forms in ways that challenge normative assumptions about gender and sexuality. In an extension of prior work, Barrett discusses the intersections of race, gender, and social class in performances by African American drag queens in the 1990s. An analysis of sacred music among radical faeries considers the ways in which expressions of gender are embedded in a broader neo-pagan religious identity. The formation of bear as an identity category (for heavyset and hairy men) in the late 1980s involve the appropriation of linguistic stereotypes of rural Southern masculinity. Among regular attendees of circuit parties (similar to raves), language serves to differentiate gay and straight forms of masculinity. In the early 2000s, barebackers (gay men who eschew condoms) used language to position themselves as rational risk takers with a natural innate desire for semen. For participants in the International Mr. Leather contest, a disciplined, militaristic masculinity links expressions of patriotism with BDSM sexual practice. In all of these groups, the construction of gendered identity involves combining linguistic forms that would usually not co-occur. These unexpected combinations serve as the foundation for the emergence of unique subcultural expressions of gay male identity.

This book examines the discursive connections between global flows of ideologies about leadership and good governance, how these ideologies are localized in Indonesia, and how all of this relates to changing political, bureaucratic, and market regimes between 1998 and 2004. It starts with a speech given by the head of the International Monetary Fund about the importance of good governance. It then traces the uptake of shibboleths of this speech within Indonesian government policy documents, within the Indonesian mass media, and in the everyday talk that occurred in a government office in Indonesia during the author’s five months of fieldwork in that office between August 2003 and January 2004. The book makes the case that in order to formulate nuanced interpretations of connection and processes of localization, researchers need to engage in a type of reflexivity that involves a constant movement between data from different time-spaces. Such a practice, it is argued, adds to our understanding of how and why both researchers and those researched come to believe and present themselves in specific ways. In doing so, the book extends contemporary conceptual work in the broad areas of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as it relates to notions of scale, connection, chronotope, leadership talk, and personhood, while sketching how this conceptual work can be operationalized methodologically.

This book explores a set of works from modern French literature that are interested in same-sex sexualities, but versions of those sexualities that fail to correspond to mainstream gay and lesbian identities in a variety of different ways that can be difficult to notice or talk about. The book’s seven chapters trace the introduction of the topic of non-mainstream or misfit sexualities into the French literary field. Writers interested in this topic generate representations of occasions of language use that display a practical, implicit knowledge of misfit sexual forms or that work to recreate or modify such knowledge. For certain authors, this representational work produces a kind of technical reflection on the semiotic characteristics upon which such verbal exchanges rely. In a number of examples treated in the book, the traces of misfit sexualities are shown to exist in the spaces between texts. Works that do not necessarily represent a given misfit sexuality can nonetheless, when viewed as part of a carefully reconstructed socio-textual array, be seen as contributing to the act of registering its existence. While exploring the presence of misfit sexualities in French literature between roughly 1930 and 1990, the book offers a model of a pragmatic cultural analysis of the way literary works participate in an aspect of sexual culture that often escapes explicit attention. It also illustrates the literary uses of language that have been developed by the works studied as they explore the ways evanescent sexual forms exist socially and in language.