I have been reflecting recently on the aims of linguistic anthropology as a practice. It strikes me that the concept can mean very different things to different people, and much of this varied intellectual activity gets washed out in its its confluence with other better-defined disciplines and methods.

So for what it’s worth, this (periodically updated) post is an effort to define what I believe makes linguistic anthropology distinctive and why it is worth pursuing.

What it is

Beliefs about language and how it relates to the world

Linguistic anthropology is all about the social meaning of language and language behaviours. One  important area of interest is the commonsense beliefs that people hold about the possibilities of language and how these beliefs are put into practice or expressed as norms. Key to this understanding is a recognition of the diverse strangeness of human beings. Men belonging to certain Indigenous Australian communities have a special lexicon to be used within earshot of their mothers-in-law, while an activist community in Sweden has an agreed-upon vocabulary for reinforcing values of gender equality. A decision to use one language over another in a multilingual north Indian workplace may be motivated by deference, enmity, national politics or a conviction that a given language has an intrinsic power to encapsulate certain ideas while another is deficient. In some parts of the world, people believe they can communicate with their pets while others converse with the dead. Malagasy peasants use French to address their cattle, or when drunk and boasting. For the most part, these commonsense assumptions could easily be described as ‘language ideologies’, a term defined by Kathryn Woolard as the “socially, politically, and morally loaded cultural assumptions about the way that language works in social life and about the role of particular linguistic forms in a given society”.

Linguistic anthropologists do not care so much about whether any of these beliefs are empirically true, nor whether the practices that stem from them are reasonable. They are much more interested in how such beliefs and practices maintain coherence within their own everyday contexts. In other words, linguistic anthropologists are interested in all the ways in which we systematically connect language to other aspects of our lives: how we organise ourselves as social creatures, how we signal belonging and exclusion, or how we express our values.

Beliefs about the world and how they are enacted through language

Linguistic anthropologists understand that language is not merely representing information in a straightforward denotative way, but is also doing something in the world. That is, they see language-use as a kind of social action. As such they are at home in the stimulating realm of pragmatics, Gricean maxims and the illocutionary speech. Within traditional linguistics, these areas of research are often considered peripheral to the ‘real’ work of investigating linguistic structure. My very biased view is that it is this very sociality of language that animates linguistic structure in the first place and serves as its bedrock.

Mary Douglas once wrote that “it is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts”. Of course, symbolic acts are not necessarily isomorphic with linguistic acts but in practice they are almost always mediated by language in important ways. As Kathryn Graber put it, a “linguistic anthropologist is more likely to take as her starting point the assumption that, through evaluative language and other forms of interaction, we do nothing less than constitute ourselves”. Others have expressed the same kinds of perspectives: that “social life and its materiality are constituted through signifying practices” (Gal 1998); that “social action requires a semiotic basis” (Gal & Irvine 2019); and that language is not “removed from the social structures and processes” but is itself a “form of social action that plays a creative role in the social reproduction of cultural forms” (Kroskrity 2008). I think my favourite account is provided by Tomlinson and Makihara who present this stance as a kind or reverse Whorfianism whereby “language structure does not necessarily shape social reality as an earlier variety of Whorfian linguistic relativism would describe it, but rather that what people do with language has the potential to change social reality, as well as to change language structure” (Tomlinson & Makihara 2009).

This amusing chart by twitterer @koutchoukalimar based on @kjhealy (here) illustrates just how linguistic anthropology can be so profoundly mischaracterised as being based in innatism rather than relativism, but I’m posting it here because it’s still pretty funny.

What it ain’t

For me, linguistic anthropology is first and foremost a form of anthropological knowledge. It analyses language and language-use as a means to understand something about people. This contrasts with what might be called ‘anthropological linguistics’ which gazes in the other direction: it takes human diversity as a starting point for understanding something about language. Of course, any piece of research can be doing both things at more-or-less the same time but it is still worth making the distinction. In my view, all of linguistics as a discipline ought to be pursued as anthropological linguistics otherwise it ends up being boring at best and naïve at worst. I have much more patience for anthropology that is pursued in ignorance of linguistics. Language represents a great deal of what it means to be human but it is not everything.

Sociolinguists in the classical Labovian mould focus on variation in language use, and how differences of linguistic expression correlate, or not, with demographics or distinctions of social identity. The habit of attributing moral or aesthetic value to these real or perceived differences is, I believe, a universal tendency. But linguistic anthropologists are not content with simply cataloguing and measuring these observed differences or attitudes and then moving on. Instead, they want discover how they fit into a wider system of meaning-making, and how this system is historically situated. While sociolinguists might nod vigorously towards ethnography, it is not the aim of the game.

Descriptive and typological linguists, meanwhile, tend to treat languages as more-or-less disembodied objects of study. This is not necessarily a flaw although they are sometimes accused of sidelining and even dehumanising speakers. Their aim, however, is to deliberately extrapolate away social context the better to isolate formal characteristics. In other words, they are posing the question: What can we say about the internal structural properties of a language, or Language, that we can reliably posit in general patterned terms, without recourse to context? Linguistic anthropologists, by contrast, are interested in how these same characteristics are contextually embedded and very often socially connected to phenomena that are not strictly linguistic.

What it means to me

Linguistic anthropology’s overarching analytic frame can be summarised very simply. It’s all about associating linguistic forms with linguistic behaviours and linguistic attitudes, and then situating all three within a bigger social picture. This is another way of describing Silverstein’s concept of the the total linguistic fact. It is not, however, about drawing straightforward causal lines between the three elements. On the contrary, the ways that they are often incommensurate are particularly revealing.

In my view linguistic anthropology suffers from both over-theorisation and under-theorisation. It is over-theorised to the extent that its practitioners can be very good at coming up with increasingly refined analytic models to apply to increasingly refined (and perhaps increasingly trivial) linguistic or social phenomena. It’s under-theorised because surprisingly few can provide a confident reason for why language should provide such a critical entry point for addressing foundational anthropological questions such as “What does the world mean to people? How are we all similar and how are we all different? Why do we entertain ideas and behave in ways that appear to contradict common sense?”

And what I’m doing with it

Language is less like a programming code distributing informational bits, and more like a multi-purpose tool that is crafted and re-crafted in the process of its use in real interactions. As a system of representation it is rigid enough to perform high-precision work under pressure, and versatile enough to adapt and change quickly. To my mind it is this peculiar property that makes language such a powerful and interesting phenomenon since it lends itself to strategic manipulations. (Enfield’s take on this is perhaps better informed. He argues that language lends itself to strategic manipulations specifically because it is not a high-precision tool.)

Languages can be imagined as evolving biological organisms, to the extent that we receive them as ready made and fully structured. This structure, and our awareness of it, presents an easy analogy for the systematicity we perceive around us in our relationships with one another and the world at large.

It is not the goal of linguistic anthropologists to reify this awareness. We do not, with Lacan, wish to claim that the “unconscious is structured like a language” nor that Eskimos have an especially nuanced appreciation of snow. Rather, we delight in the very existence of these analogies and what they entail about us as a reflective species.

For all these reasons I am interested in situations in which people actively manipulate the systematic properties of language to pursue wider social objectives. At the moment I’m exploring writing systems as a very human and very artificial extension of our communicative potential. I think, at heart, it is the artificialness of writing systems that intrigues me. After all, there is no such thing as a natural script. All writing originates in conscious creative effort, even if it can evolve in ways that are not consciously directed. In this light I’m interested in how James Paul Gee defines literacy. For Gee, literacy is not the capacity to interpret graphic symbols as linguistic values, but rather the  “control of secondary uses of language (i.e. uses of language in secondary discourses)” (Gee 1989). While I am definitely a narrowist when it comes to definitions of writing, I am a broadist when it comes to literacy as a discursive practice.

Writing may extend the potential of language but it also operates as a constraint on it, and like all good constraints it encourages formal innovation. Those who decide to write a piece of text usually do so in the knowledge that their audience is not in the same time or place as they are. This promotes a certain self-consciousness of expression, and the very pragmatic need to contextualise and to establish conventions. But counterintuitively, writing is so often naturalised or invisibilised. Far from being a game-changer that reorganises cognition and revolutionises the dynamics of knowledge (per Jack Goody), writing is regularly deployed in defence of existing social relations and conventions (per Maurice Bloch). In this way, culture-specific literacy ideologies can end up having a similar logic to the culture-specific language ideologies, outlined above.

Writing is, however, just one kind of graphic communication device. Across the world there are graphic codes that do not encode any linguistic structure and rely on a supplementary oral channel to be activated. Such systems, including Australian message sticks, Andean khipus and north American mnemonic codes, traverse the ambiguous gap between orality and the written word. The artefacts left behind in museums may be silent, but patient historical ethnography is allowing us to reconstruct the principles of communication and restore their meanings.

Seven pieces of luggage, three planes, two trains, two days, two kids. We’re in Jena. Spring has also arrived and everything is blossoms and light – a far cry from my last visit in November when the town felt dark and empty of people.

We’ve had one exciting day when it snowed just a bit. I never realised that snow does not fall silently as the poets claim. You can hear it faintly crackling through the branches of trees before it hits the ground.

Our flat in Damensviertel is perfect and our neighbours are really the best. In amongst all the paperwork I have started pecking around the edges of the research project. I’ll keep you up to date.

Tony Woodbury at the University of Texas passed me this recent article by Sheldon Pollock on the meaning and prospects for philology in the 21st century. And there’s a nice shout-out to Zukunftsphilologie.

In short, we may well be standing on the verge of a historic event: the inauguration of a world without philology for the first time in three thousand years. […]

… philologists must develop a new disciplinary formation, with a new intellectual core. For as defined here, philology, unlike philosophy and mathematics, has never had a disciplinary home in which its real capacities could develop. If it did achieve some measure of institutional dominance in the nineteenth-century European university, this was because of the veneration then paid to the study of the classics. […]

Beyond the academy, philology – though one that does not know its name – continues to broadly influence the public domain. It is ironic to observe, given the decline I have charted, how significant are the philological energies across the Internet on sites like “Rap Genius” (http://rap.genius.com), a self-described “crowd-sourced (and artist/producer-sourced) annotation of rap lyrics/beats, from ‘Rapper’s Delight’ to ‘To Pimp A Butterfly.’” Users, including original creators, provide annotation to the often complex lyrics of songs, as well as intertextual linkages and contextual material. The purpose of Rap Genius, originally named Rap Exegesis, is precisely to make sense of texts. It has recently been branching out to include other musical forms, as well as law, history, and more; it is, in fact, now simply named “Genius.” The site seeks to “annotate the world,” “to help us all realize the richness and depth in every line of text.” This is pure philology in terms of practice, albeit practice that as yet has little awareness of its history, theory, or method. Providing that context, and formalizing the discipline, is the role of the university; and today’s academy must also recognize and channel the energies of these popular philological enterprises. […]

Our goal is not only to enable students to gain a historical and theoretical grasp of textual understanding – to understand why Supreme Court Justice Scalia is wrong to assert, about the text called the U.S. Constitution, that “words mean what they mean,” and “their meaning doesn’t change” – but also to see the remarkable continuities in global philology, and, equally important, the differences, sometimes startling differences, in what it has meant for people to make sense of texts. We also want to show them how philology can be more than an academic discipline; indeed, it can be a way of living. You are how you read, and learning to read better – with greater precision, self-awareness, and, above all, respect for the diversity of textual truth in a world ever more unified and ever more in need of unity – means, potentially, learning to be better. […]

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Image of the young Hegel in 1806 observing Napoleon through a pair of locally manufactured Carl Zeiss binoculars

Starting in April 2016 I’m taking up a two-year research fellowship at the new Max Planck Institute in Jena. I will be working within the Minds and Traditions group under Olivier Morin, looking at the evolution of writing and graphic codes. This is a question that hasn’t been addressed in any serious or sustained way for a long time and I really can’t wait to be involved.

Fittingly, the Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte or the Max Planck Institute for Human History was established in the very same town in which the end of history was declared by Hegel when he was a professor at the University of Jena.

(And it’s also where Hegel famously spied Napoleon riding through town and declared “It is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual who, here concentrated in a single point, sitting on a horse, reaches out over the world and dominates it” —a remark that has been much anthologised and mythologised, most recently in one of Slavoj Žižek’s letters to Nadia Tolokonnikova during her recent imprisonment.)

Beyond Hegel, Jena is famous for aggressive cyclists, relatively expensive accommodation, and for manufacturing high-end binoculars and camera lenses. And if you type “Why is Jena … ” into Google, it auto-completes to “Why is Jena called student paradise?” We will report our findings! It’s certainly a charming town in a very charming part of the world, and its strangely quiet despite its population of 400,000.

Looking forward to doing full time research again, learning German, going on weekend family jaunts to France and the Czech Republic, and of catching up with my lovely friends and colleagues in Halle, Cologne, Potsdam and Berlin.

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I came across an apt Latin proverb today: Litterae non dant panem, meaning “Letters do not give bread”.

The earliest reference I can find for it is Horace (65 BCE to 8 BCE) and it is usually interpreted to mean that writing poetry or literature is no way to sustain yourself. I would assume that it holds for a narrower reading of “letters” in the study of writing systems and literacy, and for a broader interpretation of humanities research, or Letters.

It calls to mind a much more recent proverb from Alain de Botton: “Trying to make a living from writing is like attempting to power a city from wind turbines”.

The Romans knew it, the Carthaginians knew it, and now we know it.

I’ve been paying attention to reports of columnist Jessica Zafra’s collapse and recovery. The most recent news is that she is expecting to be discharged from hospital. What attracted my attention in the latest account, is how normal Taglish codeswitching has become in Filipino media, at least in quoted speech. I’ve read many Filipino newspapers from the 1960s through to the 1990s and never seen anything like this:

Pelicano said Zafra’s condition has gotten better since she was admitted to the MMC before dawn on May 27.

“She’s responding well, nakakausap na siya ng maayos, nagrerespond siya sa mga questions ng attending physicians,” Pelicano said.

I love it! It suggests to me that Taglish codeswitching is in the process of becoming an accepted part of written discourse. I expect the next logical development for Filipino news media will be the introduction of codeswitching in non-reported speech.

I have just received notification that I am this year’s winner of the the Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics! Feeling very pleased with myself.

Piers Kelly is the winner of the second Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics for his thesis entitled ‘The word made flesh: An ethnographic history of Eskayan, a utopian language and script in the southern Philippines’. The thesis was submitted to ANU in December 2012 and was an outstanding piece of innovative and creative linguistic scholarship.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize awarded to the best PhD (judged by the Panel) which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact.).

A lite version of my thesis (abstract-contents-intro) can be downloaded here.

I’m reading Sarah C. Gudschinksy’s How to learn an unwritten language, published in 1967. The lessons are still relevant, but some of the examples are charmingly quaint (as is the convention of addressing the prospective fieldworker as ‘he’).  Her examples of open-class lexemes must have been considered cutting-edge in their time. This from p25:

What to make of this crime scene?

First, and most confrontingly, the author has chosen to use Comic Sans, the most socially stigmatised of all fonts. Was the culprit attempting to provoke outrage? Perhaps this indicates repressed feelings of guilt and a latent desire to be ‘discovered’ and punished.

The ‘doughnut’ spelling suggests the culprit is a native of the Commonwealth while the absence of a capital and full stop on the final sentence points to the habitual use of computer code and its lowercase conventions. Or perhaps “lecturer: Dr Paul Sidwell” is the key here! (Sorry Paul!). All this reminds me of the case of the intriguing and unsolved case of the so-called ‘identity killer’: