Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Linguistic Anthropology

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary

Review of 2011

Christopher Ball

ABSTRACT I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology produced in 2011 with attention to the continuing

influence of Franz Boas’ program for the anthropology of language laid out in his 1911 “Introduction” to the Handbook

of American Indian Languages. Although the aims of linguistics and cultural anthropology have changed, many of

the tenets of the Boas plan remain central to the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology. The scope of linguistic

anthropological inquiry today includes more than language as denotational code, covering practices of signification

and communication in their social and cultural contexts. This expansion has brought new perspectives to the

questions pursued by Boas and his students, and this review considers the current place of topics such as indigenous

language change, language and race, linguistic relativity, and secondary rationalization alongside approaches to

performativity, intertextuality, circulation, and semiotic mediation with an eye to the Americanist legacy of the

subdiscipline. [Franz Boas, intertextuality, relativity, ritual performativity, race].

The year 2011 marks the centenary of two publicationsby Franz Boas: the Handbook of American Indian Lan-

guages (Boas 1911a) and the popular and influential The Mindof Primitive Man (Boas 1911b). Both works represent Boas’attack on teleological evolutionary paradigms by vigorouslyarguing for the noncorrelation of race, language, and cul-ture. I review the current state of the subfield of linguisticanthropology with specific attention to Boas’ charter forthe study of language presented in the “Introduction” tothe Handbook and also against the overall backdrop of theBoasian “cosmographic” approach to the analysis of culture.I hope that appeal to a common ancestor might key for thewider anthropological readership of American Anthropologista genre in which linguistic anthropologists are supposed tobe especially skilled: translation. One of my goals is to com-prehensibly translate results and findings of new work inlinguistic anthropology for anthropologists at large, to showits relevance to past and present scholarship on socioculturallife. My purpose is not to review 100 years of scholarship, oreven to exhaustively review one year of scholarship. Rather Ihope to construct an intertextual bridge spanning 100 years,a poetic convenience that allows us retrospectively to assesshow our work today dialogues with and forwards our Amer-icanist linguistic and anthropological foundations throughprocesses of recontextualization.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 203–216, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. c© 2012 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01419.x

My own areal and theoretical interests no doubt colorthe selection and treatment of the work reviewed. Boas’lessons on the pervasiveness of apperceptional bias that wenow understand in terms of the semiotic mediation of cul-ture, in addition to the maxim of historical particularism,have been tempered by our continued faith in the com-parative method. I bring together a necessarily limited buthopefully representative sample of approaches to the semi-otics of language, communication, and culture in this review,while I reserve a particularist focus on certain themes. It isa commonplace of semiotic anthropology that “processes ofsignification are of the order of causality and materiality,simultaneous to being of the order of ideas” (Stasch 2011a).They are therefore constitutive of social reality not merelyreflective of it. I have tried first to make my review here accu-rately reflect an empirical textual reality—the literature—with the secondary hope that good referential fidelity mayin turn contribute in some small measure to the continuedproduction of scholarship on signification.

The review is divided into sections that reflect themesprepackaged for publication in special issues, editedvolumes, and books but that also point to convergencesbetween individual articles and papers distributed amongdifferent venues. The section headers also appeal to areas ofcontinuity with and innovation in Americanist anthropology

204 American Anthropologist • Vol. 114, No. 2 • June 2012

harkening back to the Boasian program. I have tried to re-spect authors’ and editors’ own thematic affiliations, in otherwords, while pointing out further underlying connections.

FROM SEMIOTIC MEDIATION TO MEDIATIZATIONSemiotic mediation describes the necessarily relational qual-ity of the “standing for” relationship of any perception orknowledge to any object, including knowledge objects them-selves (Mertz 1985). The in-between or mediating functionof a sign consists in its having a certain connection to anobject and in orienting another sign, an interpretant, to takea similar relation to that object (Peirce 1932:135). Suchrelations between relations are infinitely iterable, makingpossible thought and communication (Parmentier 1994). Asit has been adopted into linguistic and semiotic anthropol-ogy in large part through the philosophical tradition of C.S. Peirce, mediation as an analytic category has pushed in-terpretation of pattern, habit, and meaning in processual,relativistic, historicist, and reflexive directions. In this itcoincides with some of the major tenets of Boasian anthro-pology. Elements of the Peircean and the Boasian traditions,along with the Saussurean, were famously synthesized inlinguistics by Roman Jakobson (e.g., 1980, 1985, 1990),and the seeds for the success of such a union may be foundin their similar attention to and insistence on the fact ofmediation.

The 1911 Introduction to the Handbook of American IndianLanguages begins with the rejection of racial classification ofhuman types and of any correlations among physical bodytype, language, and culture. Boas then proceeds to discussthe empirical study of language beginning with phonetics, re-peating an argument he had been making since 1889 on theapparent quality of “alternating sounds” in language (Boas1982). His point is to disabuse the naive Euro-Americanobserver of Native American languages of the belief that al-ternations thought to have been heard in the phonetic detailsof speech actually exist in the object language. Rather suchalternations exist in the mind of the observer, introduced bya mediating element between the two. The speakers of Na-tive languages distinguish sounds that speakers of Europeanlanguages do not, leading to biased apperception in bothdirections. We hear in terms of the categories to which weare habituated. This insight is correctly credited as a precur-sor to the later development of Boasian relativity (Leavitt2011, Stocking 1992) and with putting Native American lan-guages, and thus Native peoples, on level logical and psychicfooting with the West (Webster and Peterson 2011). It alsoshows, however, the Boasian view of language and cultureas providing categories that vary from group to group inthe ways that they “screen or sieve” experience (Stocking1992:121). In other words, it shows the pervasive fact ofmediation of social and mental life by shared norms (of lan-guages). Linguistic anthropology remains committed to thefact of mediation, even where it is not concerned with thatold question of language diversity and thought, although,as I show in this review, research in that domain is alive

and well. On the larger view, by situating contemporaryapproaches to the production and circulation of diverse signforms in complex societies within the frame of mediation,linguistic anthropologists work to undo social scientific andfolk understandings of varied sorts of semiotic activity bypointing out how they are biased by cultural ideologies ofcommunication.

For example, in the introduction to the special is-sue “Mediatized Communication in Complex Societies,”Asif Agha (2011c) explicitly describes how mediation “en-globes” mediatization.1 Mediatization—communication viathe channels of mass media—exists at the intersection ofcommunication and commoditization, and because commu-nication is unquestionably semiotic, this is a way of furtheringthe study of commodities from the point of view of media-tion, an argument laid out in more detail in a sister article“Commodity Registers” (Agha 2011a, see also Kockelman2006). This work together contributes to a reformulationof the properties of circulation in exchange, the role of themedia in defining the communicational frames within whichit is interpreted, as well as the ways in which texts composedof multichannel indexical properties are deployed in socialaction, taken up in events of interpretation, and reflexivelyregimented through culture.2

Mediatized practices link processes of commoditizationand communication, and they receive various sorts of reflex-ive interpretations that skew how we view the market, socialrelationships, and ourselves in terms of persona and subjec-tivity (Agha 2011b). The collection (Agha 2011d) critiquesculture-bound models of communication disseminated in“the media” as biased by the media’s own commoditizedstructure and ideology. To get past just-so stories of me-diation, linguistic anthropology needs to document ethno-graphically the production, circulation, and uptake of me-diatized objects. As Bakhtin (1986:68) has cautioned, noneof these is as simple as suggested by “football” metaphors ofcommunicative ready-mades iteratively lobbed and caught;instead, we are drawn to focus on the virtuality of circula-tion in intertextuality, the pervasiveness of recycling evenin so-called production, and the impossibility of analyticallyisolating moments of merely passive reception of mediasigns. Ethnographic studies collected here show the com-plexity of uptake (Wortham, Katherine, & Allard 2011),the ironies and injustices of mediatized representation inHollywood films (Bucholtz 2011a), and the complexities ofdissemination of “newsworthy” public health information toan anxious public (Briggs 2011).

Cody’s contribution (2011) explores how the tailoredproduction of Tamil print newspaper columns to mimicframes of working-class talk for a nostalgic middle-classreadership creates collusive communicative connections be-tween editor and consumer that figurate past, present, andfuture spaces of Indian sociality. Eisenlohr (2011) suggeststhat views of semiotic mediation typically oscillate betweentransparency (presumed immediacy or nonmediation) andopacity in folk theories from Western Europe to South Asia, a

Ball • Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology 205

tendency that is leveraged by Mauritian Muslim consumersof devotional poetry audio recordings to ritually producemore immediate ties among a community of practitioners aswell as between practitioners and the supernatural. Trans-parency versus opacity of semiotic mediation is also a themeof Inoue’s (2011) contribution, as she follows the historicalmove of early modern Japanese government stenographyfrom highly mediated male craft to transparent unskilledfemale labor.

The related concept of commodity registers (Agha2011a) as a semiotic framework for the transformation ofvalue through social interaction widens inquiry into how reg-isters allow signs—only sometimes “things”—to gain andacquire the status of commodity as they are transformedand variously construed or made as gifts, identity emblems,works of art, etc. It suggests abandonment of the image of“circulation of things” (Appadurai 1986) as the literal move-ment of durable objects in favor of a focus on how reflexiveengagement in interaction in social life transforms valuesof signs through phases that go beyond the commodity oreven the economic. How far does the commodity registerformulation go to cover other forms of exchange in whatare traditionally analyzed in terms of gift economies? Thepotential exists here more broadly to encompass not onlycommoditization and communication within an analysis ofmediatization but also to demonstrate the intersection andoverlap of exchange with communication—in the broadsense of systems of intersubjective transformation of valueachieved through various semiotic media including but notlimited to “things.” Similarly, the special issue “Tongue-TiedTerritories” (Swinehart & Graber 2012) looks at how indige-nous languages become commodities when caught “up” inthe state-level politics of representation in broadcast media(Graber 2012, Swinehart 2012), but by contrast the volumepays less attention to how far “down” mediatization can gointo local regimes of exchange and communication.

Research on mediatization is relevant to digital orvirtual media. Ethnography of communicative events inthese media in part explores the durability of football orbroadcast metaphors for communication in new contexts(Boellstorff 2008; Coleman 2010; Gershon 2010; Manning2009). Moore’s combined (2011a, 2011b) look at reflexiveentextualization of Irish accents is particularly interesting inthis regard, as he shows remarkable ideological and genericstability in expressions of anxiety about overheard, reported,and commented-on forms of talk across centuries of printand now online media, suggesting strong continuity acrossthese communicative epochs.

EMBLEMATICITY AND INTERTEXTUALITYIn his 1911 “Introduction,” Boas discusses secondary ratio-nalizations as ways in which ethnological phenomena be-come objects of thought. In 2011, linguistic anthropologistsexplored the discursive production and circulation of cul-tural emblems. Both concerns center on conventional in-dexicality and the ways in which people make connections

among events, objects, and ideas that might not otherwise begrouped together, save perceptions of shared resemblance.Boas was after what Malinowski (1922) called “the native’spoint of view,” but he warned against taking native theo-ries at face value. Secondary rationalizations can obscure thetrue development of ideas, but here language was, for Boas,unique among ethnological domains. As linguistic (gram-matical) categories typically remain unconscious, Boas tellsus, linguistics affords a relatively clear window on the pro-cesses that lead to their formation. Linguistic anthropologytoday is interested not so much in bypassing secondary ratio-nalization but in recognizing how much of it people engagein with respect to language. Linguistic ideologies can be seenas ways in which the phenomena of language become ob-jects of thought and vehicles of obfuscation. The ideologicalprocesses of iconization, fractal recursivity, and erasure, asdescribed by Irvine and Gal (2000), for example, involvethe emergence and circulation of emblematic knowledgethat typifies linguistic forms and their speakers, thus drawingboundaries and asserting groupings from a highly positionedperspective.

Attention to circulation and emblematicity is motivatedby the broader study of processes that work to link and de-limit texts: intertextuality. Actors perceive links and “gaps”between textual connections and put them to use for po-etic and political purposes (Briggs and Bauman 1992). Ofrelated interest are those complex signs combining iconic,indexical, and conventional modalities known as emblems,and how they facilitate notions of identity.3 In social prac-tice all indexicals tend to become emblematic because theyare subject to processes of naturalization and essentializationthat would have them be iconic expressions of qualities thatmay actually be quite arbitrarily seen as “like,” reproducingconventionalized iconic indexes: emblems.4

How does linguistic anthropology contribute to thestudy of traffic in cultural emblems? The answer has beengestured at already in the reformulation of dominant hand-to-hand models of circulation in favor of the marquee modelprovided by empirical analysis of human communication.The marquee model of circulation points out that flow oftext in systems of signification and communication, such asthe circulation of a recently coined neologism for example,is not like a river. Instead the appearance of spatial move-ment is an ideological imposition on—therefore a biasedview of—recognized similarities between distinct events.Rather than analyze discourse as flowing in circulation, weanalytically see virtual movement as in the sequential light-ing array of the bulbs of a cinema marquee, where indexicallinks (temporally ordered incandescence in spatially contigu-ous bulbs) between iconically similar events (bulbs lightingup) produce the appearance of motion (Agha and Wortham2005, Gal 2007, cf. Rockefeller 2011). Participants mayconnect individual events of discourse to other self-similartoken events or to generalizable types, and they may do soin different directions, either targeting or sourcing the textevent in question with respect to others (Silverstein 2005).


Ethnographic attention to how actors accomplish such inter-textual, or properly interdiscursive, linkage and how theydo so to purposeful ends is a prime site of linguistic anthro-pological investigation.

Silverstein’s (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) series of articles on“message” and “image” in U.S. presidential politics involvingNixon, Bush Jr., Obama, and also-rans like Romney, Dean,Clinton (Hillary), and McCain, contextualizes the manifes-tation and circulation of recognizable emblems of individualand group identity across generations of the U.S. electorate.One important point of this work is to demonstrate thatthe spatiotemporal fabric, the chronotope, of the narrativeof U.S. electoral politics—and it is indeed all narrative—exists as interconnecting chains of discourse events andtheir interpretations grasped culturally in terms of the“imaginaries of what we think of as circulation” (2011c:55).The semiotic reduction of the dynamism of U.S. politicalhistory to the terms of the metapragmatic functional folktheorization of talk by and about politicians, their issues, andtheir message does not impugn its reality by replacing it withan “imaginary.” Rather this work critically historicizes how“brand-like packaging” (2011a) in political, especially pres-idential, campaigns has fused governmentality and modernadvertising since the early 1950s (2011a). Political personaeexist as emblems cum commodities emergent from the forg-ing of looping interdiscursive links across complex nestingsof textual events including speeches, multimedia journalisticreportage, posters, Super-PAC ads, water cooler banter,neofascist rallies, and so forth, that give us the culturalimpression of a narrative moving picture show in terms ofthe biography of the candidates and the historicopoliticaltrajectory of the nation (see also Lempert 2011).

With emphasis on emblems in phonation and phonatedemblems in circulation, Mendoza-Denton (2011) examinescreaky voice in the United States to show how “a singlefeature acts as a semiotic hitchhiker, and how its indirectindexicality changes from hardcore persona to Chicano mas-culinity in successive contexts of circulation and through in-tertextual serialization” (274). Intertextual links also fosterthe construction of modern Georgian narratives of a distinc-tive national voice represented in, for example, “nonsense”vocables in folk song. Continuities with the past and inter-textual links among contemporary reflections combine intropes of unintelligibility in depicting the nation’s aestheticheritage (Ninoshvili 2011). Harkness’s (2011) descriptionof Korean Fricative Voice Gestures such as in [khix::: h:::]locates them in contexts as diverse as “rough” masculinedrinking, children’s stories, Christian sermons, and upper-middle-class female speech to show that phonation does notonly reflect identity categories but also that “the FVG isactually a multi-purpose emblem within intersecting andparallel paradigms of differentiation in a rapidly changingsociety” (116). Such linguistic anthropological work on theemblematicity of phonetic qualities of speech in relation tobroader cultural historical fields of meaning is in dialoguewith work in “sociophonetics,” which tends to focus more

statically on social identities in relation to phonetic variation(Hay and Drager 2007).

Research on the creation and intertextual propagationof emblems in society has also been carried out in placessuch as Papua New Guinea and Lowland South America.Slotta (2012) treats speakers’ use of shibboleths from oth-ers’ dialects in the Yopno valley of Papua New Guinea.Shibboleths as emblems of villages and patrilines are care-fully but implicitly situated within and across text events totropically figurate acts of gift giving and acts of distancing.The argument relies on detailed analysis of dialect shiftingin intergroup greetings and church meetings to show howuses of dialect emblems are embedded in multimodal con-texts, networks of gift exchange, kinship, and place. Ball’s(2011a) ethnography of inalienable possession and the in-teractional negotiation of emblems of identity in a BrazilianAmazonian context shows, through attention to circulation(in both its both marquee and also in its “classic” hand-to-hand modalities), the ways that signs can move throughgrammatical, ideological, and discursive systems. Analysisof ritual exchange involving inalienable emblems such askin and body part terms and other culturally potent signsthat enter and exit commodity, gift, kinship, corporeal, andspirit(-ual) phases of possession and exchange sheds lighton the range of regimes that enregister value, personhood,and community (see also Kockelman 2007, 2009).5 Movingfrom local interdiscursive economies to processes of nationaland transnational interdiscursive (mis-) representation,Graham (2011) and Stasch (2011b) treat mediatized formsof print journalism and travel writing with special attentionto authority and persuasiveness. The Brazilian press ventril-oquates the voice of indigenous Xavante politician MarioJuruna, making tactical changes across textual boundaries tofirst positive and later negative effect for the agenda of indi-geneity (Graham 2011). Stasch (2011b) focuses on iconicityof form across text artifactual examples of representationsof New Guinean Korowai people in travel writing in Englishbooks and magazines as well as on how tropes of presenceand evidentiary authority persuade their readerships of thenaturalness of what he calls a primitivist cosmos. Both ofthese studies deconstruct how “expected” images of indige-nous and other minority peoples are discursively managedand by whom, a topic also addressed by linguistic anthro-pological work that links up with critical Native AmericanStudies, reviewed in the next section.

INDIGENEITY AND THE ARTIFACTUALIZATIONOF VANISHING OBJECTSThe Boas plan for the study of Native American languageswas based in documentation of textual materials in part toreconstruct philosophical contributions of Native cultureboth esoteric and exoteric (Boas 1940b). The salvage ori-entation of the project presumed that indigenous languagesand cultures were disappearing and that artifact productionwas a key to their preservation, if only for posterity. Lessonsof Native cultural continuity, diverse forms of hybridity, as


well as language shift over the past 100 years have all servedto raise these issues in new guises for local communities andfor anthropologists and linguists, most recently in discoursesof “language endangerment.”

Undeniable violence has been wrought on indigenouspeoples through relations of colonial and postcolonial aswell as settler-state domination, to be sure. Yet, stressingthe diversity of local situations, our understanding of the his-tory of processes of (language) contact on this continent andelsewhere recognizes not merely resistance but the culturalcontinuity and creative potentials of the “indigenization ofmodernity” as Sahlins (1999) calls it (Granadillo & Orcutt-Gachiri 2011 and the preface there by Hill 2011, Meek2011a, Muehlmann 2012, Philips 2011). We may see in theBoas salvage program a precedent for recurring urgenciesbut with a move from, in most cases, the goal of savinglinguistic or cultural “code” alone to sustaining people andtheir cultural heritage through revitalization. This is an ide-ological shift that mainstreams the association of languageand identity (Handman 2009).

Meek’s (2011a) ethnography of Kaska language revital-ization focuses on the semiotics of disjuncture to explore mo-ments of discontinuity in practice in relation to ideologicalcontradictions that influence the prospects of Kaska languagevitality. For example, community internal reinforcement ofexternal measures of linguistic authority—including castinglinguists as experts—indirectly fosters contextual compart-mentalization of Kaska language use and valuation of formallanguage instruction by elders in terms of remuneration(Meek 2011a:113–114). This may be seen as a dual pro-cess of artifactualization and commoditization as units oftext become valuable gems that can be brought out and dis-played, with affection to be sure, in elicitation, schooling,and other diminishing contexts typically involving fixationthrough audio (-visual) recording and writing.

But as Moore (2006) has pointed out, such a memorial-izing gaze has as its counterpart a regenerative gaze throughwhich many Native would-be speakers read in the creation ofsuch text artifacts the recipe for future reanimation. Meek’swhole study remains cautiously committed to the prolepticoptimism of this pragmatic perspective as she describes thedisjunctures that would, and do, interrupt its realization.The finding that contradictory forces can occur togetherand proceed through dialectical relation in language revital-ization more broadly is echoed in McEwan-Fujita’s (2011)analysis of denigrating versus redemptive discourses aboutGaelic in Scotland from the 18th to 20th centuries. Likewise,Smalls (2012) looks at how two competing institutional ide-ologies of Gullah language in the Carolinas have historicallyphased into multiple tracks for the revitalization of Gullahselfhood.

A special issue on Native American Indian languages inunexpected places exemplifies how linguistic anthropologycan contribute to understanding trajectories of local lan-guage use in Native communities. Here, empirical attentionfocuses on forms of language use that might otherwise be

dismissed as inauthentic or as counterexamples to creativity(Webster and Peterson 2011). In the light of P. Deloria’s(2004, 2011) critique of expectations placed on Native peo-ple as an exogenous limiting gaze, here we find detailedethnographic attention to intertextual links, showing howquotidian life as well as high-stakes indigenous politics islinguistically mediated and often explicitly focused on lan-guage. Articles in the volume address various ways in whichthe contemporary field of research in indigenous languagesencourages immersed and engaged interconnections, suchthat the authors may themselves be agents in processes offilm production, language documentation, and/or kinshiprelationality that they reflect on and write about (Debenport2011, Leonard 2011, Meek 2011b, Peterson 2011).

Webster (2011) follows the emergence of poetics inthe spaces among languages such as Navajo, English, andNavajo English as well as in moments of discursive inter-action. Rather than focus on the level of grammar, as dooutside critics of Navajo English poetry, Webster leads usto consider ways of speaking that may be Navajo regardlessof denotational code. He appeals to the aesthetics of “inti-mate grammars,” echoing Povinelli’s (2009) discussion ofthe “intimate pragmatics” at the convergence of grammaticalnorms and people’s individual experiences as, for exam-ple, gendered or colonial subjects. Webster revisits a scenewherein the young poet Blackhorse Mitchell surreptitiouslyco-opts a grammar lesson to write the poem “The Drift-ing Lonely Seed” (Mitchell & Allen 1967) challenging histeacher and voicing his desire for freedom from the prisonof boarding school. Through detailed analysis of multiplereentextualizations of this event we see that it is baptismal ofthe poet’s professional biography and of a wider but intimatecommunity mediated by Navajo English in verse and prose.

The title of Debenport’s (2011) “As the Rez Turns”is the creative product of teenage Tiwa language studentswho composed an English language soap operatic renditionof life on the reservation for eventual performance in theTiwa language. The intertextual connections of this complexgenre are the focus of analysis. Consider that “rez” in the ti-tle replaces “world” in the indexed cotext of the “cheesy”daytime soap title “As the World Turns.” The reservation iscast as a world unto itself here, and as Debenport demon-strates, the text moves back and forth across framings andvoicings that worry over and implicitly address relationshipsof Native youth to their community and to the outside. “Asthe Rez Turns” introduces politics of kinship, race, gender,and generational difference within the shifting boundaries ofthe tribe through the figures of the casino and tribal rolls;interethnic indigenous relations through jokes of decidedlynon-Pueblo “Buffalo Thunder” images of Plains-style Indianidentity; and figures of non-Indian otherness through de-nomination of main characters as “Vivian, Chance, Skylar,and Peppa.” But for all of its social critique and bound-ary crossing (Rampton 1995), the most remarkably un-expected aspect of the text might be its cultural continu-ity, as its authors “uphold the norms of Pueblo propriety”


(Debenport 2011:106), drawing on a Pueblo linguistic ide-ological framing of narrative as morality tale in which theresponsibility that comes with authorship may be diffused(Kroskrity 2011a:166).

In discourses of endangerment, there is perhaps noth-ing more evocative than the image of the last speaker ofa language.6 Through rich ethnographic and linguistic de-scription, Suslak (2011) engages media depictions of hisown research with the “last two speakers” of Ayapaneco,contextualizing people’s lived experience of loss amid thecontradictions that come with attention to disappearing lan-guages and their speakers. This experience is not just tragic.It is profoundly human and therefore conflicted, tinged withsadness, bright with hope, injured by jealousy, and softenedby humor. Paradoxes, in fact, run throughout the story,from conflicting representations of Ayapaneco grammatical-ity, to valuation of Indian identity as shameful and then ascelebrated, and perhaps most compelling of all, to the un-certainty shared by all involved if a last speaker is “supposedto be a guardian of tradition or its living embodiment—ateacher or a monument” (Suslak 2011:579).

Bauman’s (2011) discussion of museums of the spokenword, “Better Than Any Monument,” finds many of theseissues encountered in language loss in another sociohistori-cal context as he explores processes of artifactualization oflanguage as treasure and speculates why plans for museumsof language, trumpeted as repositories of intangible heritagein the late 19th and early 20th centuries, did not succeed.The themes of languages in danger, languages as heritage,and languages revitalized speak to various ways in whichlinguistic practices, and even their authors and animators,may be turned into artifacts of one sort or another and inturn made into possible emblems and commodities that canenter into or be withheld from circulation. Languages andtheir speakers then, as signs in history, as well as potentialsigns of history (Parmentier 1987).

COMMENSURABILITY AND RELATIVITYThe very prospect of studying Native American or any othernon-Western languages in their own terms belies a beliefin the possibility of categorical calibration. In cultural, orperhaps conceptual, or even cognitive terms, the Boasianprogram, pace contemporaries such as Levy-Bruhl (1926),and the linguistic anthropological research carried out in itsspirit today presume that we can know the other. As Sapirput it, in spite of, or, rather, because of, the realizationthat societies do not live in “merely the same world withdifferent labels attached,” comparative linguistic analysis isbest positioned to afford understanding of the “‘psychologicalgeography’ of culture at large,” through a “truly scientificstudy of society that does not ape the methods nor attemptto adopt unrevised the concepts of the natural sciences”(2008:221–226).

Pragmatic semiotic approaches to interaction comple-ment foci on semantic translatability in the anthropology

of commensuration (Povinelli 2001). The integration ofgrammatical description with the semiotics of culture al-lows Kockelman (2010), for example, in pursuit of a viewthat is empirically Mayan and theoretically universal(-izing)to track connections of public matters of stance, status,and role (Linton 1936), and matters of private intention-ality and mental states. Q’eqchi’ Maya and more broadlyGuatemalan engagements with poultry—chickens, cocks,chicken hawks, quetzal—become a lens on mundane waysthat people come to understand “self, alters, and objects(ontology)” through semiotic processes of speaking, feeling,having, and knowing, and ultimately on culture grasped aslanguage and mind (Kockelman 2011). Geertz’s (1973) Ba-linese symbolism of fowl is echoed here to be sure, but theanalysis shows how linguistic anthropology has moved fromseeing cultures as texts to be read to analyze the processualemergence of textuality through reflexive action. It does sowhile retaining a Boasian approach to particular and differentconfigurations of patterned meaning created through histor-ical time, as bound to not universal laws underlying contentbut equivalent psychic principles that unite human thoughtand feeling.

Leavitt’s (2011) book Linguistic Relativities is importantnot only because it gives due credit to the Boasian tradition,and to Whorf in particular, conspicuously derided in otherrecent works on linguistic relativity,7 but also because ofits deeper historical contextualization. The book begins bytracing the cultural gap in representations of space-time,subjectivity, and language from medieval European to re-ceived post-Enlightenment Kantian assumptions. Of coursethis is what Whorf was talking about all along in his analy-sis of “what we call ‘time’” (Whorf 1956, cited in Leavitt2011:179–188, see discussion there and in Lucy 1992:283,Silverstein 2000), specifically a modern Western culturaland linguistic habituation to duration in the terms of a spatialtopology that is but one perspective on the universal humanexperience of “always getting later.” Leavitt’s approach as aBoasian anthropologist allows him to take a cosmographicview of apperceptional habituation to bias that goes to theheart of what the Sapir-Whorf principle of linguistic rela-tivity referenced in its own cultural historical context. Thiswas Einstein’s “discontinuist” theory of the relativity of ob-servations to velocity and the curvature of spacetime suchthat “the world that science can glimpse is different from theworld as we experience and construe it through ‘habitualthought’” (Leavitt 2011:187).

Much of the book demonstrates the systematic Westernhistorical oscillation between universalism and rela-tivism through English empiricism, French rationalism, andGerman essentialism, a history dutifully explored by linguis-tic anthropology (Bauman and Briggs 2003) but unreflectedon within cognitive science paradigms. In bringing linguisticrelativity up to date with current linguistic anthropology,Leavitt makes important connections to poetics throughBate (2009), Friedrich (1979), and Jakobson (1960). Theanalysis could go further into the potential of Whorf’s


theory to bridge what we now call language ideologies. Notonly do grammatical categorical configurations of languagesinvite speakers to spatialize time or not but also specifictendencies such as these may be encompassed by larger ide-ological “images of imaginary space” constructed to hold thereferential world at a certain “distance” but that inhibit the“intensity-factor of thought” whereby thoughts and wordstraffic directly with referents (Whorf 1956:150–151). Seehow Whorf described Hopi “preparing” activities as rootedin cyclic time, yes, but also in the general Pueblo attitudinalorientation to the creative or performative power ofthought and talk, through repetition today, to positively ornegatively shape tomorrow’s return (Hoijer 1954). We havein Whorf, prefigured in Boas’ theory of language, a prefig-urement of linguistic ideological approaches to the efficacyof ritual speech and action hinging on reflexivity, (meta-)indexicality, and density of poetic textual structuration.

RITUAL PERFORMATIVITYScholarship influenced by the Boasian concern with concep-tual thought-worlds put into ritual action converges in whatStasch (2011a) describes as the “poetic density” theory ofeffective action. A “You are here” sign come to life, rit-ual is understood to be “composed of densely crisscrossingindexical and iconic relations” (161) located within ritualframes and crossing such frames to anchor events in macrocontexts. Although the metaphor is simple, Stasch invitesus to consider that ritual action invokes “layers upon layersof other scales and categories of space, time, action, his-tory, personhood, and social morality. Imagine too if withinthe sign’s plane there are multiple ‘You are here’ arrows,wrought in different media, but each connecting the smallscene of ritual action indexically and iconically to larger spa-tiotemporal orders” (162). Ritual thus locates participantsin wider structures. It is poetic because it employs formalcorrespondences (iconicity) in sequenced acts of contiguity(indexicality), what Jakobson (1960) called the projectionof equivalence “from the axis of selection into the axis ofcombination,” from paradigm into syntagm.8 Poetic densityis a matter of degree, however, and formal elaboration con-tributes to the metasemiotic prominence and to the relativeeffectiveness of ritual activity.

Fleming and Lempert (2011) introduce their volume onverbal taboo with the point that “proscription is productive,”treating taboo as a strongly performative or “ritual” avoid-ance of action. Articles in the volume can be roughly splitbetween those that primarily treat avoidance (Fleming 2011,Frekko 2011, Lempert 2011, Moore 2011b), or transgres-sion (Danziger 2011, Haviland 2011, Seizer 2011, Silverstein2011a), or both (Irvine 2011, Stasch 2011c). Analysis ofnames is one area where the volume succeeds in linkingavoidance in general to explicit taboo and in situating trans-gression explicitly in relation to avoidance. By virtue of theirplace on the noun phrase hierarchy (Silverstein 1987), per-sonal names are excellent candidates for taboo, being bothrigidly referential and performative such that they are po-

tent across contexts and discourse frames (Fleming 2011). Inavoidance and transgression names are “channels of personalconcern” that Korowai speakers use to build social relationson a model of “sacrificial renunciation” (Stasch 2011c).

Other ethnographic examples in the volume includecomedic use of taboo language. Haviland (2011) treatsperformance of an expletive-laden creative insult genre inMexico City as the skillful poetic ritual production of publicintimacy, recalling analysis of rural Mexican festival drama(Bauman 1996) as well as exemplifying more general trendsin the anthropology of ritual oratory (Stasch 2011a). Thereis a division of linguistic labor among U.S. comedians thathinges on the valued nonreferential intensifying use of ex-pletives such that using expletives like “fuck” to joke aboutactual sex is considered the domain of hacks (Seizer 2011).Insights such as these from this volume interestingly connectto Kramer’s (2011) independent analysis of contentious on-line discussions of rape jokes, where “rape,” unlike a truetaboo term, is always referential and thus for many is lessreadily amenable to humorous effect.

One key point that runs through the volume’s treatmentof transgression, gestured at clearly by Silvestein (2011a),is that transgressions such as bloopers made by U.S. pres-idential candidates, despite politicians’ and spokespersons’claims to the contrary, can never simply be acts of misspeak-ing. Always and only meaningful in the shadow of sharedcultural norms of proscription, transgressive acts of speak-ing are built on the foundations of presumed direct useand indirect avoidance, making them third-order phenom-ena of intense ideological potency. The outrage and moralpanic that mark the confusion of “Osama” with “Obama”(Silverstein 2011a), perceived improper levity among Mayancompadrazgos (Danziger 2011), the creep of supposedly—gasp!—Americanized accent into posh Dublin youth speech(Moore 2011b), or spiteful attempts at “wrecking” throughname use (Stasch 2009, 2011c) show that the strong indexi-cality of taboo speech derives from the systematic interrelationsof use, avoidance, and transgression. As the editors point out,the relative strength of unmentionables in use and avoidancedemonstrates “a seldom appreciated point: performativity isgradient, a matter of degree” (Fleming and Lempert 2011).

Carr’s Scripting Addiction (2011), a study of therapeuticdiscourses in the treatment of substance dependency, alsooperates on a gradient model of ritualization and of per-formativity. Carr’s careful attention to transcribed textualdata shows how the institutionalization of ritual “scripts”that are actively indexically iconically anchored to figures ofpersonhood works to interpellate addicts as feminized andracialized subjects. But Carr crucially puts the second pairpart reply of so many of the women she worked with at thefore of her analysis whereby they creatively and sometimesproductively “flip,” that is, undo the ritualized interactionalscript that would define them.

This approach to the effectiveness of maneuvers suchas “flipping the script” emphasizes cultural contextualizationbecause, although “Austin tended to assume that authorized


speakers—across time and space—had equal opportunity tomake, take and break things with words,” linguistic anthro-pology demonstrates that “what one can do with words ina particular time and place is largely determined by localideologies of language,” making the ethnographic record anelaboration of the “the conditions in which a particular personin a particular place can do something by saying something”(Carr 2011:159 emphasis added). Goffman called this Fe-licity’s Condition, or “any arrangement which leads us tojudge an individual’s verbal acts to not be a manifestationof strangeness” (1983:27). In a special issue on ritual dis-courses in Amazonia (Deleage 2011), Ball (2011b) inves-tigates cultural variation in Felicity’s Condition by look-ing at how therapeutic ritual healing among indigenousBrazilian Wauja laypeople accomplishes the channeling ofspirits. These ritual acts of exoteric shamanism are modeledon everyday conversational frames, suggesting that the “flip”side of the ritualization of interaction—the interactional-ization of ritual—can also foster performativity as a pro-cess through which the subject emerges and is transformed(Butler 1993, Kulick 2003).

LANGUAGE, RACE, AND RACIALIZATIONOf all of the Boasian influences leading to subsequent devel-opments in not only anthropology but also the humanitiesand social sciences at large, perhaps the most lasting and so-cially consequential has been in the scholarly delegitimationof race as a natural category. Boas’ lifelong project to exposethe cultural construction of race and thus the social basis ofracism continues in linguistic anthropology. A main strengthof the semiotic approach to social and discursive processesof racialization derives from markedness theory.

The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology added a third on-line issue in 2011 and the first number was dedicated to“racializing discourses” (Dick and Wirtz 2011). Urciuoli’s(2011) discussion essay does an excellent job not only ofpointing to connections among the group of articles col-lected there but also of staking out a powerful approach tothe construction of race through discourse. The articles treatenvironmental racism (Blanton 2011), the construction ofMexican immigrant illegality (Dick 2011), and narratives ofcrime (Wortham et al. 2011) in the United States, ritual per-formances of racial pasts in Cuba (Wirtz 2011), and racismimplicit in neighborly Italian conversations (Pagliai 2011).As Urciuoli puts it, the articles expose different aspects ofthe production of hegemonic metacultural discourses (Hill2008, Urban 2001), commonsense racial knowledge thatstructures the world of the racially marked: “The metacul-tural effect of the “scary narrative” is shown by Pagliai andby Wortham et al; the metacultural power of law and policyis shown by Dick and by Blanton; the metacultural outcomeof performance is shown by Wirtz” (Urciuoli 2011:E117).

Deictic elements of racializing discourses “anchor” racialcategories in chronotopes, narratable space-time envelopesunderlying shared cultural experience. Furthermore, racial-izing constructions “always [operate] against an unmarked

ground, imagined and referred to as white, a position ofprivilege also continuously constructed through discourse”(Urciuoli 2011:E113). This adds up to inequality in pointsof view and the privilege of the unmarked to “call the meta-cultural shots” while maintaining an outward “what’s all thefuss about” stance, reserving the right to claim rationality asthey delimit the possible trajectories of “‘those’ kinds of peo-ple” in ironically irrational ways. This ideology of whitenesspartakes of modern folk theories of the self as an intentional,rational, free choosing individual in a field of equal opportu-nity. Yet it locates control squarely in the unmarked domain,casting racialized others as precisely lacking in control, asemotional, and “incapable of not seeing the world from aracial perspective” (Urciuoli 2011:E118).

The force of linguistic anthropological analyses of raceproduced in 2011 owes a debt to the work of Jane Hill, so itis not surprising that many of the articles in a special issue ofthe Journal of Linguistic Anthropology dedicated to her (Roth-Gordon and Mendoza-Denton 2011) treat race and language(Gaudio 2011, Kroskrity 2011b, Mendoza-Denton 2011,Roth-Gordon 2011). Roth-Gordon (2011), for example,shows how mock-Spanish use in the United States affordswhite actors opportunities to engage in “occasional boutsof ‘orderly disorder,’” in a game of “dangerous” interracialcontact, but always returning to the privileged unmarkedposition of control. Latinos and other nonwhites, however,because they begin from marked social positions, cannotgo the other direction through disciplined linguistic andbodily conduct to successfully “improve” themselves, never“acquiring the racial ‘essence’ of whiteness or losing the‘taint’ of nonwhiteness.”9

Not all analyses of race and ethnicity in relation tolanguage focus on racism per se. Bucholtz’s (2011b) bookWhite Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity followsthe tradition of work by Eckert (1989) in its explorationof the discursive means through which U.S. teenagersreproduce community. While recognizing the markednessrelations that privilege the unmarked category of whiteness,the book’s strength lies in its ethnographic attention toways in which racial groups are interactionally negotiated aslocally meaningful. A reminder of how fluid racial and ethnicmembership can be, Handman’s (2011) account of PapuaNew Guinean “Israelite genealogies” combines attentionto kinship, ritual oratory, and postcolonial transformationsin cosmology to explore how phenotypically “black”Guhu-Samane people identify with the Jewish Lost Tribes ofIsrael.

LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEADAlthough I have reviewed published work in linguistic an-thropology, it is worth briefly mentioning some notable con-ferences and panels held in 2011. Linguagenesis, organized byPaja Faudree and held at Brown University in May 2011,explored creativity in language. Franz Boas was commemo-rated in September of 2011 in the interdisciplinary confer-ence “Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz


Boas,” organized by Isaiah Wilner and held at Yale Univer-sity. The American Anthropological Association Meetings inNovember 2011 saw too many engaging linguistic anthro-pology panels to mention here, although a few examplessuch as “The Poetic Structure of the World,” “Of Sound,Mind, and Body,” “Tracing Styles, Styling Traces,” “Per-formative Economies,” “Kinship Chronotopes,” as well as“Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality and Voice,” dedicatedto Dell Hymes, indicate some foci of the subdiscipline. Thefirst year that finalists in the Society for Linguistic Anthropol-ogy graduate student essay contest were brought togetherwas 2011, for a panel at the AAA entitled “New Voices inAnthropology.” Looking ahead, it will be exciting to see thework that comes from all of these venues.

Looking back, linguistic anthropology since Boashas come to see—cumulatively surpassing the variousstructuralisms of Levi-Strauss, symbolic anthropology,Americanist descriptive (i.e., Bloomfieldian), transforma-tional (Chomskyan), and variationist (Labovian) (socio-)linguistics—that language and culture are not primarily“symbolically” patterned in the Peircean sense but indexicallyiconically so. The search has been for first-order indexicalfacts of language and other sociocultural signification in prac-tice, to locate them in the dialectic of reflexive normativitythat links them to higher order metaindexical regimenta-tion that is proper to such a legisign level (conventional–institutional) phenomenon. As is shown by the robust at-tention to the pragmatics and metapragmatics of languagein culture in 2011, it is the complex configurations of manyindexical signs, linguistic and otherwise behavioral, in partic-ular contexts, that gives events of speaking their apperceivedtextual thinginess. In turn it is the intertextual linkage of andcomparison with past, future, and imagined events of text-making through indexical connections between iconic framesthat gives conventional cultural norms that are arbitrary bydegrees their apperceived forceful moral naturalness.

Another way to put this is that linguistic anthropology isin search of the play of voices—ascriptive intentionalities—that make up discursive life (Bakhtin 1981). Keane’s (2011)reflection on Hill’s (1995) approach to “The Voices of DonGabriel” demonstrates the ways in which voices are evalua-tive and therefore involve moral stances. Voices are not onlyto be found “out there” in community but also a plurality ofvoices constitutes the basic fact of social being within the in-dividual. Linguistic practice is necessarily multivoiced, andmuch of the art of discourse consists in the ways in whichactors navigate moral choices and voice indexical alignmentwith moral figures. Keane (2011) points out that this canbe a journey of self-discovery, and I might add that in thisway it is performative, as a process through which the very“self” emerges. Although “some political and philosophicaltraditions might take the very existence of internal conflictamong voices to be a moral failing in itself” (2011:173), lin-guistic anthropology’s purview is grounded in an embraceof linguistic plurality and a commitment to viewing the het-erogeneity of particulars with positive wonder.

And what could be more Boasian, after all, than a scienceso conceived? In his focus on any phenomenon, the cosmo-grapher “lovingly tries to penetrate into its secrets” (Boas1940a:645). Or, as Margaret Mead described the ethnog-rapher’s demeanor, the “open-mindedness with which onemust look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder,that which one would not have been able to guess” (Mead1950:xxvi, see Boellstorff 2008:71). Looking ahead again,who is able to guess what linguistic anthropologists willrecord in astonishment in the future? I make no predictions,other than that our continued dedication to looking andlistening as good Boasian cosmographers will afford us “adelight not inferior to that which the physicist enjoys in hissystematical arrangement of the world” (Boas 1940a:645).

Christopher Ball Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College,

Hanover, NH 03755; [email protected]

NOTESAcknowledgments. I thank Michael Silverstein and TomBoellstorff for the opportunity to write this review and for editorialcomments. My (paid) undergraduate research assistant Sarah Cash-dollar helped immensely in compiling the bibliography. I realize thatI have not been able to include all of the excellent work in linguisticanthropology in 2011, and I regret such omissions. Any and all errorsare of course my own.

1. Both Faudree (2009) and Cody (2010) in their linguistic an-thropology years in review articles in this journal treat thebeginnings of this working group on mediatization, now pub-lished in 2011. In fact, over the past four years that AA haspublished these subdisciplinary reviews, a pattern has emergedof early reporting on oral presentations with later follow up onpublished phases of scholarship. I purposefully attend more topublished work in this review, though I do briefly mention afew conferences and panels that may or may not eventually runthrough this cycle.

2. This is even more important when viewed in terms of linguisticanthropology’s continuing commitment to the principle of cul-tural mediation in the tradition of Boasian, and later symbolicand structural anthropological approaches now out of fashion,in the face of non- or immediate explanations from within andwithout anthropology including the chaos of post modernity,and biological and genetic reductionisms in the form of evolu-tionary psychology, etc. (See Brightman 1995 for a linguisticanthropological defense of “culture.”)

3. See Singer (1984) on emblematicity and its role in the sociologyof Durkheim and Warner as well as the anthropology of Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown.

4. So a Southern drawl as identity emblem might point to (index)not only provenance but an imputed natural similarity (iconic-ity) in slow rate of speech with reduced capability of thought,but it can be immediately seen that this speech could otherwisebe an image (icon) of deliberating wisdom, showing that theassociation is conventionalized (thus a Peircean “legisign”).


5. Both Slotta’s and Ball’s concerns gesture back to the ques-tion raised above of mediatization in noncommodity, or innewly commoditized, economies, where we would explorethe broader intersection of culturally diverse regimes of (gift)exchange and communication as well as relations of commodi-tization as such to communication.

6. See Muelhmann (2012) on the preoccupation withquantification—for example, of speakers—in discourses ofendangerment.

7. See, for example, Monaghan’s 2011 indictment of Deutscher(2010) for “Whorf bashing” in last year’s review of linguisticanthropology in this journal.

8. Note how this resonates with the marquee model of discursiveinteraction, suggesting interconnections between ritualization,poetics, intertextuality, and interaction.

9. The special issue as a whole reflects and honors Hill’s diverse,indeed Boasian, concern with issues running from grammaticalstructure and language loss (Kroskrity 2011b), indigenous lin-guistic and cultural life (Chernela 2011), honorification (Philips2011), to voice and morality (Keane 2011).

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Documents

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011