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Book Reviews Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. Michael Agar. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc v 1994.284 pp. SUSAN D. BLUM University of Colorado, Denver This book is not quite one of a kind (there is also Anthony Burgess's recent A Mouthful of Air, New York: William Morrow, 1992; the somewhat kindred The Five Clocks of Martin Joos, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961; and Talking Power of Robin Tolmach Lakoff, New York: Basic Books, 1990; an earlier generation had Mario Pei's The Story of Lan- guage, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), but it is one of a very restricted genre: books intended for a popular audience that incorporate up-to-date schol- arship on linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Michael Agar's style is engaging and accessible, and the content is a distillation of his own years of teaching and researching about language. The result is a very personal and not-very-technical book that linguistic anthropologists can read with pleasure. The charm and usefulness of this book for professional anthropologists is that it illustrates with colorful, personal anecdotes material that is ordi- narily presented as basically scholarly. Agar, probably like most linguistic anthropologists, lives with his subject in both his professional and private life. I suspect that many of us could write similar accounts of the many experiences we have had with the conjunction of language and culture. But it is Agar who has written it, and the result is a morally earnest and informative summary of how complex the cultural dimensions are of language in its social setting. He includes especially his own work in Austria as a young high school student and then in subsequent visits; Mexico; academics, especially at the University of Maryland and at many conferences; and communities of drug addicts. He also brings in very personal events such as the conversations he had with the doctors he dealt with when his father was dying, about his desire to shatter expectations and so turn chicken-fried-steak into "a sacrament," and how angry he was at getting a $25 parking ticket and why. He includes the autobiographic background of professional life—something that shows how intricately 105

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Book Reviews

Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. Michael Agar. NewYork: William Morrow and Company, Incv 1994.284 pp.

SUSAN D. BLUMUniversity of Colorado, Denver

This book is not quite one of a kind (there is also Anthony Burgess'srecent A Mouthful of Air, New York: William Morrow, 1992; the somewhatkindred The Five Clocks of Martin Joos, New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1961; and Talking Power of Robin Tolmach Lakoff, New York:Basic Books, 1990; an earlier generation had Mario Pei's The Story of Lan-guage, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), but it is one of a very restricted genre:books intended for a popular audience that incorporate up-to-date schol-arship on linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Michael Agar's style isengaging and accessible, and the content is a distillation of his own yearsof teaching and researching about language. The result is a very personaland not-very-technical book that linguistic anthropologists can read withpleasure.

The charm and usefulness of this book for professional anthropologistsis that it illustrates with colorful, personal anecdotes material that is ordi-narily presented as basically scholarly. Agar, probably like most linguisticanthropologists, lives with his subject in both his professional and privatelife. I suspect that many of us could write similar accounts of the manyexperiences we have had with the conjunction of language and culture. Butit is Agar who has written it, and the result is a morally earnest andinformative summary of how complex the cultural dimensions are oflanguage in its social setting. He includes especially his own work inAustria as a young high school student and then in subsequent visits;Mexico; academics, especially at the University of Maryland and at manyconferences; and communities of drug addicts. He also brings in verypersonal events such as the conversations he had with the doctors he dealtwith when his father was dying, about his desire to shatter expectationsand so turn chicken-fried-steak into "a sacrament," and how angry he wasat getting a $25 parking ticket and why. He includes the autobiographicbackground of professional life—something that shows how intricately

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intertwined these are for many anthropologists and linguists—"high den-sity" identities, to use Agar's term.

Agar's ambitions are broad: he hopes to help people take part in "thegrowing global conversation" (p. 24), to convince people that "there arealternatives to circling the wagons, alternatives to forebodings of fear oraggressive threats to bring those 'differenf people into line" (p. 27). Hewrites, "What I want to do is show you how interesting and importantlanguage and cultural differences really are, how encounters with themdisrupt buried routines and open up possibilities previously unimagined.Differences aren't a threat; they're an opportunity" (pp. 28-29). For those ofus who write and teach about linguistic anthropology, such a conclusion isthe beginning. But for the audience he hopes to reach, this may be arevelation. He wished to write a "language appreciation course" thatincludes material that will provide a shock very much like that of "cultureshock." Whether it will shock or not is unclear.

Agar coins the term "languaculture," based on Paul Friedrich's notion of"linguaculture" ("Language, Ideology, and Political Economy," AmericanAnthropologist 91:2, June 1989), to emphasize the inseparability of languageand culture and argues that we must erase "the circle around language,"meaning that the social and cultural contexts of language must be includedin any discussion of meaningful language. His self-acknowledged "eld-ers"—mentioned in the text and given in intellectual genealogy form in thenotes—include Malinowski, Whorf, Boas, Hymes, Wittgenstein, Bateson,Gumperz, and—to his own surprise—Margaret Mead. He cites generouslyfrom the work of Saussure, Whorf, Berlin and Kay, Frake, John Gumperz,Deborah Tannen, Harold Garfinkel (with an extraordinarily clear accountof the origin of the unwieldy name of "ethnomethodology" [pp. 169-174]),Michael Moerman, Gregory Bateson, and Ron and Suzanne Scollon.

Topics covered include turn taking, topic shift, transcriptions, nationsand states, codeswitching, diachrony and synchrony, sign and semiotics,paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, ethnography, color terms, pro-nouns, folk taxonomies and semantic domains, cognitive anthropology(the 1970s version), case relations, participant-observation, "discourse,"and "culture." While acknowledging that to call our object "culture" is toassume an understanding that anthropologists rarely dare to muster, Agardefends classic definitions like that of his late teacher David Mandelbaum(anthropology is "comparative, holistic, and field work-based") on thegrounds that we can scarcely do without a definition (pp. 108-132). En-gaged in academic debates to some extent, Agar makes a good case forerasing the difference between an emic and etic perspective (p. 205) andargues against postmodernist views that everything is up for grabs (p. 231).

My minor objections to this endearing book have to do with the editorialdecisions made to target a popular audience. The preface refers to "Chapter10" (p. 8), but there are no chapter numbers in the table of contents or ateach chapter; numbers appear with chapter titles in the notes section at theback of the book. There is also a tendency for the style to be so colloquialand accessible that it verges on pandering to a juvenile undergraduateaudience who might delight in seeing the phrase "hell of a" in print ("We'd

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screwed up but good," p. 207, on the Vietnam War). Some of the sentencesare so full of short words that a reader trained to read visually has troubleslowing down and listening to the sentences (e.g., bottom of p. 175).Occasionally the self-effacing avowals of inability (his difficulty learningGerman, writing bad poetry [p. 41], or playing chess badly [p. 421) strikeme as overly modest, trying to make his readers not feel daunted by therich variety of experiences Agar musters. And one might object to his claimthat "readers of this book are people interested in life . . . not professionalanalysts" (p. 187). Most professional analysts are also interested in life.

This is a likeable book. I wish I could figure out a way to use it in myclasses aside from reading or photocopying passages to illustrate pointsotherwise presented in a more standard way. When I read aloud Agar'sdescription of his seminar on pronouns conducted in Austria and itsdeterioration into a session of linguistic therapy (pp. 18-19) in an introduc-tory course on linguistic anthropology, in conjunction with our coverageof Brown and Gilman's classic discussion of the pronouns of power andsolidarity, the students roared with laughter at the colloquial treatment ofwhat had been presented as a fairly abstract topic. The book can be readnonconsecutively, in pieces, and the stories will linger. Whether it willchange the minds of stalwart xenophobes is doubtful, but for people whowant an arsenal of arguments against them, it provides it generously, andwith unfailing good humor.

The Social Art Language and Its Uses. Ronald Macauley. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994.241 pp.

J.V. (JAY) POWELLUniversity of British Columbia

In the three decades that I have been a linguist, I have read and taughtfrom dozens of introductions to language and linguistics. Remember them?Going back to Sapir, Bloomfield, Hayakawa, Hockett, Gleason The listcouldfill the page and might serve as the basis for a form of linguistic TrivialPursuit. Some of those introductory books were popularizations; otherswere aimed at the Linguistics 100 students or a subset of the intro-audiencelike intending developmental psychologists, speech pathologists, readingteachers, ethnographers, or English language historians. Well, Macauley'sintro to linguistics, The Social Art, can be added to the list, but it left me ina quandary at first. I was well into it, not unenjoyably, when I realized thatI was having a difficult time deciding who Macauley's intended audiencewas. The prose, terminology, and layout definitely had a technical edge tothem. But the flyleaf of the dustjacket tells us, "Language plays an integralpart in our lives. Yet most of us know very little about the nature of