Linguistic anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is a discipline of anthropology that deals with the study of the diversity of languages spoken by human societies and how the lexicon and linguistic uses are related to the basic cultural characteristics of such societies. Alessandro Duranti defines linguistic anthropology as "the study of language as a resource of culture, and of speech as a cultural practice". Due to its interdisciplinary nature, linguistic anthropology lies and is develops thanks to methods that belong to various disciplines, particularly anthropology and linguistics, with the aim of providing an understanding of the many aspects of language as a framework of cultural practices, that is, as a communication system that enables representations of the social order between individuals (inter-psychological) and within the same individual (intra-psychological), and that contribute to individuals making or use of these representations to carry out constituent social acts.

This discipline works on an ethnographic basis for the production of stories about linguistic structures as they appear within human groups in a defined space and time. For the study of language in linguistic anthropology, linguistic anthropologists perceive speakers as social actors, that is, as members of unique and complex communities, individually linked as sets of social institutions, and through a web of expectations, beliefs and moral values, not necessarily overlapping, but intertwined.

What differentiates linguistic anthropologists from other students of language is their vision of language as an accumulation of symbolic strategies that are part of the social fabric and of individuals' representations of real or possible worlds. Linguistic anthropologists approach in innovative ways "some of the themes and issues that constitute the core of anthropological research, such as the politics of representation, the constitution of authority, the legitimization of power and the cultural bases of racism. and ethnic conflict, the socialization process, the cultural construction of the person (or individual), the politics of emotion, the relationship between ritual action and forms of social control, the specific domain of knowledge and cognition, the artistic fact and aesthetic consumption policies, cultural contact and social change."

Stages of development

Alessandro Duranti identified three different stages in the development of this discipline.

First Paradigm

The first paradigm, then known simply as "linguistics" He studies part of what is now included in anthropological linguistics and was interested in issues related to the documentation of languages of pre-state peoples (generally in extinction). Thus the first North American researchers concentrated on the native languages of North America, on their grammatical description and on their typological classification. Also at that time, the problem of linguistic relativity was important, associated with the ideas of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and previously various issues dealt with by thinkers such as Vico, Herder or Humboldt.

Second Paradigm

Dell Hymes was responsible for the creation of the new paradigm, in the 1960s, called at the time "linguistic anthropology". The type of topics collected are included today within the ethnography of communication.

Third Paradigm

From 1980, broader anthropological problems began to be studied but using data and methods taken from linguistics.

Areas of study

Contemporary linguistic anthropology continues its research in accordance with the three paradigms described above. Several fields related to the third paradigm, the study of anthropological issues, are particularly rich fields of study for today's anthropolinguists.

Identity

Much of the studies in linguistic anthropology explore questions of sociocultural identity with a linguistic approach. This was done by anthropolinguist Don Kulick, for example, with a number of parameters, for the first time in a village in Papua New Guinea. Kulick was interested in practicing two languages with and around the children of the village of Gapun in Papua. New Guinea: The traditional language, Taiap, only spoken in their village and therefore mainly the 'indexed' Gapunaise identity, and Tok Pisin, the official and widely spoken language of New Guinea. Taiap is associated with not only a local but also a "past" and based on hed (personal autonomy). To speak Tok Pisin is to show a Christian (Catholic) identity, based not on hed but on guardar that is, an identity related to the will and the ability to cooperate.

In his most recent work, Kulick has shown that in speeches called Scandal, Brazilian transvestites who practiced prostitution mocked their clients. This is the way in which the transvestite community, it seems, has found to try to overcome the ridicule of the Brazilian public of which they are certainly victims (through, therefore, loud public speeches and other types of demonstrations)..

Socialization

In a series of papers, anthropolinguists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin addressed an important anthropological issue: socialization, the process by which infants, children, and foreigners become members of a community by learning to participate in its culture., using linguistic and ethnographic methods. They found that the processes of enculturation and socialization did not proceed separately from the process of language acquisition; but that children acquire language and culture together in what might be called an integrated process. Ochs and Schieffelin have shown that "baby talk" it is not universal; in fact, the direction of adaptation (that is, whether or not the child is invited to adapt to the conversation or discourse going on around him) was a variable related to, for example, the direction in which he was moving. directed towards the body of his mother or father. In many societies, parents hold their babies out and direct them toward a group of loved ones they must already learn to recognize.

Ochs and Schieffelin also showed that members of all societies socialize their children "al" use of language and "thank you" to the use of language. Ochs and Taylor found that in stories told spontaneously over dinner in middle-class white families in Southern California, both fathers and mothers reproduced the patriarchal pattern (the always-right-father syndrome) through distribution. of the roles of the participants, such as that of a simple participant (often a child but sometimes the mother and almost never the father) and that of "discussion leader" (often the parent who asked unsettling questions or challenged the participant's abilities). When the mothers stepped in to help their children tell their story, they inadvertently assumed the same role as a simple participant.

More recent research by Schieffelin has uncovered the socializing role of herders and other relatively recent converts to Bosavi in the Southern Highland community of Papua New Guinea, which she is studying. Herders have introduced new ways of transmitting knowledge (new epistemic markers) and new ways of talking about time. They also fought and rejected passages in the Bible that speak of being able to know the internal states of others (such as the Gospel according to Mark).

Ideologies

Third example of the current paradigm: ideologies. In this context, it is about "linguistic ideologies", a concept often defined as "sets of shared notions about the nature of language in the world". Michael Silverstein showed that these ideologies did not constitute a false consciousness (in the Marxist sense of the term), but had a real influence on the evolution of linguistic structures, such as the abandonment of old English words te and you. Woolard, in his comprehensive analysis of language code switching, that is, switching different language codes in a conversation or even in a single sentence, states that the underlying question of anthropolinguists on this topic (why do they do that?) reflects a dominant linguistic ideology. This is the idea that people "should" to be monolingual and their sole aim for the sake of clarity, rather than to be amused by the incredible diversity of linguistic varieties involved in a single utterance position. A large body of research on linguistic ideologies is interested in more subtle influences on language, such as the influence on Tewa (a Kiowa-Tanoan language spoken in some towns in New Mexico and on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona) by "kiva speech".

Social Environment

To conclude on an example of this third paradigm, a group of anthropolinguists worked very creatively on the topic of the social environment. Duranti published an article on innovative forms of greeting in Samoa and their use and transformation of the social environment. Prior to this, Joseph Errington, who has worked extensively on Indonesian languages and was inspired by earlier work on this topic that does not necessarily deal with topics purely linguistic, he has based on the methods of linguistic anthropology (and semiotic theory) the concept of the "model center", that is, the center of political or ritual power emanating behavior from the model. Errington demonstrated how the Javanese priyayi, whose ancestors served in the royal courts of Java, became emissaries long after the dissolution of these courts and represented the best example of 'refined speech'; through java. Joel Kuipers' work explores this issue in more detail on the island of Sumba in Indonesia. And even if the Tewa language is spoken by Tewa Indians in Arizona and not by Indonesians, Paul Kroskrity's theory that kiva forms of expression (a place where religious rituals take place) exerts great influence. in the Tewa language in general, it can be clearly paralleled with Errington's work.

Silverstein tries to find as many theoretical meanings and applicability of this notion of model center as possible. He thinks that the notion of the model center is one of the three most important findings of linguistic anthropology. He generalizes the notion as follows: according to him there are large-scale and institutional orders of interactionality, historically contingent and yet structured. Within these orders of magnitude, which could be described as macrosocial, ritual centers of semiology end up exerting a structuring influence and conferring a certain value on any given situation of discursive interaction with respect to the meanings and meanings of the verbal and semiotic forms used in her". Current approaches to typical anthropological themes, such as the rituals of anthropolinguists, confirm the existence of non-static linguistic structures, but rather the real-time development of a "hypertrophic ensemble" of orders of parallel patterns and indexicalities that seem to bring about the ritual creation of one's own sacred space through what often appears to be the magic of synchronized textual and non-textual versification.

National Schools

Anthropology has always been marked by national schools, and in no area is this nationalism manifested more than in linguistic anthropology. That is why a good part of the scientific literature on the subject can be ordered according to its national origin, be it British, American or French. This 'nationalist' tendency is clearly observed in linguistics.

British Linguistic Anthropology

The creation of a British linguistic anthropology was difficult, as the first obstacle was the almost complete abandonment of the use of the concept of culture in British anthropology dominated by Radcliffe-Brown, and a second obstacle was that, even where the term was used, The concept of culture in anthropological work was a biologically derived concept of culture that did not lend itself very easily to articulation with the study of language. For Malinowski, who does accept the usefulness of the concept of culture, the articulation with a systematic study of language is not easy either, so the most promising way to articulate cultural anthropology with the study of language as a phenomenon that belongs to the domain of the unconscious. Malinowski was practical in spirit, but he did not lack the ability to express himself in theoretical terms, detached from practical matters. The best evidence is in his approach to linguistic problems, and from his cooperation with J. R. Firth – Britain's foremost linguist between the wars – emerged one of the few original efforts in England: the context theory of situation.

For Malinowski, it is not possible to make translations from one language to another without first making a description of the culture of the users of the language to be translated and thus providing the necessary measure for a translation. Thus the need to combine the study of language and ethnography is immediately manifested. Malinowski's starting point can be summarized as follows: the definition of language as the vocal communication of thought does not work, language is a mode of activity and words themselves do not carry any meaning; the meaning is acquired thanks to the context of the situation, and emerges as a multifaceted relationship between the word in its sentence and the context of its production and exchange; the meaning of words is not due to a relationship between the word and the things that exist in the world, but rather to the place of the word in the total cultural context and, finally, that the main unit that carries meaning is not the word, but the phrase. Malinowski's contribution was forgotten and almost all the work of British social anthropology lacked a linguistic dimension.

Edwin Ardener's anthropology is perhaps the best example of the development of British linguistic anthropology, for he had linked the renaissance of linguistic anthropology in England with influence from outside: he noted these developments with the growing influence by Levi-Strauss. In Ardener's linguistic anthropology, an approach to British empiricism is evident, and he manages to articulate theoretical models with observable reality: he introduces a rich ethnography into his study of the categories of witchcraft in West Africa, while in another context introduces a historical dimension that also makes it less deductive than in the French style, distinguishing “p structures” and “s structures” (paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures).

Linguistic Anthropology in the United States

In the United States the situation is very different, and to this day the linguist can be considered a kind of cultural anthropologist. American linguistic anthropology begins with Franz Boas, not only because of his compendium of indigenous languages, Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas, 1911), but also because of the influence he had on his disciples, such as Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and Leonard Bloomfield. Boas's teachings contain in germ the ideas that later, when evolving and systematizing, would become the famous 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', and through Boas a strong direct influence of the German tradition begins, a tradition that is reaffirmed and continues. in the works of his students Kroeber, Sapir and Ruth Benedict. Boas defines ethnology as "the science that deals with the mental phenomena of the life of the peoples of the world", and his linguistic interests belong mainly to three problem fields: to the phonetic description of North American indigenous languages, to the categories of indigenous thought expressed in the corresponding languages and to the grammatical processes that structure the expression of thoughts.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is of main interest, about the relationship between language and thought formulated by students of Boas and the foundation of cultural relativism. Boas's influences on Sapir are decisive, and Sapir soon distances himself from linguistics that gives priority to the physical and positivistically measurable features of the language to emphasize his interest in features that are much less quantifiable, although observable. Just as Boas had stressed that cultural phenomena belong to the domain of the unconscious, Sapir also early manifested his interest in the unconscious, as the title indicates: The influence of the unconscious on the organization of social behavior (Sapir, 1927).

Benjamin Lee Whorf, late in life a student of Sapir, concentrated his study of the language on four core points. First, that language establishes a strong principle of cultural and linguistic relativity, so no one can describe nature with total freedom, since we find ourselves limited by certain modes of interpretation, even when we believe ourselves to be freer. Second, that the language has an obligatory character; and third, that there are mental processes that precede, both individually and collectively, the acquisition and use of language. From all this then came the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, whose essence is that language becomes a chain that limits the freedom of perception, thought and action of the human being, an idea that is also present in Sapir's efforts to develop a language. artificial, as this could foster "a tendency to make man see himself as master of the language instead of as its obedient servant".

In the course of the 1960s, a new approach known as cognitive anthropology emerged in an attempt to systematize the implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as far as possible, and is primarily a heuristic procedure. In essence, cognitive anthropology seeks the answer to two questions: What mental phenomena are significant for people with a given culture? And how do they organize these phenomena? Cognitive anthropologists develop their discipline as a constructive alternative.

French structuralism

Unlike British empiricist anthropology, in France the main interest of structural anthropology is the search for universals of culture. In French structuralism we can count two different lines of development: a line that we can call ontological, which is valid both in anthropology and in other disciplines that are more or less related to anthropology, and another type of purely linguistic structuralism, which it can be called epistemological, and whose most outstanding anthropological representative is Lévi-Strauss. However, not everyone agrees on this distinction, which makes it difficult to decide whether structuralism is a method (as Lévi-Strauss argues) or a (wrong) theory.

Anthropology and Linguistics in Mexico

Linguistics in Mexico begins with the friars in the XVI century, when they arrived in America they found an authentic Tower of Babel, for two reasons: the number of languages was overwhelming, and the languages they found here were completely unknown to them. The study of hitherto unknown languages, whose existence had not even been suspected, was carried out by the Spaniards who had arrived in these lands, mostly friars who were in charge of the 'spiritual conquest'. Those chroniclers, historians, and linguists (mostly friars, but not always) broadly produced three types of work. First, vocabularies; second, grammars; but the practical purpose of their work is revealed in the third type of works they produced: confessionals. Their linguistic work was done in order to get to know, as a linguist, these languages and to enable others to learn them, thus speeding up the process of Christianization of the Indians. One of the most obvious tasks for friars with linguistic talent and interest was the classification of the staggering number of unknown languages: reducing chaos and confusion to order and making the unknown known.

By combining Enlightenment and Romantic intuitions, linguistics received a strong boost in Mexico in the XIX century and, nevertheless, Since the presence of foreigners is more than noticeable, names of Mexican researchers such as Manuel Orozco y Berra (1816-1881), Francisco Pimentel (1832-1893), Francisco Belmar (1859-1915) and Nicolás León (1859-1929) stand out., four linguists and scholars who took up the heritage of the friars, while modernizing and nationalizing linguistics in Mexico, thus creating a bridge between colonial New Spain and the new Mexican republic. Thus entering the XX century with an already established tradition, the advances made in that century, now past, are divided into periods of the century, so that the first quarter of the century is dedicated to a descriptive linguistic study within the framework of a nascent structuralism, while in the second quarter comparative studies are carried out within the framework of a more mature structuralism; the comparisons that are made are exploratory and are placed somewhat within the obvious, such as Weitlaner's explorations of some of the Otopia languages. In the third quarter of the century, more solid basic research was already available and less obvious comparisons were sought, such as the postulated relationship between Zuni, Tarascan, and Quechua. Finally, the last quarter of the century brings us to the threshold of today, there is a significant movement in ethnography that borders directly on linguistics: from a Marxist tradition in the 1970s, which never really found the specificity of anthropology and Less than ethnography, it is returning to an ethnographic practice that articulates backwards with old traditions such as Franz Boas, Edward Seler and Konrad Theodor Preuss, among others. In the possible theoretical crossroads that are offered today, mainly between a tradition of the left and another of the right, theoretical ground is being gained at the same time that ground is being lost in the question of social commitment.

Sociolinguistics was born in Mexico in 1970, with the publication of a book by Oscar Uribe Villegas, in which the word 'sociolinguistics' is found in the title, which presents a series of basic principles of the new discipline, strongly influenced by from sociology, and it is indicated that the book is the result of the sociolinguistic project of the UNAM.

In the context of Mexico, above all two sociolinguistic problems have come to some prominence: the general problem of bilingualism and the more specific problem that has to do with bilingual-bicultural education. For an anthropologist, the most obvious point of contact is perhaps cognitive anthropology, a trend that emerged in North American cultural anthropology in the 1960s, also under the label of the 'New Ethnography' and which has had a weak development in Mexico, at least until recently.

A new linguistic approach was born in 1976, when James Lockhart published two books of works based on the Nahua codices, with which a movement began that came to have its confirmation some fifteen years later in two other books by James Lockhart himself. This new approach has its roots in Miguel León-Portilla's The Vision of the Vanquished and, as Nahuatl had a special status as the language of the empire and in the colonial world it once again occupies a very important position. Especially as a lingua franca in early colonial times, Lockhart's work draws on Nahuatl sources.

Other related topics

Linguists attempt to reconstruct the history of languages and the language families from which they come, which is linguistic paleontology. They also try to establish the relationship between the evolution of language and the evolution of man.