Reviews on Ling Anthro in the US?

[Nathaniel Dumas]

Thanks all for the recommendation on Duranti's piece. When I read that  
article now in light of the course I am designing, I remain curious  
about the way it positions paradigms as perspectives that are amenable  
to circulation to other non-US sites while much of these ideas were  
developed within broader sociohistorical circumstances in the US,  
including the demographic changes of its practitioners, particularly  
people of color in the discipline. So it is, in a sense, part of the  
moves by cultural anthropologists to look at the ways that partial  
Americanist ideas of theory circulate to non-US contexts (if we  
position theory as a form of cultural production via Cattelino's  
understanding of Anthro of the US in her 2010 ARA article). But, as I  
read it, the article doesn't exactly (a) interrogate how a focus on  
the US makes us rethink particular issues in linguistic anthropology  
methods, theory, and practice and (b), on a related note, if what  
linguistic anthropology offers perspectives on the US is roughly the  
same as what it could offer anywhere, with not much detail to  
researcher positionality (i.e., if you're what Cattelino calls a first- 
instance US anthropologist, where your first work is in the US, or one  
in which you do fieldwork in the US after research abroad, which the  
discipline has conventionally encouraged for various reasons but does  
not examine the way in which the US is framed differently in these  
ethnographies as an object of study.)

This could make a great panel for next year's meetings for the Society  
for the Anthropology of North America, if anybody's interesting in co- 
organizing a new project with me.

Much respect,
Nate

On Feb 22, 2013, at 9:49 AM, Dave Paulson wrote:

> Dear Nathaniel,
>
> I would recommend Duranti's "Language as Culture in U.S.  
> Anthropology."
>
> http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/368118
>
> *Abstract*
> *
> *
> The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of  
> distinct
> and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of  
> through
> the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas  
> the
> first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to  
> documentation,
> grammatical description, and classification (especially of North  
> American
> indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second
> paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording
> technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in  
> context,
> introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although  
> it was
> meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual
> separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its
> focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes  
> a new
> attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending  
> linguistic
> methods to the study of issues previously identified in other  
> (sub)fields.
> Although each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the
> preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of
> their differences is in the best interest of the discipline.
>
> All the best,
> Dave Paulson
>
> -- 
> Dave Paulson
> PhD Student & University Fellow
> Temple University, Department of Anthropology
> Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
> United States

Nathaniel Dumas
Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
http://ucsb.academia.edu/NathanielDumas/About

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