[Linganth] Michael Silverstein's Language in Culture

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Summerson Carr, Susan Gal, and Costas Nakassis
discuss Michael Silverstein's posthumous book, Language in Culture.

https://campanthropology.org/

All the best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Language enables us to represent our world, rendering salient
the identities, groups, and categories that constitute social life. Michael
Silverstein (1945–2020) was at the forefront of the study of language in
culture, and this book unifies a lifetime of his conceptual innovations in
a set of seminal lectures. Focusing not just on what people say but how we
say it, Silverstein shows how discourse unfolds in interaction. At the same
time, he reveals that discourse far exceeds discrete events, stabilizing
and transforming societies, politics, and markets through chains of
activity. Presenting his magisterial theoretical vision in engaging prose,
Silverstein unpacks technical terms through myriad examples – from
brilliant readings of Marcel Marceau's pantomime, the class-laced banter of
graduate students, and the poetics/politics of wine-tasting, to Fijian
gossip and US courtroom talk. He draws on forebears in linguistics and
anthropology while offering his distinctive semiotic approach,
redefining how we think about language and culture.
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