Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms

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.