David L. Shaul & N. Louanna Furbee, Language and culture. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1998. Pp. xiv, 303. Pb $13.95.

Abstract

This unusual and ambitious book attempts to define a field both more narrow and more broad-ranging than linguistic anthropology: the field of “language and culture studies.” Like a number of other recent works, including Duranti 1997, Bonvillain 1997, Salzmann 1998, and even the edited volume of Brenneis & Macaulay 1996, this book is intended to introduce an often misunderstood field to a new generation of students. Each of these books begins with a discussion of how to title the field (anthropological linguistics? linguistic anthropology?) and how to justify the material included and excluded. While acknowledging kinship with sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, ethnography of speaking or ethnolinguistics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies, each book mentions studies belonging to these subfields but does not situate them at the center. The basic issue appears to be what these authors regard as fundamental questions; to fall within linguistic anthropology, the questions have to be anthropological. In other words, the aim is usually to uncover some aspect of a society through close examination of its language. Studies of language for its own sake might be interesting, important, even essential; but these tend not to be the focal issue in the works mentioned above.