This chapter examines the different kinds of Indigenous-language texts that scholars can find in the archives, including word lists, philosophical vocabularies, dictionaries, grammars, and religious texts. It provides an overview of the kinds of features scholars are likely to find in these sources and the kinds of (sometimes competing) interpretations scholars have put forward to understand them. This essay argues that Indigenous-language texts reveal the practices of intercultural communication and demonstrate the varied ways traders, missionaries, officials, and other colonizers deployed linguistic knowledge to justify dispossession and to achieve the practical goals with respect to colonization. Yet because these texts ultimately depended on willing Native participation in the production of linguistic knowledge, these sources also provide unmatched possibilities for recovering diverse Indigenous intellectual and sociopolitical frameworks.

In the 1990s, the idea that culture had a role to play in political sociology was relatively novel. Identifying sociologists who fit this emerging interdisciplinary subfield posed a challenge. Today, it is difficult to imagine a sociologist, or even a political scientist, who would argue against the importance of culture to politics. It has become de rigueur to acknowledge culture in political analysis. If anything, the field of politics and culture borders on oversubscription. Methodological issues that dominated early syntheses (Berezin 1994, 1997b) remain salient. These include epistemological discussions of culture as an explanatory factor in social analysis (e.g., Berezin 2014a; Wagner-Pacifici 2017) distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methodology (Goertz and Mahoney 2012).