3.2 Linguistic anthropology Alessandro Duranti

In his book, Alessandro Duranti “introduces linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field which studies language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.” (Duranti 1997, Preface) In comparison to Fetterman (1997), Duranti (1997) focuses more on the field of linguistics and, as he explicitly describes linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field he furthermore includes a digression into the field of cultural studies. For linguists who are not cultural scientists, Duranti offers a compact and easy-to-read overview of essential concepts and theories prevalent in the field of cultural studies. The chapter “Theories of culture” presents various notions of culture in which it is described as distinct from nature, as knowledge or, especially interesting for linguists, as communication. The latter includes theories such as Lévi-Strauss’ semiotic approach and Clifford Geertz’ interpretive approach which also play an essential role in the field of linguistics. Another interesting concept of culture is the one describing it as a system of participation, which says that

[t]he idea of culture as a system of participation is related to culture as a system of practices and is based on the assumption that any action in the world, including verbal communication, has an inherently social, collective, and participatory quality. This is a particularly useful notion of culture for looking at how language is used in the real world because to speak a language means to be able to participate in interactions with a world that is always larger than us as individual speakers and even larger than what we can see and touch in any given situation. (Duranti 1997: 46)

Keeping this theory in mind it is unsurprising that linguists, when analysing specific linguistic patterns in specific speech acts, also analyse the structure of the community (cf. social network analysis) in which they are doing their research by observing its “participants” (cf. participant observation). Language is seen as “part of the constitution of any act of speaking as an act of participation in a community of language users” (Duranti 1997: 46) and therefore any shift in performance of speech can be related to changes in the social framework. For instance, when considering that Eckert’s example of final /t/ release is commonly associated with a high degree of intelligence and articulateness, a plausible assumption could be made that speakers within a more formal social framework are more likely to exhibit final /t/ release than speakers from a more informal one. Therefore, combining the methods of participant observation and social network analysis seems to be a logical consequence.

In Chapter 4, Duranti offers a description of the field of ethnography including its definition, its research methods as well as its methods of recording information and a guideline about how comprehensive an ethnographic study should be. As Duranti deals with ethnography on no more than about forty pages, this chapter should be read in addition to more detailed works on the subject, such as Fetterman's Ethnography Step by Step, as different authors always tackle the topics differently and include or exclude different aspects of the field.

Chapter 6 summarizes the issues every linguist is confronted with at the very beginning of his or her career. It provides a compact introduction to linguistics, dealing with topics related to phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax etc. For novices, this chapter provides a good review of basic linguistic knowledge and offers a guideline for finding a specific linguistic pattern which can be investigated.

All in all, Duranti's Linguistic Anthropology perfectly suits beginners with little experience in linguistic research and provides simple answers to general questions concerning the different sub-fields of linguistic anthropology.

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