UNESCO – EOLSS SAMPLE CHAPTERS LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY - History of Linguistic Anthropology - Alessandro Duranti ©Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY Alessandro Duranti Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles Keywords: Language as culture, history of anthropology in the U.S., American Indian languages, linguistic diversity, linguistic relativity, the ethnography of communication, language socialization, indexicality, heteroglossia. Contents 1. Introduction 2. The First Paradigm: The Boasian Tradition 3. The Second Paradigm: The Ethnography of Communication and the Birth of Sociolinguistics 4. New Directions of Research: Language Socialization, Indexicality, and Heteroglossia 5. A Third Paradigm: Language as a Flux of Indexical Values 6. Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary The field of linguistic anthropology was born in the United States and Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century as one of the four fields of North American anthropology. At first it was mainly focused on the documentation of aboriginal languages (especially in North America) and grammatical structures. Later it became more concerned with language-mediated activities and the relationship between language and context. The chapter uses Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift framework to discuss how goals, key concepts, units of analysis, issues, and methods have changed over the last one hundred years without necessarily replacing older paradigms. The first paradigm emerged with the pioneering work of Franz Boas on American Indian languages and continues today in the descriptive work of so-called “field linguists,” who are committed to writing grammars of previously undocumented aboriginal languages around the world. This paradigm persists today in much of so-called cognitively oriented linguistics (and cognitive oriented anthropologists) especially with regard to their interest in language as a resource for the encoding of experience. With the emergence of the second paradigm, language came to be conceived of as a variable entity that is sensitive to context and at the same time structures context. The second paradigm coincides with the ethnography of communication and interactional sociolinguistics. Many of the scholars involved in the second paradigm have been influential in developing what is considered here to be a third paradigm, which has expanded and challenged previous conceptualizations of language and its role in the construction of identities, institutions, and communities. Through the development of new areas of research (e.g. language socialization) and the adoption and further elaboration of concepts such as indexicality, heteroglossia and agency, those in the third paradigm have established a closer connection with contemporary social theory. Despite