Richard Bautnan INDIANA UNIVERSITY Genre T he concept of genre has played a significant role in linguistic anthro- pology since the inception of the field, part of the philological foun- dation of the Boasian program. The centrality of texts in the Boasian tradition demanded discrimination among orders of texts, and generic categories inherited from the European (especially German) study of folk- lore served this classificatory purpose. Genre received little critical or theoretical attention in the field, however, until the latter part of the 1960s, under the convergent impetus of ethnoscience, with its analytical focus on indigenous (ernic) systems of classification; structuralism, in both its mor- phological and structural-symbolic guises; and the ethnography of speak- ing, in which genre served as a nexus of interrelationships among the constituents of the speech event and as a formal vantage point on speaking practice. More recently, the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin on genre as the compositional organizing principle of utterances has given further promi- nence to the concept of genre in the work of linguistic anthropologists. Current approaches center on a conception of genre as one order of speech style, a constellation of systemically related, co-occurrent formal features and structures that serves as a conventionalized orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse. More specifically, a genre is a speech style oriented to the production and reception of a particular kind of text. When an utterance is assimilated to a given genre, the process by which it is produced and interpreted is mediated through its intertextual relationship with prior texts. The invocation of a generic (i.e., genre-specific) framing device such as "Once upon a time" carries with it a set of expec- tations concerning the further unfolding of the discourse, indexing other texts initiated by this opening formula. These expectations constitute a framework for entextualization, that is, for endowing discourse with textual properties: boundedness, internal cohesion, coherence, availability for de- contextualization and recontextualization, and so forth. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(l-2):84-87. Copyright © 2000, American Anthropological Association. 84