N. J. Enfield & Jack Sidnell 17 Language and culture in Mainland Southeast Asia In the early decades of the twentieth century, Franz Boas argued for the central importance of language to an understanding of culture. Specifically, Boas noted that certain aspects of linguistic structure, such as grammatical categories, rarely become objects of conscious reflection. Because of this, he proposed, these aspects of language provide a window onto primary ethnological phenomena (or “funda- mental ethnic ideas”; see Stocking 1966, Silverstein 1979). In contrast, aspects of custom and tradition more available to conscious reflection are subject to second- ary explanation and reanalysis, and get caught up in higher-order subjective schemes of social evaluation (as, e.g., “high”, “popular”, “traditional”, “noble” and so on, see Sapir 1924). In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have focused on differences in the degree to which cultural phenomena are available to con- scious awareness, finding here not a reason to privilege some kinds of data over others but rather a central mechanism of cultural dynamism. In what follows, we explore these issues at the heart of the language/culture relationship – and some of the associated complexities of current semiotic theory – through a consideration of the language-culture nexus in two settings in mainland Southeast Asia: histori- cal developments in twentieth century Vietnam and contemporary life in rural communities of lowland Laos. We evaluate the implications of these case studies for directions in linguistic anthropology broadly, as well as for research on lan- guage and culture in mainland Southeast Asia. 1 Introduction The relation between language and culture is central to linguistic anthropology. This is especially so if we take “culture” in the most general way to include any form of non-instinctive, patterned behavior that is transmitted via social learn- ing across generations and supported by rules or norms (see Sahlins 1976, Trouillot 2003). This would encompass diverse forms of human behavior, not only those described as economic, political, legal, religious, and scientific, but also knowledge and practices of language. This presents a problem: How can N. J. Enfield, University of Sydney/Australia, e-mail: nick.enfield@sydney.edu.au Jack Sidnell, University of Toronto/Canada, e-mail: jack.sidnell@utoronto.ca https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726626-017