Bambi Schieffelin – författare

Viewing language as a dynamic semiotic system that shapes and is shaped by cultural, social, and cognitive factors alike, the materials gathered in this new Major Work collection from Routledge explore how people in communities worldwide think about language, talk about language, use language, and change language. The collected works illustrate the ways in which language practices—spoken, written, and signed—are resources that participants use for creating social worlds and accomplishing a wide range of activities within those worlds. Furthermore, they demonstrate how analysts use linguistic and cultural practices, and the ideologies that shape them, to provide insights into the complexities of everyday, as well as less commonly occurring, social encounters.Theoretical essays are complemented with readings that illustrate, integrate, and often advance these frameworks. Focus is on work that emphasizes the importance of cultural contexts in analysing the linguistic practices in which they are embedded; the role talk-in-interaction in establishing, maintaining, or transforming social realities; and the linguistic and communicative resources and strategies that speakers use in conforming others to their point of view. Selections range from investigations, for example, of how speakers create and assert identities in particular kinds of face-to-face interactions; how political institutions, including language academies and experts, attempt to regiment the language practices of particular communities, and how such attempts are resisted; and how various technologies and media, including literacy, radio, television, cellular telephones, and computers, are transforming communicative landscapes at local, national, transnational, and global levels.Primarily drawing on the work of linguistic anthropologists, the collection will be of interest to those working in Social and Cultural Anthropology, the Sociology of Language, Sociolinguistics, Communications, Discourse Analysis, Language and Education, Rhetoric, and other fields in which scholars and students explore how language use creates and shapes social worlds.

Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces. Furthermore, interviewers rarely examine the compatibility of interviews as a means of acquiring information to one another. These oversights often blind interviewers to ensuing errors of interpretation, as well as to the limitations of the interview as a means of acquiring data. To conflict these problems, Professor Briggs presents an analysis of the 'communicative blunders' that he himself committed in conducting research interviews among Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico. By focusing on these errors and exploring how they may be avoided, he is able to propose new techniques for designing, implementing, and analyzing interview-based research. These rest on identifying the subjects' resources for conveying information, and the relative compatability of the shared rules and understandings that underlie their strategies with those associated with interviews. Critical of existing paradigms of interviewing, which he sees as deriving from Western 'folk' theories of reality and communication, Briggs shows that the development of more sophisticated interviewing methodologies requires further research into interviewing itself. Briggs's conclusions provide a basis for the reexamination of current uses of interviews in a wide range of contexts - from social science research to job applications, welfare and health care delivery, criminal and legal investigations, journalism and broadcasting, and other areas of everyday life. His book will appeal to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, as well as other readers whose research or professional activities depend on the use of interviews.

As children are learning to become competent members of their society, so also are they learning to become competent speakers of their language. In other words socialisation and language acquisition take place at the same time in a child's experience. In this book, Elinor Ochs explores the complex interaction of these two processes. Focusing in particular on the experiences of children in Samoa, Ochs examines both the cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of children's language development. She shows that language competence includes not only knowledge of grammatical principles and sentence construction but also knowledge of the norms that link language to social and cognitive context; and that local social and cultural systems as well as children's individual psychological and biological capacities, organise their understanding and production of particular language constructions. This innovative study will appeal widely to anthropologists, developmental psychologists, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, communication specialists and educationists interested in child development and caregiver-child communication.

Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.

Language is closely linked to our social relationships and is the medium through which we participate in a variety of social activities. This fascinating study explores the important role of language in various aspects of our social life, such as identity, gender relations, class, kinship, status, and hierarchies. Drawing on data from over thirty different languages and societies, it shows how language is more than simply a form of social action; it is also an effective tool with which we formulate models of social life and conduct. These models - or particular forms of social behaviour - are linked to the classification of 'types' of action or actor, and are passed 'reflexively' from person to person, and from generation to generation. Providing a unified way of accounting for a variety of social phenomena, this book will be welcomed by all those interested in the interaction between language, culture, and society.