# Language and Communication

## Language and the Mind

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the role of language in categorizing items in the natural world.
2. Explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
3. Provide at least two examples of linguistic universals.
4. Describe how metaphor shapes how we talk about abstract concepts.
As discussed in the previous section, certain cognitive abilities were crucial to the development of language in humans. And reciprocally, once language emerged, it shaped our thoughts and actions in ways that helped our species cooperate, invent, learn, and adapt to the environment. Language must have been a fundamental element in the creation of human culture (singular) and the eventual development into human cultures (plural) as different groups of humans moved into different geographical areas and began adapting to different conditions.
One key advantage of language is that it provides a way of encoding specific information about the environment and sharing that information with others so that it endures over time. If, say, there are snakes in an area, it would certainly be important to distinguish the venomous ones from the harmless ones, so probably there would be separate words for those two categories of snake or at least words for each specific snake so that people could alert each other to the presence of a dangerous one.
This means that early language must have been developed relative to environmental conditions. Linguistic anthropologists are interested in the way that language varies across cultures, reflecting different environmental, historical, and sociocultural conditions. This is called linguistic relativity.
On the other hand, languages are also constrained by human anatomy and cognitive abilities. Say there were two species of snake in an area, one poisonous and the other harmless, but you could not tell them apart by looking at them. (This is actually an adaptive strategy deployed by harmless animals called adaptive mimicry.) In this case, early humans probably would have had just one word for snake, indicating that sometimes a snake’s bite made you sick and sometimes it didn’t. As this example shows, the human visual apparatus shapes our understanding of the world, which, in turn, shapes our language.
Consider another example from the natural world—the beetle. There are over 300,000 types of beetles in the world. How many can you name? All of them? Ten of them? Two of them? Outside of written scientific taxonomy, there is no language in the world that contains separate terms for each kind of beetle. This is not only because there are only a few thousand of each type of beetle living in any one environment but also because of limits to the number of terms any person can learn and remember. Our vocabulary is constrained by the limits of human memory.
So language is shaped not only by environmental conditions but also by how humans interact with their environments. Our common human anatomy influences our comprehension of the world, and that comprehension is expressed in language. This insight suggests that all languages must have some things in common by virtue of the fact that all humans have the same anatomy and cognitive abilities. Some linguistic anthropologists are interested in discovering these linguistic universals.
In the next section, we take a look at some intriguing research on both linguistic relativity and linguistic universals, seeking to better understand how language interacts with our human minds.

### Linguistic Relativism and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

As seen in previous chapters, it was lamentably common for scholars in the early 20th century to think of non-Western societies as backward and primitive, incapable of complex, abstract thought. Franz Boas worked hard to disprove these racist notions, seeking to demonstrate the equal sophistication of all peoples and cultures. Boas trained a student named Edward Sapir who was particularly interested in how non-Western languages conveyed forms of complex, abstract thought that were different from the Euro-American habits of thought. Sapir, in turn, trained a student named Benjamin Whorf who further elaborated on this theme in his own research (Ahearn 2017). The result is what we have come to call the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that the particular language you speak influences how you think about reality (Lucy 2001). Thus, different languages encourage different habits of thought. This is an essential tenet of linguistic relativity. Whorf based his argument on a comparison between the Native American language of Hopi and what he called “Standard Average European” (SAE), a broad category of European languages including English. Whorf was interested in how speakers of each language might think differently about time. In English vocabulary, time is divided into units that can be counted. English speakers talk about the number of seconds, minutes, or days before an event or consider the number of months or years since something occurred. In Hopi, according to Whorf, time is conceived as indivisible and enduring, a whole process unfolding. The Hopi talk about the flow of events in a completely different way, a processual way Whorf termed “eventing.” Whorf argued that these linguistic features profoundly influenced sociocultural life in each of these two contexts. Holding with the understanding of time as process, Hopi culture emphasized preparation, endurance, and intensity. Coordinating with the SAE expression of time as countable units, Euro-American culture emphasized schedules, accounting, and record keeping. Many people use a calendar to keep track of meetings, appointments, and assignments. Whorf would argue that the English language encourages us to think of time and events in this way, as a spatialized set of boxes to be filled up with discrete objects.
In connection with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it is sometimes said that the “Eskimos” have 400 words for snow. This notion is both problematic and untrue. The first problem is that “Eskimo” is considered a derogatory term by the Inuit and Aleutian peoples to whom it has been applied. And, secondly, the claim turns out to be wrong. Anthropologist Laura Martin (1986, also described in Ahearn 2017) has debunked the myth by documenting that Arctic peoples really have just two root words for talking about snow, one for snow that is falling and the other for snow that is on the ground. They use these roots much as English-speakers would, to talk about snowstorms, snowflakes, snow drifts, and snow melt. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not typically applied to the vocabularies of different cultures anymore.
Recall the earlier example about snakes. We hypothesized that a culture might not distinguish between two species of snakes if those snakes looked identical. But if people gradually came to notice that the poisonous snakes were always found in trees while the harmless snakes were always found on the ground, it is likely that a different term would come to be used for the tree-dwelling kind of snake, the one with the harmful bite. That is to say, even if a culture previously had only one term for snake, the people in that culture could easily understand that there were, in fact, two kinds and would be able to change their language to mark that difference in their vocabulary for future reference. Their vocabulary would not limit their thinking to such a degree that they could not conceive of two different kinds of snake.
Rather than specific vocabulary words, researchers who study linguistic relativity have come to focus on larger abstract topics like space. In languages such as English, when people want to tell someone where a particular object is, they most frequently use language focused on their own bodies. English-speakers say, “You have a bit of arugula on the left side of your mouth” or “Grab the pink top hat on the shelf above you.” This way of talking relies on the human body as a point of reference and therefore is relative to the bodies of the speaker and/or hearer. This creates confusion when the speaker is facing the person they are talking to, sometimes prompting someone to say, “No, my left, not your left!” Steven Levinson has conducted research on languages that do not use the human body to talk about direction at all (2003). Instead, they use the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and specific features of their environments (mountains, oceans) to talk about where things are. A speaker of the Australian indigenous language of Guugu Yimithirr might say, “Watch out for the snake just north of your foot!” This way of talking about space is absolute, not relative. Such speakers never have to say “No, my north, not your north,” as there’s only one absolute north. Research suggests that these different ways of reckoning give us different kinds of mental maps, such that a Guugu Yimithirr speaker might be better at absolute navigation than an English speaker, and perhaps more adept at finding her way back home if she lost her way.

### Linguistic Universals and Folk Taxonomies

While linguistic relativists explore how different linguistic patterns shape different thought patterns (and vice versa), other linguists are interested in how all languages are constrained by our common human biology and in finding universal linguistic patterns. There are specific domains of language that lend themselves particularly well to this kind of inquiry. One of them is color. The reason for this is that color relies directly on our human visual system, invariant across cultures.
And yet there is enormous diversity in the ways that different cultures divide up the spectrum of possible color. Some cultures have hundreds of color terms, while others have only two or three. Researchers Brent Berlin and Paul Kay analyzed the color term systems of 98 languages and found that the diversity of color term systems is governed by one set of rules. All of these color term systems are comprised of a few basic colors with specific colors added to the scheme over time (Kay 2015, Berlin and Kay 1969). The color schemes of all cultures are based on the distinction between black and white (or light and dark). If a culture has only two terms, those two terms will always be black and white. The next most important color is red. If a culture has three color terms, those terms will be black, white, and red. Next comes green and yellow, then blue, then brown, then purple, pink, orange, and gray, always in that order. Berlin and Kay suggested that these rules form a pattern for the way all languages develop over long periods of time. Although the scheme proposed by Berlin and Kay has been revised a little in the past 50 years, the basic tenets have held up pretty well (Haynie and Bowern 2016).
Oddly, though this finding lends very strong support to the notion of linguistic universals, the very same research has also been used to argue for linguistic relativity. Paul Kay later teamed up with another linguist, Willet Kempton, to consider how different color schemes might affect how people “see” color in the environment around them (1984). They presented people with color chips on the spectrum between true blue and true green. They asked subjects how they would group all the colors into two categories. People who spoke languages that had terms for both blue and green drew a more distinct boundary between the two colors than people who had just one word for both blue and green.
Clearly, relativity and universalism are both aspects of human language. Our common biology plays a role in how humans interact with the world, providing regularity to the way all languages categorize not only color but also plants, animals, weather, and other natural phenomena. Researchers who study the systems of categories people use to organize their knowledge of the world have a term for those cultural systems: folk taxonomies. The folk taxonomy for any area of human knowledge reflects both human biology and the surrounding environment and sociocultural practices. There are folk taxonomies for plants, animals, clouds, foods, and the cries of babies.
Folk taxonomies are not just vocabulary terms; they frequently structure any kind of distinction that is meaningful within a culture, even those that rely on simple qualifiers like “good” and “bad.” One example is death, surely invariant across cultures. Societies all over the world distinguish between a “good” death and a “bad” death. These notions reflect cultural beliefs and values—such as the American notion that a good death is a painless one. Among the Akan peoples of Ghana, a good death is the death of someone who has led a very long life, achieving all of the culturally valued accomplishments in life, such as getting married, having children, accumulating property, and providing support to friends and family members (Adinkra 2020). Imagine a very old great-grandmother surrounded by her many descendants as she lies in her bed, heaving one final breath as she drifts away peacefully into death. That is a good death. A bad death is tragic and violent, the sudden death of a person who has not had the chance to really live a full life. Think of a young person drowning or dying in a traffic accident. That is a very bad death. If someone has had a good death, that person is eligible to become an ancestor if the correct rituals are performed. The body must be washed, publicly mourned, and buried in a beautiful casket in a public cemetery, often with grave goods like tools and money to help the person in the afterlife. Ancestors are important, as they watch over their living relatives, possibly helping them out if called upon through libation or other ritual means. If someone has had a bad death, however, they may become an angry ghost, haunting family members with bad luck. The funeral rites of bad deaths are rushed, minimal, and private in order to avoid commemorating or communicating with the agitated spirit.
Categorization is central to our perceptions, thoughts, actions, and speech. The way humans categorize objects and experiences is limited by the way our brains and bodies work, resulting in linguistic universals like the developmental scheme of color terms. However, the complex meanings associated with cultural categories vary widely, resulting in a great deal of linguistic relativity. Linguistic relativism and universalism are often described as opposite positions, but in fact, they are both essential and complementary features of human language.

### Meaning and Metaphor

How are you feeling today? Are you feeling up or feeling down? If you’re feeling low, try doing something fun to lift your spirits. Take care of yourself so you don’t fall into a depression.
An old theory suggested that languages are primarily referential; that is, each language contains a set of vocabulary terms that correspond to elements in the natural world. According to this theory, language functions as a mirror of reality. We have seen in the last section, however, that different languages divide up the natural world in different ways, from the natural domains of color and plants to the human domains of life and death. Moreover, humans use language to talk about abstract issues like mood, social relationships, and communication itself. It is fairly easy to use our terms for spatial organization to talk about the location of concrete objects like arugula on somebody’s face. But what about more abstract issues? How do we talk about becoming friends with someone? How do we discuss an argument we’re making in a term paper? How do we talk about how we’re feeling today?
Mood is like color insofar as the human physiology of mood structures a set of near-universal basic categories including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. And yet, because mood occurs on a spectrum, it is divided up in different ways by different cultures. Consider “schadenfreude,” a German word combining the roots for “damage” and “joy.” Schadenfreude refers to taking pleasure in another’s misfortune. There is no equivalent word in English.
We don’t just use language to identify the emotions we’re feeling. We also talk about the process of developing an emotion, how one mood leads to another, and how we can prevent ourselves from feeling a certain way. These are mysterious and abstract processes. How do we do this? We use metaphor. A metaphor is a linguistic idiom where we use what we know about something concrete to think and talk about something abstract. Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphor is the primary way we create complex meaning in language (1980). In terms of mood, we use our concrete language of direction to talk about our abstract experience of mood. A positive mood is understood as up, while a negative mood is considered down. If you’re feeling really happy, you might say you’re on top of the world. If you’re really sad, you might say you’re down in the dumps. In fact, the word for prolonged sadness, depression, literally refers to a sunken place or the act of lowering something.
Metaphor is one of those things that you don’t notice until you start paying attention to it. And then you realize that it’s everywhere: in the way you think about time, number, life, love, physical fitness, work, leisure, sleep, and thought itself, just to name a few highly metaphorical topics. Just about any abstract area of experience is structured by metaphorical thinking. Here are three common metaphors in English, with examples.
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
LOVE IS SWEET
ARGUMENT IS COMBAT
There are thousands and thousands of metaphors in English. Many abstract domains rely on a combination of various metaphors used to describe different aspects of the experience. You can think of love as sweet (as above) but also as a journey (as in “Will the couple go forward together, or will they go their separate ways?”) or as combat (as in “He slew me with his come-hither glance”).
Metaphor is found in all human languages. Some specific metaphors, like the directional metaphors used to describe mood, are found in many, many cultures. A study by Esther Afreh (2018) found that the king of Asante (in Ghana) frequently uses metaphorical language in his public speeches, including such familiar ones as “life is a journey,” “life is a battle,” “ideas are food,” “knowing is seeing,” and “death is sleep.” Though the speeches were delivered in English, Afreh notes that these metaphors also exist in Akan, the local language of the Asante people. Alongside her analysis of the English-language speeches, she notes many proverbs and phrases in Akan that use the same metaphors.
As with our discussion of categorization in the last section, metaphor is both relative and universal. Lakoff and Johnson argue that our common human biology structures our experiences of things like emotion and life. When you’re feeling really sad, you might literally feel like lying down, and when you’re really happy, you might jump with joy. We may use the notion of a journey to structure our understanding of life, social relationships, and time in general because in our everyday life, we move forward in space to pursue objects and activities.
Sometimes the reasons for cross-cultural similarities are not so directly linked to human biology. English and Chinese have similar metaphorical systems for talking about moral issues. In both languages, the adjective meaning “high” is associated with things that are lofty, noble, or good, while the adjective “low” is used to describe things that are mean, contemptible, or evil (Yu 2016). Alternatively, it is also possible in both languages to describe moral behavior as “straight,” while immoral behavior can be termed “crooked.”
On the other hand (to deploy a useful metaphor), different cultures do rely on different metaphors to talk about some domains of experience, metaphors that emphasize certain aspects of those abstract topics. Consider the English notion that “time is money.” This is a metaphor, pure and simple, but many English speakers believe it to be absolutely true. You can spend time, waste time, save time, and invest time. So time does seem like money in capitalist cultures. But time is not literally money. Nor is time a journey or a horizontal line in space, though these are common ways of thinking about time in the English language. Time is just time, an abstract idea. Certainly Whorf did not find the Hopi talking about time as money. English speakers think of time in terms of money because they live in a society in which time is treated as money, a society that tends to monetize nearly everything, from land and labor to advice, attention, and even body parts like human sperm.


# Language and Communication

## Language, Community, and Culture

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain the role of culture in the acquisition of language.
2. Describe how language can form the foundation of sociocultural groups in speech communities.
3. Describe how people code-switch among speech communities.
While language is critical to individual human thought, its basic function is to communicate messages in human communities. That is, language is fundamentally social. Through social interaction, humans learn the language of their community. And through language, humans express community identity and coordinate their activities.

### Language Acquisition and Language Socialization

Imagine that someone handed you a babbling baby and said to you, “Teach this baby the basic rules and values of our culture.” What would you do?
Likely, you’d start by teaching the baby your language. Without language, it’s pretty hard to teach rules and values (unless you are a really good mime). Luckily, babies come into the world with special cognitive abilities that make them ready to learn language. Most babies undergo a rapid process of language learning between the ages of nine months and three years. Babies proceed through a set of stages that allow them to learn language just by being exposed to surrounding talk. Many scholars study the problem of language acquisition, examining precisely how humans manage to learn language in a diversity of sociocultural contexts.
So your babbling baby would probably learn language just by being exposed to it. But what if someone wanted to hasten the process or make sure their baby was particularly excellent with language?
An American would probably interact with the baby in a particular way, sitting the baby on their lap facing them, pointing to objects and asking basic questions in a quiz-like fashion. “See the cookie? Where did the cookie go? In my tummy!” The person might say these types of things while talking in a high-pitched, sing-song voice. Linguists call this type of talk “motherese.” In many other cultures, caregivers do not interact with babies in this way. In some cultures, oversimplified “baby talk” is considered detrimental to language learning. The context of language learning might involve a whole host of characters beyond the baby and the caregiver, encompassing all household relatives, neighbors, visitors, and even strangers. Language is not always “taught” to babies, but is often witnessed and overheard. Rather than quizzing her baby American style, a mother in Kaluli society in Papua New Guinea is more likely to sit her baby on her lap facing outward, talking “for” the baby in conversations with siblings (Ochs and Schieffelin [1984] 2001). In West Africa, babies spend large parts of the day wrapped on the backs of their mothers where face-to-face interaction with her is impossible. But they overhear the talk around them all day long, and people frequently engage their attention in brief interactions. In the field of language socialization, researchers go beyond the various stages of language learning to focus on the social contexts in which language is acquired. As social contexts shape the way children learn language, language itself becomes a means of learning about sociocultural life.
Whether facing their caregivers or facing out to the social world around them, babies in all cultures learn to be proficient in their languages. And yet, in American culture, the notion persists that language proficiency relies on very precise forms of interaction between caregiver and baby, the American model of motherese. Every culture has specific ideas about language, how it is acquired, how it varies across social groups, how it changes over time, etc. These ideas are termed language ideologies. Some of these ideas, like the notion that babies have a special “window” of opportunity for learning language, are supported by linguistic research. Others, however, are challenged by ethnographic and cross-cultural research.

### Speech Communities and Code Switching

A ten-year-old girl described one of her stuffed animals as “derpy.” Here is a snippet of her conversation with her mother:
Thisbe: Look at his face. He’s so derpy.Jennifer: Derpy? I don’t know that word. What does it mean?Thisbe: Like, kind of stupid. Kind of dumb.Jennifer: Oh, ok. Like Clover [our dog], when she fell off the couch. Was that derpy?Thisbe: No, that’s not derpy! It’s like ... Mom, I just can’t explain it to you. You just have to know.
All speakers of a particular language form a hypothetical community, sharing a common grammar and vocabulary, as well as a set of understandings about how language is used in different situations. Within this large group are smaller groups of speakers who use the common language in special ways unique to that group. Anthropologists use the term speech community to describe such a group (Muehlmann 2014). Speech communities often have distinctive vocabularies, grammatical forms, and intonation patterns. Using these features appropriately, members of the speech community demonstrate their membership in the group.
The concept of speech community was originally used to describe the distribution of dialects in a language. A dialect is a form of language specific to a particular region. For instance, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, it’s common for local people to pronounce the word “water” as “woohder,” as if it nearly rhymes with the word “order.” It’s also common to use the phrase “yooz” for the second-person plural (as in, “Yooz better drink some woohder!”). Linguists William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg famously mapped out these dialectical differences in different regions of the United States (2006). Over time, a dialect can accumulate such unique linguistic features that it develops into a separate language. Indeed, the distinction between a well-developed dialect and a language is largely political. Nation-states may downplay regional differences as mere dialects in order to maintain linguistic unity, while separatist political movements may champion their way of speaking as an entirely different language in order to justify their demands for independence.
Other researchers have focused on the speech communities of ethnic groups and immigrants. Researchers use the term vernacular to describe dialects that are not necessarily regional but associated with specific social categories, such as groups based on ethnicity, age, or gender. Anthropological research on African American Vernacular English (AAE), Chicano English, and Native American English have all shown how these vernaculars shape distinctive forms of storytelling, arguing, and criticism (Chun and Lo 2015). Rather than seeing ethnic vernaculars as “incorrect” forms of English, researchers demonstrate how vernaculars like AAE are highly structured linguistic systems with regular grammatical patterns and innovative vocabularies (Labov 1972a). In formal settings like American classrooms and courtrooms, these alternative ways of using English are too often stigmatized as lazy, unintelligent, or just plain wrong. Believing their own English to be the “correct” form, authority figures often forbid the use of alternative vernaculars of English and refuse to engage in any effort to understand those forms.
More recent research on vernaculars has explored how speakers maneuver among the styles of language they encounter in their daily lives, engaging in various languages, dialects, vernaculars, and other elements of style. We all use a variety of linguistic styles, and many speak more than one language. Addressing different audiences, U.S. President Barack Obama used linguistic strategies to “Whiten,” “Blacken,” “Americanize,” and “Christianize” his public identity, thus subverting racial stereotypes and indicating his membership in a diversity of communities (Alim and Smitherman 2012). In parts of the world that were previously colonized by Europeans, European languages have been maintained as the formal language of government and education even as most people speak local languages in their everyday interactions with kin, neighbors, merchants, and other community members. In these postcolonial contexts, people tack back and forth between various styles of their local languages as well as shifting between the local language and the European one. Such strategic maneuvering among linguistic styles, called code-switching, is done by people in many difference contexts.
For many people, the style of language spoken in elite settings such as schools and government institutions has the effect of disempowering and marginalizing them. Linguistic anthropologists examine how vernaculars associated with elite and professional groups become a means of in-group solidarity and out-group exclusion. Anthropologist and lawyer Elizabeth Mertz (2007) conducted participant observation in first-year classes at several American law schools, looking at how law students are taught to “think like a lawyer.” Using a version of the Socratic method, law professors teach their students to set aside the moral and emotional elements of cases to view them purely as texts subject to abstract, professional analysis. The ability to master the linguistic maneuvering and arcane vocabulary of this form of analysis becomes a prerequisite for becoming a lawyer. The American justice system is thus dominated by people who are trained to set aside humanistic concerns in favor of textual authority and manipulation. Mertz’s study shows how people are socialized by language throughout their lives, not just in childhood. And it alerts us to the way that language can be used to elevate the learned perspectives of elites, dismissing the moral and emotional perspectives of others.


# Language and Communication

## Performativity and Ritual

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Provide examples of the performative function of speech acts.
2. Describe how ritual language can be performative.
3. Identify the informal ways that people “talk back” to formal speech.

### The Performativity of Language: Speaking as Action

Consider the following pairs of sentences. What are the differences between the two sentences in each case?
1. Boris and Natasha are married.
2. Boris and Natasha, I now pronounce you husband and wife.
1. Natasha: Boris lost his job.
2. Natasha: Boris, you’re fired!
1. Boris: Natasha, I ate the last pickle.
2. Boris: Natasha, I apologize for eating the last pickle.
In all the above pairs, the first sentence is a report about an event. The second sentence makes an event happen. In the sentences about the pickle, the second sentence does not make the pickle disappear, but it does create an apology for that action, hopefully altering the consequences of the pickle-eating. In the previous section, we explored how we use language to think and reason about the world around us. This is an essential function of language, but it is not the only one. We also use language to do things—that is, to perform actions in the world.
Way back in the 1930s, Bronislaw Malinowski explored how people use language in culturally specific ways to play an active part in their societies (Duranti 2012). Malinowski described how the people of the Trobriand Islands used magical language to compel the growth of yams, bananas, taro, and palms in their carefully cultivated gardens. Magical spells, like all ritual language, aim at making something happen through the special manipulation of public speech. We see the same use of language in other ritual settings like marriages and naming ceremonies. The plot of many a Hollywood romantic comedy hinges on the moment the partners say “I do” and the officiant pronounces them married. In American marriage ceremonies, it is clear that ritual language is the tool that marries people—not the rings, or the pageantry, or the blessings of family and friends, or any other aspect of the ritual.
In his influential book How to Do Things with Words (1962), philosopher of language J.L. Austin coined a term for action-oriented language: performatives. The most obvious performatives use phrases like “I pronounce,” “I order,” “I promise,” “I warn,” or “I appoint.” Sentences that begin with these phrases are explicitly uttered with the intention of doing something through the act of speaking. As he dug deeper into the performative function of language, however, Austin realized that performatives are not so much a separate category of utterances but an aspect of most of the things we say. Even when people are making a simple descriptive statement, they are saying it for a reason. The power of speech to make things happen is called performativity. Consider the following sentences:
The exam is next week.The dog is pawing on the door.
The above sentences are statements about an event or situation. However, if a professor announces to the class, “The exam is next week,” this is not merely an observation, but a warning—a cue to students to study in preparation for the upcoming exam. And if someone tells their roommate, “The dog is pawing on the door,” they are essentially telling that person to let the dog out.
Like metaphor, performativity is one of those aspects of language that permeates everyday speech. Once you learn about it, you recognize performativity in just about everything you say. Spend a few hours paying attention to each utterance as you go about your activities. You’ll find that you rarely use language to merely describe what’s going on. You speak in order to generate a response or result, even when you just say “Hi.”

### The Performativity of Ritual Language

Just as Malinowski studied the special language used in garden magic among the Trobrianders, many contemporary linguistic anthropologists study the role of performative language in various ritual settings. In a recent article, Patience Epps and Danilo Paiva Ramos examine the performance of incantations among the Indigenous Hup community of the northwest Amazon (Epps and Ramos 2020). An incantation is a patterned set of phrases or sentences used to compel a magical result. Among the Hup, incantations are used by elders for protection, healing, and causing harm. While Epps and Ramos were conducting fieldwork in the area, Hup elders expressed concerns that the young men in the village were not learning the repertoire of important incantations properly, thus endangering the health and safety of the community. The elders invited Epps and Ramos to write down their incantations for healing and protection in order to preserve them for future generations. Epps and Ramos documented and analyzed these incantations in consultation with Hup elders.
In the article, Epps and Ramos analyze an incantation used by the Hup to protect travelers on paths through the rain forest. This incantation is recited by an elder before a group of Hup people embark on a journey. After providing the original text and its English translation, Epps and Ramos describe the incantation’s structure and poetic features, including the use of metaphor and repetition of phrases. As a whole, the incantation lists various dangers and helpful entities and enacts certain magical practices through the speech itself. At the beginning of the incantation, the elder states that he is enclosing the entire path in a protective “canoe,” much as a traveler on a river would ride in a canoe. This canoe is named after a particular snake, the mussurana snake (Clelia clelia), a constrictor snake that eats other snakes and is immune to their venom. Thus, the incantation is creating a metaphorical shield of protection around the travelers, making them safe from venomous snakebites. In the second section of the incantation, the elder lists all classes and subtypes of snakes that might be encountered in the rain forest, asserting a kind of taxonomic mastery over the snakes. Summoning the snakes one by one, he tells of lining them up, sitting them down, and feeding them sticky coca and tobacco. The snakes then sit quietly, their jaws stuck together by the sticky substance so that they are unable to bite anyone. The incantation goes on to deal with several other malevolent entities and engage with beneficial entities to help the travelers in their journey.

### Informal Back-Talk: Teasing, Grumbling, and Gossip

Linguistic anthropologists most frequently rely on long periods of fieldwork, living in the communities they study and witnessing and even participating in ritual events where performative language is deployed. Such events include protection and healing magic, but also naming ceremonies, puberty rites, weddings, funerals, and other rituals that mark the passage of persons from one social status to another. Anthropologists term such rituals “rites of passage” (discussed in detail in Anthropology of Food). At such ritual events, elders or religious specialists are called upon to perform the ritual language necessary to publicly move persons from the previous category to the new one.
Naming ceremonies are a great example of the power of performative language in rites of passage. In many West African societies, a baby is not considered a true person until they have been publicly named by an elder or religious official in a naming ceremony performed a certain number of days after the baby is born. Extended family and friends attend the ceremony as markers of their relationship to the baby. Guests bring gifts such as rice and cloth for the baby, and they are rewarded for their attendance with prepared food and kola nuts.
During his fieldwork in southeastern Senegal, linguistic anthropologist Nicholas Sweet witnessed the naming ceremony for a baby in a Pular-speaking village (2019). When the family were gathered in the compound of the baby’s father, the imam rose, faced east, gave the blessings of the prophet, and then performed the naming of the baby girl (in Arabic, English translation below):
In the name of God, the gracious and the compassionateO Allah, send blessings on our master MuhammadO Allah, send blessings on our master MuhammadO Allah, send blessings on our master MuhammadThe name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her AissatouThe name of the child has come here, her mother and her father have named her AissatouThis is what was written on the tablet of AllahMay God grant her blessings
While carefully recording the formal performative language so important to this naming ceremony, Sweet was also attuned to the more informal kinds of language that surrounded the main action. For instance, just before the imam’s performance, some friends of the family were gathered around the baby, remarking on her beauty. As a way of showing their admiration, some of the men joked and teased one another about the prospect of marrying her someday. Other relatives teased the baby’s parents with demands for kola nuts and other food. As dramatically performative as the official naming was, this informal language was also performative, providing a way for guests to socially configure their various relationships to the new person in their community.
Someone important had been left out of the ceremony—the great-aunt of the baby, also named Aissatou. As the baby was her namesake, Auntie Aissatou had been invited and should have been a featured guest at the ceremony. But when the time came to perform the ceremony, she had not arrived yet, and so they went on without her. Afterward, as guests were making their way home, they crossed paths with Auntie Aissatou, who was just then on her way to the event. Realizing that the naming had already been performed, she complained that she had been waiting for someone to fetch her and bring her to the ceremony. Auntie Aissatou was angry that she had missed the ceremony as well as the gifts distributed afterward.
Wrapping a scarf around her head in imitation of an imam, Auntie Aissatou continued on to the compound of the baby’s father. Striding ceremoniously into the compound, she addressed a number of elders still gathered there. In a parody of the official naming performance, she faced east, delivered the blessings of the prophet, and then announced:
The name of the child has come here. It is Buubu Nooge (Trash Owl).
The audience of relatives erupted in laughter but also protest, interrupting Auntie Aissatou to correct her with the baby’s true given name. But Auntie Aissatou persisted, saying over and over again that the baby’s name had come and it was “Trash Owl.”
Why Trash Owl? In this community, it is believed that witches turn themselves into owls when they fly through the night. “Trash” seemed to refer to the joke gifts of garbage (broken flip-flops, an old sock) in a small gourd that Auntie Aissatou presented in lieu of the usual baby gifts of food, cloth, and soap.
In the days following the naming ceremony, the teasing name for the baby became a running joke in the community, especially among people who had not been invited to the ceremony but felt that they should have been. In order to quash the teasing nickname, the baby’s family was compelled to make a number of visits around the community with appeasing gifts of kola in an effort to get everyone to recognize the baby’s proper name. Once Auntie Aissatou and the others had received their visits and kola, they abandoned the name Trash Owl, recognizing the baby as Aissatou, the namesake of Auntie Aissatou.
This incident illustrates the power of parody and gossip to steal performative power from the authoritative realm of formal speech, giving excluded and marginalized people a way to “talk back” to authority. There are many ways of doing this. Often, audiences to formal speech will deliberately misunderstand or creatively interpret the proclamations of authority figures.


# Language and Communication

## Language and Power

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain how language can operate as a gendered form of power.
2. Identify how racial categories and bias are expressed through linguistic practices.
3. Describe strategies used by communities to revive their dormant languages.

### Gender and Language

In 2018, the word “mansplaining” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The word is defined as “what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he's talking to does” (“Words We’re Watching” 2018).
The word was inspired by an article written in 2008 by the feminist blogger Rebecca Solnit. In the article “Men Explain Things to Me,” Solnit described an incident at a party in which she mentioned to a man that she had recently written a book about a particular photographer. Immediately, the man interrupted to inform her about a very important book that just came out about that same photographer, a book he had read about in The New York Times. After the man had described the book in great detail, Solnit’s friend finally intervened to say that the book he was talking about was, in fact, written by Solnit. In the wake of Solnit’s article, other women writers described similar experiences in their workplaces, schools, and relationships, and the whole phenomenon came to be called “mansplaining.”
Have you ever witnessed mansplaining? Have you ever mansplained to someone? Embedded in the very term is a notion about gender and language. The idea is that men and women have different styles of speech, styles that reflect and reinforce inequality between genders.
In recent years, many writers have pushed back against the term “mansplaining,” arguing that all men do not always speak this way to all women. Some argue that many men are much more respectful and sensitive to the dynamics of power in their conversations with women. Some argue that privileged White women tend to speak in a mansplaining way to male waiters and salespersons or to people of color more generally. Others suggest that older people speak in a condescending way to younger people, or vice versa.
Have you ever become annoyed with a friend or relative who repeatedly interrupts you? Have you ever noticed how some people tend to end their sentences with rising intonation, making everything they say sound like a question? How about a person who ignores what you say but then rephrases your idea and takes credit for it? Many people associate these ways of speaking with gender, the way men speak or the way women speak. As noted in the discussion of language acquisition, every culture has ideas about how language operates, called language ideologies. The idea that American men and American women have distinctive styles of speech is a language ideology. Whether it is true or not is a question for linguistic research, but this idea has become a widespread way of thinking about gender, power, and language in American culture.
In the 1970s, linguists inspired by the women’s movement turned their attention to the way gender shapes different patterns of speech. In her influential book Language and Woman’s Place (1975), Robin Lakoff argues that women and men are socialized to speak in distinctive ways that empower men and subordinate women. Lakoff describes women’s speech as uncertain, excessively polite, and full of hedges, emotional language, euphemism, and tag questions (“Don’t you think?”). Other linguistic researchers have found that men tend to interrupt women far more than vice versa, even when the women speaking are doctors and the men are their patients (Zimmerman and West 1975, West 1998).
Building on this research, Deborah Tannen generalized beyond speech patterns to describe two entirely different communicative subcultures for American men and American women (1990). When men and women speak to one another, Tannen argues, they are speaking cross-culturally, deploying different motivations and expectations for talk. Men engage in conversation to assert their status in a social hierarchy, while women are more interested in building solidarity through social connection. Men authoritatively report information to their interlocutors, while women engage in conversational rapport with their interlocutors. In popular media, differences in the speech styles of men and women are frequently linked to purported differences in specific parts of male and female brains, such the corpus callosum, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. In this way, gendered patterns of speaking are naturalized as biological.
Like the pushback against the term “mansplaining,” researchers have begun to challenge the view that women and men are embedded in different linguistic subcultures with different patterns of speech, motivation, and interpretation. Psychologist Janet Hyde conducted a meta-analysis of hundreds of quantitative studies to see if widespread notions about gender and language were actually borne out by linguistic data (2005). Along with notions of power, Hyde was interested in testing the idea that women are chattier and more deferential than men. Focusing on studies of children, Hyde found that boys and girls exhibited no differences at all in reading comprehension, verbal reasoning, and vocabulary. The tendency for boys to interrupt or speak assertively was only very slightly higher than for girls. The girls’ tendency toward self-disclosure and cooperation with their conversation partners was only slightly higher than for boys. The only significant differences Hyde found were in smiling and correct spelling (girls did more of both).
How do we reconcile research demonstrating differences in the way men and women talk with data that suggests very little difference in the speech patterns of girls and boys? One could argue that children have not been entirely socialized into their assigned gender category. Perhaps the discrepancy suggests that gendered ways of speaking are cultural, not biological, and that, for children, the most intense period of socialization is yet to come in adolescence.
Moreover, ethnographic research by linguistic anthropologists shows that patterns of speech associated with men and women are culturally relative. Reversing the American stereotypes, anthropologists working in Madagascar and New Guinea have found that women are expected to speak in a more confrontational and argumentative style, while men are associated with more cooperative, euphemistic, and ceremonial speech (Keenan [Ochs] 1974, Kulick 1992, both cited in Ahearn 2017).
So both quantitative and ethnographic research overturn the notion that women and men are biologically engineered to use language in different ways. That leaves us with the conclusion that any differences in the ways men and women talk are entirely cultural. Literary scholar Judith Butler argues that gender identities are not biological but are performed through language and other cultural practices, particularly those centered on the body (1988). So when men and women speak in certain ways, they are socially performing their gender identities, whether consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, through their linguistic performances, people enact their own versions of gender in complicated ways that transcend the neat dichotomy of male and female. You probably have a language ideology that tells you how men and women speak in your culture, but do you always speak in the style associated with your assigned gender category? Nobody does. And some people rarely do. As these contradictory performances build up over time, the very notion of gender can change.

### Race and Ethnicity

On many government forms, people are asked to identify their “race.” Forms in the United States often include five categories: Black, White, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander. The category “Hispanic or Latino” is often listed as an ethnicity rather than a race. On the 2020 U.S. Census, people were presented with 14 racial categories to choose from: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Chinese, Filipino, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Other Asian, Native Hawai’ian, Samoan, Chamorro, and Other Pacific Islander. Again, “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” was listed as a question of “origin.” Even with so many options, many Americans still could not find a category that represented their racial or ethnic identity.
As you’ll remember from earlier chapters in this text, race is not biological. There is no accurate way to divide up the gradual spectrum of human biological variation, meaning that biological categories of race are entirely imaginary. However, we also know that social categories of race are very powerful tools of discrimination, subordination, solidarity, and affirmative action. Earlier in this chapter, we studied how sets of categories, “folk taxonomies,” are embedded in language. We saw how different cultures divide up the natural world differently. Likewise, race and ethnicity are folk taxonomies, embedded in language and organizing the social world into a neat set of groups. These categories are real insofar as they have shaped the structure of our society, advantaging some groups and disadvantaging others. And they are real insofar as they shape our thoughts and actions and even our subconscious habits and tendencies.
Like gender, race and ethnicity are performed in language. We use language in conscious and unconscious ways to express racial and ethnic belonging as well as exclusion. Take the use of Spanish catchphrases by Americans who do not speak Spanish. Many Americans intend to be jokey and fun by using Spanish phrases such as “hasta la vista!” and “no problemo” as well as deliberately incorrect ones such as “buenos nachos” and “hasta la bye bye!” Anthropologist Jane Hill found that middle-class, college-educated White Americans were most likely (among other Americans) to use this “mock Spanish” (2008). People who use these phrases consider them harmless and even respectful, while Spanish speakers are often insulted by the association of Spanish with silliness. Hill argues that such phrases are only funny because they covertly draw from stereotypes of Spanish speakers as foolish, lazy, and inept.
Similar arguments about cultural appropriation and stereotyping can be made about the use of Black vernacular speech by White Americans. In the United States, a variety of English called African American English (AAE), or African American Vernacular English, is spoken by many people in predominantly Black communities. With the widespread popularity of Black culture, many White Americans have picked up phrases and grammatical features of AAE while knowing very little about the vernacular and the people who speak it as their primary language. To many Americans, AAE is just imperfect English (it is not, as we’ll see in a moment). So what are White people signaling when they say things like “chillin’,” “lit,” “on fleek,” “aa’ight” (for “alright”), “ima” (for “I’m going to”) and “Yasss, Queen!” Does the use of this language convey respect for the communities associated with Black vernacular English? Or does it demean and subordinate Black Americans who speak AAE?
People who use mock Spanish and mock AAE typically do not mean to insult anyone. The problem is not one of intent, but of context. In American culture, most middle-class White people speak forms of English considered standard or mainstream (Lippi-Green 2012). In fact, Standard American English (SAE) is historically based on the language of Anglo American immigrants. The adoption of White Anglo-English has always been considered critical to successful assimilation by minority and immigrant groups. Success at complete assimilation is often measured by the ability to speak SAE without an accent. But SAE is not speaking “without an accent.” SAE is an accent—the accent of White people whose ancestors emigrated from the British Isles.
SAE is the dominant language of American public spaces, including schools, workplaces, government, and media. People who speak SAE without effort or accent can speak freely in these spaces, knowing that their language will be understood and respected. Americans whose primary language is Spanish or AAE often struggle to be understood and taken seriously in American public life. Given this context, it can seem disrespectful for White Americans to appropriate Spanish and AAE as tools of humor while denigrating and marginalizing the actual speakers of these languages.
The issue is further complicated by the widespread and persistent notion among White Americans (and many Black Americans too) that AAE is not a language at all, but merely a hodgepodge of slang and bad grammar. This view is simply wrong, another language ideology that has no basis in fact. AAE is a rule-governed form of English with its own regular system of sounds, grammar, and vocabulary (Labov 1972b). For historical reasons, AAE shares many features with the English spoken by White southerners in the United States as well as working-class Cockney English from London (Ahearn 2017). Rooted in historical experiences of slavery and segregation, Black Americans have developed their own distinctive set of innovative linguistic features to supplement the more basic structure of American English. Consider the following three sentences:
He is angry.He angry.He be angry.
The first sentence is SAE, and the second and third are AAE alternatives. In SAE, this conjugation of the verb “to be” describes a situation happening in the present. But the SAE present tense of “to be” is a bit vague, as it can mean “right now, this very minute” or a more ongoing situation, perhaps describing a person who is frequently or enduringly angry. AAE helpfully distinguishes between these two possibilities. “He angry” means angry “right now,” whereas “He be angry” indicates a more ongoing situation. In linguistic terminology, the second example is called “copula deletion” and the third is called “the habitual be.” Both are used in regular ways to indicate the difference between momentary and enduring conditions.
AAE is governed by many more rules and features that provide its speakers with expressive possibilities not available to speakers of SAE. In other words, AAE is not only a rule-bound vernacular; it’s a more developed and complex form of English. Linguists have been trying to convey this message to the American public since the 1970s (Labov 1972a). Read more about AAE at the Anti-Racism Daily website.
Rather than recognizing the innovative contributions of vernaculars like AAE, language policy in the United States stigmatizes non-SAE vernaculars as “bad English” spoken by uneducated and unintelligent people. Linguist John Baugh calls this “linguistic profiling” (2003). With colleagues Thomas Purnell and William Idsardi, Baugh (1999) compared the response of California landlords to apartment inquiries spoken in SAE, AAE, and Chicano-American English (CAE). In Woodside, California, landlords responded to SAE inquiries 70.1 percent of the time. Inquiries in AAE received responses only 21.8 percent of the time and CAE inquiries only 28.7 percent of the time. Research in American schools and courtrooms corroborates the discriminatory effects of linguistic profiling on access to housing, education, and justice.
The use of language to discriminate and marginalize is certainly not limited to American English. Elites in many cultures define their own way of speaking as “correct” and “official,” using linguistic practices in public spaces to disempower other groups based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. How can people respond to these forms of linguistic marginalization? For many upwardly mobile speakers of “nonstandard” vernaculars and languages, the process of becoming successful has involved the abandonment of their primary way of speaking in favor of standard, elite forms of language privileged in public discourses. But there is another alternative. As speakers of nonstandard vernaculars and languages move into public discourses, they can hold on to their primary languages, code-switching from context to context. Some language activists celebrate the genius of their “home” languages and work to nurture and revive them, as we will see in the next section.
Can speakers of dominant languages contribute to the process of celebrating and revitalizing marginalized languages? Is it always insulting or racist for speakers of a dominant language to use phrases from another vernacular or language? Some people think so. Certainly it is harmful to use phrases that reference negative stereotypes (even indirectly). But what if your limited use of a few phrases can help you communicate with someone from a different background? What if SAE speakers started quoting Spanish or AAE in ways that highlight positive aspects of those speech communities? What if White people started learning AAE in order to publicize the genius and complexity of this American vernacular? What if you learn another language or vernacular in order to subvert the forces of cultural segregation in your own society? There are no easy answers to such questions.

### Endangered Languages: Repression and Revival

In 1993, a Wampanoag woman living on a reservation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, had a mysterious dream, recurring on three consecutive nights (Feldman 2001). In the dream, a circle of Wampanoag were singing in a language she did not understand. When she woke, words of the language stuck with her, and she longed to find out what they meant. Were these words of Wôpanâak, the language of her ancestors? Wôpanâak had died out in the mid-1800s.
The woman was Jessie Little Doe Baird, a social worker and mother of five. Haunted by those words, she began reading through documents from the 1600s written in Wôpanâak, including letters, deeds to property, and the earliest translation of the Bible printed in the Western hemisphere (Sukiennik 2001). Though frustrated in her efforts to find the meaning of her dream words, she developed a passion for the language of her ancestors and began working with local Wampanoag communities to reclaim their common language of Wôpanâak. Community response was enthusiastic. Committed to the project, Baird went to MIT to study linguistics, earning a master’s degree. Based on her survey of Wôpanâak documents, she wrote a dictionary and began teaching Wampanoag students to speak the language.
By learning their ancestral language, Baird and her students found themselves reconnecting with Wampanoag culture in unexpected ways. The grammar of Wôpanâak, for instance, puts the speaker at the end of the sentence rather than the beginning. Whereas English speakers would say “I see you,” Wôpanâak speakers would say something like “You are seen by me.” Baird suggests that this word order highlights the value of the community over the individual, putting awareness of the other ahead of the self. Wôpanâak displays alternative logic in the formulation of nouns as well. For instance, in English, animal names reveal little or nothing at all about the animal. The words “cat,” “mouse,” and “ant” are based on arbitrary sounds that convey no information about their referents. In Wôpanâak, however, animal names frequently contain syllables that refer to the animal’s size, movement, and behavior. The word for “ant,” for instance, incorporates syllables communicating that the animal moves about, does not walk on two legs, and puts things away.
By now, you know that forms of cognition and culture are embedded in language. The languages of the world encode diverse experiences of time, space, life, death, color, emotions, and more. A language serves as a form of oral documentation of the surrounding environment, a survey of the flora, fauna, topography, and climate of an area. Forms of cultural wisdom are preserved in the stories and proverbs of a language. History is recorded in epic tales and legends. Language can be essential to maintaining cultural identity, affirming the common history and values of a people while providing them with a distinctive way of communicating with one another.
Among the seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, roughly 40 percent of them are in danger of dying out in the next hundred years. A language is considered dead when it is no longer spoken by any living person. Wôpanâak was once considered a dead language. Some linguists argue that no language should ever really be considered “dead,” however, and prefer the terms “dormant” or “sleeping.” So long as there are written or audio records of a language, it can come to life again, a process called language revitalization. Returning to a language that has become dormant or endangered, community members can develop strategic programs to spread, nurture, and modernize the language, ensuring it has a future for generations to come.
Languages generally become endangered or dormant through processes of colonialism and imperialism. In North America, as Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands and confined to reservations in the 1800s, they were compelled to send their children to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their Native languages or practice their Native cultures. As foreign settlers seized lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii, they established similar schools, aimed at assimilating Indigenous children by stamping out their language and culture. Elsewhere, more gradual processes of endangerment can occur when a new language offers opportunities for employment and trade only available to speakers of that language. Parents may encourage their children to learn the new language in order to take advantage of these opportunities, and children may come to reject their own language as a backward language of old people.
Many, many languages have risen from dead or comatose states, among them Cornish, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Scots-Gaelic, the Ainu language of Japan, the Indigenous Australian language of Barngarla, the Indigenous New Zealand language of the Māori people, and the Native American languages of the Navaho and Blackfoot peoples. Often, as with Wôpanâak, the impetus for language revival comes from energetic community members who feel the loss of their language as a threat to their cultural survival. These concerned people create programs to document the language and teach it to children and adults. They establish contexts where the language is spoken routinely and exclusively. Sometimes they work with linguists to develop these programs.
The most successful of these revitalization strategies are immersion schools and master-apprentice programs. In the early 1980s, Māori language activists developed full-immersion preschools, called Te Kōhanga Reo, or “language nests” (King 2018). In these nests, very young children are taught language and culture by Māori elders—grandmothers and grandfathers in the community. Native Hawaiians have developed a similar program of language nests, called Pūnana Leo. Early on, some parents worried that children in immersion schools would not learn the dominant national language well enough to be successful in later life, but research has shown that such children do just as well or better in later classroom performance and standardized testing. Many language revitalization projects combine early immersion with later bilingual education (Hinton 2011, 2018). The Navaho Immersion School in Arizona provides immersion education for the first three years of schooling and then introduces English as the medium of instruction through grade seven. From grades eight to twelve, children are taught in Navaho half the time and English the other half.
One of the challenges of school-based revitalization programs is finding enough adults sufficiently proficient in the language to teach it to children. Among the strategies of language revitalization that target adult learners is the master-apprentice approach. The original Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program was founded in California by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (Hinton 2018). The strategy has since spread all over the world. In these programs, a proficient speaker and a motivated learner spend 20 hours a week together, using the target language plus gestures and other nonverbal communication to engage in various activities.
When successful, language revitalization can empower individuals and energize communities. Learning their heritage language, people come to understand the distinctive genius and complexity of their culture while preserving a crucial means of transmitting that culture across generations.

### Summary

Language and culture are closely entwined in the evolutionary development and contemporary diversity of human societies. Human language differs from animal communication in its complexity and flexibility, aspects of human communication made possible by unique human biological and genetic features. The complexity of language makes it a powerful tool in shaping human thought, providing categories and metaphors for organizing our information about the world. Though language shapes thought and action in universal ways, many aspects of language vary widely relative to local cultures. The social aspects of language are particularly relative, influencing how children learn languages in various sociocultural contexts as well as how people use language to create speech communities. In ritual contexts, language is used performatively to accomplish social action as well as challenging those actions. As a tool of power, language structures gender, race, and ethnic dynamics. Recognizing the fundamental importance of language to the preservation of culture, many Indigenous communities have developed strategies to revive their heritage languages using immersion schools and master-apprentice programs.

### Critical Thinking Questions

### Suggested Readings

Ahearn, Laura. 2017. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. 2nd ed. Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Afreh, Esther Serwaah. 2018. “Metaphors Otumfo? Lives By: A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Metaphors in Some Addresses by Otumfo? Osei Tutu II, Asantehene.” Cognitive Semantics 4 (1): 76–103.
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Alim, H. Samy, and Geneva Smitherman. 2012. Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. New York: Oxford University Press.
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# Work, Life, and Value: Economic Anthropology

## Introduction

If you are in college, someone has probably asked you the question, “So, what you want to do after you graduate?” Are they asking about the hobbies you would like to pursue? Are they asking about the vacation spots you would like to visit, the sporting events you would like to attend? No, of course not. When people ask about your plans postgraduation, they are asking about work. After you graduate, you will be faced with a similar question: “What do you do in life?” or “What do you do for a living?” It is one of the first things people ask when they meet someone new.
What do people mean when they ask what someone does for a living? Certainly, they are wondering what kind of work that person does in order to meet basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. But they are wondering more than just that. If someone answers, “I’m a circus clown,” or “I’m a tax accountant,” what does that reveal? Only where their paycheck comes from? Or does it also give some idea about where they live, what they eat, how they spend their days? Does it hint at what is important to that person? Of course, it can be misleading to generalize. But the way a person makes a living does often say something about that person’s way of life.
In some cases, the question of what a person does for a living is not just an individual matter but one for the whole society. In some societies, most people meet their basic needs by doing roughly the same thing. And even in societies where different people play different roles, there is a fundamental process for making and distributing things that people need and want. Economists and anthropologists agree that this is the most basic definition of an economy: the central way in which societies meet basic material needs and wants. More specifically, an economy is a system for making, circulating, and using things, including material goods, services, and information. Economic systems are shaped by ideas about the meaning and value of objects, actions, and people. In many economic systems, some groups gain control over the work and leisure of others, structuring relations of inequality that operate through techniques of discipline (in the realm of work) and persuasion (in the realm of consumption).
Like nosy strangers at a cocktail party, anthropologists always want to know what people do for a living. Archaeologists are curious about how people in the past developed strategies for making a living in response to different environmental conditions and sociocultural pressures. Physical anthropologists are interested in how human biology evolved alongside ways of using the environment to meet basic needs. Cultural anthropologists study the social and cultural implications of different ways of making a living. And linguistic anthropologists focus on the roles of language, classification, and metaphor in shaping different strategies for making a living.
This chapter takes a close look at the primary ways in which humans interact and have interacted with the environment to meet their basic needs, in the past and in the present day. This area of study is called economic anthropology.


# Work, Life, and Value: Economic Anthropology

## Economies: Two Ways to Study Them

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Distinguish between economic anthropology and the discipline of economics.
2. Describe the universalist and normative approaches to studying economic issues.
3. Understand the importance of diversity, holism, environmentalism, and cultural relativism to economic anthropology.
4. Explain how economic anthropology foregrounds social groups and power relations.
Maybe you’ve had a course on economics or read a book by an economist. There are many good ones. A favorite of the author of this chapter, Jennifer Hasty, is Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Thomas Piketty. It is an unusual book for a contemporary economist to have written. In fact, it’s almost anthropological.
Most economics research is not very anthropological. Recall the three commitments of anthropology—in short, diversity, holism, and environmentalism. Across the four fields, anthropologists also value cultural relativism and reaching for an insider’s point of view. When an anthropologist considers how societies, groups, and individuals make a living, they incorporate these commitments and values. Take a look at a few of the articles featured in the January 2021 issue of Economic Anthropology:
1. “Religious Networks and Small Businesses in Senegal”
2. “Honesty and Economy on a Highway: Entanglements of Gifts, Money, and Affection in the Narratives of Ukrainian Sex Workers”
3. “Gendering Human Capital Development in Western Alaska”
4. “‘No trabajaré pa’ ellos’: Entrepreneurship as a Form of State Resistance in Havana, Cuba”
Note the diversity of cultural contexts (the West African country of Senegal, the eastern European country of Ukraine, the North American state of Alaska, and the Central American island country of Cuba). Other articles in this same issue focus on economic issues in Kentucky, Spain, Italy, China, and Colombia. The titles also demonstrate an interest in linking ways of making a living to other aspects of society, such as religion, gender, and political resistance. All are based on long-term fieldwork aimed at understanding the multiple perspectives of local peoples and groups. Note also terms such as gendering and resistance, indicating an anthropological interest in social groups and power relations.
Perhaps most importantly, the point of these articles is not to evaluate economic practices as better or worse compared to an ideal. Rather, economic anthropologists analyze the cultural and historical features that shape economic practices in different cultural contexts. As for environmentalism, this issue also features a discussion by five anthropologists on the topic of what economic anthropology contributes to the understanding of climate change. In this one issue, all of the central elements of anthropology are on full display.
How is this approach different from the one taken by the discipline of economics? Compare Economic Anthropology with a premier economics journal, the American Economic Review (AER). The January 2021 issue of AER features such articles as the following:
1. “Going Negative at the Zero Lower Bound: The Effects of Negative Nominal Interest Rates”
2. “The Distributional Consequences of Public School Choice”
3. “Politically Feasible Reforms of Nonlinear Tax Systems”
4. “Lack of Selection and Limits to Delegation: Firm Dynamics in Developing Countries”
5. “Job Seekers’ Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias”
The first thing you might notice in this list is the lack of any cultural context, with the one exception being the vague reference to “developing countries.” School choice where? Whose tax systems? Which job seekers? Although some of these articles do specify the context in the article text, that detail is not considered a sufficiently important part of the analysis to warrant inclusion in the title. This suggests that mainstream economic analysis assumes that history and culture do not play a very strong role in economic issues such as school choice, tax systems, and job seeking.
Economists tend toward universalism, which assumes that economic processes operate in much the same way all over the world. In fact, a central concern of economics is to discover the universal principles that govern economies anywhere and everywhere. Implicit in most economic analysis is the idea that most realms of society work like markets, responding to universal forces of supply and demand. Moreover, economists view people as self-interested, rational actors situated within the various market-driven realms of society. Economists use statistics rather than fieldwork to evaluate these market-driven activities, sometimes searching for best policies to encourage economic growth or discourage inequality. Most of the articles in the January 2021 issue of the AER focus squarely on the economic realm, tracing relationships between factors within this realm rather than reaching beyond it, as anthropologists tend to do.
And finally, in the January 2021 issue of the AER, there is no mention of environmental issues.
This comparison is not intended to denigrate the discipline of economics but rather to show the difference in how anthropology frames economic issues. Anthropologists take a human-centered approach to economic issues, describing what people think and do as they make a living and how their practices change over time. Economists take a market-centered approach, describing how market mechanisms shape different areas of human life and how those processes change over time.


# Work, Life, and Value: Economic Anthropology

## Modes of Subsistence

### Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Define modes of subsistence.
2. Describe the general elements of all modes of subsistence.
3. List the four main modes of subsistence humans have used to make a living.
4. Understand how each society has a predominant mode of subsistence but may also practice strategies from other modes.
Anthropologists have a term for the way that people interact with their environments in order to make a living: mode of subsistence. There are four main modes of subsistence that have been used throughout human history: gathering-hunting, pastoralism, plant cultivation, and industrialism/post-industrialism. Each of these modes incorporates distinctive strategies for producing, exchanging, and consuming the things that people need to survive. At the most fundamental level are the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and health. Modes of subsistence provide solutions to meet these needs by generating materials from the environment and developing techniques of labor and forms of technology to process those materials. Beyond these very important functions, modes of subsistence also organize society to get the necessary work done. Societies develop roles, groups, and institutions to divide up the workload of producing things. Modes of subsistence also entail specific ways of trading and circulating things within and beyond local groups. And finally, modes of subsistence emphasize certain ideals and values.
This chapter will examine the four basic modes of subsistence one by one, including their development and a detailed ethnographic example of each. While each mode of subsistence is explored separately, it is important to recognize that most societies have a predominant mode of subsistence that incorporates various practices from other modes. The chapter also discusses the contemporary predicaments faced by many peoples practicing the first three strategies and why one might want to protect and support those economic lifeways.