Language and Culture

This is the first book-length treatment in English of the interactions of language and culture. Though focused on North American anthropology and linguistics, all major cross currents in the field from Europe and America are covered, from Boas to structuralism and on through postmodernism. The two key issues are how language might influence culture, and how language structure may be used as a model for nonlanguage-based systems. Like Siamese twins, these two themes of linguistic relativity and semiotics have much in common, and the ideas raised in language and culture studies have relevance to cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore, literary criticism, cognitive science, and linguistics.

This book is unique not only in being the sole organic treatment of this important part of linguistic anthropology, but also in its historiographic organization, which allows the reader to see how the field developed along with major issues. At the same time, the relations to the other areas of linguistic anthropology-- sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, paralinguistics, cognitive anthropology, and literary studies--are clearly shown.