The anthropological and ethnographic concepts in the study of language By: Lorraine M. Carmona Torres Prof. E. Lugo ENGG 604

Objectives  After discussing this topic, the participants will be able to:  Define significant concepts regarding the study of linguistics, ethnography, and anthropology.  Compare and contrast the relationship between these concepts and culture and language.  Analyze the importance of ethnography and anthropology in the study of linguistics.

Introduction  This presentation aims to discuss concepts regarding ethnography and anthropology and how these are pertinent to the study of language.

Linguistic Anthropology  Linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.  It assumes that the human language faculty is a cognitive and a social achievement that provides the intellectual tools for thinking and acting in the world.

 American anthropology has played an important part in the progress of linguistics in this country, through the careers of Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, and their students, and through the opportunities offered by American Indian languages.  Anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology').

 Boas believed that each language should be studied on its own terms rather than according to some preset categories based on the study of other, genetically unrelated languages (e.g., Latin).  Hybridization between linguistic concepts, and the technologies of the computers and experimental psychology, is producing perhaps the most rapidly growing sector in the study of speech, one with which anthropology must keep informed liaison.

 Diffusion of the tools of modern linguistics may be a hallmark of the second half of this century. In the course of such diffusion, presumably three things will hold true:  1. the discipline of linguistics will continue to contribute studies of the history, structure, and use of languages.  2. in other disciplines, linguistic concepts and practices will be qualified, reinterpreted, subsumed, and perhaps sometimes re-diffused in changed form into linguistics.  3. linguistics will remain the discipline responsible for coordinating knowledge about verbal behavior from the viewpoint of language itself.

Ethnography  Fills the gap between what is usually described in grammars, and what is usually described in ethnographies.  Both use speech as evidence of other patterns; neither brings it into focus in terms of its own patterns.  In another sense, this is a question of what a child internalizes about speaking, beyond rules of grammar and dictionary, while becoming a full- fledged member of its speech community.

 Or, it is a question of what a foreigner must learn about a group's verbal behavior in order to participate appropriately and effectively in its activities.  The ethnography of speaking is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own right.

 That means that the basic architecture of ethnography is one that already contains ontology, methodologies and epistemologies that need to be situated within the larger tradition of anthropology and that do not necessarily fit the frameworks of other traditions.  Central to this is humanism: "It is anthropology's task to coordinate knowledge about language from the viewpoint of man" (Hymes 1964: xiii).

 Language is approached as something that has a certain relevance to man, and man in anthropology is seen as a creature whose existence is narrowly linked, conditioned or determined by society, community, the group, culture.  Language, from an anthropological perspective, is almost necessarily captured in a functionalist epistemology, and questions about language take the shape of questions of how language works and operates for, with and by humans-as-social beings.

 Language is typically seen as a socially loaded and assessed tool for humans, the finality of which is to enable humans to perform as social beings. Language, in this tradition, is defined as a resource to be used, deployed and exploited by human beings in social life and hence socially consequential for humans. Further implications of this will be addressed below. A second important implication is about context.

 There is no way in which language can be 'context-less' in this anthropological tradition in ethnography. To language, there is always a particular function, a concrete shape, a specific mode of operation, and an identifiable set of relations between singular acts of language and wider patterns of resources and their functions.  Language is context, it is the architecture of social behavior itself, and thus part of social structure and social relations.

 These anthropological roots provide a specific direction to ethnography, one that situates language deeply and inextricably in social life and offers a particular and distinct ontology and epistemology to ethnography.  Ethnography contains a perspective on language which differs from that of many other branches of the study of language.

Language  Language is seen as a set of resources, means available to human beings in societies. These resources can be deployed in a variety of circumstances, but when this happens it never happens in a neutral way (Blommaert, 2006).  Every act of language use is an act that is assessed, weighed, measured socially, in terms of contrasts between this act and others (Blommaert, 2006).

 In fact, language becomes the social and culturally embedded thing it is because of the fact that it is socially and culturally consequential in use.  Hymes differentiates between a linguistic notion of language and an ethnographic notion of speech. Language, Hymes argues, is what linguists have made of it, a concept with little significance for the people who actually use language.

 Speech is language-in-society, i.e. an active notion and one that deeply situates language in a web of relations of power, a dynamics of availability and accessibility, a situatedness of single acts vis-à-vis larger social and historical patterns such as genres and traditions  Speech is language in which people have made investments – social, cultural, political, individual- emotional ones. It is also language brought under social control - consequently language marked by sometimes extreme cleavages and inequalities in repertoires and opportunities (Blommaert, 2006).

Conclusion  Anthropology and ethnography have played a key role in the study of language. Both disciplines see language as derived from culture, but without one of them, the study of language can not be effective.  It is important for us as teachers to know the origins of language in order to understand how it works and to aim our class to fulfill the needs of our students focusing on their cultural background. This background provides us information valuable for us to give a class that can be relevant to them.

 These concepts have proven to be of valuable relevance for English teachers because they show us where language comes from and how it works cognitively.  This helps us to understand the way our students learn the language and provides us with the necessary information to work accordingly.

References  Blommaert, J. (2006). Ethnography as counter- hegemony:. Working Papers in Urban Language &, (34), 2-6.  Duranti, A. (2001). Linguistic anthropology. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences,  Hymes, D.H. (n.d.). The Ethnography of speaking. Retrieved September 5, 2010, from tml