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- Language and Culture
David L. Shaul and N. Louanna Furbee. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press,
1998. 306 pp.
Though focused on North American anthropology and linguistics,
all major cross currents in the field from Europe and America are covered in this
volume, 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.
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