"Foley's book illustrates quite convincingly that 'Linguistics without anthropology is sterile, anthropology
without linguistics is blind'(Hockett 1973: 675)"
--Gunter Senft, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics
"I applaud Foley for having overcome one of the main constraints of structuralist - inspired approaches
to analysis."
--Peter Muhlhausler, University of Adelaide
Blackwell Publishers
March, 2000
Summary
This is a textbook for courses in language and culture for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.
It starts from a theoretical viewpoint of both language and culture as conventionalized forms of situated practice
and uses this as a unifying framework to cover the full range of topics normally treated under the rubric of language
and culture.
An important orientating strand in the book is the tension between innatist or universalist versus relativist approaches
to anthropological linguistic phenomena: various topics like kinship, color, classifiers or the effects of literacy
are discussed from these contrasting viewpoints to provide a richer understanding of their implications. The book
is organized so that in a modular way individual instructors may use or omit sections to fit into their overall
teaching design.
Table of Contents
Preface.
Part I: Introduction:
1. Introduction.
Part II: The Evolution of Language:
2. The Evolution of Language.
Part III: Universalism: Innate Constraints of Mind:
3. Mind, Universals and the Sensible World.
4. Structuralism.
5. Cognitive Anthropology.
6. Kinship.
7. Color.
Part IV: Relativism: Cultural and Linguistic Constraints on Mind
8. On Relativist Understanding.
9. Models and Metaphors.
10. Linguistic Relativity and the Boasian Tradition.
11. Space.
12. Classifiers.
Part V: The Ethnography of Speaking
13. Speaking as a Culturally Constructed Act: A Few Examples.
14. Politeness, Face and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood.
15. Language and Gender.
16. Language and Social Position.
17. Language and Socialisation.
18. Genre: Poetics, Ritual Languages and Verbal Art.
Part VI: Culture and Language Change
19. Contact Induced Language Change.
20. Standard Language and Linguistic Engineering.
21. Literacy.
