Natural Histories of Discourse - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226757706 ISBN 13: 9780226757704

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it.

Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.

About this title

About the Authors

Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Silverstein was known for his highly influential research on language-in-use as a social and cultural practice and for his long-term fieldwork on Native language speakers of the Pacific Northwest and of Aboriginal Australia. He served on the editorial boards of American Anthropologist, Law and Social Inquiry, Ethnos, Functions of Language, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology among others. Silverstein was also a member of seven professional societies, including serving as the founding vice president and then president of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. Silverstein was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1982. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2008.

Michael Silverstein is the Samuel N. Harper Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Psychology at the University of Chicago. Greg Urban is professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226757706
• ISBN 13: 9780226757704
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 362
• Editor: Silverstein Michael, Urban Greg