This unusual and ambitious book attempts to define
a field both more narrow and more broad-ranging than linguistic
anthropology: the field of “language and culture
studies.” Like a number of other recent works, including
Duranti 1997, Bonvillain 1997, Salzmann 1998, and even
the edited volume of Brenneis & Macaulay 1996, this
book is intended to introduce an often misunderstood field
to a new generation of students. Each of these books begins
with a discussion of how to title the field (anthropological
linguistics? linguistic anthropology?) and how to justify
the material included and excluded. While acknowledging
kinship with sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, ethnography
of speaking or ethnolinguistics, discourse analysis, and
cultural studies, each book mentions studies belonging
to these subfields but does not situate them at the center.
The basic issue appears to be what these authors regard
as fundamental questions; to fall within linguistic anthropology,
the questions have to be anthropological. In other words,
the aim is usually to uncover some aspect of a society
through close examination of its language. Studies of language
for its own sake might be interesting, important, even
essential; but these tend not to be the focal issue in
the works mentioned above.