Natural Histories of Discourse

Michael Silverstein, Greg Urban

University of Chicago Press, Jul 15, 1996 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 352 pages

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.

Contents

• Greg Urban: 21
• Text from Talk in Tzotzil: 45
• The Secret Life of Texts: 81
• SelfCentering Narratives: 106
• THE DIACHRONY OF TEXTS: 131
• Exorcism and the Description of Participant Roles: 160
• Structure and Contradiction: 203
• Text and Pragmatics: 229
• A Case Study in: 253
• National Spirit or the Breath of Nature? The Expropriation: 277
• Transformations of the Word in the Production of Mexican: 301
• Codafication sic: 329
• Index: 335

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Natural Histories of Discourse
• Editors: Michael Silverstein, Greg Urban
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0226757692, 9780226757698
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Semantics; Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Sociolinguistics; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Social Science / Anthropology / General; Social Science / Archaeology; Social Science / General