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Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• State the similarities and differences between “speech communities” and “language communities” as “organizations of diversity.”

• List the reasons linguistic anthropologists use terms like “languaging,” “language socialization,” and “iconization.”

• Describe what distinguishes genres from registers.

• Explain what makes the anthropological use of the term “socialization” different from the popular use of the word.

• Describe the relationship of language, culture, and society in the context of language socialization.

Introduction

This chapter builds on the introduction to human social semiotics in Chapter 8. I now explore how indexical relationships come to appear as iconic. We then turn toward communicative forms in sociocultural context, addressing the following questions: What happens if we start an analysis of culture and communication using social “fractions,” by which I mean parts of societies defined by demographic characteristics like gender and ethnicity? What happens, on the other hand, if we start such an analysis with activities and the settings for those activities, or with communicative forms, especially registers and genres?

Finally, I introduce “language socialization” as the process by which communicative forms are transmitted to novices (especially children), such that they learn to act – especially to engage in communicative activities – in ways that are appropriate to their society (and the “fraction” to which they belong) and its culture (rules and norms).

Iconization

By now, you are familiar with the terms icon and even iconicity. Here, however, I introduce a new concept – iconization.

From the Preface onward, we have considered the advantages of using words that remind us that human life – which is always social and cultural and which constantly involves communication – is filled with processes that we misunderstand as things. For instance, I have pointed to some disadvantages in using “language,” which sounds like a thing, when “languaging” might be more accurate. More generally, I have advocated processual terms such as “discoursing” and “identification” in our discussions about communication.

To understand iconization, we must realize that it starts with indexes. In particular, its raw material is the indexical relationships between groups of people and speech patterns associated with them. Iconization treats those phenomena as iconic. Certain markers of sociolect – such as the use of “ain't” or the practice of dropping “r”s at the ends of words – are subject to critical awareness.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Identify and define the levels of linguistic structure.

• Define phonetic difference. Describe how sound variation can make either a phonemic difference or a stylistic difference.

• Explain “meaning” in relation to phonemes and morphemes.

• Describe the social (indexical) significance of “two ways of saying the same thing” in different varieties of English.

• Explain the social (indexical) function of switching between varying forms of second-person pronouns (“you”) – for example, in Spanish, French, German, and Nepali.

Introduction

In Chapters 1 through 3, we have been exploring the nature of language – as a tool for social action, in speaking as a form of action, in the importance of metasemiotic reflection, semiotic ideologies (e.g., ideologies of social media and how we use them), and language ideologies (i.e., language as generator and object of value).

In this chapter, we look at language at a more granular level. Although we include a traditional view – meaning a structural linguist's view – of language, we also interweave a communicative-functional perspective on language.

To explain, very often textbooks on linguistics, culture and communication, or linguistic anthropology present readers with a hierarchy of structures, from the sounds of language (phonetics and phonology) to how words are formed through processes like adding affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and then to rules for joining words together into phrases and sentences (syntax). Somewhere along the way, such textbooks deal with “meaning,” particularly semantic meaning. Finally, some textbooks describe a level of structure beyond the sentence – commonly called discourse, but in other contexts or text(uality).

There is nothing wrong with this traditional view in and of itself. It is important, however, to recognize the range of functions performed at least potentially by each level: In addition to their contribution to semantic (i.e., denotative-referential) meaning, building blocks from sounds through sentences may also carry (1) social-indexical, (2) participation-managing, (3) poetic, and (4) emotional functions. (If we take “social-indexical” to be reflecting something about the social context, “participation-managing” is entailing/creating some social-contextual feature.)

Because of the importance of these functions, and because they are so rarely acknowledged in either cultural anthropology or linguistics textbooks, I introduce them here and ask you to read the remaining chapters of the book with this perspective in mind.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Define culture and society in such a way as to distinguish them clearly from each other.

• Describe the problems that can result from using the term “culture” inaccurately.

• Understand the difference between terms like language and languaging.

• Contrast the American idea of ritual with that of social scientists, especially anthropologists.

• Define signs in relation to metasigns and language in relation to metalanguage.

• Understand communication-centered approaches to culture.

Introduction

In this first chapter, we explore the argument for studying communication from the perspective of culture and society – which is another way of saying that we explore languages as “forms of life” (Wittgenstein 1958).

We begin by defining culture and society in such a way as to carefully distinguish between the two as different but interacting types or orders of reality. Along these lines, this chapter explores speaking as a social activity and language as a cultural resource (Duranti 1997:1–2).

In this chapter, I also advocate studying what we often call “identity” or even “identities” – social, cultural, and personal – from the perspective of identification (meaning actions, often laden with emotion, linking oneself to another individual, group, or practice).

I further call for the processualization of not just identity, but culture, society, and language. That does not mean I completely eliminate these more familiar terms, but I do emphasize them as denoting the products of processes because it is crucial to give process its due.

With all of that in mind, let's get back to directly considering the terms culture and society. Both are notoriously difficult concepts to pin down – even before processualizing these concepts (for instance, by replacing “culture” with “enculturate/enculturation”). Thus, the distinction between culture and society can easily be blurred. By taking care to avoid such blurring, I aim to help you understand the intersection of culture, society, and communication as a foundation for understanding the rest of this book.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand linguistic anthropology methods you might use in a project's data collection stage.

• Grasp the meaning of naturally occurring interactions.

• Summarize three valid approaches to transcribing discourse.

• Establish which analytic methods are appropriate to data you might collect.

Introduction

In previous chapters, I have introduced perspectives on the world that characterize linguistic anthropology. That includes the questions that interest us and the issues that motivate us.

But how exactly do anthropologists interested in the intersection of culture and communication do what we do? What methods do we use? How is it that we can call what we do “methodical”? And how might newcomers to our field – perhaps you – start studies of your own?

This chapter provides a behind-the-scenes look at linguistic anthropological research – from planning and design, to methods of collecting data appropriate to our discipline, to methods of analyzing data, and to preparing and delivering presentations and publications or finding other ways to circulate your results. This chapter builds on what might appear to be “merely” theoretical. It builds, in particular, on the idea that speech is a form of social action – and that languages are cultural products and filters through which we encounter the world. These are not – or not just – “hypotheses,” but guidelines that inform our research.

It is important to state here that linguistic anthropology is a science. Specifically, it is one of the “human sciences” (Keller 2016). Therefore, interpretation plays a role along with what is typically called analysis in the so-called “hard” sciences. You will see examples of this interpretive research throughout this chapter.

Why should anyone conduct research in the various ways laid out in this chapter? What we've talked about in Chapters 1 through 6 provides the answer: We conduct linguistic anthropological research because we are interested in social action and therefore are interested in ways and moments of speaking. We conduct research because language is not a pseudo-tool that merely refers to things in the world without doing anything to them. Instead, language is a real tool that does all kinds of things in the world. That is what we seek to learn ever more about through research.

Summary

Especially in Chapter 4 of this book, you will find some marks – quotation marks, slash marks, and square brackets – setting off individual letters and sometimes groups of letters in the text. You will also find some unfamiliar symbols enclosed in these marks. In this appendix, we explore a bit of the story behind those marks and symbols.

I put these bits of the story in an appendix instead of in Chapter 4 because they are parts of a more specialized understanding than you need at this level of linguistic anthropology. Nonetheless, they provide an interesting glimpse of some of the technical aspects of our discipline that are worth being aware of.

First, we'll talk about these specialized marks, then about what are called IPA symbols, and then a few last details about phonetic transcription options more generally.

Specialized Uses of Punctuation Marks

Let's begin by explaining how three basic marks are used in discussions about languages and their sound components.

Summary

A young woman in South Asia performs a traditional dance, full of hand motions that “speak” to her audience. A student posts an update to her Facebook page and receives responses within moments. Emerging drowsily from sleep, a couple ask each other how they slept, while halfway around the world, in a village made up of longhouses, other people emerge from sleep and a ritual dream-telling occurs.

Participants in a university course discuss language and communication. Someone approaches a few friends who, as it happens, had been talking about the very man approaching them now. He asks what they had been discussing. They say, “Oh, nothing. We were just talking.”

Opening Up Culture and Communication

In these two paragraphs, I have introduced the topic of culture and communication in a way that illustrates a theme I develop throughout this book: We not only communicate with each other in many ways, in many media, all the time, but we also communicate about our communication – we engage in metacommunication. (Note that bolded words like this are defined in the Glossary at the end of this book.) As exotic as metacommunication might sound, it is really quite ordinary and pervasive in our lives.

This book is intended for students on anthropology, linguistics, or communication courses receiving their first exposure to linguistic anthropology – to “culture and communication” as seen through the lens of linguistic anthropology. If anthropology is the study of humankind from many angles, linguistic anthropology is the anthropological field that mines the practices of communication – language in particular –for their sociocultural significance. It studies human life, human culture, and human societies through the social production, exchange, circulation, and reception of signs in society.

Linguistic Anthropology: Features of My Tribe

My tribe – linguistic anthropologists or “linganths” – is as exotic as any other. Note that I associate “tribe” here with “the exotic” – in a purely tongue-in-cheek manner! I use “tribe” elsewhere in this book in the technical anthropological sense (Ranjan 2012).

My tribe works well with others, in the sense of having related interests and sometimes approaches to what we do. At the same time, my linganth tribe is also unique in what we do, in how we explore and reflect on the interconnections between culture and communication.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Recognize two different kinds of linguistic indexicality.

• Describe two kinds of linguistic iconicity.

• Understand communicative or semiotic multimodality.

• Identify communicative or pragmatic metaphors.

• Distinguish between sociolinguistic forms that index groups and those that index situations and persons with expertise in those situations.

Introduction

In this chapter, we explore how the nature of signs and their workings – particularly indexes/indexicality and icons/iconicity – help to create the sociocultural realities we inhabit.

Here we revisit the two kinds of indexicality we first discussed in Chapter 2 and the important role they play in the contexts of communication. We also build on the preliminary discussions of iconicity in previous chapters and explore diagrammatic iconicity as a key concept in the analysis of ritual communication.

Next in this chapter, we move on to multimodality , which is the complex nature of most instances of human communication, often involving layers of signs, including those that are visible as well as audible. Finally, we discuss cultural reflections on signs and their workings, with an emphasis on cultural metaphors for aspects of communication and communicators.

In Chapter 9, which follows, we continue building on these themes.

Language as Social Action, Communicationas Culture

Linguistic anthropologists approach language and communication in a very particular way, which sets us apart from linguists, cultural anthropologists, and those in communication studies, among others. Linguistic anthropologists agree that language is a cultural resource and that speaking and communicating in general are forms of social action (Duranti 1997:1).

This chapter addresses the question of how communication, particularly discourse, constitutes society (i.e., the social order) and culture. By discourse, I mean language-in-use, in both face-to-face and mediated interaction. Discursive communication (re)constitutes or (re)creates the social order. The importance of interaction via new media reflects what we mean by a changing “social order,” with international borders and populations both shifting in new, rapid, grand, and unpredictable ways. (We explore these topics in more detail in Chapter 11.)

Indexes, Indexicality, and Indexicalities

By now, you are familiar with icons and symbols as well as both indexes and indexicality. Indexicality is the property or properties of being an index – immediacy, context-bounded-ness, or pointing-ness. Here I argue that it is useful to distinguish two indexicalities, or ways in which indexical signs relate to their context.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Summarize the history of applied anthropology, particularly applied anthropology involving language.

• Describe the issues uniquely related to culture and communication in the areas where applied/engaged/public anthropologists work.

• Explain why applied or engaged work has sometimes been controversial.

Introduction

In this chapter, we focus on applied linguistic anthropology. We begin with the frequently troubled (and troubling) history of applied anthropological projects involving language. However, the brief history we review here also includes increasingly promising links between theoretical models of language ideology – with which you are familiar – and their importance in projects designed to resist language shift.

In this chapter, we frequently echo anthropologist Eleanor Nevins (2013), who emphasizes that projects involving communities with traditionally spoken languages that are now in decline consist of more than just documenting that language as it declines. She also emphasizes that language revitalization efforts involve much more than outsiders “suggesting” to Indigenous groups what they should do.

After an extensive look at language revitalization, we then discuss how linguistic anthropology can help improve the quality of practitioner–patient encounters and thus the experience of medicine. This includes engaging with hospitals and other providers that require translation services but often fall back on untrained interpreters, including children, serving as “language brokers.” Beyond these brokers, whose task is clearly one of mediation, we also consider two other kinds of mediating technology. The first is the now pervasive use of computers coming between practitioners and patients in literal and figurative ways. The second example is the use of therapy dogs to help children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to participate in communicative activities that are more challenging without their service dogs.

The final pair of examples we present in this chapter are stories of engagement outside of both medical settings and communities facing “language contraction” that we discuss earlier. The first entails encouraging university students and faculty to break out of the “ivory tower” – to engage with local communities in addressing local linguistic inequality. The second takes place at the national level. It involves linguistic anthropologists joining together to propose policy changes that could affect schools all over the United States.

Summary

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Describe how anthropologists think of globalization.

• Name unique features of anthropological approaches to media.

• Describe how globalization, media, and emotion are linked in our contemporary world.

• Explain the global circulation of emotion as an important new phenomenon.

• Distinguish between old and new media.

Introduction

In this chapter, I address three major themes in contemporary scholarship, particularly in studies of culture and communication. The first two, globalization and mediation, are undoubtedly familiar terms to you. The last one – emotionalization/subjectivization – is likely not. And, as you have certainly come to expect, even familiar terms like globalization and mediation have specialized meanings for our purposes here.

In this chapter, we explore specialized perspectives on how “the global,” media influences, and subjective human experience interact to create new ways of thinking and being in our world today. As you might anticipate, we see in this chapter that language plays a central role in the globalization of culture. Moreover old, but especially new, media are central to the production and circulation of contemporary forms of language. This chapter distills some of the exciting and recent work in the “anthropology of media,” especially by anthropologists concerned with language. Their media-centered ethnographic studies offer insights not only into “the media” but also into the nature of emotion and what it means for emotion to be culturally constituted and socially circulated.

The Interconnection of Globalization, Media, and Emotion

As you begin this chapter, you might well wonder how globalization, media, and emotion pertain to one another. Their interconnections have captivated me, at least since I wrote Crying Shame (Wilce 2009a). In that book, I traced the damaging impact of globalization on local traditions, especially “crying songs” or laments. The echoes of lament traditions in globally circulating media, albeit distorted and distorting, intrigued me, as did the stark differences in ideologies of emotion in globalizing modernity versus traditions such as ritual wailing. In this chapter, I tell a related but different story about the collaboration of globalization, media, and emotion, one that you may more easily recognize than you would in relation to a perhaps “exotic”-seeming tradition like ritual wailing.

Summary

There are three ways to conceive of mental health. The pathogenic approach views mental health as the absence of mental illness. The salutogenic approach views mental health as the presence of positive emotional states and positive functioning. The third approach is the complete state model, which derives from the ancient word for health as being hale, meaning whole. This approach is exemplified in the World Health Organization's definition of health as a complete state, where mental health consists of the absence of mental illness and the presence of positive emotional states and positive functioning. This chapter reviews evidence supporting the complete state model, showing strong empirical support for the two continua model at the phenotypic and genotypic levels. Studies are reviewed making the case for promoting and protecting positive mental health to prevent mental illness and to improve overall psychosocial functioning of individuals and population health. So, is illness more serious than health? Is it enough to seek cures, treatment, and protection from disease and illness as the way toward achieving better mental health? The complete state model would answer “no” to both questions – why? What would it mean to focus on increasing population mental health, as opposed to reducing mental illness?

Introduction

Mental illness has always been a problem, but never serious enough to be considered a public health issue until 1996, when the World Health Organization published the results of the first Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study (Murray & Lopez, 1996). The GBD study estimated the total contribution of 107 acute and chronic medical conditions and illnesses by including disability in the equation to calculate disability-adjusted life years (DALY). The DALY reflects the total number of years in a population that were either lived with disability or abbreviated prematurely due to death that is attributable to specific physical or mental conditions. Depression was the fourth leading cause of disease burden, accounting for 3.7 percent of DALY in 1990, 4.4 percent in 2000, and projected to be 15 percent of DALY by 2020 (Üstün, 1999; Üstün, Ayuso-Mateos, Chatterji, Mathers, & Murray, 2004).

The debate is no longer about whether mental illness, and depression in particular, are a public health issue. Rather, the next debate is what can be done to reduce the number of cases of mental illness and those suffering from it.

Summary

We are pleased to offer the third edition of A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health. While the second edition is only seven years old, recent changes to psychiatric classification systems (DSM-5), mental health services, and policy called for a new edition. Eric Wright took over as co-editor given his expertise in mental health systems and policy, and we undertook a substantial revision of the contents of the volume. Several new chapters in Part I address DSM-5 and psychiatric nosology, and raise important questions for future researchers. Part III includes a new chapter on community mental health organizations, another on adolescent suicide and public health interventions, as well as a new chapter on mental health policy. The Epilogue is also a new addition; it is addressed to researchers and provides guidelines for integrating disparate areas of scholarship in the sociology of mental health and illness. These new additions make the Handbook an essential resource for scholars, and we thank our new authors for their contributions and insights. Returning authors worked hard to substantially revise their chapters, and we thank them for their tireless commitment to the Handbook. We also completely rewrote the introductions to each part to provide a framework for the ensuing chapters. As with the previous two editions, proceeds from this volume benefit the American Sociological Association Section on Mental Health.

Summary

The biological understanding of mental illness views it as a disease of the brain. The biological revolution in psychiatry was sparked by evidence for a genetic component to psychiatric disorders and pharmaceutical advances in drug therapies, which added to understanding of the chemistry of the brain and neuronal communication (neurochemistry). Furthermore, advances in neuroscience or neuroanatomy (which combines the findings from several scientific disciplines) have furthered our understanding of the relationship between the structure of the brain and human behavior. Schwartz and Corcoran provide an overview of what biological psychiatrists know about the brain and its function and dysfunction (neuroanatomy), neurochemistry, and genetics. Psychiatric medications affect the level of neurotransmitters, and hence correct dysfunctions in the neuronal communications systems. Schizophrenia has been hypothesized to result from an excess of dopamine, and the symptoms of schizophrenia are often reduced with the administration of medications which block specific dopamine receptors. Yet this evidence does not demonstrate that the cause of schizophrenia is a chemical imbalance as not all people respond to medications. The medications only affect some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and studies report inconsistent responses. Contradictory findings and gaps also exist in knowledge of the role played by neurotransmitter dysfunctions in depression. While the evidence for a genetic link to schizophrenia and depression is compelling, Schwartz and Corcoran describe a variety of methodological problems which make heritability estimates questionable.

Furthermore, the specific mode of transmission and interactions among genetic and environmental factors need further examination. The biological revolution has pointed to the complexity of understanding mental illness. Schwartz and Corcoran conclude by outlining what role sociologists can play in researching the factors which affect the etiology and course of mental disorder, and in using the information gained by biological psychiatrists to further understanding of the relationship between social and biological factors. The student will want to read this chapter carefully and identify what information they thought was incontrovertible (i.e., schizophrenia is caused by a particular gene) has in fact not been verified.

Introduction

That recent decades have witnessed a biological revolution in psychiatry is undeniable. A presidential proclamation branded the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.” President Obama announced the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative in 2013 to promote an understanding of the brain functions underlying health and disease (http://braininitiative.nih.gov/about.htm).

Summary

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a relic of the universe when it was only 380,000 years old. Standard lore has it that the photons in the CMB have traveled freely to us since that time, so constitute an unvarnished picture – literally a picture – of the early universe.We have already seen some of the power of this picture, in that the constraints on cosmological parameters from the CMB, as shown for example in Fig. 8.16, are extraordinarily tight.

The purpose of this chapter is to remove one word from the preceding paragraph: “unvarnished.” In fact, the photons in the CMB do not travel completely freely to us; rather, their paths are distorted by the gravitational potentials along the line of sight. On the simplest level this means that CMB photons observed as emanating from a given direction actually started their 13-billion-year journey from a slightly different direction.We have seen this through the book and learned to ask: how can the deflections be observed?

Understanding the effect of CMB lensing, as these deflections are called, is not as simple as understanding how a point source is magnified or a galaxy is stretched. Rather, it is the statistics of the CMB that are distorted. So we have to rely on our growing understanding of the spectrum of fields like the CMB and observe the small distortions in the spectrum in order to infer information about the projected gravitational potential.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

Photons characterized by a blackbody distribution with temperature T = 2.725K permeate the universe. The peak of the intensity of a blackbody boson gas is at ν = 3kBT/h, where kB is the Boltzmann constant and h Planck's constant. In this case the peak is at 160 GHz, in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. So there is a microwave background. This radiation is a relic of the early universe and conveys information about the state of the universe at early times. A photon with a frequency today of 160 GHz would have had a larger frequency (shorter wavelength) earlier in the history of the universe, when the scale factor that dictates physical lengths was smaller.

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Index

9 - Communicative Enactment and Transmission of Society and Culture

Summary

4 - The Structure of Language

Summary

1 - Society, Culture, and Communication

Summary

7 - Researching Communication and Culture as a Linguistic Anthropologist

Summary

List of Tables

Frontmatter

Acknowledgments

Appendix: IPA and Other Specialized Marks

Summary

Preface

Summary

8 - Human Social Semiotics

Summary

12 - Applying Linguistic Anthropology

Summary

11 - Globalization, Media, and Emotion Talk

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6 - Weak Lensing: Galaxy Shapes

List of Figures

4 - The Dual Continua Model: The Foundation of the Sociology of Mental Health and Mental Illness

Summary

List of Tables

Preface

Summary

6 - Biological Approaches to Psychiatric Disorders: A Sociological Approach

Summary

9 - Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Summary

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