Based upon 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Mopan Maya in Belize, Eve Danziger examines the semantic complexity of particular kinship terms used among Mopan women and children and shows that a culture-specific analysis of their terms is superior to other non-ethnographically-based methods. In doing so she contributes not only to theoretical semantics and the ethnography of that area, but to the cross-cultural study of child development and language acquisition.

Puckett takes a new look at the relationship between language, society, and economics by examining how people talk about work in a rural Appalachian community. Through careful analysis of conversations in casual yet commercial contexts, she finds that the construction and maintenance of this discourse is essential to the community's socioeconomic relationships. The volume will appeal to linguists, anthropologists, and scholars in communications and Appalachian studies.

Irian Jaya is the official name of the western half of New Guinea, a province of Indonesia since the 1960s. Its inhabitants are generally untouched by civilization, and most of their hundreds of native languages and cultures remain unstudied. Van Enk and de Vries gained access to one of the most isolated parts of Irian Jaya in order to study the Korowai, a tribe in southern Irian Jaya. The Korowai still use stone tools, live in tree-houses, and have no knowledge of the outside world. Van Enk and de Vries provide the first study of the Korowai language and culture. They reproduce oral texts...

"Language ideologies" are cultural representations, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. Mediating between social structures and forms of talk, such ideologies are not only about language. Rather, they link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. Through such linkages, language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use, but also significant social institutions and fundamental nottions of person and community.

The essays in this new volume examine definitions and conceptions of language in a...

"Language ideologies" are cultural representations, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. Mediating between social structures and forms of talk, such ideologies are not only about language. Rather, they link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. Through such linkages, language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use, but also significant social institutions and fundamental notions of person and community.

The essays in this new volume examine definitions and conceptions of language in a...

Eloquence in Trouble captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigor of discourse analysis with the interpretive depth of psychological anthropology. Its careful transcriptions of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some readers and move others--beyond past academic discussion of personhood in South Asia.

Eloquence in Trouble captures the articulation of several troubled lives in Bangladesh as well as the threats to the very genres of their expression, lament in particular. The first ethnography of one of the most spoken mother tongues on earth, Bangla, this study represents a new approach to troubles talk, combining the rigor of discourse analysis with the interpretive depth of psychological anthropology. Its careful transcriptions of Bangladeshi troubles talk will disturb some readers and move others--beyond past academic discussion of personhood in South Asia.

Uncovering the structures and functions of conversational narratives uttered within natural social networks, Laine Berman shows how working-class Javanese women discursively construct identity and meaning within the rigid constraints of an hierarchical social order. She does this by identifying the silences, the "unsaid," and by revealing both the structure and function of silence in terms of its indexical reference to local meaning. It is here that the force of the Javanese language as used in everyday interaction shows itself to be an extremely potent philosophical entity as well as a means...

A major concern in current anthropological thinking is that the method of recording or translating into writing a society's cultural expressions--dance, rituals, pottery, the social use of space, et al--cannot help but fundamentally alter the meaning of the living words and deeds of the culture in question. Consequently, recent researchers have developed more dialogic methods for collecting, interpreting, and presenting data. These new techniques have yielded much success for anthropologists working in Latin America, especially in their efforts to understand how economically, politically, and...

What allows certain individuals and groups to maintain control over the actions and lives of others? Linguistic anthropologist Elizabeth Keating went to the island of Pohnpei, in Micronesia, and studied how people use language and other semiotic codes to reproduce and manipulate status differences. The result is this inside view of how language works to create power and social inequality. This book challenges widely held theories on the nature of social stratification, including women's roles in creating hierarchy.