Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

Abstract

The thesis of this essay is that linguistic anthropology is not the study of language. Rather, “language” functions as a permanently problematic, if indispensable, object for linguistic anthropological analysis and thought. This is because, as I suggest, the critical intervention of linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the ways that indexical processes undermine language as an autonomous object, entangling it with other semiotic modalities and thereby displacing it beyond its putative borders. Reviewing linguistic anthropological scholarship from 2015, I argue that it is the study of this displacement and its more general semiotic implications—and the entangled and mutually informing analytics that have been developed to theorize them, for example, language ideology, entextualization, interdiscursivity, chronotope—that centers the field. Focusing on a set of such analytics, I illustrate how recent linguistic anthropological scholarship has elaborated the reflexive, dialectical nature of social life, theorizing what I call total semiotic facts. I explore these dialectics by discussing three thematic clusters that occupied the attention of the field in 2015: diversity and authenticity, political economy, and mass mediation.