Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard (eds.), Languages and publics: The making of authority. Manchester, UK, & Northampton, MA: St. Jerome, 2001. Pp. vii, 184.

Abstract

A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989 [1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures) constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other. In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical, power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed, and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural products having little, if anything, to do with human agency and invested interests.