![]() ![]() By now these ideas have become commonplace (if not universally accepted), and it may be difficult to appreciate just how novel Silverstein’s interventions were at the time, but they formed the foundation of what would in effect be a paradigm shift within linguistic anthropology, as well as a shift in the way the relationship between language and culture was understood. ![]() To put it simply, sign-use in social interactional contexts creates cultural meaning, the stuff of anthropological analysis, and thus our study of “culture” is dependent on linguistic pragmatics. The boldness of his move may not have been apparent to us at the time, however, for not only was he critiquing the concept of symbol in “symbolic anthropology,” he was more controversially asserting that what was called “culture” was to a large extent a discursive construction, not in the Foucaultian concept of discourse that was gaining ascendancy in the 1970s, but in the linguistic anthropological sense best associated with Edward Sapir and that today is often called linguistic pragmatics. Silverstein’s brilliant theoretical move was to introduce this semiotic perspective, particularly the notion of speech indexicality, into cultural analysis, which he proceeded to do in the seminal article “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description” ( 1976). Peirce, whose sign-modalities of icon, index, and symbol Jakobson, of course, had already used in his analysis of what he called “shifters” in Russian verbal categories (Jakobson 1957). As he would later tell the story to Caton, “There I was listening to what these folks were saying about ‘culture as symbols and their meanings,’ and wondering what on earth they were talking about, coming as I did from linguistics.” Of course, he was referring not to the linguistics of Chomskyian “transformational grammar,” (hailed as a “revolution” at the time) but to the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson (among others) that viewed language as a form of communication and that was influenced by the semiotic theory of Charles S. ![]() Caton considers himself fortunate to have been a graduate student in the 1970s in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where a new cultural paradigm was being forged-variously identified with Clifford Geertz (before he went on to establish the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University), David Schneider, Victor Turner, and Nancy Munn-that has been called “symbolic anthropology” (among other terms), when into this mix stepped Michael Silverstein, at the time a very young PhD in linguistics who had studied under Roman Jakobson at Harvard University. ![]()
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