Anthropology Of Discourse Research Paper

At first glance, the centrality of the concept of ‘discourse’ to the work of many anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s and 1990s might seem to represent another linguistic turn, a new convergence of linguistic and social cultural models. Nevertheless, the situation, at least until recently, has been the opposite. Practitioners influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern theories have generally followed Michel Foucault in ‘treating discourse [not] as groups of signs … but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972, p. 49). Invoking the term thus signaled rejecting semiotic and structuralist analyses that identified formal patterns immanent in cultural codes in favor of discerning the power relations that shaped them. Many linguists, on the other hand, were trying to overcome the formalism of structuralism by seeking a more rigorous empiricism, and the concept of discourse was appealing as a rallying cry for going beyond decontextualized analysis of isolated signs to the analysis of communicative acts as they are embodied in concrete contexts. Although the latter practitioners defined discourse— generally implicitly—in a variety of ways, most associated the term with particular texts, conversations, and electronically mediated messages, and analyses generally focused on details of form, content, and context. The result has been the creation of divergent bodies of literature, both of which carry the banner of discourse, that have had relatively little to say to one another until recently.

This research paper outlines these opposing approaches at the same time that it points to recent research trends that are not only narrowing the gap between the two types of perspectives but leading to critical reconceptualizations of discourse, language, culture, and other key concepts and producing new insights into social and political life.

1. Discourse In Poststructuralist And Postmodern Perspective

A number of writers turned scholarship on its head in the 1960s and 1970s. Academics had claimed an epistemologically superordinate position, framing their analytic concepts and methods as privileged devices that were not subject to the political and empirical constraints of the phenomena they illuminated. Poststructuralism challenged such claims, placing scholarship squarely into the middle of the politics of social life. Having played a key role—along with transformations in social and material relations—in the creation of modernity, philosophical and academic texts became central objects of analysis. Jacques Derrida suggested that concepts of language, culture, aesthetics, and so forth were in need of ‘deconstruction,’ of playful and irreverent analyses that unraveled the powerful illusions that imbue dominant frameworks with authority. While Levi-Strauss characterized culture as based upon unconscious oppositions, Derrida revealed the magical acts that he and other scholars used in creating these sorts of dichotomies and making them seem real.

The influential writings of Michel Foucault (1972) brought the term ‘discourse’ and a scholarly practice known as ‘discourse analysis’ or ‘the archaeology of knowledge’ to the fore in a wide range of disciplines. He suggests that we must examine how ‘effects of power circulate among scientific statements, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power’ (1980, p. 112). Foucault does not identify discourse with particular utterances or texts, and he argues that it is not possible to grasp the power of discourse when it is seen as rooted in a particular context, viewed as an isolated and self-sufficient totality. He rather suggests that ‘a statement always belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support from them and distinguishing itself from them’ (1972, p. 99). One of his major contributions is demonstrating that institutions form key loci for the production and legitimization of discourses, and he identifies the way they are embodied in ‘political technologies’ that create schemes of surveillance and regulation in such settings as prisons, clinics, and asylums.

Foucault’s work has been criticized for its focus on dominant texts, thereby reproducing the marginalization of contributions by women, people of color, and populations outside of Europe. Particularly in his early work, Foucault seems to go against his disavowal of structuralism and his call to look beyond the dispersion and mutability of elements of discourse in favor of finding of ‘a unity … [that] resides, well anterior to their formation, in the system that makes possible and governs’ (1972, p. 72). Foucault’s archeological approach ultimately construes discursive practices as constituting an autonomous sphere that is epistemologically privileged and possesses causal efficacy.

A complementary point of departure was provided by attempts to reverse the marginalization of rhetoric, a step long advocated by Kenneth Burke. In the course of analyzing narrative emplotment, Hayden White suggests that the way historians construct the past involves two steps—an act of imagination that creates a vision of the social world and a subsequent act of rhetorical magic that renders the imaginary real, convincing audiences that that is just the way it happened. Attending to issues of both rhetoric and power, practitioners have critically examined how anthropology similarly contributes to the imagination of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) refers to as the ‘savage slot,’ the continual reproduction of modernity’s Others. James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) and other writers dissect ‘the poetics and politics’ of anthropological texts, the rhetorical strategies ethnographers use in imagining ‘the field’ and imbuing their constructions with authority and authenticity. When viewed critically as power-laden discourse, ethnography became suspect, particularly in the eyes of scholars in cultural and ethnic studies. Unfortunately, classic deconstructions by scholars of color of the rhetorics adopted by ethnographies that stereotyped racialized minorities (see Paredes 1977) were seldom cited as precedents.

Anthropologists have also detailed the way that complex, multifaceted, and contested relations were discursively transformed into seemingly simple dichotomies, such as savage vs. civilized and traditional vs. modern, through colonial discourses. By revealing the complicity of ethnography in colonial regimes and the colonial underpinnings of contemporary anthropology, practitioners have deepened the critique of fundamental concepts and practices within the discipline. Michael Taussig (1987) draws on the work of the Frankfurt School in revealing the way that the production of racialized images went hand-in-hand with the violent oppression of indigenous Latin Americans. Students of colonialism and others have turned to theorists who come from outside the Euro-American orbit, including the Subaltern Studies group in India (Guha and Spivak 1988) and such Latin American theorists as Nestor Garcıa Canclini (1995 [1989]) for points of departure.

Finally, a number of scholars have responded to analyses of the ‘free floating’ character of postmodern discourse by experimenting with techniques of ethnographic analysis and writing. Anthropologists have sought to disrupt dominant rhetorical strategies and political positions by creating ethnographic and other texts that draw on surreal, fictional, and other techniques. The idea that both culture and ethnography are dialogic, which can be traced to M. M. Bakhtin’s conception of discourse and Dennis Tedlock’s work on narrative, has influenced many of these innovations. Concern with cultural discourses has thus been translated into attempts to transform anthropologists’ own discourses of culture.

2. Linguistic Approaches To Discourse

Other scholars have used the concept of discourse to grapple with limitations in existing approaches to language. Structural linguists largely followed Ferdinand de Saussure in constructing languages as closed systems of context-independent signs that stand apart from politics, history, and social differences between speakers. Noam Chomsky pushed many linguists toward even more formal, abstract approaches and further marginalized the study of social heterogeneity by positing an ideal speaker–listener as the model of the subject that should be adopted by linguists. An orientation toward discourse promised to free practitioners from focusing exclusively referential relations as encoded in small, decontextualized units in favor of studying the way that texts, conversations, and entire genres were embedded in social life. Rather than seeking to circumvent ‘positivistic’ concerns with concrete, empirical data, as was the case with many poststructuralist and postmodern scholars, the concept of discourse was seen by linguistic anthropologists and other scholars as a means of achieving greater empirical scope and depth.

Beginning early in the twentieth century, ‘Russian Formalists’ focused on such discursive units as stories or poems, detailing how writers played with linguistic forms apart from their semantic content (see Jakobson 1960). The Prague School developed a dynamic approach that emphasized expressive, appellative, and aesthetic functions in addition to the referential function and examined how they intersected in different genres. Russian V. N. Volosinov took on Saussure directly, drawing attention to the capacity of signs to link multiple contexts, voices, and texts and detailing the special role of reporting the words of others in creating this diversity. M. M. Bakhtin (1981) characterized discourse as heteroglossic, suggesting that languages are not closed, stable systems but points of intersection between competing structures, styles, genres, and perspectives. Rather than the sources of social consensus—and national unity—that Saussure had envisioned, languages became sites of struggle. British philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) transformed received understandings of the relationship between word and world by arguing that utterances are performative—that they do not simply refer to real world events but create them; saying, in short, is a form of doing. Linguists have mapped the grammatical and ‘discourse level’ features of texts and genres and tied them to communicative functions, as in Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional approach.

In the 1960s and 1970s, American scholars drew on these insights in challenging dominant structuralist and transformational (Chomskyian) approaches. Dell Hymes (1974) called for an ethnography of speaking that documents cultural patterning of language in its social context. While Saussure and Chomsky banished linguistic variation, the way that forms and meanings vary between speakers and contexts, from serious linguistic study, Hymes and other scholars placed it at the center of an emerging sociolinguistics. A generation of practitioners who obtained their Ph.D.’s in the 1960s and early 1970s conducted ethnographies of speaking that focused on such issues as gender, political and religious ritual, rank and status, and expressive genres (see Bauman and Sherzer 1974). Richard Bauman and other writers have illustrated how this approach can be used as a tool for historical analysis. This ethnographic approach was linked directly to a concern with esthetic and performative dimensions of language in a focus on performances, speech events that are marked by special forms of authority, and formal elaboration (Bauman 1977, Hymes 1975). At the same time, Joshua Fishman (1972), John Gumperz (1982), and William Labov (1972) drew attention to the linguistic and political importance of relationships between dialects, languages, and discourse strategies. The frameworks they presented helped to focus attention on linguistic diversity and language policies in contemporary nation-states, presaging later interest in discursive dimensions of nationalism, power, conflict, and social inequality. Michael Silverstein (1976) drew on the work of Charles S Peirce and Roman Jakobson in developing a ‘metapragmatic’ approach that complements the study of semantics with rigorous attention to the centrality of indexes that anchor discourse in existing social contexts—and create new contextual parameters. All of these approaches placed questions of communicative functions—the multiple roles of language in shaping social life—alongside those of structure at the center of inquiry.

Other scholars working in the United States sought to draw the study of discourse away from the study of types, rules, norms, and functions; they defined discourse as—and limited objects of analysis to— particular stretches of talk. Sociologists Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman argued that discourse should be studied not as an end in itself but as a window on social interaction. Garfinkel’s concern with every-day, mundane encounters was placed at the center of the field of conversation analysis, which proclaimed ‘an insistence on the use of materials collected from naturally occurring occasions of everyday interaction by means of audio and video recording equipment or film’ (Heritage and Atkinson 1984, p. 2; emphasis in original). Eschewing reference to contextual information that does not appear in the recording itself, conversation analysts scrutinize transcripts for regularities in the sequencing of conversational features. Many practitioners now focus on institutional contexts, detailing the role of interaction in shaping what takes place in courtrooms, schools, clinics, and other settings. Joel Sherzer proposes a ‘discourse-centered’ framework that similarly privileges ‘naturally occurring and recorded speech’ (1983, p. 10) at the same time that he calls for systematic attention to broader social and cultural contexts. These approaches represent an opposite pole from poststructuralist frameworks in that they view discourse in maximally empirical terms and focus on minute analysis of recorded talk.

3. Converging Paths: The Politics Of Discourse

In recent years, many anthropologists and other scholars have focused on the role of discourse in shaping power and the politics of difference, resulting in a number of important intersections between practitioners who formerly held opposing views of discourse.

Pierre Bourdieu (1991) placed sociolinguistic concepts into a framework that defined types of linguistic competence as ‘symbolic capital’ in seeking to reveal the role of discourse in processes of ‘symbolic domination.’ He redefined the concept of communicative competence in such a way as to draw attention to the barriers of class and race that limit access to sites in which such competence can be acquired. Aaron Cicourel, Charles Briggs, Elliot Mishler, and others have focused on interviews as social as well as communicative events, detailing how formal and contextual features shape and are shaped by power asymmetries, thereby creating discourses that scholars use in imagining social life and imbuing their texts with authority and authenticity.

Building on Silverstein’s (1979) foundational work, linguistic anthropologists have explored the role of language ideologies, socially situated conceptions of the nature and functions of language, speech, and communication, in shaping both linguistic structure and social life (see Schieffelin et al. 1988). Challenging the notion that linguistics provides a privileged and at least ideally objective understanding of language, investigations of language by linguists, philosophers, missionaries, and others come to be seen as being just as socially situated and politically interested as other social constructions. Bauman and Briggs (2000) argue that language ideologies have played a key role in shaping modernity, having been used in constructing and naturalizing political ideologies and institutions since the seventeenth century. Such ideologies are tied in crucial ways to metadiscursive practices that provide the means for attempting to control the production, circulation, legitimization, and reception of discourse (see Silverstein and Urban 1996).

Anthropologists responded to Jurgen Habermas’s work on the construction of a ‘public sphere’ in which citizens debate discourses that shape social life and political institutions by detailing the way that dominant forms and arenas are contested by resistant voices and counterpublics. Such investigations have helped to illuminate the processes by which limits are imposed on what sorts of things can be said and who can say them. Research on multilingualism and language policy similarly have provided crucial insights into the way that efforts to legislate the dominance of national languages and standard dialects provide politically palatable means of legitimizing forms of social inequality based on class, race, and immigration status (see Hill 1998, Zentella 1997). Work by US based linguists parallels European critical discourse analysis (Wodak and Reisigl 1999) and British concern with language and power, which have also scrutinized the discursive foundations of racism, anti-immigrant rhetorics, and other ideologies of inequality. Approaches have similarly converged in analyzing the discursive underpinnings of science and public health. At the same time that this work has helped to transform Foucault’s call to scrutinize how discourses ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak,’ it has provided tools used by specialists in cultural, ethnic, women’s, and science studies in revealing how structures of subordination and marginalization are produced and maintained.

The study of discourse has come under attack of late. Martha Nussbaum criticizes Judith Butler (1997), for example, for ‘turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women’ (Nussbaum 1999, p. 38). Such criticisms seek to reduce these many types of discourse analysis to explorations of ideological—and therefore ultimately inconsequential—dimensions of social life, thereby suggesting that such approaches cannot illuminate inequalities of power and material resources. Responding effectively to such criticisms will require new syntheses of sociopolitical and linguistic approaches in demonstrating the materiality of discourse and the way it, along with other symbolic (including material) forms, shapes social life.

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