Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of languages as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice. It assumes that the human language faculty is a cognitive and a social achievement that provides the intellectual tools for thinking and acting in the world. Its study must be done by detailed documentation of what speakers say as they engage in daily social activities     As an interdisciplinary field, linguistic anthropology has often drawn from and participated in the development of other theoretical paradigms, and some of its own history is reflected in the oscillation often found among a number of terms that are not always synonyms: linguistic anthropology, anthropological linguistics, ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Its main areas of interest have changed over the years, from an exclusive interest in the documentation of the grammars of aboriginal languages to the analysis of the uses of talk in everyday interaction and throughout the life span.

Linguistic Anthropology within the Boasian Tradition.
In the holistic tradition, established by Franz Boas (1858-1942) in USA in the beginning of the 20th century, anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: 

• Archeology.
• Physical (now ‘biological’).
• Anthropology Linguistics (now ‘linguistic anthropology’), linguistics, and social anthropology remained rigidly separate disciplines for most of the twentieth century, despite the emphasis on the use of native languages in fieldwork among UK anthropologists, and the theoretical and methodological influence of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884±1942), who wrote about the importance of linguistic research for an anthropological understanding of human societies. Other facts:
• In the 1950s was adopted the term `ethnolinguistics' (reflecting the European preference for `ethnology' over `(cultural) anthropology'). 
• John Wesley Powell (1834±1902) founded the Bureau of Ethnology, later renamed Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), supported, through grants from the US government, linguistic fieldwork, in the belief that by collecting vocabularies and texts from American Indian languages. 
• Edward Sapir (1884±1939) Boas's students, who further developed Boas's interest in grammatical systems and their potential implications for the study of culture, and trained a new generation of experts of American Indian languages.
• In the 1960s linguistic anthropology appeared Chomsky with his generative grammar that became popular in the USA, and two other important programs were also launched: the ethnography of communication and urban socio-linguistics. 
• In 1964, Hymes, in collaboration with Gumperz, produced a new paradigm in linguistic anthropology; one in which researchers were expected to study both knowledge and use of languages through ethnographic methods. 

  Sscnet.uncla.edu (n.f.) Recovered. October 6th 2012, from  http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/duranti/reprints/02ling_anth.pdf