Language and Culture

Language and Culture. David L. Shaul and N. Louanna Furbee. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. 305 pp.     

Discourse-Centered Approach to Language and Culture

The Sapir- Whorf hypothesis, as usually formulated, searches for isomorphisms between grammar and culture and views language as either providing the means for thought and perception, or, in its stronger form, conditioning thought, perception, and world view. In this article I consider discourse to be the concrete expression of language-culture relationships. It is discourse that creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in verbally artistic and playful discourse, such as poetry, magic, verbal dueling, and political rhetoric, that the resources provided by grammar, as well as cultural meanings and symbols, are activated to their fullest potential and the essence of language-culture relationships becomes salient.     

Ape Consciousness-Human Consciousness: A Perspective Informed by Language and Culture

Animal consciousness has long been assumed to be a nonviablearena of investigation. At best, it was thought that any indicationsof such consciousness, should it exist, would not be interpretableby our species. Recent work in the field of language competencieswith bonobos has laid this conception open to serious challenge.This paper reviews this work and the case it makes for our impendingcapacity to tap the consciousness of a uniquely enculturatedgroup of bonobos who are capable of comprehending human speechand employing a lexical communication system.     

The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The Politics of Culture and Identity

The Irish Language in Northern Ireland: The Politics of Culture and Identity. Camille C. O'Reilly. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.213 pp.     

Language and Culture on the North Coast of New Guinea

Statistical analysis of variability in assemblages of material culture obtained at different villages on the North Coast of New Guinea indicates that similarities and differences among these assemblages are most strongly associated with geographic propinquity, irrespective of linguistic affinities. When assemblage similarity is adjusted for the effect of distance, diversity in material culture appears unrelated to the linguistic relationships of these communities. This study shows that similarity in material culture assemblages can mask marked heterogeneity in language. Language, however, is frequently used to index people in Melanesia on the assumption that language is a useful key to their other human characteristics. This analysis does not lend support to this common practice, and it has implications for how prehistoric cultural complexes in Melanesia are defined and interpreted.