Dr Yazan Doughan

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course introduces contemporary anthropological approaches to understanding socio-cultural life as what is precipitated through socially organized linguistic and broader semiotic processes. It considers how socio-cultural life is mediated by sign phenomena in all modalities of experience, and how sign systems are produced through socio-cultural processes. We will look at sign phenomena from two complimentary perspectives: how signs function semantically by looking at how signs (re)present their objects, and how they function pragmatically as appropriate and/or effective practice-in-context by drawing on and instantiating structural orders. The focus, however, will be on the pragmatics of language use, or how people act through language use. We will study the social life of language use by considering various artifacts, sites, institutionalizations, processes, and social networks. The aim throughout is to investigate the constitutive role of language and semiotic figuration in sociocultural power and in sociohistorical processes.

In the first half of the course, students will be introduced to some key concepts in semiotic and linguistic anthropology and their place in the long tradition of thinking about language in anthropology and related disciplines, such as linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, and sociology. These will include concepts such as sign, text and context, poetics, performativity, pragmatics and metapragmatics, linguistic differentiation, language ideologies, genres, addressivity, and publics. The second half of the course will be structured thematically whereby we consider how a focus on language use can illuminate various phenomena of interest to anthropological inquiry. These may include topics such as social interaction, nationalism and linguistic standardization, space and place, political communication, professional cultures, knowledge and expertise, selfhood, authority, and ethical life. By the end of the term students will be able to incorporate a semiotic and linguistic anthropological approach into their thinking and research.

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the WT.

The course has a reading week in week 6 of WT

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

Students will be given different sets of ethnographic materials to analyse using the concepts they have learned.

Feedback will be provided online, and in group tutorials.

• Duranti, Alessandro. 2014. The Anthropology of Intentions. Cambridge University Press.
• Enfield, N. J., and Jack Sidnell. 2017. The Concept of Action. New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gal, Susan. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Goffman, Erving. Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981e
• Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton University Press.
• Kroskrity, Paul V., ed. Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. School of American Research Press, 2000
• Lee, Benjamin. Talking heads. Duke University Press, 1997.
• Lucy, John A. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge University Press, 1992
• Mertz, Elizabeth & Parmentier, Richard J., eds. Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives. Academic Press, 1985.
• Silverstein, Michael. 2022. Language in Culture: Lectures on the Social Semiotics of Language. New edition. Cambridge ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.