LINGUIST List 15.2370

Tue Aug 24 2004

Books: Sociolinguistics: Bauman, Briggs

Editor for this issue: Neil Salmond <neillinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. jreid, Voices of Modernity: Bauman, Briggs

Title: Voices of Modernity
Subtitle: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality

Publication Year: 2004
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
		http://www.cup.org

Author: Richard Bauman, Indiana University
Author: Charles L. Briggs, UCSD

Paperback: ISBN: 0521008972, Pages: 374, Price: U.K. � 19.99

			
Abstract:

Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as
scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and
economics in the making of the modern world. This novel reading of
over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology,
folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and
representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers,
country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific
revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies,
privileged linguistic codes, and political concepts and practices
shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. Bauman and
Briggs demonstrate that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social
inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem
compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language
and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce
these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for
challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.


Contents

1. Introduction
2. Making language safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to
 John Lock
3. Antiquaries and philologists: the construction of modernity and its
 others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England
4. The critical foundations of national epic: Hugh Blair, the Ossian
 controversy, and the rhetoric of authenticity
5. Johann Gottfried Herder: language reform, das Volk, and the
 patriarchal state in eighteenth-century Germany
6. The Brothers Grimm: scientizing, textual production in the service
 of romantic nationalism
7. Henry Rowe school craft and the making of an American textual
 tradition
8. The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas, George Hunt,
 Native American texts and the construction of modernity
9. Conclusion.

Reviews

'I can think of no one who has covered the terrain that they have in
such breadth and depth ... one of the best accounts of language
ideology I have encountered.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute


Lingfield(s):	Sociolinguistics
		
Written In:	English (Language Code: ENG)


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 http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=11272.