Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 338 pp.

This volume is the first state-of-the-art collection of essays to emerge from the new and rapidly growing scholarly field of language ideology. It retains a great deal of the original character and even the structure-three or four chapters followed by a discussion-of the series of symposia from which it emerged: three AAA sessions, two issues of the journal Pragmatics, and a School of American Research seminar. The collaborative effort that went into its construction has yielded a uniformly strong volume that lays out a theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically grounded research agenda for addressing the relationship between social forms and forms of talk. Variability and contestation are analyzed on many levels, from the microinteractional to the macropolitical, in the intersection between ideologies of language and other conceptual systems concerning identity, power, aesthetics, morality, and forms of knowledge.

In the interest of examining the "cultural and historical specificity of construals of language, not to distinguish ideology of language from ideology in other domains of human activity" (p. 4), Woolard's introduction to the volume takes up the matter of ideology as a domain of inquiry, its explanatory utility and the problems associated with its use, and the literatures on which the contributors to the volume draw. This essay, and the commentaries that follow each of the three sections into which the book is divided, are by themselves worth the price of the volume.

Part I, "Scope and Force of Dominant Conceptions of Language," focuses on the "exportation" of cultural models from one domain of human communicative activity to another. Ritual sites, as Silverman's commentary notes, allow us to...