The Boundaries

of Languages
and Disciplines:
How Ideologies
Construct
BY SUSAN GAL AND
Difference JUDITH T. IRVINE

Introduction

I N nineteenth-century Europe, the rise of interest in exotic

languages as well as local dialects coincided with colonial
expansion and the creation of a European regime of
nation-states. Through the dichotomizing discourses of orien-
talism, Europe created itself in opposition to a broadly defined
"East" that often included not only Asia but also Africa. As
Said (1978), Olender (1992), Mudimbe (1988), and others have
pointed out, scholars of language and ideas about linguistic
differences played a significant part in the development of
such categories of identity. Arguments about language were
central in producing and buttressing European claims to
difference from the rest of the world, and claims to the
superiority of the metropolitan bourgeoisie over "backward"
or "primitive" others, whether they were residents of other
continents, other provinces, or other social classes.
Language could be central to these arguments because by
the mid-nineteenth century language came to be seen as
crucially unaffected by human will, individual intent, or the

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 62, No.4 (Winter 1995)

968 SOCIAL RESEARCH

particularities of social life (Formigari, 1985; Taylor, 1990).

Although Saussure's argument for a "science of language" that
would be divorced from the everyday speech of its speakers is
today the most familiar of these formulations, earlier
approaches that differed sharply in other ways nevertheless
shared this view of language's independence. To them,
languages were natural objects, consequences of spiritual or
even biological differences between populations.
August Schleicher was expressing a quite general naturalism
when he noted that "languages are organisms of nature; they
have never been directed by the will of man" (1869, pp.
20—21).' A corollary was that identifying languages was the
same as identifying nations: "From the relations of separate
languages, or groups of languages, to one another, we may
discover the original and more or less intimate affinity of the
nations themselves . . . " (Lepsius, 1863, p. 24). Like many
other scholars of his time, Lepsius was asserting the now
familiar Western idea that links one culture with one language,
and maintains that the culture of a community is thus best
studied through its language. Moreover, the equation of one
language with one culture was endowed with political
significance: a linguistically united community ("nation"),
when tied to a territory, could claim to deserve a state of its
own. In effect, exactly because linguistic differences were seen
to be independent of human social intention, they could serve
as an apparently neutral warrant for political claims to
territory and sovereignty.
There is a growing awareness among linguists, historians,
and anthropologists that our conceptual tools for understand-
ing linguistic differences still derive from this massive scholarly
attempt to create the political differentiation of Europe. What
is less often remarked is that the intellectual justification of
today's disciplinary division of scholarly work on language
derives from the same source. For example, within the social
sciences, the persistent use of language as a synecdoche for
community relies unquestioningly on the supposedly natural
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 969

correlation of one language with one culture. As a result, social

scientists too often continue to rely on linguistics to provide
language categories that will delimit social groups for purposes
of analysis. Although it is now a commonplace that social
categories—including nations, ethnic groups, races, genders,
classes—are in part constructed and reproduced through
symbolic devices and everyday practices that create boundaries
between them,^ this analysis is only rarely extended to
language. Despite a generation of sociolinguistic work that has
persistently provided evidence to the contrary, linguistic
differentiation—the formation of languages and dialects—is
still often regarded as an a social process. By some it is seen as
strictly a consequence of events internal to language (drift,
pattern pressure, analogy); by others as the consequence of the
physical isolation of populations that supposedly produces
self-evident linguistic boundaries. These are then taken as
unproblematic indicators of social boundaries.^
Similarly, in the study of language, it was precisely the
argument that languages are independent of social particulars
and human will that allowed mid-nineteenth-century scholars
to argue for a separate science of language (Crowley, 1990).
Recent discussions that rehearse the justification for an
"autonomous linguistics" self-consciously reach back to nine-
teenth-century forebears and repeat this argument (New-
meyer, 1988). Significantly, neither approach encourages an
investigation of the social context of language use or of the
variable relationship between languages and groups—between
linguistic practices and social formations. Both evade that
question by assuming its answer is already known (that is, that
each group has one language). Thus, current disciplinary
boundaries between linguistic studies and social sciences were
not only produced in concert with the nineteenth-century
linguistic ideology of European nation-states, but implicitly
continue to support and thus reproduce that ideology in
much current intellectual practice.
Thirty years ago. Dell Hymes (1967a, 1967b) drew attention
970 SOCIAL RESEARCH

to this problem in studies of language: the reliance on an

empirically inadequate assumption that each language is linked
to one culture, and its consequence—the relative neglect, by
sociologists, sociocultural anthropologists, and linguists, of
linguistic variation, multilingualism, and the patterned social
functions of speech.* Hymes also noted that the quite different
methodological commitments of linguists and social scientists
kept each from noticing the high level of systematicity in the
situated, culturally-defined, and purposeful use of diverse
speech forms within a single social group. Along with others,
and in part in response to these assessments, Hymes and John
Gumperz helped spur a program of research that focused
exactly on the neglected problem of the social embeddedness
of language (Gumperz and Hymes, 1964, 1972).
Our own work builds on the tradition of this earlier
generation of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists.
First, we have been investigating the ways in which boundaries
between languages and dialects are socially constructed, and
the cultural processes by which linguistic units come to be
linked to social units. Second, we argue that some of the same
processes operating in the creation of linguistic boundaries are
also evident in the construction of disciplinary boundaries.
Two aspects of our approach move beyond classical sociolin-
guistics and enable us to address, at the same time, both of
these forms of boundary-making. First, we focus not on the
general social embeddedness of language, but on the construc-
tion of linguistic contrast and difference. This we argue,
cannot be understood without a study of the ideas about social
and linguistic difference held by socially-positioned speakers.
Thus, our perspective directs attention to the ideological
aspects of linguistic differentiation: the ideas with which
participants frame their understanding of linguistic varieties
and the differences among them, and map those understand-
ings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to
them. With Silverstein (1979), Woolard and Schieffelin (1994),
and others, we call these conceptual organizations ideologies
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 971

because they are suffused with the political and moral issues
pervading the particular sociolinguistic field, and because they
are subject to the interests of their bearers' social position.
Second, we explicitly include, within a single conceptual
framework, not only the linguistic ideologies of the immediate
speakers and participants in a sociolinguistic field, but also the
ideologies of other observers, namely, the linguists, philolo-
gists, ethnographers, missionaries, and other scholars who
have historically described and mapped the boundaries of
languages and peoples. These scholarly ideologies about
linguistic differentiation, we argue, have long continued to rely
on the equation of one language with one culture. They have
thereby made the division between hnguistics and social
science a seemingly natural one, based on the apparent fixity
and self-evidence of the split between language and social life
as distinct, if correlatable, objects of inquiry. Furthermore, we
suggest that scholarly ideologies about linguistic differentiation
are also inscribed and reproduced in the contrasting practices
through which different disciplines claim access to specialized
knowledge. The practices at issue here are those language-
based methodologies—such as ethnography, archival research,
interviews, elicitation, or intuitive introspection—that enable
the differing truth-claims of scholarly disciplines. Thus, in
addition to shaping scholarly work, these practices are also
boundary-making devices, implicated in ideologies that high-
light disciplinary differentiation in situations of scholarly
competition for institutional or public approbation, legitima-
tion, and support.
In the rest of this paper we first outline our approach to
linguistic differentiation and language ideology, specifying
three semiotic processes through which such ideologies work.
Then we illustrate the relevance of these processes for the
construction of disciplinary boundaries by presenting three
historical examples. The first two focus on the effects of
linguistic ideology on the objects of scholarship. We trace the
way linguists, missionaries, and other trained observers
972 SOCIAL RESEARCH

demarcated languages and peoples in West Africa and

Southeastern Europe a century or more ago, paying particular
attention to the ways their descriptions both relied on and
reproduced the boundaries between linguistic studies and
those of social life which they took for granted.^ The structural
parallels in these two cases emerge despite the enormous
differences in world region, historical period, and cultural
context. The final example takes up the case of ethnography
and other methods in the recent past of anthropology. Here,
the focus is on the practices of scholarship: the way in which a
sdcial science methodology, implicitly based on an ideology of
language, contributes to defining disciplinary boundaries. We
cannot provide a full historical and institutional account of
changing views of such methodologies even within a single
discipline. But our approach to linguistic ideologies of
differentiation does allow us to suggest some of the semiotic
processes through which such linguistic ideologies have shaped
disciplinary boundaries among scholars who study aspects of
language, speech, and texts.

Semiotic Processes in Ideologies of Linguistic Differentiation

Across a wide range of ethnographic and historical

examples, we find striking similarities in the ways ideologies
"recognize" (or misrecognize [Bourdieu, 1977]) difference
among linguistic practices—how they locate, interpret, and
rationalize sociolinguistic complexity, identifying linguistic
varieties with "typical" persons and activities and accounting
for the differentiations among them. We have defined three
semiotic processes by which this works: iconicity, recursiveness,
and erasure.
Before offering more specific discussions of what these three
processes are, let us note that all of them concern the way
people conceive of links between linguistic forms and social
phenomena. Those conceptions can best be explicated by a
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 973

semiotic approach that distinguishes several kinds of sign

relationships, including (as Peirce long ago suggested) th.e
iconic, the indexical, and the symbolic. It has become a
commonplace in sociolinguistics that linguistic forms, includ-
ing whole languages, can be indexes of social groups. As part
of everyday behavior, the use of a linguistic form can become a
pointer to (index of) speakers' social identities, as well as of the
typical activities of those speakers. But speakers (and hearers)
often notice, rationalize, and justify such linguistic indices,
thereby creating linguistic ideologies that purport to explain
the source and meaning of the linguistic differences. To put
this another way, linguistic features are seen as refiecting and
expressing broader cultural images of people and activities.
Participants' ideologies about language locate linguistic phe-
nomena as part of, and as evidence for, what they believe to be
systematic behavioral, aesthetic, affective, and moral contrasts
among the social groups indexed. That is, speakers have, and
act in relation to, ideologically-constructed representations of
linguistic practices. In these ideological constructions, indexical
relationships become the ground on which other sign
relationships are built.
The three semiotic processes we have identified are, thus,
the means by which people construct ideological representa-
tions of differences in linguistic practices. More particularly:
Iconicity involves a transformation of the sign relationship
between linguistic practices, features, or varieties and the social
images with which they are linked. Linguistic practices that
index social groups or activities appear to be iconic representa-
tions of them—as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or
displayed a social group's inherent nature or essence (Irvine,
1989). This process entails the attribution of necessity to a
connection (between linguistic features and social groups) that
may be only historical, contingent, or conventional. The
implication of necessity is reinforced by the iconicity of the
ideological representation. By picking out qualities supposedly
shared by the social image and the linguistic image, the
974 SOCIAL RESEARCH

ideological representation (itself a sign) binds them together in

a linkage that appears to be inherent.
Recursiveness involves the projection of an opposition, salient
at some level of relationship, onto some other level. For
example, intragroup oppositions might be projected outward
onto intergroup relations, or vice versa. Thus, the dichotomiz-
ing and partitioning process that was involved in some
understood opposition (between groups or between linguistic
varieties) recurs at other levels, either creating subcategories
on each side of a contrast or creating supercategories that
include both sides but oppose them to something else.
Reminiscent of fractals in geometry, and of the structures of
segmentary kinship systems (as well as other phenomena
involving segmentation^), the myriad oppositions that can
create identity may be reproduced repeatedly, either within
each side of a dichotomy or outside it. When such oppositions
are reproduced within a single person, we are talking not
about identities, but about oppositions between activities or
roles associated with prototypical social persons. In any case,
the oppositions do not define fixed or stable social groups. Nor
can the mimesis they suggest be more than partial. Rather,
they provide actors with the discursive or cultural resources to
claim and thus attempt to create shifting "communities,"
identities, and selves, at different levels of contrast, within a
cultural field.
Erasure is the process in which ideology, in simplifying the
field of linguistic practices, renders some persons or activities
or sociolinguistic phenomena invisible. Facts that are inconsis-
tent with the ideological scheme may go unnoticed or get
explained away. So, for example, a social group, or a language,
may be imagined as homogeneous, its internal variation
disregarded. Because a linguistic ideology is a totalizing vision,
elements that do not fit its interpretive structure—that cannot
be seen to fit—must either be ignored or be transformed.
Erasure in ideological representation does not necessarily
mean, however, actual eradication of the awkward element.
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 975

whose very existence may be unobserved or unattended. It is

probably only when the "problematic" element is seen as fitting
some alternative, threatening picture that the semiotic process
involved in erasure might translate into some kind of practical
action to remove the threat.
By focusing on linguistic differences, we intend to draw
attention to some semiotic properties of those processes of
identity formation that depend on defining the self as against
some imagined "other." This is a familiar kind of process, one
by now well known in the social sciences: the "other," or simply
the other side of the contrast, is often essentialized and
imagined as homogeneous. The imagery involved in this
essentializing process includes, we suggest, linguistic practices
and images of such practices—in which the linguistic behaviors
of others are simplified and are seen as if deriving from those
persons' essences, rather than from historical accident. Such
representations may serve to interpret linguistic differences
that have arisen through drift or longterm separation; but they
may also serve to generate linguistic differences or exaggerate
and increase already existing differentiation.
The most effective means of explicating these processes is to
present examples of their operation. We have written
elsewhere about the ways in which the immediate participants
in a sociolinguistic field produce and maintain linguistic
differentiation. Here, we offer two thumb-nail sketches before
moving to an analysis of the same processes among scholars
and other observers.
Our first example comes from a rural Wolof village in
Senegal (Irvine, 1985, 1990; Irvine and Gal, 1994).^ There, an
ideology of language represented linguistic differences as
manifestations of social rank. Of the many social categories on
the Wolof scene, the ideology picked out two, "nobles" and
"griots" (praise-singers), as typifying high and low rank where
talk is concerned. Supposedly possessing very different
temperaments and prototypical levels of affectivity, nobles and
griots were contrasted on multiple cultural dimensions.
976 SOCIAL RESEARCH

including styles of speaking. Nobles were expected to speak in

a laconic, controlled style that was congruent with their flat,
restrained emotionality; griots were expected to show volatile,
even frenetic affect, and it was appropriate for them to speak
fast, with high pitch and great expressivity.^ Thus, categories
of people were linked iconically to the their styles of speech,
which were seen as displays of their respective temperamental
essences. The noble style and the griot style were not, however,
a stable property of contrasting groups, but were rather
reproduced recursively whenever two interlocutors engaged in
establishing rank differences between each other—even differ-
ences within the same overall social category. Although
differences within the griot and noble ranks were important
and could be enacted through subtle deployments of the two
speech styles, tbe ideology itself tended to deny such
differences and to ignore the existence of other social
categories. Thus, we argue, the linguistic differentiation was a
central part of a much larger ideological system that organized
rank and motivated the reproduction of the linguistic
differences.
Our second sketch concerns a bilingual (German-Hungar-
ian) village in southern Hungary, where linguistic resources
were organized in a structurally parallel way, despite the
cultural, historical, and linguistic differences between the two
cases (Gal, 1993, 1994; Irvine and Gal, 1994). Most salient at
least until World War II, what is still surviving are two
categories of families in town: craftsmen and farmers.
Although not hierarchically ordered, a local ideology figured
these two categories as contrasting in everything from clothing,
to house styles, to modes of entertainment, and work routine.
Perhaps most important in marking the distinction were the
named styles of German considered characteristic of each
group. In their address forms, phonological variants, and
syntax, as in everything else, the craftsmen were devoted to an
aesthetic of elaboration, ornament, and display. Tbe farmers,
in contrast, practiced restraint, self-control, and a self-
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 977

conscious plainness in speech as in other aspects of life. Thus,

the linguistic varieties were iconic of the broader cultural
distinctions between the two groups and motivated divergent
linguistic change in the town. The symbolic opposition of
farmer/craftsman was itself recursively projected onto individ-
uals and situations within each group in the village. Craftsmen,
for example, when celebrating in the local wine cellar with
their farmer friends, could routinely shift their style of
speaking and sound like farmers. Thus, the opposition became
one between selves in situations, rather than one between
groups. Finally, the local dichotomy of farmer/craftsmen
effectively erased the significant differences of wealth and
power within each category.
These brief sketches are meant merely to illustrate the
principles and provide a glimpse of the way the immediate
participants in a sociolinguistic field produce linguistic
differentiation through their linguistic ideologies. Our broader
focus in the present paper, however, is on scholars. We argue
that their ideologies of language operate through the same
semiotic processes. In the first two cases, we show the way such
ideologies have shaped scholars' mapping and description of
linguistic differences; in the third, the way they have shaped
methodological practices. Together, these effects have contrib-
uted, over the last century or more, to the construction of
boundaries among the disciplines that deal with language.

Linguistic Descriptions of Senegalese Languages

Our first example concerns the work of European linguists

and ethnographers in the nineteenth century who described
the languages of Senegal—three languages in particular: Fula,
Wolof, and Sereer. This "Senegal group" of related lan-
guages'° north of the Gambia River formed, at that time, a
complex regional system in which linguistic repertoires were
bound up with political and religious relationships. Our
978 SOCIAL RESEARCH

concern is with what European observers made of this situation

and how their own ideologies, interacting with Africans',
influenced the grammars and dictionaries they produced.
While the three languages have different geographical
distributions (with Fula most concentrated in the northeast and
Sereer most concentrated in the south), they do not sort out
into neatly discrete territories. Instead, they correspond more
clearly with political and religious hierarchies. Fula has the
strongest connection with Islamic orthodoxy, because it was
associated with the region's first converts to Islam in the
eleventh century and with the strongest proponents of the late
eighteenth-century Muslim revival. Sereer, in contrast, is most
associated with resistance to Islam and the preservation of
pre-Islamic ritual practices. As a French missionary remarked
in 1873, "the marabouts [Muslim clerics] have invented this false
adage: 'whoever speaks Sereer cannot enter heaven'" (Lam-
oise, 1873, p. vii).
On the political side, Wolof was clearly dominant in the
coastal kingdoms where the French first established outposts.
These kingdoms were former provinces of an earlier state, the
Empire of Joloff, where Wolof had been the language of
political administration. Even Joloff's southern dependencies,
where much of the population used Sereer as a language of the
home, used Wolof lexicon for political offices and Wolof
language for the conduct of high-level political relations. Thus,
many Sereer-speakers in the south were (and are) bilingual in
Wolof, while Wolof-speakers further north resist acquiring
Sereer, which they (at least some Wolof) associate with
lt)W-ranking, heathen peasants.
European observers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century
interpreted this regional situation in terms of an imagined
history of racial relations and conquests. Assuming that a
language ought to have a distinct territory and nation (or
ethnic group) associated with it—as European nationalists of
the time maintained —they interpreted other kinds of situa-
tions as "mixtures" deriving from migration and conquest.
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 979

Assuming, too, that black Africans were essentially primitive

and simple-minded, knowing no social organization more
complex than the family group, they explained African social
hierarchy, multilingualism, and conversions to Islam in terms
of conquering races from the north, who supposedly brought
Islam, the state, and some admixture of Caucasian blood and
language to the region by force of arms and intellectual
superiority. Fula-speakers were supposed to be "higher" in
race and intelligence and to have brought their "superior"
religion, hierarchical social organization, and language to bear
upon the Wolof, who in turn infiuenced the "simple" Sereer.''
This putative hierarchy of racial essences and conquest
supposedly explained not only multilingualism, but also the
specific characteristics and relationships of the three lan-
guages. So, generations of linguists refused to see Fula as
genetically related to Wolof and Sereer at all, seeking its kin
among Semitic languages instead. And Fula's hnguistic
characteristics, such as its syllable structure and its noun
classification system, were taken, by European linguists such as
de Guiraudon (1894) and Tautain (1885), as emblems of its
speakers' "delicacy" and "intelligence" as compared to speakers
of Wolof, a language called "less supple, less handy" than Fula
and signalling less intelligent speakers. Meanwhile, Sereer was
the language of primitive simplicity.
To represent Sereer, with its complex morphology, as
"simple" compared to Wolof seems to us something of an
uphill battle. It required selective attention, regularizing of
grammatical structures, and interpreting complexities and
variations as "interference." Accordingly, the author of the
first substantial grammar of Sereer, Father Lamoise, suggested
that if Sereer now deviated from its original purity and
simplicity—the language God had placed among these simple
people—the deviations were due to "error and vice": either the
errors of fetishism which Sereers had fallen into or the vicious
infiuence of Islam and its Wolof perpetrators. His task in
980 SOCIAL RESEARCH

describing Sereer was to retrieve as much of the pure language

as possible (and, by implication, to purge it of error).
Thus, the Europeans who described these Senegalese
languages in the nineteenth century saw their differentiation
as iconically representing differences in mentality, history, and
social organization among their speakers. Moreover, the
hierarchical relationships thought to obtain between Europe-
ans and Africans—relationships of white to black, complex to
simple, dominant to subordinate —were (recursively) replicated
in European representations of linguistic relationships within
the Senegal group. Those linguistic features and varieties that
could not be made to fit such a model were erased from the
picture.
It is this last point we would like to emphasize particularly.
Descriptions of these languages were motivated by notions of
their distinctness. Differences between them were highlighted;
variation and overlap were erased. Varieties that had to be
called "mixed" were never further described at all, and
registers incorporating lexicon deemed "borrowed" from the
other language were stripped away. Lamoise's descriptions of
Sereer, and his text citations, remove (among other things)
much of the political discourse and most of the lexicon
identified with Wolof.'^ Similarly, descriptions of Wolof
tended to purge those registers connected with non-Islamic
ritual (such as the language of local circumcision ceremonies),
whose discourse included expressions identified as "Sereer."
Each language was represented in an impoverished way to
differentiate it from the other and accord it with an ideology
about its essence.
Thus, the role of the linguist was to find languages, each of
which could then be assigned or assumed to belong to a single
social group. As research became increasingly specialized, the
description of the customs and beliefs of the group, once so
identified, would be tbe work of another investigator, whose
job would be based on the units the linguist had mapped.
Assertions about the social processes of conquest, migration.
 BOUNDARIES OE LANGUAGES 981

and other kinds of group contact would be "read off" from

linguistic categories separately established.

Contests Over Macedonian

For our second example, we turn to southeastern Europe

and consider attempts to identify and standardize speech
varieties in Macedonia.'^ Macedonia was never the colony of
any European state. Nevertheless, as in the Senegalese colonial
situation discussed above, nineteenth-century descriptions of
the languages and peoples of Macedonia were crucially
affected by the ways in which the linguistic ideologies of
western European observers interacted with the quite different
ideologies and communicative practices of speakers in Mace-
donia.''' This clash of ideologies was further exacerbated
during the decline of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the
nineteenth century, when each of Macedonia's neighbors-
Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, and Greece—made serious claims to
parts of the same territory, always partly on linguistic grounds.
These claims relied for their persuasiveness on the three
semiotic processes we have proposed.
In the symbolic geography of nineteenth-century Europe,
western European observers saw the southeast of the continent
through the lens of a dichotomizing, recursive orientalism. On
the one hand, the Balkan region was considered quintessen-
tially European, indeed home of the heroic Christian
defenders of the continent against the incursions of Islam
during Ottoman campaigns of earlier centuries. But this
distinction between east and west could be deployed again and
projected onto Europe itself, thereby producing an orient
within. So the southeast of the continent, exactly because it was
conquered for centuries by the Ottomans, came to be seen as
oriental, undeveloped, disorganized, unchanging: the least
European part of Europe, lacking the qualities metropolitan
Europe assigned itself. By the early twentieth century, the term
"Balkan" meant primitive, barbarian, and, especially, subject to
982 SOCIAL RESEARCH

political disintegration. And by recursive logic, now applied to

the southeastern region itself, Macedonia—one of the last
provinces to be freed from Turkish rule (1912-1913)—was
seen as the Balkans of the Balkans.'^
Despite recent attention to this symbolic geography (Bakic-
Hayden and Hayden, 1992; Todorova, 1994), analysts have
not noticed the way in which these images were buttressed by
the linguistic ideologies through which metropolitan Europe-
ans viewed Macedonian language practices. By western
European expectations that one language would be linked to
one culture and people, Macedonia appeared doubly anoma-
lous: it not only had astonishing linguistic diversity, but the
diversity failed to correspond in expected ways to ethnic
boundaries. Travellers noted the simultaneous use of up to ten
linguistic varieties in a single marketplace (Brailsford, 1906, p.
85; Garnett, 1904, pp. 234-35).'*^ But they also noted that
families who were officially Greek often sent one son to a
Bulgarian school, another to a Greek School, a third to a
Rumanian school, a fourth to a Serbian school, considering
each child, therefore, as having a different religion, language,
and nationality (Brailsford, 1906, p. 102; Moore, 1906, p. 147).
Thus, the ethnic profusion and confusion predicated of the
region as a whole were perceived to be recursively reproduced
within individual families residing there. Moreover, this
reported heterogeneity also had implications for the moral
reputation of Macedonians, who, therefore, were seen as
untrustworthy. If language and political identity are seen to be
inherently, essentially linked, than multilingualism and shift-
ing language use must be an icon of equally shiftable,
therefore shallow, political allegiances and unreliable moral
commitments.
These accounts illustrate the workings of recursiveness and
iconicity in the linguistic ideology through which western
Europeans saw Macedonia. Erasure was also evident: erased in
many such accounts were the unfamiliar yet systematic ways
inhabitants of Macedonia understood categories of language
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 983

and identity such as "Greek" or "Turkish" or "Bulgarian" or

"Macedonian." For instance, at the start of the nineteenth
century "Greek" was not only a religious (Greek Orthodox)
and linguistic category, but also indicated membership in a
multiethnic, urban, merchant class (Stoianovich, 1960). Due in
part to the Ottoman millet (nationality) system, Moslems
counted as "Turks" no matter what language they spoke, and
the designation "Bulgarian" meant less a linguistic or national
category than a Christian, rural, lower class subject of Ottoman
rule. What these cross-cutting patterns of usage suggest is that
although there was systematicity, there were no "total"
categories in early nineteenth-century Macedonia that were
linked indissolubly to language (Brown, 1995).
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, when
national movements within the region struggled with each
other to subvert and simplify these complexities, the local
dialect situation provided fertile ground for controversy. A
dialect continuum in South Slavic runs from Serbia to Bulgaria
through Macedonia. In one part of this region, corresponding
roughly to what is today the political border between Serbia
and Bulgaria, a bundle of significant isoglosses permits Serbian
and Bulgarian to emerge as linguistically distinct from one
another. Further south, however, isoglosses fan out. So, while
the dialectological transition from Serbia to Bulgaria in the
north is relatively rapid, that from Serbia to Bulgaria through
Macedonia (in the south) is gradual. Varieties located in
Macedonia share more lexical and phonological features with
Serbian than with Bulgarian varieties, but in morphology they
resemble Bulgarian varieties more than Serbian. For instance,
Serbo-Groatian retains much of the complex declensional
system of Common Slavic, but the Eastern Balkan Slavic
dialects, including those in what is now Bulgaria and
Macedonia, have lost the infiections, replacing case marking
with prepositions and syntactic features (Lunt, 1984; Fried-
man, 1975).
Advocates of Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek national
984 SOCIAL RESEARCH

independence and expansion called on linguistic descriptions

to prove the existence of social boundaries, thereby authorizing
claims to popular loyalty, in their requests for Great Power
help to gain more territory. Once again, our semiotic processes
were at work in these linguistic debates. In Serbian and
Bulgarian arguments, "deep" linguistic relationship was the
key, identified by selecting some linguistic features and
ignoring (or explaining away) others. Thus, Bulgarian linguists
emphasized the Macedonian dialects' relatively analytic mor-
phology, which resembled literary Bulgarian, to argue for the
languages' deep kinship; they explained phonological differ-
ences as superficial "new developments." Social relations of
"closeness" and "distance" were projected iconically from
presumed or claimed "closeness" of linguistic relations and
used to justify political unity, while denying the existence of
the Macedonian language. All sides erased from their
descriptions both widespread multilingualism and messy
dialect chains, or devalued their importance.
But the process of erasure was most evident in Greek
arguments and policies. Not only did late nineteenth-century
Greek maps show great areas of Greek speakers in Macedonia
by counting the use of "commercial language" rather than
mother tongue (Wilkinson, 1951), but after World War 1, the
existence of Slavic speakers and Slavic forms in Greece was
denied altogether. Official policy prohibited mention of them;
census questions asked only whether individuals spoke Greek.
Village names and family names were forcibly changed in the
1950s, and Slavic speaking villagers were coerced to take
"language oaths" promising never to speak Slavic again
(Karakasidou, 1993).
But the most significant change in the linguistic economy of
the region was the official creation of literary Macedonian in
1944 within the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Friedman,
1975, 1985, 1993). The dialectal base for literary Macedonian,
and the official borrowing sources, were chosen—by linguists
engaged in encouraging its development—at least in part to
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 985

enhance differentiation from neighboring languages, iconi-

cally signalling the social difference of Macedonians. This
complex linguistic scene, and the nationalist arguments within
it, reveal all three semiotic processes we have discussed and
show them to operate in a number of different ways. The
intensity of contestation over the representation of Mace-
donian speech forms is hardly surprising, given that misrecog-
nition of the source of linguistic differences made them a
powerful legitimator of political action.
The example of the debates surrounding Macedonian also
makes clear the way in which social scientists (as well as
politicians) relied on linguistics to provide language categories
that would then be assumed to delimit social groups. Linguists,
in turn, defined their object of study as independent of social
life and for that very reason a reliable, supposedly neutral
indicator of ethnic group membership.

Ethnographic Eieldwork and Disciplinary Boundaries

The previous examples have focused on the way observers'

ideologies defined the object of study of linguistics and
ethnology—the material claimed to be the particular area of
expertise of each—by producing the appearance that language
is separate from questions of social process. In this way, the
linguistic ideology we have described has been significant in
constructing the boundary between linguistics and social
inquiry. The processes of iconicity, recursiveness, and erasure,
operating as part of scholarly ideologies, have created the
impression that we already know how language is related to
social life. They have therefore, obviated questions that would
link the two kinds of inquiry, questions about the varying ways
in which the boundaries of languages may be constructed, or
the diverse ways in which named languages and unnamed
varieties are linked to social groups.
Our final example shifts the focus away from the effects of
986 SOCIAL RESEARCH

linguistic ideologies on the conceptual objects produced by

scholarly work to the methodologies or practices of scholarly
disciplines. We suggest that these methodologies are often
linked to their practitioners through linguistic ideologies that
construct difference. Thus, they provide another way of
making boundaries between disciplines. In the human sci-
ences, ideologies of language are implicated in the methodol-
ogies by which scholars claim special means of knowing their
objects of study. For example, archival research, textual
analysis, elicitation, introspection, interview, ethnography all
involve different uses of language and different assumptions
about the "optimal" means of communication between
investigator and subject/informant.^^ The brief example of
ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation) in anthropol-
ogy will illustrate the way in which the three semiotic processes
we have outlined form part of an ideology that links
anthropology and anthropologists to the task of fieldwork—
which, in that ideology, is implicitly viewed as a form of
linguistic practice—and then produces the boundaries of
anthropology that separate it from other, related disciplines. It
is important to note that we could have chosen some other
scholarly methodology as an example.'^ We do not aim to
question the importance of ethnographic fieldwork as a
sensitive method for producing knowledge about culturally
different practices. We merely want to observe the way it has
been involved with the production of disciplinary boundaries
in part through pervasive assumptions about language.
The thoroughgoing critique of ethnography that has
emerged in the last decade and a half has focused most
intensely on the textual practices and genre conventions of
ethnographic writing. Anthropologists as well as historians of
anthropology have diagnosed a crisis in ethnographic repre-
sentation, derived in part from a more general epistemological
insecurity in the social sciences. Both were brought on as much
by a changing world political economy in which the traditional
subjects of social science would no longer sit still for their
 BOUNDARIES OE LANGUAGES 987

portraits as by new theories of representation. Declaring the

end of an era of ethnographic realism, these critiques noted a
renewed refiexivity and a questioning of previously unexam-
ined concepts such as empathy, rapport, and subjectivity, along
with a new focus on the power-laden contexts in which
fieldwork was actually done. Historical studies of ethnographic
writing observed that the classic, realist, modernist mode that
had developed between 1900 and 1960 was at least in part an
effort to constitute the fiedgling discipline of anthropology by
distinguishing it from professional rivals: other observers of
the "exotic," such as missionaries, travellers, administrators,
and journalists, who could often claim at least as much
expertise about the colonial populations that were the usual
subjects of anthropological description.'^
While concern with textual practices has taken center stage
in the recent discussions of ethnography, we find it useful to
focus more broadly on the entire range of ways that the task of
fieldwork has been understood as a particular form of
linguistic practice. Historically, there has been a general trend
in anthropology from reliance on more mediated forms of
evidence—involving the use of interpreters, guides, and
missionaries who send reports or fill out questionnaires—to
less mediated forms. Simultaneously, one can trace a shift from
images of fieldwork that figure it as a collection, gathering,
survey, observation, or documentation of objects and texts to
descriptive metaphors that rely on some image of a face-to-face
linguistic encounter: dialogue, conversation, instruction, judg-
ment, confession, interrogation, initiation, interaction, friend-
ship.^° In concert with this ideal of unmediated communica-
tion, expectations about the linguistic knowledge of the
fieldworker have escalated, so that linguistic proficiency now
affects the "authenticity" or credibility that can be achieved by
the worker or the account.^'
As early as 1913, W. H. R. Rivers recast the distinction
between "survey" and "intensive study" in linguistic terms:
"language is our only key to the correct and complete
988 SOCIAL RESEARCH

understanding of the life and thought of a people" (Stocking,

1983, p. 90) and focused on problems of exact translation.
Boas (1911) emphasized the crucial role of language as both
medium of communication and evidence in its own right. Even
earlier, anthropologists explicitly preferred data from mission-
aries who, in contrast to travellers, could be trusted to have
mastered the local language. Malinowski's famous skills as a
polyglot went a long way toward maintaining his mythic
ethnographic authority. His success in establishing a norm for
fieldwork that included long-term, multi-year residence in the
target community made on-going interaction in everyday life
and conversational exchange in the native language of the
community an indispensable feature of ethnographic field-
work (Stocking, 1983). Indeed, Malinowski suggested that an
ethnographer should aim to render "the verbal contour of
native thought as precisely as possible" (1922, p. 3) by noting
speakers' comments in the native language. Some decades
later, even such unorthodox fieldworkers as Margaret Mead,
while arguing that fluency was unnecessary and the ability to
"use" a language was sufficient, nevertheless accepted Boas's
and Malinowski's strictures against the mediation of interpret-
ers (Clifford, 1988, pp. 30-31).
Note that the focus of interest was most often on a single
native vernacular and its encoding of cultural categories and
concepts. One of the reasons for dispensing with contact
languages, trade languages, and local languages of widespread
use was that they were not seen as part of the cultural
repertoires by which the studied populations communicated
and expressed their culture. Such languages were often known
to be used within the group as well as with neighboring
groups, nevertheless, they were assumed to be unauthentic
accretions to the group's single native language. Even attempts
to reform anthropology by more rigorous attention to the
elicitation of semantic categories in fieldwork, such as the "new
ethnography" movement of the 1960s and 1970s, failed to
question this assumption. As Cohn has noted in a review of
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 989

anthropology's history, "An indigenous language was not

merely something which anthropologists had to learn, just as
historians needed to know Latin or Greek to read texts . . .
[rather] it bound their objects of study to the assumption of
one language, one culture" (1981, p. 233).
We review these well known developments only to pick out a
single feature. What is most important for our purposes here is
that fieldwork came to be seen as requiring a specific kind of
linguistic practice, which thus became an inherent part—and
sign—of the anthropological enterprise.^^ Initially this linkage
between anthropology and ethnography was historically
contingent, indeed indexical. The adoption of ethnographic
fieldwork by anthropologists was a part of a similar move in a
range of nineteenth-century sciences toward naturalistic
observation of species in their ordinary environments (Kuklick,
1991). Furthermore, ethnographic fieldwork has always
coexisted with less linguistically-based methods such as
census-taking and perceptual testing. And the closeness of the
link between conceptions of anthropology as a discipline and
ethnography as a method has also varied over time. "A clear
sense of the tension between ethnography and anthropology is
important in correctly perceiving the recent, and perhaps
temporary, confiation of the two projects," suggests Clifford
(1988, p. 28). Nevertheless, in this century-long confiation, the
semiotic relationship between ethnography and anthropology
has become transformed. To the extent that anthropology has
been justified and understood as the scholarly discipline that is
the source of information about the "exotic other" (Stocking,
1983), face-to-face interaction with such people has become, in
some quarters, the picture—the icon—of what anthropology is.
And when anthropologists themselves have been iconically
linked to their own fieldwork activities among exotic others,
they have been consistently seen by the popular American
imagination as "exotics at home," as diLeonardo (forthcoming)
has recently argued.
Despite the recent attempts to undermine ethnographic
990 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Authority both within and outside of anthropology—or

perhaps because of them—this linkage of anthropologists to
ethnographic genres and ethnographic fieldwork has, if
anything, been strengthened within the discipline. Indeed, in
recent years, numerous prominent anthropologists have
reasserted the equation between the discipline and the
method. These statements have come in the context of rivalry
and competition not, as earlier, with journalists, missionaries,
travelers, but rather with other academic disciplines, mainly
literary studies, cultural studies, studies of "resistance" in
political science, and others that laid claim to concepts of
culture as well as ethnography. Although these statements
occur in a scholarly world awash in attempts to work across
disciplines, and are made by scholars who are engaged in
projects that integrate diverse genres, they nonetheless can be
read as attempts to protect, indeed extend, the boundaries of
anthropology through arguments about proper ethnogra-
phy.^^ And we can detect, in these and other recent
statements, the workings of the semiotic principles of erasure
and recursiveness we have discussed in other cases where social
boundaries are constructed.
Erasure is perhaps easiest to detect if we recall, on the one
hand, how other methods have been subtly backgrounded in
most recent discussions of anthropology. And, on the other
hand, as Gupta and Ferguson, in a fascinating reconsideration
of the concept of "the field," have observed: "[T]he single most
significant factor determining whether or not a piece of
research will be accepted as (that magical word) anthropologi-
cal is the extent to which it depends on experience 'in the
field'. . . . Fieldwork based on participant observation. . . . is
increasingly the single constituent element of the anthropolog-
ical tradition used to mark and police the boundaries of the
discipline" (in press, pp. 1, 2—3). But it is also interesting to see
what anthropologists do with the vast amount of work based at
least in part on ethnographic method being produced by
scholars from other disciplines. These cannot be completely
 BOUNDARIES OE LANGUAGES 991

ignored, and so redressive action is required, as in Ortner's

brief against those from other disciplines who claim to write
ethnographically about resistance. It is not that they practice
bad ethnography, she explicitly notes, but rather that they
"refuse" real ethnography. Their refusal consists in not
listening hard enough, not attending to the subaltern's voice,
which is not utterly silenced, but rather unheard. Hence, they
are unable to do justice to the density and ambiguities of the
lived worlds of the people described. In short, they cannot
accomplish the special linguistic interaction that is "real"
ethnographic fieldwork.
If iconicity and erasure operate within the linguistic ideology
that locates the shifting boundary of anthropology, recursive-
ness is also fully apparent. As many commentators have
remarked, the practice of ethnographic fieldwork has long set
the anthropologist apart from others who are not members of
the discipline. But this dichotomy is reproduced inside the
discipline in a number of ways. For instance, although "library
dissertations" that do not involve fieldwork have a long history
in the discipline, students are still vehemently warned against
them as not "truly" anthropological. In the culture of the
disciphne, only fieldwork makes one truly an anthropologist.
Although archival work in post-colonial and other contexts is
increasingly important in anthropology, research that is "only"
document-based, unenhanced by fieldwork in the same locale,
has traditionally not been an asset on the competitive job
market. Finally, a further recursiveness is suggested by the
very way in which anthropologists routinely distinguish
between "home" and "the field." Regardless of the actual
physical locations in which research and writing are done, the
opposition between those-who-do-fieldwork/those-who-do-not
can be reproduced at the level of the individual and projected
onto his or her activities and practices. For instance, if doing an
anthropological study of media reception, one can be "in the
field" while watching television in one's suburban ranch house.
992 SOCIAL RESEARCH

while Malinowski was not "in the field" when he read English
novels in his tent on Kiriwina.
If the practice of ethnographic fieldwork—and fieldwork
conceived in a particular way—is seen as what distinguishes
anthropologists from non-anthropologists, it renders problem-
atic those subdisciplines within anthropology that regularly
rely on other methods. That is, if "anthropology" becomes
identified with a certain kind of social-cultural anthropology,
other subfields and approaches are marginalized. Of special
interest for our discussion here is the position of linguistic
anthropology, whose practitioners are routinely referred to as
"linguists" by colleagues in other subfields of anthropology but
as "anthropologists" by colleagues in linguistics departments.
Linguistic anthropology includes a wide range of methods—
not only elicitation, interviewing, text analysis, and the like, but
also participant observation; yet, an ideology that locates the
study of language itself as outside the bounds of anthropolog-
ical research may erase some of this range from view and
suggest that linguistic anthropologists "only" practice those
methods most identifiable with an autonomous linguistics.
Though their work may be seen as prerequisite to the
ethnographer's single-language immersion, they them-
selves—in this ideologized formulation—are not seen as
ethnographers.^"^ In this way, an ideology recursively repro-
duces the opposition between linguistic and social research
within anthropology and erases practices that cross the
boundary.

Conclusions

We have argued that linguistic ideologies, operating through

three semiotic processes, are central to the creation of social
and linguistic boundaries in several related ways. First,
boundaries between languages are not natural or utterly
outside of human will and political forces. Rather, speakers
 BOUNDARIES OE LANGUAGES 993

and observers notice, justify, and rationalize linguistic differ-

ences, placing them within larger ideological frames that link
them to the properties of "typical" persons and activities.
Ideologies interpret linguistic structure, sometimes exaggerat-
ing or even creating linguistic differentiation. But the linguistic
ideologies that rationalize and create order in historically
contingent sociolinguistic situations are not limited to ordihary
speakers. Professional observers of language have been equally
adept at regularizing linguistic descriptions and the boundaries
between languages they demarcate in grammars, maps, and
monographs.
Our discussion has noted further that linguistic ideology
affects not only the product of scholarly activity about
language. It is also crucial in the self-constitution and
demarcation of scholarly disciplines. Because scholarly claims
about truth and knowledge have been linked so often in the
Western tradition to ideas about language, linguistic ideologies
are often centrally, if implicitly, involved in disciplinary claims
to special knowledge and, thus, distinctness. These claims are
always embedded in the changing political economic contexts
of scholarship and in the competitive, institutional circum-
stances of disciplines' particular historical moments. But we
have suggested that like the boundary practices of non-
scholarly speakers, the claims of scholars also have an
important semiotic component, relying on the processes of
iconicity, recursiveness, and erasure.
We must emphasize that we are not trying to undermine
either anthropology or ethnography through some decon-
struction of disciplinary assumptions or by noting links with a
nineteenth-century ideology of language. Nor do we wish to
discourage ethnographic fieldworkers from acquiring linguis-
tic competence. Instead, we want to express the hope that this
particular ideology can be superseded. Were that to occur, it
would entail some reconsideration of the objects and practices
characterizing research in the disciplines, perhaps with a focus
on boundary-making activities themselves. With regard to
994 SOCIAL RESEARCH

objects of research, it is important to pay attention (as Hymes

and Gumperz advocated years ago) to the multiple ways
linguistic practices are imbricated in social life; and, beyond
this, it is especially important to pay attention to linguistic
differences and boundaries, their relationships with social
formations, and the positioned ideologies that configure these.
With regard to practices, if participant-observation (for
example) is one of anthropology's principal methodological
contributions to social research, doing it well requires
including methods some anthropologists have relegated to
linguistics. Insofar as disciplinary boundaries are constituted in
discipline-specific practices, this example shows disciplinary
boundary-making in need of rethinking. For participant-
observation involves engaging in linguistic activities (though
not necessarily only through immersion in a single linguistic
variety); but it does not obviate the need to observe linguistic
activities.
Reconfiguring ideologies, including ideologies of language
and of academic disciplines, is no simple task. Our analysis has
indicated what a large ideological package and global
political-historical context in which the one-language/one-
culture assumption has been wrapped. Scholarly efforts to
investigate the identities and boundaries of social formations
have been part and parcel of the same conceptual system that
generates the identities and boundaries of disciplines. It is,
therefore, crucial to remember the semiotic processes by which
disciplinary boundaries are imagined, for—like social and
linguistic boundaries—they are constructions that can be
re-imagined.

Notes

' Although some scholars of his day found Schleicher's organi-

cism too extreme, and pointed out that languages were not living
substances existing independently of human speakers, they did not
 BOUNDARIES OE LANGUAGES 995

quarrel with his emphasis on naturalism. Scholars as different as

Aarsleff (1967) and Eoucault (1970) note a turn in the nineteenth
century towards the study of language as autonomous phenomenon.
^ In the burgeoning literature on social boundaries, we note as
examples Barth's (1969) classic work on ethnicity; Bourdieu (1984)
on class; Gerson and Peiss (1989) on gender, among others.
^ See the recent work of Sokal et al., 1989, for such use of
language in biological anthropology. Even so influential a student of
ethnicity and nationalism as Benedict Anderson (1983) seems to
assume that "communities" will be linguistically homogeneous and
easily linked to named languages. He laments the "fatality" of
monolingualism, which supposedly provides the fertile ground for
linguistic nationalism. But he thereby ignores the variety of culturally
and, often, politically significant linguistic differentiation present in
the repertoires of speakers before print capitalism, and within
contemporary states which are only legally or nominally "monolin-
gual." Earlier scholars making the same assumptions include Naroll
(1964), among many others.
^ Hymes himself was echoing similar concerns about the lack of
cross-disciplinary work voiced by Sapir; it is a pleasant coincidence
that Hymes' paper on disciplinary boundaries appeared in Social
Research.
^ There is no "view from nowhere," no gaze that is not positioned.
But, of course, it is always easier to detect positioning in other
people's views—such as linguists and ethnographers of an earlier
era—than in one's own. Most of our examples, therefore, discuss
scholars writing a century or more ago, so that we have been able to
rely on the wisdom of hindsight, or at least historical distance* in
trying to detect their ideological commitments.
^ Considerably more detailed descriptions of these case studies
can be found in our "Language ideology and linguistic differentia-
tion" to appear in Kroskrity (forthcoming).
^ See, for example, Herzfeld, 1987; Abbott, 1990; Bateson, 1936;
Gal, 1991.
^ The fieldwork on which this description is based was conducted
by Irvine, mainly in the 1970s. And the next example is based on
fieldwork conducted by Gal in the 1980s and 1990s.
^ See Irvine (1990) for detail, including the phonological,
morphological, and syntactic differentiae of the two styles.
'° They are members of a "Senegal group" (or "Senegambian
996 SOCIAL RESEARCH

group") within the Atlantic language family, in turn a branch of

Niger-Congo.
'' European writers of the time differed as to whether Islam could
be considered "superior" to anything. Those who insisted it could
only be the work of Satan nevertheless still asserted Fula cultural and
racial superiority over other Senegalese groups by focusing on those
Fula-speaking pastoral nomads, who they believed were less devoted
to Islam than were sedentary Fula-speakers.
'^ The more recent, massive dictionary of Sereer (Crdtois,
1972-77) does include lexicon marked as "Wolof." No explanation is
given, however, as to why these forms are so marked. It is not clear
whether these items are included because Sereer-speakers incorpo-
Irate them in their speech or just for comparison.
'^ Many thanks to Victor Friedman for his helpful comments on
Macedonian matters.
'"* The geographic extent of any region called Macedonia is a
hiatter of heated debate. Historically, the following regions have
been considered Macedonia: the current Republic of Macedonia, a
chunk of western Bulgaria, a northern province of Greece, and small
parts of eastern Albania.
'^ It is important to note that metropolitan Europe had by no
means achieved the characteristics it assigned itself. See for instance,
Eugen Weber's (1976) discussion of the lack of cultural, linguistic,
and political unity in the most centralized of European powers,
France.
'^ Because it was not orderly in the way Western observers
imagined their own polities, Macedonia was seen as incomprehensi-
bly complex and, therefore, a "barbaric," "primitive," "hybrid," a
veritable fruit salad—inspiring the French culinary term macedo-
ine—of peoples, religions, and languages (see Goff and Fawcett
[1921] for these epithets).
'^ See Smith (1995) for instance for an important discussion of
how seminars and archival research have defined the discipline of
history.
'^ For instance, the methodologies of linguistics, such as elicitation
of acceptability judgments or introspection by the linguist, are also
susceptible to the analysis we propose. As Hymes (1967b) long ago
pointed out, these methods provide access only to those aspects of
language that are independent of social context, and the ideology
that sustains the methods assumes such are the only important
linguistic facts. This, of course, contributes to producing and
 BOUNDARIES OF LANGUAGES 997

justifying the boundary between linguistics and social sciences. But

the practices themselves could also be analyzed as iconically linked to
the practitioners, for example, the widespread assumption that
linguists are necessarily polyglot or particularly adept at knowing and
learning languages. And the problematic status and often lower
prestige within linguistics of what are called the "hyphenated
specialties," such as socio-linguistics and psycho-linguistics, could,
upon analysis, emerge as part of a recursive exclusion, and so on.
'^ The political critiques are best exemplified by Asad (1973); the
most influential of the textual critiques include Marcus and Gushing,
1982; Glifford and Marcus, 1986; Glifford, 1988.
20 See, for example, Glifford, 1983; Hinsley, 1983.
2' Revelations that a fieldworker does not "control" the language
of the people with whom he or she has worked continue to cause
minor scandals within the discipline.
^^ Note the crucial difference between engaging in a linguistic
practice and analyzing the possibly diverse forms of language use
and structure in relation to social life.
2^ For example, see, Gomaroff and Gomaroff, 1992; Ortner, 1995.
^'^ Anthropologists will recall that the "new ethnography" of the
196O's-7O's claimed a more central role in ethnography for linguistic
elicitation. The current discussions of ethnography to which we
allude here, however, have rejected that school's arguments.
Moreover, the same opposition of disciplinary and methodological
boundaries emerged even within the New Ethnography itself, when
so-called "white room" methods of decontextualized elicitation were
contrasted with "grass hut" methods of participant observation.

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