245-260

Shouts on the street : towards a dialogical point of view in linguistic anthropology

• Τσιτσιπής, Λουκάς Δ.

In an attempt to provide for a dialectic between theory and empirical data this article examines recent advances in the field of linguistic anthropology. It is suggested that culture is not simply a set of homogeneously shared meanings but also, and more importantly, the outcome of discursive practices. Such practices which engage the energy of community members rather that serving as a glass through which cultural meanings are viewed constitute culture.Participants in the cultural-social formation are constantly in dialogic relations in which both discourse and metadiscourse interact dialectically. In these interactions various points of view interanimate each other. The ethnographer is a vital part of this complex process since s/he also provides texts and interpretations of the texts of the communities under investigation.The Bakhtinian philosophy of language is found to be a useful methodological tool for the grasping and handling of such problems. This is so because Bakhtin and his circle have early enough focused on the social foundations of language even before the advances of recent sociolinguistic scholarship.Ethnographic examples from South American Indians, Mexican Nahuatl speakers, and Arvanitika (Greek-Albanian) regions in Greece are offered in order for the dialogical perspective to be justified.

• Other social sciences
• Languages and Literature

• Ανθρωπολογία
• Γλωσσολογία
• Κοινωνικές επιστήμες
• Πολιτισμός

Περιέχει βιβλιογραφία