Between Linguistic and Cultural Anthropologies

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the boundaries between linguistic and sociocultural anthropologies through the lens of language socialization scholarship. Sometimes posited as a bridge between these subfields, language socialization scholarship is a site through which issues of interest to sociocultural anthropologists are increasingly studied by linguistic anthropologists. Current foci of both subfields are found in contemporary language socialization research, such as highly complex situations of linguistic, social, and cultural contact, often under colonial conditions, and the roles of social differentiation, power, and institutionalization in language socialization processes. This chapter argues that the concepts of relativity, ideologies, and scaling provide common ground for linguistic and sociocultural anthropologies and serve as sites for better bridging the subfields through research on (language) socialization. To achieve this, it advocates making education a meta-framework for studying (language) socialization, as the latter is a fundamentally educative process that holds implications for understandings of being human across the life span.