Does language channel how people form social relations? Does it shape their cultural and ontological expectations about social life or material causality? Conversely, do cultural patterns or rules shape the ways people use language? These may be the wrong questions, as neither language nor culture can be excised from specific human networks and histories: we learn to speak not "in general," but in concrete situations and spaces--a family, a colonized border, a factory, a doctor's office... While languages and cultures were once described as mutually reinforcing systems of meaningful coherence, social life unfurls through negotiations across multiple languages, through conflicts and collaborations among diverse perspectives. We will attend to ways languages and cultures have been described as shaping each other and thus shaping choices. But we will attend also to struggles over semantics, to attempts to police grammar and pronunciation, and to claims about what speaking can do -- as practices of linguistic ideology that make and unmake social roles and hierarchies.

Course Requirements:

This course does not assume any background in linguistics and has no prerequisites.