Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities
Office phone: (773) 702-7713
Office: Haskell 313
Michael Silverstein received his PhD from Harvard in 1972. He is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology and in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. Professor Silverstein studies language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and history of linguistic and ethnographic studies. His fieldwork in northwestern North America and northwestern Australia has been the basis of various descriptive, theoretical and generalizing contributions. He is also investigating language use and textuality as sites of contestation and transformation of cultural value in contemporary American society, reconceptualizing sociocultural and rhetorical practices in light of the semiotic anthropology of communication.
Selected Publications
Year | Title / Publications | |
---|---|---|
2014 | The Voice of Jacob: Entextualization, Contextualization, and Identity. English Literary History (ELH), special issue ed. by R. Copeland and F. Ferguson (in press). | |
2013 | From Baffin Island to Boasian Induction: How Anthropology and Linguistics Got into the Interlinear Groove. In R. Darnell, ed., Franz Boas: Ethnographer, Theorist, Activist, Public Intellectual. University of Nebraska Press (in press). | |
2013 | (w/ M. Lempert) Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency. Indiana University Press. | |
2013 | Worora Kinship and 'Parenteral' Relationships. Anthropological Theory, special issue on "Qualia" ed. N. Harkness and L.H. Chumley. 13 (1-2): 89-103. | |
2013 | The Race from Place: Dialect Eradication vs. the Linguistic 'Authenticity' of 'terroir'. In Lacoste, et al. eds., Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. de Gruyter (in press). | |
2013 | Performative Risks in Risking Performace. In Metz, et al. eds., Translating the Social World for Law. Oxford University Press (in press). | |
2012 | The Eucharistic Chiastic Trope in American 'Civil Religion': Ritual Interdiscursivity and the Production of Cultural Intertexts. Lexia, Revista di Semiotica. 11-12: 297-325. | |
2012 | Does the Autonomy of Linguistics Rest on the Autonomy of Syntax: An Alternative Framing of our Object of Study. In Meeuwis and Ostman, eds., Pragmaticizing Understanding: Studies for Jef Verschueren. John Benjamins, 15-38. | |
2011 | The 'Message' in the (Political) Battle. Language and Communication. 31(2):203-216. | |
n.d. | Seized by Eminent Domaine: The ‘Vinification’ of Comestible Prestige. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 2011 (forthcoming). | |
2011 | What goes around. . .: Some Shtick from ‘Tricky Dick’ and the Circulation of U.S. Presidential Image. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 21(1):54-77. | |
2011 | Presidential Ethno-blooperology: Performance Misfires in the Business of ‘Message’-ing. Anthropological Quarterly, 84(1): 165-86. | |
2010 | Society, Polity, and Language Community: An Enlightenment Trinity in Anthropological Perspective. Journal of Language and Politics. 9(3):339-363. | |
2010 | ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’ Communicative Acts in Semiotic Perspective. Journal of Pragmatics. 42: 337-353. | |
2009 | Private Ritual Encounters, Public Ritual Indexes. In S. Senft & E. Basso, eds., Ritual Communication. Oxford: Berg, 271-291. | |
2006 | How Knowledge Begets Communication Begets Knowledge: Textuality and Contextuality in Knowing and Learning. Intercultural Communication Review (Tokyo) 5: 31-60. | |
2006 | How We Look from Where We Stand [Review essay on 3 Blackwell Handbooks]. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 16(2): 269-78. | |
2006 | Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol 35, 481-96. | |
2006 | Writing at the Chronotopic Margins of Empires. In S.L. Sanders, ed., Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures. Chicago: Oriental Institute Press, 149-155. | |
2005 | Cultural Knowledge, Discourse Poetics, and the Performance of Social Relations. In A. Makkai, W. J. Sullivan & A. R. Lommel, eds., LACUS Forum XXXI: Interconnections. Houston : LACUS, 33-52. | |
2005 | The Poetics of Politics: “Theirs” and “Ours.” Journal of Anthropological Research. 61(1):1-24. | |
2005 | Heartburn as a Cultural System. In R. Cernea, ed., The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate. University of Chicago Press. | |
2005 | Axes of --evals: Token vs. Type Interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):6-22. | |
2005 | Languages/Cultures are Dead! Long Live the Linguistic-Cultural! In D. Segal & S. Yanagisako , eds., Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Durham : Duke University Press, 99-125. | |
2004 | ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology. 45(5) : 621-652. | |
2004 | Boasian Cosmographic Anthropology and the Sociocentric Component of Mind. In R. Handler, ed., Significant Others. History of Anthropology, Vol. 10] Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 131-57. | |
2003 | Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating Glossando on Thin Semiotic Ice. In P. Rubel and A. Rosman, eds., Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology. Oxford: Berg, 75-105, | |
2003 | The Whens and Wheres—as well as Hows—of Ethnolinguistic Recognition. Public Culture. 15(3): 531-57. | |
2003 | Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life. Language and Communication. 23(3-4): 193-229 [Special issue on the work of M. Silverstein and students: Words and Beyond: Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of the Sociocultural Order. ed. P. Manning.] | |
2003 | Talking Politics: The substance of style from Abe to “W.” Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press [distributed by University of Chicago Press ]. | |
2000 | Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality. In P. Kroskrity, ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 85-138. | |
1998 | The Uses and Utility of Ideology. A Commentary. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, P. Kroskrity, eds., Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford University Press, 123-145. | |
1998 | Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology, 27:401-26. | |
1998 | The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive Practice. In K. Sawyer, ed., Creativity in Performance. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., pp. 265-312. |