ABSTRACT
Not so long ago, it would have been considered self-evidently true, by the vast majority of anthropologists, that human cultures owe their very existence to language. This assumption, which made of language the indispensable tool of anthropological inquiry, also served to remove it, and its role in cultural processes, from the field of investigation. Nowadays we are no longer so sure, and by the same token the use of language both by the peoples among whom we study, and in our own research and writing, has become a focus of critical attention. That many today would doubt that language is the essence of culture, or at least regard this as a matter calling for justification, is eloquent testimony to the extent to which anthropology has cut itself loose from past certainties. We have begun to question whether, or in what sense, things like ‘culture’ (or cultures) and ‘language’ (or languages) can be said to exist at all, whilst talk of essences immediately sparks off charges of unwarranted reification. What is left of the old maxim that ‘to understand the culture you must first understand the language’, when verbal discourse seems to generate as much misunderstanding as understanding, and when a large part of what goes on in everyday life appears to be independent of-and even resistant tolinguistic articulation? It was to address questions of this kind that the proposition, ‘language is the essence of culture’, was adopted as the motion for the fourth in this series of debates.
