ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the so-called relativity hypothesis, the idea that there is a significant relation between the language people speak and the way they understand their experience. It focuses on two aspects of this paradigm, the treatment of "ways of speaking" and the description of ethnopoetics and performance. The major theme is discourse style and textuality, topics that ethnographers of communication have already opened up but that have become increasingly central in the field, particularly since the 1980s. The chapter begins with the early development of North American linguistic anthropology and first formulations of the relativity hypothesis in the writings of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. The name most often associated with relativity in this sense is Benjamin Lee Whorf. During the 1950s Whorf produced a series of studies of Native American languages and general issues in the conceptual consequences of language structure.
