Text and Textuality

Abstract

In recent years, the study of discourse has grown dramatically in anthropology and linguistics, generating a plethora of terms, concepts, and issues. A wide array of disciplinary orientations lies behind labels such as textuality, discourse, rhetoric, narrative, and poetic (198). Here I focus on a limited range of issues in the organization and interpretation of text, working primarily with selected linguistic (34, 36, 54, 92, 118, 202), anthropological (17-20, 63a, 182, 188, 211), sociological (39, 76, 89, 90, 134), and critical (48, 73, 111, 123, 155, 161, 162, 205, 206) approaches. General overviews of these approaches, or collections of articles representative of them, can be found in the works just cited. Although research on unavoidably touches on literacy and writing (38), language acquisition, education, and socialization (47, 89, 90, 153, 165), and political discourse and dispute (23, 29, 30), I do not address these topics directly in the following discussion. Rather, I concentrate on the status of as sociocultural product and process, voicing in text, elements of textual organization, the relation of to power in social contexts, some recent ethnographic studies of text, and certain further implications of this literature for social science. It is helpful by way of introduction to consider the relation between the two terms conjoined in the title. When used as a mass noun, as in text is composed of interconnected sentences, can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users. As vague as such a definition is, already it commits us to a certain line of inquiry. The term sign raises issues of textual typology [iconic, indexical, and symbolic (59, 157, 170); dense, replete (77, 155)],