Franz Boas’s “On Alternating Sounds,” published in 1889 in The American Anthropologist, is a founding document for linguistic anthropological method and theory. This little piece, only six-and-a-half pages long, was written to refute a false, but influential, claim that the languages of indigenous North America exhibited unsystematic phonetic variations (“alternating sounds”) which exposed them as primitive. Boas identified phonological bias, unsystematic field methods, and social evolutionary pseudoscience as the true source of the phenomenon: the “alternating sounds” of the speakers of the languages of indigenous North America were in fact the “alternating apperceptions” of the pseudo-scientists themselves. Placing language at the center of the problem of cross-cultural epistemology, the publication formed the Urtext for studying language as a dynamic of structure, practice, and ideology—what Michael Silverstein, a century later, would call the “Total Linguistic Fact.” This lecture discusses some trajectories in anthropology that emerged from “On Alternating Sounds,” emphasizing in particular the connection between sociocultural process and language change, and arguing more generally that linguistics is necessary for calibrating the instruments of ethnography to the objects of sociocultural analysis.
Nicholas Harkness is the Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. Harkness’s research aims to understand and explain the role of language, communication, conceptualization, and other semiotic processes in the formation and transformation of social groups. Harkness’s long-term ethnographic research in South Korea has focused on these topics in the context of Korea’s massive engagement with Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. His publications include two books, Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea and Glossolalia and the Problem of Language, as well as numerous papers that extend the empirical study of meaning from speech and interaction to the social world more broadly. At Harvard, Harkness also organizes the Roman Jakobson Symposium and the Harvard-Yenching Institute field development program in linguistic and semiotic anthropology.