This review surveys recent research on language-music: the unified expressive field comprising sounded and textual signs whose segmentation into “language” and “music” is culturally constructed. I argue that approaching language-music semiotically will promote—alongside the discipline's emergent “auditory turn”—greater holism in anthropological practice if coupled to the joint effort of attending to textuality while decentering its primacy. I discuss recent scholarship that demonstrates, if often implicitly, the merit of this approach. I organize this work into three overlapping themes of active research: scholarship on chronotopes and soundscapes exploring processes that reconfigure time and place; work on subject creation focusing on voice, emotion, intersubjectivity, and listening; and scholarship on the social dimensions of object creation, including technological mediation, authentication, and circulation. I conclude by discussing future directions in research on language-music and the promise such work offers of furthering the call to broaden anthropology's holism while loosening adherence to its text-centered practices.
Though linguistic anthropologists have long surpassed Austin's initial formulation, the performativity concept remains of enduring interest for its utility in exploring how language constitutes social action. I build on those conversations by considering the concept's applicability to a key document used in the conquest of the Americas, an event involving one of the greatest discursive divides in human history. After examining the text's internal structure and what we know of its use, I suggest that the complex performative dynamics at work in the text are tied to the ways it presupposes and simultaneously instantiates social hierarchies by establishing participant roles. Competing interpretations of those participant roles are made possible by the text's strategic indeterminacy and the temporal dynamics of its circulation. I conclude by considering parallels to other texts and speech acts likewise designed to grapple with discursive difference.
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