Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p> Among contemporary linguistic anthropologists, Alessandro Duranti is unique in the breadth of his research and in his interdisciplinary engagement in theorizing relationships between language and culture. His work can be understood as a career‐long interest in human creativity as expressed in linguistic (and other semiotic) forms, and the mediating influence of these forms on culture and social life. His work is highly influenced not only by formal linguistics, but by European and American philosophical and anthropological traditions. His earliest academic work at the University of Rome was on Korean syntax and semantics, but after beginning PhD study in the United States he also became interested in the social life of linguistic forms. These interests were perfectly synthesized in his ethnographic work on the role of grammatical forms in accomplishing social action, for example, how ergative case marking in Samoan could be manipulated by village chiefs and orators to negotiate agency and responsibility, one of many observations about language and culture in <jats:italic>From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village</jats:italic> (Duranti, 1994). Later ethnographic work on the campaign trail in California, a contest for a US Congress seat, is another example of Duranti's approach to language, the video recorded data proving to be a rich source for understanding genre, the collaborative construction of meaning, and the materialization of locally relevant, taken‐for‐granted concepts such as democracy (Duranti, 2003, 2006a). Throughout his work he has developed and expanded his notion of “ethnopragmatics” (Duranti, 1993a, 2007) beyond a focus on the contextual life of language, local communicative practices, and speakers' attitudes, and toward the meaning and impact of those practices to language as an expression and realization of human agency more generally. Duranti is perhaps best known for his work on intentionality, both as it is perceived locally in different world areas, and the role of discursive practices in defining it (Duranti, 1993b, 2006b, 2008a). Most recently he has been reinvestigating the writings of Husserl on phenomenology in order to contribute to perhaps the most challenging anthropological question, understanding intersubjectivity and the limits and nature of sharing the perspective of the “other” (Duranti, 2009, 2010). </jats:p>