Anthropology has a history of dealing with texts which goes back to its origins as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. American cultural anthropology, following Franz Boas, revolved around the collection or creation, transcription, translation and interpretation of texts gathered from representatives of endangered Native American cultures. Linguistic expertise and cultural empathy combined, as anthropologists engaged native informants or collaborators in marathons of dialogue and textual editing. British social anthropology, following Malinowski, also treated text collection as a vital ethnographic tool, supplying chunks of evidence on indigenous attitudes and beliefs. But while American cultural-linguistic anthropologists made texts the central focus of inquiry — the method, object and outcome of research — British social anthropologists tended to bury them in their fieldnotes and refer to them only when they were needed to corroborate or expand a point based on other forms of data. In both traditions, there was a certain slippage between text as an indigenous creation existing independently of ethnographic intervention (ritual chants, praise poetry, myths, proverbs), and text as the joint creation and outcome of anthropologist’s interactions with informants (elicited life stories, explanations of customs). Up till today, it is striking that American anthropology gives the interpretation of texts a central place, while British social anthropology prefers to focus on the interpretation of ritual and material culture.
The American focus on texts gave rise to an influential interpretative approach, principally associated with ^Clifford Geertz and influenced by the work of Paul Ricoeur, in which text became a metaphor for society/culture, and anthropology’s remit was hermeneutically to interpret that text. Allied with this approach has been the focus on the ethnographic document as text — what and how the anthropologist writes, using what tropes and conventions, what elements of fictivity or poetic form. This emphasis was highlighted by Clifford and Marcus (1986) and has led to an intense critique of ethnographic writing, and of the ethnographer’s claims to authority and self-positioning in the text. It called for ethnographers to acknowledge the role of their interlocutors as co-authors, and called for anthropologists to ‘give a voice’ to natives presumed otherwise mute.
Text has traditionally been associated with writing. However, following "fBakhtin, the linguistic anthropologist William F. Hanks in an influential overview article defined text as ‘any configuration of signs that is coherently inter-pretable by some community of users’ (1989: 95). Text in this definition includes not only oral verbal productions but also other visual and kinetic sign systems such as film, dance, music and art. Hanks goes on to outline a range of approaches to text and the questions that these raise, concerning genre, fintertextuality, the relations between text/discourse and between language/work, the definition of context, and text’s relations with adjacent forms such as co-text, meta-text, context, pre-text, sub-text and after-text.
A productive move within cultural/linguistic anthropology has been to focus on the process of verbal text formation or ‘entextualization’, the ‘process of rendering a given instance of discourse as text, detachable from its local context’ (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 21). If discourse is the unremarked and unrepeated flow of utterances in which most human activities are immersed, text is created when instances of discourse, by being rendered detachable from their immediate context of emission, are made available for repetition or re-creation in other contexts. In other words, they are stretches of discourse which can be reproduced and thus transmitted over time and space. Detachability, according to Silverstein and Urban’s groundbreaking edited volume, is achieved by a variety of linguistic, structural and performative devices. This model offers a more restricted definition of text, contrasting it with a wide range of discourses which may be meaningful and coherent but which are not demarcated as forms detachable from context.
The entextualization approach departs from earlier though related approaches in which ‘text’ (written, invariant, rigid) was held to be the antithesis of ‘performance’ (fluid, emergent, improvisatory). The entextualization approach makes it possible to get away from this misleading (if curiously productive) dichotomy and focus on the specific ways in which people in different societies seek to establish cultural form. This makes possible a comparative approach to the modes by which texts are constituted in different cultures, the types of discourse that are locally regarded as worthy of recreation (a category that has some affinities with the Western category ‘literature’, but clearly exceeds it and diverges from it in numerous ways) and the varying emphases placed in different cultures on perpetuation through recreation. In Urban’s subsequent work (2001), this idea has been expanded to a theory of ‘how culture moves through the world’, where the focus is on the recreation of form in cultural life, employing an approach that regards material culture, ideas, patterns of behaviour, institutions and verbal texts as all being constituted and reproduced in a similar way.
Attention to the constitution and reproduction of verbal texts has potentially far-reaching significance for wider anthropological understandings of culture and society. Verbal texts often encapsulate what people have thought was worthy of remark, and worthy of preservation. They are social facts in the sense of being products of human "sociality and creativity, but they are also commentaries on social facts. Such texts are in many cases couched in oblique or obscure terms and their exegesis often leads into local modes of interpretation where well-established "hermeneutic procedures (often involving the invocation of other verbal genres) are brought into play (Barber 2007). The study of the conventions and procedures of local modes of textual interpretation, as distinct from anthropologists’ textual guesswork, is a field that has been broached by ethnopoetics but which demands a much greater investment of anthropological work before we even begin to see its importance.
