Paradigms Lost: The New Ethnography and the New Linguistics

Abstract

The methodological premises and analytical models of "the new ethnography" represent an extension to cultural phenomena of the paradigm of pre-transformational linguistics. Thus "ethnoscience" has emphasized emic descriptions of cultural uniqueness, discovery procedures, phonological models, and a finite corpus. The linguistic foundations of these approaches to culture have been pulled away by the newer transformational paradigm. The implications of the new linguistics for cognitive anthropology are traced, and it is suggested that development of a more powerful anthropological paradigm could contribute to solving the dilemmas of the linguistic frontier.