Reviewed by Anna Pucilowski, University of Oregon

For many years, Paul Friedrich’s commitment to immersion in multiple dimensions of a culture has attracted students and admirers. The contributors to this volume come from a wide variety of disciplines, which fittingly reflects Friedrich’s interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and the individual. The essays are divided into three sections, each of which concentrates on one aspect of Friedrich’s research: relative nonarbitrariness, ethnographic parallax, and lyrical voices. Following an introduction to both Friedrich’s work and the current volume, in an interview conducted by Thomas Bartscherer, Friedrich describes his pluralist approach to anthropology, linguistics, classics, and Slavic studies.

Section 1 centers on the theme of ‘Relative non-arbitrariness’, which is perhaps Friedrich’s best-known contribution to anthropology and linguistics. Unlike most linguists, Friedrich (1975) claims that the relation between a symbol and the world is, in fact, nonarbitrary. The essays in this section explore the relationship between language and culture. John Attinasi outlines Friedrich’s major intellectual achievements and discusses his ideas on linguaculture and the nonarbitrary links between language and the world. Murray J. Leaf specifically considers Friedrich’s contributions to linguistics and discusses Friedrich’s theory of meaning in language. He puts Friedrich in the same philosophical tradition of romanticism as Benjamin Lee Whorf and Otto Jespersen. William O. Beeman’s essay extends Friedrich’s argument of nonarbitrariness to performative symbols and looks in particular at the representation of women in traditional Iranian theater. Two essays consider the relationship between sound and meaning: Janis B. Nuckoll discusses sound-symbolic properties in ideophones; and Ellen Zimmerman looks at iconicity in language, suggesting that there may be cognitive connections between sound and meaning that are universal. Bonnie Urciuoli discusses the cultural semiotics of accents, looking at a group of New York Puerto Rican bilinguals. In the final essay in this section, John Leavitt compares translation strategies and suggests that anthropologists and translators have a lot to learn from each other.

Section 2, ‘Ethnographic parallax’, contains essays that draw on Friedrich’s parallactic tradition of examining ethnographic data from seven angles. Jeffrey Anderson investigates the life of a Northern Arapaho man and reveals the relationship between vision and language in Arapaho culture. Three papers contain historical studies of poetics in myths: David Koestler looks at the manipulation of reputation in Icelandic sagas; Hajime Nakatani discusses the conception of representation in Aztec and Inca cultures; and Kevin Tuite examines Dael, a popular figure in the oral literature of the Georgian Svans.

Also in Section 2, Louanna Furbee closely examines multiple narratives of a single event to better understand various world views and political orientations. Mary Scoggin studies the debates over the function of words and human agency in China. The final two papers investigate different aspects of Russian society: Dale Pesmen investigates the Russian cultural notion of ‘soul’, dusha; and Clementine Fujimura explores the false myths that draw Russian children to the cities.

Section 3, ‘Lyrical voices’, contains seven essays that examine the relationship between literature and music.

All of the essays in this volume make frequent reference to Friedrich and his ideas on language, the individual, and culture. Just as Friedrich has been highly interdisciplinary in his work, this book will appeal to readers from a wide variety of disciplines.

References

Friedrich, Paul. 1975. The lexical symbol and its relative non-arbitrariness. Linguistics and anthropology: In honor of C. F. Voegelin, ed. by M. Dale Kinkade, Kenneth L. Hale, and Oswald Werner, 199–248. Lisse: de Ridder.