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Editorial: Keywords

2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/661743

1537-5382

Mark Aldenderfer,

Lexicography and Language Studies

Next article FreeEditorialEditorial: KeywordsMark AldenderferMark Aldenderfer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIn this issue, I am pleased to bring into print one of Ben Orlove’s final projects of his editorial term at Current Anthropology: a set of manuscripts about keywords. Keywords are terms or phrases that direct a reader to the main ideas or concepts that are to come in a document or text. They act as a kind of shorthand and, used effectively, they offer us insight into the author’s intent. Keywords are words that have both general and specific meanings; they can be general in the sense that they are words that are commonly encountered in everyday language and that have shared and overlapping meaning. However, they also may well have special, more restricted meanings, such as is often the case in their scholarly use. Many keywords are innocuous, such as those that indicate, say, the temporal span or the geographic location of a topic at hand.Other keywords, however, have conflicting and contested meanings. In anthropology, the poster child for such a conflicted keyword is “culture.” Even the use of the term signals to some anthropologists that the author is either hopelessly out of date or proudly old school. Because the meanings of keywords are often less well shared than is commonly thought, it becomes interesting and important to track down their intellectual pedigree and heritage. This is not to define the keyword more precisely but, instead, to identify the meanings the term has taken and to show how these meanings are transformed when new intellectual perspectives and paradigms make their appearance.Raymond Williams made a systematic attempt to explore contested and common meanings of these important terms in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). This book and an updated version of it titled New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) are of particular interest to anthropologists. In his introduction, Williams identified keywords “in two connected senses. They are significant, binding words in certain activities and their interpretation; they are significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought. Certain uses bound together certain ways of seeing culture and society” (15). Among the words he chose to examine were “anthropology” (!), “elite,” “family,” “evolution,” “modern,” “consumer,” “science,” “sex,” and “western.” Many of these words were reexamined in the 2005 version of the book, including two terms that appear in this collection of papers: “consumption” and “identity.” Although the theoretical orientation of these volumes, especially the 2005 edition, is heavily indebted to cultural studies, the analyses provide interesting insights into these much-debated terms.The keywords in this issue—“neoliberal agency,” “consumption,” “identity,” and “flow”—have become commonplace in anthropology. But as the authors indicate, their meanings even within the field are contested and are far from settled. Indeed, that is one of the key points that Williams made back in 1976—that the meaning of a keyword is never settled until it truly disappears from common use or its scholarly paradigm goes into decline. I found each of these essays insightful and provocative, and I am certain they will stimulate much-needed debate and reflection in our field. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 52, Number 4August 2011 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/661743 Views: 656Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Andrew M. Carruthers In lieu of “keywords”: Toward an anthropology of rapport, American Anthropologist 125, no.33 (Jun 2023): 478–492.https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13881Noel B. Salazar Key figures of mobility: an introduction, Social Anthropology 25, no.11 (Feb 2017): 5–12.https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12393