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A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as
an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new
publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public
sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989
[1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the
public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting
the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among
individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures)
constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work
under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being
critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern
in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective
on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance
of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other.
In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important
contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages
are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical,
power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction
of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed,
and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying
ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and
institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending
to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural
products having little, if anything, to do with human agency
and invested interests.
