Linguistic Agency

What can words do? How do they shape the worlds we inhabit, the identities we claim, and the actions we take together? This volume offers a clear, accessible, interdisciplinary introduction to the power of language to shape individual experience, everyday social life, political reality, and scientific inquiry.Structured around the concepts of representation, creation and action, the book moves from cultural theory through literary history to the philosophy of language, bringing together debates on ethnographic authority, literary creation, speech acts, conceptual engineering, and violent political discourse. It shows how contests over words, from ‘Gulf of Mexico’ versus ‘Gulf of America’ to who counts as a ‘woman’, are never merely semantic: language can reinforce hierarchies, open or foreclose new possibilities, shape collective imaginaries, and alter what people are able to perceive and do, in daily life, in science, and in moments of crisis.Clear, concise, and wide-ranging in its scope, Linguistic Agency gives a name to the space for manoeuvre that language affords us, inviting students and scholars of philosophy, literary studies, and anthropology, as well as general readers, to use this power more consciously, critically, and effectively.