Alessandro Duranti

Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. He is an expert on language as a code and as a practice, political discourse, improvisation in language and music, human agency and cooperation. He has carried out fieldwork in (Western) Samoa and the United States. His books include From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (1994), Linguistic Anthropology (1997), The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (2015), and a number of edited volumes, including Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (co-edited with C. Goodwin, 1992), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (2004) and The Handbook of Language Socialization (co-edited with E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin, 2012). He is the recipient of various awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and the American Anthropological Association/ Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He has been president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, and the editor of two journals: Pragmatics and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. His wife is Fellow Elinor Ochs.