THE BIBLE AND CRITICAL THEORY ARTICLES Neo-Marxism, Language Ideology, and the New Testament

This essay introduces the discipline of linguistic anthropology and, more specifically, the notion of language ideologies, arguing that it might be put to fruitful use in the study of New Testament texts. Linguistic anthropologists, working on a notion of “ideology ” of clear neo-Marxist ascendency, have elaborated a very effective set of tools for the analysis of language as a social practice that both re-inscribes socio-political structures and shapes them through its creative impulses. New Testament scholars, who are bound to deal with texts that are detached from their almost irretrievable original contexts, can benefit from the help of linguistic anthropology in delineating the socio-political profiles and agendas of the writings they are working on. Alessandro Duranti (1997), in the very first pages of his influential textbook of linguistic anthropology, describes the history of the discipline as the development of an intellectual identity out of the conjunction of the two separated fields labelled “linguistics ” and “anthropology. ” One could summarise this by stating that linguistic anthropology has taken the best from its two parents and tried to overcome some of their respective weaknesses. In the present paper, I will try, at first, to sketch very briefly the intellectual contours of linguistic anthropology as a discipline by paying specific attention to the interesting concept of “languag