Language and Material Culture

This innovative and provocative work introduces complexity theory and its application to both the study of language and the study of material culture. The book begins with a wide-ranging theoretical background, covering the areas of dialect geography, the anthropological study of material culture, and a general introduction to the study of complex adaptive systems. Following this general introduction, the principles of complexity theory are demonstrated in data drawn from linguistics and material culture studies. Language and Material Culture further highlights the principles of complexity through a series of case studies, using data from the Linguistic Atlas, colonial American inventories and the Historic American Building Survey. LMC shows that language and material culture are intertwined as they interact within the same cultural complex system. The book is designed for students in courses that focus on language variation, American English and material culture, in addition to general courses on applications of complex systems.

Bill Kretzschmar, University of Georgia:
Language and Material Culture is brilliantly creative, making the connection between language with both historical culture and complexity science. It bridges linguistics and anthropology in a fundamentally new way, using complex systems to explain words and things in culture. Burkette shows how distributional patterns emerge in our words for things, as we all interact to create our culture, and that the study of culture creation involves getting to know the history and contexts for our household and community circumstances, as for pantries and building styles, so that we can understand our houses as part of broad movements in complex systems.