Alessandro Duranti - Home Page
Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology and Dean of Social Sciences at UCLA. He is an expert on language as a cultural practice, political discourse, verbal performance and jazz improvisation, human agency and intersubjectivity. 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 (Univ. of California Press, 1994), Linguistic Anthropology (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), and A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Blackwell, 2004). He is the recipient of various awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award, and the American Anthropological Association/Mayfield Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.