William F. Hanks (born 1952) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

and

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms an ...

who has done influential work in

linguistic anthropology Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass mo ...

describing the uses of

deixis In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...

and

indexicality In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a '' sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, ...

in the

Yucatec Maya language Yucatec Maya (; referred to by its speakers simply as Maya or as , is one of the 32 Mayan languages of the Mayan language family. Yucatec Maya is spoken in the Yucatán Peninsula and northern Belize. There is also a significant diasporic com ...

. He holds the Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. Hanks earned his undergraduate degree from

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private research university in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll in 1789 as Georgetown College, the university has grown to comprise eleven undergraduate and graduate ...

. A student of Michael Silverstein, he received his Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. He is also known for introducing the practice theory of

Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu (; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence ...

to the study of communicative practices. He received the Edward Sapir award of the American Anthropological Association for his 2010 monograph "Converting Words" about the colonial period society of Yucatán.http://linguisticanthropology.org/tag/william-f-hanks/ In addition to the University of Chicago, he also held a faculty position at Northwestern University before receiving his chair at the University of California at Berkeley.

Partial bibliography

*2009. Converting words: Maya in the age of the cross. University of California Press. *1999. Intertexts, Writings on Language, Utterance and Context. Denver: Rowman and Littlefield. *1995. Language and Communicative Practices. Series Critical Essays in Anthropology. Boulder: Westview Press. *1990. Referential Practice, Language and Lived Space among the Maya. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. *1992. The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference. In Rethinking Context, Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin, eds. pp. 43–77. Cambridge University Press.

References

Linguists from the United States American semioticians University of Chicago alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Living people 1952 births {{US-linguist-stub