Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor of Communication and Culture, Folklore, and Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Charles L. Briggs is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director, Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Making language safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to John Lock; 3. Antiquaries and philologists: the construction of modernity and its others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England; 4. The critical foundations of national epic: Hugh Blair, the Ossian controversy, and the rhetoric of authenticity; 5. Johann Gottfried Herder: language reform, das Volk, and the patriarchal state in eighteenth-century Germany; 6. The Brothers Grimm: scientizing, textual production in the service of romantic nationalism; 7. Henry Rowe school craft and the making of an American textual tradition; 8. The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American texts and the construction of modernity; 9. Conclusion.

'Their scope is enormous and I can think of no one who has covered the terrain that they have in such breadth and depth … one of the best accounts of language ideology I have encountered.' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute