In his book, Alessandro Duranti “introduces linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field which studies language as a cultural resource and speaking as a cultural practice.” (Duranti 1997, Preface) In comparison to Fetterman (1997), Duranti (1997) focuses more on the field of linguistics and, as he explicitly describes linguistic anthropology as an interdisciplinary field he furthermore includes a digression into the field of cultural studies. For linguists who are not cultural scientists, Duranti offers a compact and easy-to-read overview of essential concepts and theories prevalent in the field of cultural studies. The chapter “Theories of culture” presents various notions of culture in which it is described as distinct from nature, as knowledge or, especially interesting for linguists, as communication. The latter includes theories such as Lévi-Strauss’ semiotic approach and Clifford Geertz’ interpretive approach which also play an essential role in the field of linguistics. Another interesting concept of culture is the one describing it as a system of participation, which says that

[t]he idea of culture as a system of participation is related to culture as a system of practices and is based on the assumption that any action in the world, including verbal communication, has an inherently social, collective, and participatory quality. This is a particularly useful notion of culture for looking at how language is used in the