Bauman Richard, Briggs Charles L. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality

Cambridge University Press, 2003. — xvi, 356 p. — ISBN13: 978-0-511-07275-8.This study asserts that conscious development of new ways of thinking about language had a crucial role in modern history, particularly the discovery of how differences between languages legitimated social inequalities. It claims that savages and ancients were judged alike because they used language similarly, in contrast to modern Europeans who used disciplined language in scientific, philosophical and legal projects.Making language and making it safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to John Locke
Creating modernity’s others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England: antiquarian and philological inflections
The critical foundations of national epic and the rhetoric of authenticity: Hugh Blair and the Ossian
controversy
Language, poetry, andVolkin eighteenth-century Germany: Johann Gottfried Herder’s construction of tradition
Scientizing textual production in the service of the nation: the Brothers Grimm and Germanic philology
The making of an American textual tradition: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Indian researches
The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas’s cosmopolitan charter for anthropology