Talking Politics

Michael Silverstein (1945-2020) was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology in the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Silverstein was known for his highly influential research on language-in-use as a social and cultural practice and for his long-term fieldwork on Native language speakers of the Pacific Northwest and of Aboriginal Australia. He served on the editorial boards of American Anthropologist, Law and Social Inquiry, Ethnos, Functions of Language, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology among others. Silverstein was also a member of seven professional societies, including serving as the founding vice president and then president of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. Silverstein was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1982. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2008.