Learning to Read Like a Lawyer 45generally, an issue on which anthropologists and linguists have focused a great deal
in recent years.
Text as Process
Just as research on language structure has led to an emphasis on the crucial role of
context and language use in organizing how language in general conveys meaning
(see Chapter 2), studies of the ways written texts carry meaning in human societ-
ies have similarly demonstrated the importance of contextual analysis to under-
standing the significance of these texts. However, following initial work that simply
emphasized the importance of context to textual interpretation, recent work is
“in the midst of a radical reformulation wherein ‘text,’ ‘context,’ and the distinc-
tion between them are being redefined.”^4 As part of this reformulation, researchers
like Bauman, Briggs, and Silverstein have questioned a clear-cut division between
text and context, casting doubt on the utility of such a reified and static concept-
ualization. Rather, building from a new framework centered on language prag-
matics, scholars analyzing written and other texts now focus on processes,
analyzing “contextualization” of texts rather than “context,” “entextualization”
(the process by which texts are created) rather than “text.”^5
The action discussed under the rubric of entextualization is a first step in the
process by which text is recontextualized; it is simply “the process of rendering
discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a
text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text, then, from this van-
tage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable.”^6 It follows that the word
“text” in this sense can refer to units derived from spoken as well as written dis-
course, as with a myth that is passed down through oral tradition. Silverstein dis-
tinguishes between the “text-artifact, such as a graphic array on the printed page”
(i.e., the physical object),^7 and the varieties of more abstract text connected with
these text-artifacts, for example, the “denotational text” (roughly, what this stretch
of discourse “means” in a denotational or semantic sense), which can be differen-
tiated from the “interactional text” (again roughly, what this stretch of discourse
“means” as an instance of social interaction: what it “does” socially).^8 In this book,
I generally distinguish the text-artifacts of legal cases by referring to them as “writ-
ten texts,” as opposed to discussions of text or textuality, or of the “meaning of
texts” in a more abstract sense.
This new approach to the study of textuality allows researchers to examine the
dynamic process through which interpreters invoke features of texts in creating and
shaping their contexts of use. Here text does not exist entirely apart from context, as
something that is then acted upon by contextual factors; rather, features of the text
influence and form a part of interpretive context. This new approach problematizes
the creation of texts as detachable chunks of discourse, asking about the process by
which speakers segment discourse into texts that can then be removed from one
context (decontextualized) and put into another (recontextualized). Note, as well,
that the move to examine process also highlights human agency to a greater degree,
reminding us always that texts are created and recreated through people’s actions
and interpretations.