Joseph Errington
Professor of Anthropology
Joe Errington, B.A. Wesleyan University, Ph.D. University of Chicago, faculty member at Yale since 1982: You are widely known as the most rigorous and subtle analyst to apply the tools of anthropological linguistics to Javanese, one of the most linguistically complex languages in Southeast Asia. You also pioneered the application of semiotics to analyzing speech styles and modes of interaction, and you have shown how political and social contexts of language use can reveal how languages change over time.
Your surgically precise questions at scholarly presentations cut through performative empty speech, deflating too-lofty conjectures. You never shied away from correcting misunderstandings of Javanese linguistic practice, even challenging Clifford Geertz’s oversimplifications when he was perhaps America’s most famous anthropologist. But Geertz, and the brilliant but equally demanding linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein, had nothing but praise for your ethnographically nuanced sociolinguistics of Javanese.
Your work spans topics including courtly life, linguistic etiquette, language interaction, and national and language politics. Your recent volume, Other Indonesians: Nationalism in an Unnative Language, published in 2022, offers the most comprehensive analysis to date on the role played by Indonesia’s national language in post-colonial nationalism.
You once nearly perished from a bout of dengue fever incurred during one of your research trips, but colleagues express even greater wonder at how you survived the full range of Yale’s most taxing administrative duties, including long and effective service as the Department of Anthropology’s Director of Graduate Studies and two pivotal and longer-than-average terms as chair of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies. You funded a faculty slot, hired full-time lectors in Indonesian and Vietnamese, and found a curator for the Yale Art Gallery’s Indo-Pacific collection. You even made possible the purchase of a Gamelan Suprabanggo, whose gongs and metallophones will thrill Yale for generations to come. Today it sounds in grateful celebration of you.