William F. Hanks is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 linguist and anthropologist who has done influential work in linguistic anthropology

Linguistic anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past 100 years to encompass almost any aspect of language structure and...

 describing the uses of deixis

Deixis

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...

 and indexicality

Indexicality

In linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behavior or utterance points to some state of affairs. For example, I refers to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of utterance...

 in the Yucatec Maya language. He holds the Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. A student of Michael Silverstein

Michael Silverstein

Michael Silverstein is a professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He is a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he has drawn together research on linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, language ideology,...

, he received his Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

. He is also known for introducing the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...

to the study of communicative practices. He received the Edward Sapir award for his 2010 monograph "Converting Words" about the colonial period society of Yucatán.

Partial Bibliography

2009. Converting words: Maya in the age of the cross. University of California Press.

1999. Intertexts, Writings on Language, Utterance and Context. Denver: Rowman and Littlefield.

1995. Language and Communicative Practices. Series Critical Essays in Anthropology. Boulder: Westview Press.

1990. Referential Practice, Language and Lived Space among the Maya. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

1992. The Indexical Ground of Deictic Reference. In Rethinking Context, Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin, eds. pp. 43–77. Cambridge University Press.