William F. Hanks

William F. Hanks
Name	William F. Hanks
Birth date	1949
Birth place	Berkeley, California
Occupation	Anthropologist, Linguist
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University
Notable works	"Intertexts", "Converting Words"
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship

William F. Hanks is an American linguistic anthropologist known for work on discourse, deixis, temporality, and ritual among Mixe–Zoque languages speakers, especially the Yucatec Maya and Yucatec. He is noted for combining fieldwork, ethnography, and interactional linguistics in studies of Mesoamerica, Mexico, and Guatemala. His scholarship bridges traditions associated with Erving Goffman, Clifford Geertz, Dell Hymes, and Michael Silverstein.

Early life and education

Hanks was born in Berkeley, California and raised in a milieu influenced by the intellectual communities of University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. He completed undergraduate study at Swarthmore College before pursuing graduate training in anthropology and linguistics at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley. His formative mentors included scholars connected to Boasian anthropology, Prague School linguistics, and traditions represented by Roman Jakobson, Edward Sapir, and Franz Boas.

Academic career

Hanks held faculty appointments at institutions such as University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Michigan. He contributed to programs in Linguistics, Anthropology, and Area Studies and served on committees associated with the American Anthropological Association and the Linguistic Society of America. Hanks supervised students who later joined faculties at Yale University, Columbia University, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Pennsylvania. He participated in editorial work for journals linked to Annual Review of Anthropology, Language, and American Anthropologist.

Research and major contributions

Hanks advanced theories in interactional linguistics that dialogue with frameworks by Michael Silverstein, Dell Hymes, Erving Goffman, Noam Chomsky, and Roman Jakobson. His analyses of deixis and indexicality intersect with debates involving John Austin, J. L. Austin, and Charles Sanders Peirce. He developed methodological approaches to discourse analysis that relate to work by Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gordon Wells. Hanks's research on temporality and modality engages with scholarship from Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gilles Deleuze. He is credited with influential concepts that have been cited alongside studies by Susan Gal, Alison Wray, Mary Bucholtz, and Deborah Tannen.

Fieldwork and collaborations

Hanks conducted long-term fieldwork in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and the Yucatán Peninsula, collaborating with community leaders, ritual specialists, and speakers documented in archives at Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia and university collections at El Colegio de México. He worked alongside researchers from Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Smithsonian Institution, Getty Research Institute, and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Collaborative projects included partnerships with scholars from University of California, Los Angeles, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Brown University on grants funded by National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Awards and honors

Hanks's honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and prizes from the American Anthropological Association. He was awarded fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He held visiting appointments at Institute for Advanced Study, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and The Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Selected publications

- Hanks, W. F., "Intertexts: A Study in Discourse and Deixis," published in venues associated with University of Chicago Press and cited alongside works by Clifford Geertz and Erving Goffman. - Hanks, W. F., "Converting Words: Maya in the Discourse of Catholicism," referenced in comparative studies with Anthony F. C. Wallace and Sidney Mintz. - Hanks, W. F., articles in Language, American Anthropologist, and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology discussing indexicality, deixis, and temporality in conversations documented in Mesoamerican contexts. - Hanks, W. F., chapters in edited volumes produced by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press on interactional approaches to linguistics and anthropology.

Category:Anthropologists Category:Linguists