The Appalachian Mountain People have in recent years been a rich source of stimulus for theoretical development in anthropology, political science, sociology, and linguistics. For more than a hundred years the Mountain People have been an internalized Other, unquestionably apart (“In, but not of America,” in William G. Frost’s phrasing [“Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” Atlantic Monthly 83:311-319, 1899]), yet lacking most of the more familiar markers of Otherness, such as distinctive complexion, religion, or nationality. The Mountain People reveal their Otherness most noticeably in their speech. In Seldom Ask, Never Tell, Anita Puckett examines the linguistic constructions through which the Mountain People construct a local social and economic system that is set apart yet in ongoing relationships of labor and commodity exchange with the capitalistic system of the United States.

Puckett’s argument, in brief, is that language-in-use does not simply reflect but actually constitutes these social, political, and economic relationships. Economic relationships such as valuation, ownership, and exchange are created through complex patterns in which semantic categories (age, gender, kin), pragmatics, and metapragmatics are all intertwined to create a thick and stable discourse within the local community. When an agent of the larger capitalistic economy confronts this thick discourse, the typical result is any number of communicative failures. Puckett documents these failures and demonstrates why they occur.

Central to the local discourse is the idea of “belongin,’” which intertwines both persons and possessions in networks of possessive relationships. A “belongin’ network” for Puckett is only partly the network of kinship that many have noted in Appalachia. It can also include certain types of objects, homes, cars, gardens, and tools that, once incorporated into a belongin’ network, become decommoditized. Within a belongin’ network one is permitted to make certain semantically appropriate requests for objects and labor and to issue certain nonimperative directives. Such requests and directives are to be made only in certain specified formats and contexts. A cousin, for example, is permitted to request the loan of tools.

Although those outside the belongin’ network lack such rights and claims, they have a right to issue task directives, most typically around the nexus of wage labor. If they exceed these limits, communication fails (i.e., the employee quits), and the speaker who exceeded the boundary may be subjected to sanctions (e.g., his truck explodes).

Within the belongin’ network there are certain stylized forms for monetary exchange and compensated labor, such as “tradin’” and “helpin’ out.” The phrase “We’ll take care of you” implies not only that a service will be rendered but also that an obligation will be created. Through these linguistic mechanisms, the belongin’ network regulates flows of commodities, labor, and information in, from, and out to the capitalistic commodity system on its own terms.

Puckett concludes with a discussion of the linguistic ideology (using Silverstein’s term) of the Mountain People, showing how a number of linguistic forms--from highly contextual nonverbal socioeconomic interactions to highly textual religious stories and narratives--are arrayed on a continuum from context orientation to text orientation. According to Puckett, contextual communication includes both nonverbal exchanges and a number of metapragmatic designators that enfold the socioeconomic constitutive functions of language among the Mountain People.

By demonstrating how discourse constitutes economic relationships across class boundaries, Puckett makes a solid contribution to the evolving body of studies of language-in-use. Additionally, she sheds light on the speech of the Mountain People in ways that dialect collectors and accent measurers have not.

Every urban, middle-class practitioner--doctor, social worker, nurse, lawyer, business manager, educator, and even anthropologist--working among the Appalachian Mountain People should carry Seldom Ask, Never Tell under his or her arm. With every chapter I reflected on the malapropisms, miscues, rudenesses, and faux pas I might have avoided in my own fieldwork had I known then what I learned from this book.

One should not fault an already fine book for what it does not say. However, it appeared to me that, given the central place of land in the scheme of belongin,’ the lack of discourse or discussion of land transactions with outside agents was a notable omission. Perhaps it is something the Mountain People don’t talk about.

Seldom Ask, Never Tell is a fine example of how to examine the economic and politically constitutive acts of language-in-use in a manner that captures local nuances of communication and places them in a larger social context. One hopes that researchers in disciplines such as sociology and economics will find Puckett’s book as valuable as it is for those in linguistics and Appalachian studies.