Gossip

Gossip is a truly ubiquitous form of talk. In this review, we provide an easily locatable, legible, and citable source for identifying key findings in the anthropology of gossip, and especially within linguistic anthropology. We survey work that shows how gossip and other genres of information control and circulation figure in the crafting of selves, in the constitution of groups, and in the flouting or enforcement of norms. As such, we examine the intersection of scholarship on gossip with works on morality, secrecy, scandal, rumor, affect, publics, and politeness, among other enduring critical concerns. We also demonstrate that gossip is central to anthropology not only as a paradigmatic object of analysis but also as a key practice that socializes scholars into the discipline, a core methodological element of ethnographic fieldwork, and an ongoing means of navigating academic work. And yet, gossip is often cast as mere background noise to more consequential modes of communicative interaction. Countering that tendency, we aim in this review to make gossip more visible and to encourage future work that centers it as both an object of analysis and as a mode of intersubjective theorizing.