Over the course of more than three decades, efforts to integrate theories of political economywith verbal culture have produced some of the most generative inquiries into the social meaningof discursive form. Beginning in the 1960s, sociolinguists developed what became known as the“ethnography of speaking,”1 with the aim of considering verbal skillsand performance as aspects of a socioeconomic system whose resources are apportionedaccording to a hierarchical division of labor. Critical of the more formalist and universalistlanguage paradigms of Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, these theorists argued thatspeaking is a socially and culturally constructed activity that is meaningful precisely in itsrelationship to specific systems of material organization. By the 1970s, sociologists wereextending these insights to broader political theory by proposing that linguistic competence beconsidered a form of “capital” that is distributed in “linguisticmarkets.”2 Through pioneering interdisciplinary efforts, inquiries into thecompetences of individual speakers gradually yielded to analyses of situated calculations thatindividuals make in exchange—calculations of quantities and kinds of return, of symbolicand economic capital, of alternative representations. Meaning was becoming as much a matter ofvalue and power as it was an expression of relationships between, as Ferdinand de Saussure onceproposed, a “sound pattern” and a “concept.”3 Indeed,in recent work in linguistic and cultural anthropology, studies of meaning have been linked evenmore intentionally to political economy by scholars who locate signs within social and materialcontexts. Words are things that circulate as signs through social, symbolic, and economictrajectories4 and are refracted through linguistic markets that are multiple andshifting.5 Building on earlier social anthropology, these studies suggest that, evenwithin one tightly knit social community, exchange becomes meaningful only at the intersection ofmultiple systems of value.