As Gerd Bauman (1996: 9) observes in his book Contesting Culture, '[n] o idea is as fundamental to an anthropological understanding of social life as the concept of culture'. Given that people's ways of speaking are often, if not always, culturally shaped, it would seem that the same must apply to linguistic pragmatics. Certainly cultural factors play a central part in the ethnography of communication (in anthropology) and in cross-cultural pragmatics (in linguistics). As suggested by Bauman's title, however, the 'culture concept' has lately been subject to sustained scrutiny and criticism for, among other things, its alleged essentialism, over-simplification, failure to accommodate variability and change, and under-estimation of human agency. Ironically though, as Bauman observes, '[a]t the same time, no anthropological term has spread into public parlance and political discourse as this word has done over the past twenty years'.