As in Faust's reinterpretation of John's Gospel, in this chapter, we will learn that words themselves can be seen as actions and that actions and activities should then be the units of analysis for the anthropological study of language use. In chapter six, we started to see that when we use language, we help constitute the reality we are trying to represent. This was made apparent in the discussion of indexical relations between linguistic expressions and features of the context in which they are used. Not only do certain expressions require an understanding of the surrounding world for their interpretation, they also actively shape such a surrounding world, especially in terms of social identities.