Language and Culture in Dialogue [1 ed.] 1350059811, 9781350059818

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Language and Culture in Dialogue

Also available from Bloomsbury: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Sharon K. Deckert Ritual, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern Violence: Theory and Ethnography, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern Where Is Language?, Ruth Finnegan

Language and Culture in Dialogue Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, 2019 Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Carved Papua New Guinea mask (© THEPALMER / Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5981-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5982-5 ePub: 978-1-3500-5983-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd

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To words of love and sounds of being

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Contents About the Authors Preface Acknowledgments 1 Language as Cultural Practice 2 Origins 3 Language, Practice, and Embodiment 4 Themes in Language Practice 5 Cognition and Categories: The Work of Roy Ellen 6 Cognition and Categories: The Work of Anna Wierzbicka 7 Cognitive Science and Language 8 Language and Ritual: The Merina and the Melpa 9 Language and Ritual: Maring and Melpa 10 Language and Power 11 Language, Literacy, and Change: Scots and Tok Pisin 12 Excursions, Translations, and Explorations References Index

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About the Authors Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern) and Andrew J. Strathern are a wife and husband research team who are based in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, and co-direct the Cromie Burn Research Unit and the Okari Ritual/ Environmental Program. They are frequently invited to be international lecturers and have worked with numbers of museums to assist these organizations in documenting their collections, especially from the Pacific. They have worked and lived in many parts of the world. Stewart and Strathern have published over fifty books and hundreds of articles, book chapters, and essays on their research in the Pacific (mainly Papua New Guinea and the South-West Pacific region, e.g., Samoa, Cook Islands, and Fiji); Asia (mainly Taiwan, and also including Mainland China and Japan); Europe (primarily Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and the European Union

Figure 1  “Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern at Mbukl area, Hagen, WHP, Papua New Guinea, 2017. Photo authors’ own.”

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countries in general); as well as New Zealand and Australia. Their most recent co-authored books include Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Kinship in Action: Self and Group (Routledge, 2016, originally published in 2011); Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New Guinea Perspectives (University of Queensland Press with Penguin Australia, 2011); Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Working in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Diaspora, Disasters, and the Cosmos: Rituals and Images (Carolina Academic Press, 2018); Story of the Kuk UNESCO World Heritage Prehistoric Site and the Melpa, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea: Pride in Place (Angkemam Publishing House, 2018); and Sacred Revenge (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Their recent co-edited books include Exchange and Sacrifice (Carolina Academic Press, 2008); Religious and Ritual Change: Cosmologies and Histories (Carolina Academic Press, 2009, and the updated and revised Chinese version: Taipei, Taiwan: Linking Publishing, 2010); and The Research Companion to Anthropology (Routledge Publishing, 2016, originally published in 2015). Stewart and Strathern’s current research includes the new subfield of Disaster Anthropology, which they have been developing for many years. They are the Series Editors for the new Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology. Also, the topics of Cosmological Landscapes and the Environment; Healing Practices; Ritual Studies; Political Peacemaking; Comparative Anthropological Studies of Disasters and Climatic Change; Language, Culture, and Cognitive Science; and Scottish and Irish Studies are all research topics that they are engaged with. Stewart and Strathern have been, respectively, Visiting Research Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham, England. They are also Research Associates in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2003–present), and have continuously been Visiting Research Fellows at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, during parts of every year from 2002 to 2014. They are affiliated faculty at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (2015– present). They have served as Senior Visiting Fellows at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands (1998); as Research Visitor and Research Scholar (respectively), Minpaku, National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Expo Park, Osaka, Japan (2000 and again in 2014); as Visiting Scholars, Department of Anthropology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (2006–2011); as visiting professors, Department of Anthropology, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia (1997–1999); and (2004–2005, and 2017–2018)

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as invited lecturers at a number of Chinese Universities: Peking University, Xiamen University, Shanghai University, Nanjing University, Fudan University (Shanghai), Minzu University (Tongliao, Inner Mongolia), Inner Mongolia Normal University (Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China), and Inner Mongolia Art School (Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China). They jointly presented the 2012 DeCarle Distinguished Lectures at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and have been Visiting Fellows at the University of Otago (2008, 2012, 2015–2016, 2018). They were Special Advisers to the Organization for Internal Cultural Development (OICD) (2013–2016) and have served as Guest Lecturers on conflict studies and medical anthropology at the University of Augsburg, Germany (2014–2018). For many years, they served as Associate Editor and General Editor (respectively) for the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania book series. They currently edit three book series with Carolina Academic Press: Ritual Studies, Medical Anthropology, and European Anthropology, and they are the longstanding Co-Editors of the Journal of Ritual Studies (available through JSTOR and AtlaSerials). They also are the Series Editors for Anthropology and Cultural History in Asia and the Indo-Pacific with Routledge Publishing (formerly with Ashgate Publishing). They are on the editorial boards of the journals Shaman and Religion and Society. They are the Co-Leaders of the University of Pittsburgh’s Study Abroad program Pitt in the Pacific, which they developed from their contacts in the Pacific, especially at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Their web pages, listing publications and other scholarly activities, are: http://www.pitt.edu/~strather/and http://www. StewartStrathern.pitt.edu/.

Preface What is the relationship of language to culture? Answers to this classic question take various forms, depending on whether we seek to identify the place of language in culture or the place of culture in language. Language is not separate from culture, but a part of it, although it has a special capacity and role within the formation of cultural patterns themselves. Culture operates in many embodied and material manifestations that are separate from language, although language can be involved in discourse about them. In this book, we bring to bear on this topical arena of discussion insights and viewpoints from social and cultural anthropology. We recognize also the physical evolution of forms that have contributed to the ability of humans to speak, as well as the cognitive patterns that have fed into the development of language as a cultural creation. We draw generally on the fields of language study, sociology, and social analysis, primarily taking our materials from ethnography, including our own long-term work in different parts of the Pacific, Asia, and Europe. A major focus of our interest lies in the study of continuity and change in language and culture and the importance of identifying creativity and transformation, as well as the maintenance of cultural forms. Our broad aims emerge out of teaching courses over many years in this arena in universities around the world and an extensive engagement with field languages in general as a part of long-term ethnographic work and continuous engagement with grounded versions of theory. The book aims to include interesting field research materials of a primary kind as well as giving a broad coverage of contemporary and historical issues in the domain of language and culture studies. We target throughout it a middle ground of exposition not only without too many technicalities but also without oversimplifying the materials when we discuss cases. This is not a textbook in either cultural anthropology or linguistic anthropology, if these are defined as separate categories of disciplinary study. We would like to make this clear because some commentators on an earlier proposal for this book complained that it did not deal with all minutiae on technical topics in linguistic anthropology, although it was never intended to do so. Instead, it explores a continuous middle ground of interest between arenas of concern within anthropology, covering a broad swath of studies, and aiming to be relevant to students in the field of humanities as well as to practitioners

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in anthropology. The book reflects our own vision of anthropology in general and its relevance for both the humanities and the social sciences. We include in earlier chapters materials of a kind needed for both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as materials in later chapters from our own field researches that go deeper into contemporary debates on issues of meaning in language practice. The plan of the book is as follows: the overall emphasis in the book is on practice theory, highlighting its stress on language in action, an emphasis that also informs our work on kinship (Strathern and Stewart 2011a) and in ritual studies (Bell 1997; Stewart and Strathern 2014). In Chapter 1 we relate this approach to Dan Everett’s concept of “dark matter” as the substratum of culture and to his concept of “cultural grammar.” Chapter 2 is an excursus into the question of the origins of language as a human capacity, using Alan Barnard’s idea of the importance of narrative structures in the development of language, which jibes with our own interest in language as practice. We also broach Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and critiques of it. Chapter 3 discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of practice and embodiment theory, extending the general approach of language in practice. Chapter 4 rounds out this part of the book by looking at arguments between scholars on the correlates of literacy as a modality of practice and its possible influences on patterns of thought, a theme stemming from the seminal work by the anthropologist Jack Goody and his early collaborator Ian Watt. We include here a brief discussion of performativity and illocutionary forms of expression that lead into cognitive issues. In Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 we move from our general exposition of a practice approach to a more specific investigation of studies on cognition and culture, all the time hewing to particular ethnographic cases, while relating these to broader issues, such as modes of classification and cross-cultural perceptions, and the way that verbal and non-verbal elements enter into ritual practice. These chapters form the heart of our approach to questions of meaning, including an appraisal of the contributions of cognitive science to the understanding of language use. Chapters 10 and 11 deal with issues of language and power and with language change, as especially evident in studies of vernacular and lingua franca forms of expression that develop in contexts of social enclavement or correlate with the persistence of minority identities within larger dominant contexts. Finally, Chapter 12 moves to a short consideration of problems of translation between languages, and adds a further dimension of significance by noting the importance of the ecological functions of language and language itself as an instrument of adaptation to the environment made more complex by the advent of artificial intelligence.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Publishing who have assisted us in the production of this book. We also wish to thank the many people who have worked with us in our global traverses, stays, and movements. In particular, we express our thanks to all the people who have collaborated with us in the field, especially in Papua New Guinea [e.g., the Highlands areas of Hagen (Melpa speakers), Duna (Duna speakers), and Pangia (Wiru speakers)]; in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland we especially thank the Ulster-Scots Agency and the Ulster-Scots Language Society; and in Scotland we express our appreciation to the Scots Language Society. We thank the many colleagues at institutions where we have been based while conducting research and lecturing around the world. Sections of this manuscript were composed while staying in New Zealand as Visiting Fellows in the Department of Anthropology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, during a part of 2017–2018. We thank the supportive staff members and our colleagues within the Department, especially Professors Glenn Summerhayes and Richard Walter, for their assistance. We also thank everyone who helped us during our 2018 Study Abroad program, Pitt in the Pacific (University of Pittsburgh, Summer School at the University of Otago campus—a study program that we created), which we were also running during our stay in Dunedin. We also thank the Office of the Dean, in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, for continued support of our work in general. We also worked on this manuscript while we were serving as Guest Professors at the University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2018, teaching a master’s degree course in Medical Anthropology. We want to thank our kind sponsors and helpers in Augsburg, especially Professor Klaus-Dieter Post and also Professor Guenther Kronenbitter, Dr. Ina Hagen-Jeske, and Dr. Carolin Ruther, of the Department of European Ethnology, and the assistance from the Center for European Studies, University Center for International Studies, at the University of Pittsburgh. The final pieces of this book were completed, and the manuscript was made ready to send to the press while we were researching the outcome of the 2016 Referendum in the UK that voted to exit from the European Union (EU) (BREXIT: British Exit from the EU). We have worked for decades in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, so it

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was especially moving to be staying in those three locations in June, July, and August of 2018, after this vote by the UK to exit the EU and the negotiations to attempt to resolve relationship matters. A mindful anthropology would also be needed to study this situation in all its ramifying complexities (for a fuller discussion on our concept of Mindful Anthropology, see Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Breaking the Frames: Anthropological Conundrums, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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Language as Cultural Practice

This chapter begins to explore, in a preliminary way, aspects of meaning in language practices, concentrating on cultural patterns and relating these to the idea of “dark matter,” as discussed by the linguist Dan Everett (Everett 2016). In accordance with our overall approach, we start from a familiar interactional context. How do you greet people? How do you say goodbye? What can people tell about you when they first hear you speaking? In everyday life what we say, to whom, and how we say it constantly influence our social relationships. This is the context of usage that we refer to as language in practice. Moreover, when we move to different places or use a different language, our performance of practices and sensibilities changes. The subtle or sometimes obvious ways in which language use is enmeshed with and influences practically every aspect of our lives make it evident how important the study of language is. Linguists, anthropologists, philosophers, and scholars in the fields of communication and media studies have constantly explored the intricate symbiosis between language use and human activity in general. Language has sometimes, indeed, been upheld as the one cultural characteristic or achievement that makes us human or distinct from other living creatures. All living things have distinct ways of communicating with the world, and there is clearly a continuum between such ways (including vocalization and gestures) and human language, but humans have developed flexible and adaptable methods of symbolizing the world in ways that give them some communicational advantages over other creatures, although these creatures also have their own capacities for thought and in some respects superior sensory abilities. In this book we explore some dimensions of this immensely rich field of enquiry, with a concentration on language but seeking always to situate language in its practical contexts, rather than isolating it as a “thing in itself.” From earliest times people have probably been attuned to similarities and differences in speech among themselves. The origin of this tendency lies partly in

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the imperative to distinguish insiders from outsiders or friends from foes. How often if one enters a new social milieu do we find that sooner or later, someone will say “What kind of accent is that you have there?” Or, in another version, “Where do you come from?” As scholars who frequently move around different parts of the world this has been a recurrent experience for us, one to which we provide situational answers. A world of inferences about identities hides in that simpleseeming question, but the answers are indeed various. In many contexts political identities are at stake. One’s accent and ways of speaking can vary in different places, consciously or unconsciously, and over time may take on an intermediate or hybridized character, making it harder for listeners to “place” one, and this is because one belongs partially to many places. In a cosmopolitan world this is bound to happen, yet it does not mean that senses of identity are flattened or obliterated by this process. Language differences are often referred to as a source of barriers between people, and the question of how they have diverged over time and whether there was at some remote time a single human language teases the imagination. Relatedly, scholars have debated whether there is a universal capacity for language that is innate in humans or whether all languages conform to some universal pattern. Scholars looking for deep cross-cultural patterns that are shared can be characterized as universalists, while those who are more interested in what makes languages and cultures different from one another can be described as particularists. What all scholars agree on is that language and culture are interdependent and influence each other. Clearly, language varies according to the requirements of the broader culture to which it contributes. At the same time, we can acknowledge that there is an active role of language as a pervasive influence through all dimensions of cultural life, and so it is more than a tool of culture at large and is rather a tool integral to the creation of culture. It is also important to recognize from the outset, and in line with recent trends in the analysis of both sociocultural life in general and language in particular, that individual variation is significant in the overall production of meaning and that meaning is an outcome of practical usage, or as one prominent theorist Nick Enfield has argued it is shaped by broad considerations of utility (Enfield 2015). Utility, in turn, can be related to cultural context, since utility is itself a culturally articulated concept. A related way of putting this is found in Dan Everett’s recent work on “dark matter” (Everett 2016). In his usage, dark matter signals a broad range of assumptions, norms, images, attitudes, and ideas that underlie people’s actions and may not be directly expounded by them. Everett also refers to this realm as “the culturally articulated unconscious” (the subtitle of his book). In his viewpoint, this realm is formed in every individual via their lived experience. It

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underpins language usages but is not necessarily directly expressed in linguistic ways of expression. Everett notes further that it “is a combination of culture and individual psychology” (2016: 26); in other words, this is not a theory that posits a collective unconscious separate from individual consciousness. The use of the term “dark matter,” however, suggests that there is a preponderance of it in the makeup of the world of any given culture and that culture depends on it for its continued maintenance. Everett uses this image very effectively to convey the importance of cultural learning through experience, and to elaborate on a view that he has long sustained on the question of linguistic universals. (See also his earlier work on language as a cultural tool, Everett 2012.) Everett refers to the concept of dark matter in various ways, for example (p. 3), “the invisible hands of … cultural values” that are mostly unexpressed in explicit terms and are embodied and derived from the individual experience of living. Another way of putting it is that dark matter is tacit knowledge that is learned, internalized, and forgotten until called upon (p. 11). Implied further is that dark matter is an important cognitive resource. Dark matter is found everywhere but is particular to each culture in which it is carried. Everett has opposed Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar as a domain of cognitive hard-wiring that supposedly distinguishes humans from other species, preferring instead to posit flexible learning capacities as the hallmark of humanity. Culture remains preeminent in Everett’s analytical scheme and one of the interesting explorations he makes linking language and culture together is in the sphere of how culture influences grammar. Everett’s discussion of this topic is quite complex and depends on displaying some features of the Amazonian language he studied in detail, Piraha, which has elaborate tones and stress rules that define meanings, as well as speech channels such as hum speech, yell speech, musical speech, and whistle speech. Understanding how all this is a product of culture further means that the operative grammar cannot be understood without considerable cultural knowledge. We find this a productive perspective. For example, in the Papua New Guinea Highlands languages, numbers of culturally significant features are embedded in verbs that replace a state of being with bringing things into being. Such embeddings mean that linguistic expressions are invariably marked in ways that flag important cultural values and because of their embedding they operate as dark matter in social practice. In other words, these are elements of language usage that both align with cultural values operative beyond language and also themselves assist in shaping and reproducing these values. Two examples may help here to elucidate this point. In the Melpa language of the Mount Hagen

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area, an infix /nde/ can indicate an action that is done on behalf of someone else or causes something to be (on Melpa see, for example, Stewart, Strathern, and Trantow 2011). Thus, /menem/ signifies “carries,” while /mendenem/ indicates that the carrying is done for another person. A comparable feature is found in the Wiru language of Pangia in the Southern Highlands Province, where /kako/ means that a person is standing, and /kakako/ with the /ka/ infix means to make something stand up (on Pangia see, for example, Strathern and Stewart 1999a, 2000a). Making things happen or doing something on behalf of someone else is an important cultural pattern in these two areas, and much emphasis is placed on actions. Of course, this can also be true of cultures where these grammatical features are not found, but the point here is that in these two languages the speakers automatically exhibit the emphasis on socially oriented action, so that the grammatical features become carriers of dark cultural matter. The idea of dark matter thus provides a bridge between universalist and particularist perspectives on language and culture. Expanding the idea of grammar, Everett further develops a concept of “cultural grammar” (pp. 26–27), which he sees as the outcome of several influences working together to produce senses of identity. The same may be said of our two grammatical examples just given. A related point about the creative powers of language in social relations is integral with our overall approach in this book. Another broad debate has engaged writers in parallel with arguments about universals versus particulars. Does language fix identities in cultural milieus or can it also be an instrument for the creation of new identities or bridging across identities? The answer is that, because of its creative potentialities, language can be used performatively to do all of these things. The globalization of forms of language such as English is also matched by the constant creation of dialects and sub-dialects and hybrid forms that emerge from migration and cultural interchange. As anthropologists who specialize inter alia on the Pacific region, we think it is important to write about the creation of lingua franca or creole vernacular forms such as Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, which illustrate the flexibility and ingenuity of human cultural creation, as well as being poignant historical markers of colonial and postcolonial histories. In addition, we bring attention to rich vernacular forms that are enclaved within wider majority language environments, such as the Scots language within the English-speaking world of the UK. A major overall theme that intersects with the above argument is the formation of speech communities, identified by Gumperz (1968, reprinted in Duranti 2009) along with Dell Hymes’s development of the “ethnography

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of communication” concept and the study of “communicative competence” (Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1972, reprinted in Duranti 2009). Language usages can be a means of establishing and defining communities, and language intersects with culture generally in the construction of what Hymes called communicative competence. In Everett’s terms, communicative competence is a product of the dark matter that shapes it. By the same token, language can be used to disrupt existing community forms and create new ones. Language, identity, and the politics of boundaries are therefore bound up together. Code-switching occurs when people interact in complex, layered circumstances associated with differential power; while at the same time transgressive identities may be formed as a result of the movements of people. Variability, individuality, and innovation all contribute here. We will be commenting later in this book on the concept of speech community by using our field materials on the Lowland Scots and Ulster-Scots language forms in Scotland and parts of Ireland. A speech community can be stretched and expanded or restricted and constrained, depending on how one handles the definition of the term “community” itself. Involved here also is a current interest in what are called language ideologies, ideas about what language as such is and does in different cultural milieus. This issue is in turn related to the concept of language pragmatics. Speakers and users of literary forms of a language may operate unselfconsciously or may be operating consciously in using language as an identity marker. In the latter case, the question of a speech community intersects with the production of a language ideology that gives value to the language as a marker of identity in an environment of other language forms. This point applies also to the lingua franca forms in the Pacific, for example Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. The term “language ideology” has been developed with a specific use in focus, meaning what people think language is capable of doing, as we have just noted above. In a related but separate domain of anthropological discussion we also need to distinguish between two very different contexts: those contexts in which the language users express their general ideologies via their language, including their language ideology as such, and those contexts in which others evaluate and perhaps rank that language and ipso facto its speakers’ social standing. The two contexts may merge, or they may remain separate and potentially opposed. The rubric under which discussions of meaning have often been undertaken in the past has centered on the meanings of words. This convention can plausibly be argued to have been influenced by elaborate forms of literacy and dictionaries and by the making of dictionaries on the languages of preliterate populations.

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Meaning, in effect, is carried in many different domains of action, notably in the level of dark matter that we have discussed above in this chapter. There remains the possibility that there are levels of shared universal domains of meaning expressed within culture, but dark matter is always specific or particular in its content. If universality is to be found, it is within general cognitive capacities shared by humans and in generalities of custom, such as the existence of systems of kin classifications (see, for example, our book on kinship, Strathern and Stewart 2011a).

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Origins

Linguists and anthropologists have been interested in questions of origins. So, indeed have been most of the peoples of the world, who have been concerned to explain basic issues of their identities as humans in the wider worlds of life, including the invention of language, marriage, relationships with spirits, and the like. There are two foci of discussions about origins of language forms: (1) the emergence of human language as such and its universal or variable features, (2) the historical reconstruction of worldwide or regional language families, such as the categories of Indo-European, Austronesian, etc. We will discuss (1) in relation to functional theories in general and with particular reference to Noam Chomsky’s famous ideas of universal grammar (see Chomsky 1965), learning acquisition device, and recursion as a putative universal grammatical or syntactic feature of language. Much theorizing has surrounded the broader issues of how and why language, whatever its characteristics, emerged in society, and how it enabled a speeding up of cultural evolution. We will therefore deal with this arena also. We will not be dealing with the second focus mentioned above, the classification of language families by the tools of historical linguistics, although this is a fascinating part of overall language and culture studies. This is because in this chapter our focus is at the level of language origins in general and the evaluations of Chomsky’s general ideas, which do not depend directly on the classification of language families. Origin stories in folk traditions answer to some of the same concerns as those of scientists: what makes humans unique or not unique, what links them to other beings, how did customs (including different languages) emerge, what is the role of spirits in people’s lives—these are some of the concerns. The fundamental tendency to explain things in terms of first origins is shared widely among cultural patterns and provides momentum for historical linguistics and glottochronology

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(the study of time depths of language forms and their interrelations) as well as appearing in folk mythologies. An interesting feature of such mythological stories is that they sometimes portray animals as communicating with humans, guiding them on difficult journeys into mountain interiors that are gateways into a spirit world. Or they may center on a motif that dogs could once speak with people but that this capacity was lost owing to a mistake that was made or some wrongdoing on either side. In general, these stories portray the lives of people and other beings as closely linked together, a feature that may have originated at an early time when humans were hunter-gatherers, especially in relation to dogs, which are widely used for hunting purposes. How humans came to invent and possess language has been a favorite topic for theorists for a long time. From what we have said in Chapter 1 it is obvious, to begin with, that the genesis of language is inseparable from the genesis of culture in general. Most theories have gone on from that starting point to trace the beginnings of human language forms to sociopolitical causes, such as the development of group structures and the need for effective communication stemming from shared activities, the pressures of armed conflict and defense of territories, the contexts of the food quest, and the need for equitable distribution of resources. All these are self-created factors. Alan Barnard has carried this discussion productively forward by pointing out that language capacities developed during the long period of time in which humans were hunter-gatherers. It is not possible to pinpoint exactly when or how language abilities arose, or whether, for example, earlier populations such as Neanderthals or Denisovans possessed this capacity. (For details on the category “Denisovans” see Barnard 2016: 58ff.) It is apparent that Neanderthals possessed complex aspects of culture shared with Homo sapiens and that they interbred at times with the latter. Similarly, with the populations now known as Denisovans. Barnard notes that the development of forms of language out of gestural communication methods depended on the production of sounds associated symbolically with meanings, and there are no records that could tell us when this innovation took place. What is more certain is that language began for social reasons, for communal aims rather than simply communication, and that it was instrumental in the growth of culture through its provision of a way of storing, passing on, and elaborating knowledge beyond the immediacies of experience, a way that was not available without it. There is a world of difference, we can agree, between pointing to a tree and naming the tree in its locality and as a marker of a leader’s place or speeches made under its shade.

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Language also enables the creation of a kind of narrative memory distinct from episodic memory of events and narrative implies that the memory is shared among individuals in social relationships, feeding into what Dan Everett has called the dark matter of culture (Everett 2016), and we have discussed in Chapter 1. Scholars have noted that, regardless of the timescale, language developed among hunter-gatherer populations, meeting the social needs of people, in accordance with the kinship structures and modes of subsistence in operation. It is an interesting thought. If language took shape in that way, how much of it still reflects or encapsulates a former hunter-gatherer way of looking at the world? Following the intriguing remarks on this point by Alan Barnard (2016: 56), where he says that “humans are in nature hunter-gatherers,” we make here three suggestions. First, humans are classifiers and language is a tool of classification. Barnard (2016: 58) cites Richard Lee’s work on classification by Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers of Botswana and Namibia, who identified 105 edible species of plants, far more than they regularly used for food, indicating the power of the classificatory impulse. Such knowledge would also function as a backup in cases of food shortage. Second, humans are collectors. They collect all kinds of things, as an outgrowth of the classificatory impulse. In a dysfunctional excrescence of this characteristic, they may become irrational hoarders. Third, they are travelers who visit places and try to make themselves comfortable wherever they are, like the transhumant ways of the hunter-gatherers who move around and seek to set up viable camps with access to resources wherever they stay. Knowledge of the environment is always crucial in these processes, and this knowledge may be stored in narrative forms and symbolic representations that constitute forms of ecology, incorporating notions about spirit forces that give focus to human interest and concern about places. The symbolic character of these representations, we suggest, gives them an adaptive mnemonic character. A feature of all these viewpoints on the origins of language is that they are focused on actions and functions in a broad sense. Barnard notes (p. 58), in line with other scholars whom he cites, that language is not a thing, but a process, and this also makes it easier to understand that language is constantly in change through the phenomenon of “languaging” and “doing language.” This process involves a number of elements working together. Scholars, as Barnard notes, have maintained differing views on the priorities among these elements. Generally, it seems reasonable to imagine that words (themselves dependent on physiological and phonological attributes) must come first in the

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process. Words by themselves are insufficient for language to be realized, so syntax and grammar must come into play. Some theorists, notably Noam Chomsky, have laid stock on a particular grammatical feature, recursion, in which one clause is encapsulated within another. Barnard cites (p. 75) another scholar who opined that location is another prerequisite, that is, a way of indicating linguistically where the action is taking place, a version of directional indicators that can also be expressed in gestures. Doubtless all these are significant enabling factors but whether there is a finite set of such factors is hardly possible to determine. One thing we can suggest is that in small-scale face-to-face societies embodied aspects of language usage are prominent, and also that where people are or are said to be is socially very salient, hence these societies are likely to have highly developed linguistic and paralinguistic (gestural) spatial indicators tied in with landscape as their life-world. The strongest overall proposition that Barnard puts forward is that we cannot say whether language came first and facilitated thought or whether the reverse is true, but we can safely say (as Barnard, p. 78, does) that they have coevolved over time, strengthening each other and creating complexity in modes of expression, in a stochastic or aleatory progression. Language thus evolves in a mode analogous to the way that learning in general does. Given this, it is worth noting also that contemporary hunter-gatherer languages and modes of cognition are not in general simple but are often enough as complex as the languages of agriculturalists or pastoralists living around them, if not more so. Hunter-gatherer languages as they are known today may not be like what they were in prehistory, of course, but they surely show evidence of long-term tendencies and structures that give us some insight, at least, into their past. Here a feature brought into focus by Barnard can be adduced. Barnard asks what part story-telling may have had in the development of language. He answers that stories are intrinsic to human communication and are found in early forms of mythology and their stories of the interactions among spirits, deities, and humans. Such stories, we may further note, require various equivalents of indirect and reported speech, and thus specific grammatical mechanisms, for them to work as comprehensible sequences of sentences. This point can be confirmed from studying how stories are constructed in consecutive pieces linked grammatically. In Melpa language stories from Mount Hagen, each new piece of this kind is linked grammatically to the piece before it with a specific participle verb form indicating that the new subject of the piece is the same as or different from the preceding piece. Thus, for example, if the verb /iti/, “to do,” is the linking form,

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it can appear as /etepa/ (“doing”) if the action is by a single person and that person continues as the actor, or as /elinga/ (“being done”) if the action switches to another single actor. Correlative shifts or correspondences are made with plural or dual actors in focus. This “piecing” formula thus becomes the means whereby multiple actors enter and leave the scene of action as the story develops. Without the relevant verb inflections this could not be achieved, that is, without the whole range of subject continuity or discontinuity forms of all verbs in the language, extending also to “irrealis” forms that depend on an imagined future state. The language here literally provides the correlates of time that are needed for a story to move along. Exactly the same mechanisms, with a further twist, are found in the Wiru language of Pangia south of Hagen. There, a composite verb form /niroa/ means “doing so” (literally “that doing”) with continuity of the subject, while /nirikolo/ is the subject-change form when the action belongs to a single flow linking the actors together and /nirikale/ when there is a disjunction of action, plus all correlative forms. These features are a part of the fact that each grammatical form also has culture imprinted on it. Demonstration of this point is in fact a favored pastime of anthropologists. The Melpa language distinguishes between dual and plural forms of pronouns and between inclusive and exclusive forms with regard to who is talking with whom, and this is because such distinctions are important on a daily basis for face-to-face relationships. (Melpa, Wiru language materials are taken directly from the Stewart Strathern field language materials.) Barnard notes (2016: 90) that Harold Conklin was able to explain a much more complex set of pronominal distinctions among the Hanunoo people of the Philippines. Since language and thought are so closely bound together, it seems that it is not feasible to try to determine priority between them. In fact, we can go one step further here and comment on how language itself may skew thought in a particular direction. The existence of these two words “language” and “thought” suggests to us that we are dealing with two different bounded “things” on the assumption that words identify in a bounded way such “things” in the world. However, this is not necessarily the case. What has become represented by these two words may signal an interlinked domain of reference, dealing with experience that encompasses both concepts. Thus, the issue may be created by language usage itself. The answer to the conundrum about priority may be to reframe the question and examine not only how language constrains thought but also how efforts to rethink problems lead to creative changes in language use. We may cite, for example, the proliferation of neologisms in language used to describe computer operations, a whole new technical world of terms.

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A reason why issues of priority among processes have arisen and occupied theorists is that they have sought to establish both why and how language developed in human populations, with the obvious corollary that language greatly facilitates social life. Was it, then, preceded by thoughts that guided how language would emerge? Or was it guided by some biological characteristics, such as a particular gene mutation in humans? Intersecting with such questions but from a different perspective is the well-known theory of Noam Chomsky that there is a language instinct in humans that sets them apart from other species and that along with this goes a universal grammar underlying all forms of languages. Chomsky’s theory starts from the factual observation that all peoples have languages and that children rapidly learn the first language or languages to which they are exposed. Chomsky then hypothesizes that the reason for this is that there is an inbuilt capacity for language in the child, genetically encoded at the species level and accompanied by an equally inbuilt learning acquisition device that enables the coding to be applied. Other theorists argue, however, that a whole range of genes may be involved, or that all we are dealing with is a general aptitude for learning cultural practices and values that require skill and commitment. Everett takes this further by arguing that there is no universal grammar of languages, but each grammar is a cultural artifact. It could be that there is a universal pattern, and that cultural particularities are then added to it. Chomsky wished to argue that one particular feature is common to all grammars, and this feature is recursion. However, Everett also argued that this feature precisely is not found among the Piraha, whom he spent many years studying. At this point the argument becomes rather intractable. Perhaps it is best to note that recursion is a very common grammatical motif, but there is no a priori reason why it must occur in all languages or to consider it to be diagnostic of our species. There is another level of argument. Chomsky made a clear break between humans as language users and other species without explaining how language could have arisen. Other theorists, however, have, per contra, seen language as arising and developing out of earlier evolutionary processes, with a stress on the advantages for survival that it conferred on its users. The ability to talk and persuade others to listen, the utility of knowledge being retrievable and accessible to memory, and the ease with which further innovations could occur, all these factors would go together and coincide with the capacity for language, making a strong pressure for its development. As with general cultural learning, so also with language. Mistakes have to be corrected, and a trial-and-error process of learning holds sway.

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A systematic scheme of theorizing on the origins of language is provided by Derek Bickerton (1990). Bickerton takes as his initial point that language involves consciousness, and that consciousness depends on learning representations that can become formalized as categories, developing out of what he calls our species’ primary representational system (PRS) of perception. Language provides a secondary representational system (SRS), which facilitates thinking via the operation of a syntactic system or module, and language also is the means whereby other parts of the brain are co-ordinated. Language also provides a platform for the evolution of an idea of the self and self-consciousness, through which we are able to comment on and evaluate our own actions. It is a fundamental and illuminating observation that gives language a pivotal and central place in the genesis of thought: language is necessary in this scheme for the operation of thought itself, if thought is to be seen as a conscious operation. Bickerton formulates this: “what we are conscious of is what we are able to process linguistically” (Bickerton 1990: 216). Bickerton fully recognizes that some aspects of the operations of the brain are not, at least ordinarily, accessible to the self, while others are accessible via language. He also notes the point we have made above about binary classifications, that language often divides the world into two opposed categories, and this can be misleading. Language also tends to posit an agent of any given action, so that a personal subject is invoked by linguistic usage itself. “It thunders” thus leads potentially into an idea that a powerful agent has caused the event (p. 226). Myth follows easily from this. In the Melpa language, the phrase /kona ronom/ means “it is raining,” but its literal form is “rain strikes,” where the subject is expressed but the object is not. Rain is given an agentive role in this usage. Alternatively, another agent may be implied, such as an ancestral spirit that wished rain to fall. As Bickerton notes, the way is thus opened, through the portal of syntax, “for the setting up of unlimited hypothetical entities” (p. 227). Language can therefore be either adaptive or maladaptive in terms of the concepts it makes possible. Language usages can also deal with embodied processes in ways that do not fit a simple subject/object predicate. In Melpa the statement /na mindil enem/ means “I am feeling pain,” but it literally parses as “me pain (it) makes.” By starting the statement with the firstperson pronoun the speaker draws attention to the immediacy of the pain they are feeling. The pain and the person are conflated in a kind of double predicate. An interesting further set of considerations is supplied by Robbins Burling (Burling 2005). He remarks on something that is well-known, but not always discussed, the ability to learn and understand many words in a new language

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in advance of being able to speak them (p. 17). Something similar may have happened with language itself in a gradual development over time. Burling is also in accord with the views of scholars who have taken the position that language is likely to have come into being gradually (p. 18). He adds that at each step comprehension would have to be shared before another stage in production could be achieved (p. 21). Later in the book, he goes on to show that language learning depends on certain shared cognitive orientations, such as an idea that words can be names of things, that facial expressions and gestures can contribute to communicative processes, that interactions are important, that word order is stable allowing extrapolation of syntax, that we can successfully mimic or imitate sounds, that we seek for patterns, and the like. Burling stresses (p. 73) that concepts and categories must exist in a cognitive sense for language to come into being. However, we cannot assume too much uniformity here because otherwise we would be disposed to elevate culture-specific concepts into universal categories. As he himself recognizes, uniformity is matched by variability, because otherwise all languages would be the same. One way in which variability and flexibility would be selected for, he notes, is the movement by humans into new environments requiring them to pay attention to different stimuli crucial for their adaptation. The point is a good one, reminding us that our species is a mobile one, and pointing again to the use of language in practice, a topic that we pursue in the next chapter. In the present chapter, we have not been concerned with a detailed examination of all factors at work in the evolution of language from a biological perspective, because we have started from the perspective of language in culture, but this does not imply that such biological enabling factors are unimportant, only that they are not the immediate focus of our discussion here.

3

Language, Practice, and Embodiment

The study of language, as employed in practical speech contexts, meshes with approaches in practice theory generally in anthropology. “Practice theory” is well exemplified in general by the complex work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1977). Bourdieu’s early work was carried out among the Kabyle of Algeria, and he often gives examples of linguistic usages derived from this work, but his work is in general important for its combination of both sociological and semantic insights. Insights from the Kabyle work also informed his later work on language and symbolic power and on cultural themes such as “taste” (in the sense of aesthetic discrimination). Bourdieu was engaged with marxist theorizing, and in his discussion of aesthetics he notes that such matters are greatly inflected by class identities (Bourdieu 1984). His theories are also relevant to the analysis of what speech communities are and how they operate in social terms. Such communities need not be homogeneous, as William Labov (1972) famously pointed out through his study of Lower East Side New York City in the 1960s. (See also Bourdieu 1991.) “Practice theory” in language studies also owes much to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. Malinowski stressed the importance of context in understanding linguistic usages, and this viewpoint corresponds closely to a standard ethnographic or cultural approach, in which culture is invoked as the means of understanding language. Malinowski’s work on the language of magical spells well exemplifies his approach (e.g., Malinowski 1935, and see also Tambiah 1968 for a close analysis of the language of Trobriand spells and their performative structures). In taking readers into Trobriand garden magic, Malinowski immediately places us in a Trobriand garden, not far from the ocean, in the presence of the appointed garden magician, who exerts his influence on the garden plants, perhaps taro and types of yams important in the ceremonial economics of the village chief. The magical expert is chanting a spell over the garden soil containing the growing plants, exhorting the plants to grow big and healthy. The logic of the spell is

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contained in its imagery, which envisages the process of fertility in the ground as like the way a child grows inside its mother. In a society in which ties of descent through the mother are fundamental to identity, the image carries great force. Human and garden fertility are brought together, while the agency that brings this about is male. So, the specialist intones, “The belly of my garden swells” and from a linguistic viewpoint another feature is interesting. The magician literally visualizes his magic by presenting the growth of the garden plants underground as actually happening, not just a wish or a command, but an event unfolding in response to his words. This makes his utterances on a par with what linguists have called “illocutionary statements,” words that actually perform what they portray, following the original use of this term by the philosopher J. L. Austin (Austin 1962). Language pragmatics, as a special component of practice theory in general, investigates how language forms are used, for example, in the sphere of pronouns and possessives as explained in the early and ongoing work by Stephen Levinson and his collaborators. (See also above Chapter 2, on the Hanunoo.) How “things” are used is also the basic starting point of Bourdieu’s work, and is well exemplified in his classic reexamination of the theme of “The Gift” in the writings of his predecessors, Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Mauss gave an account of the rules underlying gift-giving, while Lévi-Strauss systematized these under the rubric of general reciprocity, Bourdieu says (Bourdieu 1977: 5). However, neither of these theorists, he says, established how the gift was organized in practice, depending on two principles, one that returns for the gift must be deferred rather than immediate and the other that the return must be different from its predecessor. The fact of deferral gives scope for management and also for failure. It is vital that the return should not simply be the same as the earlier gift because that would amount to a refusal to redefine the gift itself as a way of strengthening social ties. Bourdieu presents these propositions as universals. Whether this is so or not, the formulation is a perfect characterization of how gifts work in the Mount Hagen moka system in Papua New Guinea, with the addition that return gifts should exceed their predecessors’ levels. (See, for example, Strathern and Stewart 2000b.) Bourdieu attempts to introduce another point, that this kind of system involves that the participants “misrecognize” the true conditions under which they produce their actions. We do not follow him in this regard because he says that participants are not aware of or do not recognize the strategies that actually constitute the dynamics of their activities. Our observation here is that all the strategies he enumerates relating to gift-giving are known to and commented

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on by the Hageners themselves in the moka system. Indeed, from his own ethnography on the Kabyle (pp. 8ff.), exactly the same conclusion emerges from all the Kabyle categories he proceeds to enumerate, dealing with the intricate practices of making gifts to keep relations going, via “necessary improvisations” enacted in time (p. 8). An uncertainty of outcomes, and the possibility of failure, also accompanies this process (p. 9). Time and tempo rule what happens, what transpires. Rules do not. Meanings emerge pari passu with the flow of interactions; they elicit one another. Kabyle men, like many Pacific Islanders, are very conscious of their honor, as something to be asserted, defended, and maintained, he says, and a competitive game of challenge and counter-challenge or refusal of challenge emerges, depending on the status of the actors. Among Kabyle, there is much ambiguity of status, with an ever-present possibility of suffering or inflicting shame (again, as in the Pacific Islands). Kabyle express honor in an embodied expression calling it /nif/, “nose” (p. 15). A man of honor is said to “face east” and to “look to the future.” In his discussion here, Bourdieu hits on a fundamental and enduring point, the significance of embodiment. The sense of honor is inscribed in bodily schemas as well as in schemes of thought (p. 15). The Kabyle language expresses all this. Building on these observations, we can say that key semantic concepts in particular cultural contexts play important pragmatic, and also cosmological, roles. We will instance here two concepts from the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea: popokl (“anger”) and noman (“mind”) (Stewart and Strathern 2001). Throughout our discussions, we deal with the intersection of culture and language, primarily but not exclusively, through the lens of language itself. This does not mean that we give any absolute priority to language as a part of culture. In general terms, culture is a holistic concept, dealing with all aspects of learned and transmitted patterns of human activity. Alessandro Duranti (1997: 23–59) advances the idea of culture as separate from nature, culture as knowledge, culture as mediation between humans and the environment, culture as practice, and culture as a system of communication. To these standard analytical classifications, we would add culture and creativity, as we have mentioned already above. The concept of creativity makes it easier to incorporate a recognition of individuality and change into practices, and the place of language in creating change, adaptation, and variation. Thus, culture is important throughout our discussions, even though we are concerned in our ethnographic cases, primarily with language in culture. Our citations from the influential work of Bourdieu indicate that he, too, was concerned to build change and creativity into his analyses, via his recognition of strategy and uncertainty. Our two examples from

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Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea will illustrate this general approach to our topic. With their immediacy of reference to embodiment, they also point to a link between the sensory physical world of experience and the world of language. Popokl and noman are closely linked topics that tie together body, mind, emotions, thought, action, and causation, in configurations of practice that are dynamically seen as embodied. Popokl can be glossed as “anger” or “frustration,” while noman means in general “mind.” The connection between the two concepts is that popokl is thought of as experienced in the noman. In turn, noman is conventionally located in the chest area, and when popokl enters it the noman is said to lie athwart or “crooked” ( /peta ronom/) against the windpipe, so that thoughts cannot proceed in a proper or “straight” ( /kwun/) way between the head and the rest of the body. In this circumstance, there are two possible outcomes. One is that the popokl leads the person experiencing it to take retaliatory or redressive action, such as taking revenge for the death of a relative or attacking a co-wife in a polygynous marriage. The other possibility is that the person will internalize their feelings and not take redressive action, with the result that they will fall sick and draw attention to their suffering by this means, so that others will take notice and try to rectify things, in the first place by sacrificing a pig to the sufferer’s dead kin, so that they will release their grip on the person’s life force, and in the second place by finding out the source of the popokl and setting things to rights. After all this is accomplished the person’s noman will lie straight again. Otherwise, the cycle of sickness and/or violence will continue until it can be brought to a close. The popokl/noman nexus is clearly an ethno-psychological site where complex concatenations of social issues can be mediated. The nexus links living kin together via the notion of empathy between persons, and it also links the living with the dead because dead kin are responsible for sending sickness as a mark of their pity for their descendant suffering from popokl, or else the dead are held to demand that their descendants act on their popokl and exact revenge for deaths. This is therefore a primary driver of dealing with “trouble” in social life. The concept of the noman is important in all spheres of social life. Good behavior and bad behavior are both referred to the state of the noman. Pleasure and joy also belong to the noman. Powers of creativity, memory, and sincerity also are associated with the noman. Noman is a concept that relates body and mind together. Sickness and health are both seen as products of the state of the noman. If a person is well and looks healthy, friends will comment and ask, “What thoughts are you having?” Sickness, as noted above, is often seen as the product of some hidden popokl, which must be brought to light if the person

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is to get better. The sick person is encouraged, therefore, in a special meeting of kin, to tell of any resentments they have, to put these into the domain of their kin and to settle them in any way possible. Also, friends and kin will advise an aggrieved person not to give way to becoming popokl over their upset because otherwise they will fall sick. This intricate set of practices and concepts is a selfregulating mechanism that depends on a set of assumptions about personhood and the body that join well-being and the state of the body, and also link this theme further with issues to do with conflict, violence, and dispute settlement. (We have discussed these ideas in a number of previous publications, e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2001; Strathern and Stewart 2010.) As Bourdieu would put it, none of this operated automatically and all depended on which way the actual feelings of persons took them. What we have called concepts operate only in the way that practice theory indicates, that is, in the embodied actions of individuals, so each stage of enactment is contingent on the will and understandings and intentions of these individuals. Indeed, the theory of the noman itself encompasses all of these complications, along with another point of indeterminacy, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know what the state of mind of any individual actually is. Furthermore, the Hagen area has for many years been subject to the teaching of varieties of Christian churches. These, particularly the newer Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, have generally set themselves against indigenous practices without understanding their vital roles as the carriers of morals and values. Anger leading to conflict is something they preach against. People should not have anger and should forgive each other. However, this admonition does not carry over into specific action except in very small-scale and intimate contexts and so it cannot function as a means of social control in the way that the indigenous concepts are designed to do. So, a gap emerges in the process of mediation (see Stewart and Strathern 2009). The problem starts as a problem of translation. “Popokl” is taken out of the nexus of meanings that give it its pragmatic value, and it is equated with “anger” in the English language and the negative sense that it carries. So, it acquires this new pejorative sense in the local language also. A cultural mismatch is then imported back into the indigenous language. The next chapter looks into arguments about the effects of literacy on human communication and thought.

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4

Themes in Language Practice

Language is built up out of parts, which linguists study via a range of concepts and tools: phonetics, phonology (phonemes and their allophones), morphology (morphemes), semantics, grammar, and syntax. The practical use of language in speech and writing depends on these tools, although speakers may not be consciously aware of them. A basic concept is that of the phoneme, a unit of sound that makes a difference in the meaning of a word in a particular language, determined by the study of minimal pairs of words, for example /pin/ and /bin/ in the English language, which demonstrates that /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes. Allophones are versions of phonemes that do not make a difference in meaning. Morphemes are combinations of phonemes that enter into grammatical forms and also mark differences in meaning, for example, in terms of plural or singular forms of words, as in English plurals are sometimes marked by /-s/, with variants as allomorphs. Grammar builds on the structures of phonemes and morphemes by applying basic ways of making statements, for example, by ensuring agreements between words in tense, number, or mode of expression, such as whether the mode indicates a real or a hypothetical situation. Syntax adds a further level by way of acceptable co-ordination, for example, the placement of subject, object, and verb within a unit such as a sentence. Languages differ noticeably in regard to word order. The English language order of subject, verb, object contrasts with Melpa (Hagen) subject, object, verb, where the verb, which carries great importance in the language, is kept to the end, as it is in German also. We join here to the discussions in Chapter 2 about universals and cultural particulars by pointing out that all descriptions of languages tend to follow the structure of these grammatical terms, even if the substantive aspects of each example vary: in other words, if there is no universal grammar as such, there are still recognizable variants of word order in sentences. As noted in Chapter 3, linguistic practice has most patently been studied in the domain of speech and its social contexts, looking at how context and

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speech mutually mold each other. We discuss the implications of this point in terms of two major domains of practice: (1) orality versus literacy, with some reference to the theories of Jack Goody and critical commentaries on these and also the emergence of the useful concept of the “lecto-oral domain” and (2) performative practices in language, with reference to J. L. Austin’s work on illocutionary and perlocutionary forms of language performance. In broad terms, illocution depends on social power and personhood. The philosopher John Searle has explored this topic in his work on speech acts generally, showing how large numbers of expressions in English reveal values and assumptions about motivation and personhood. (Searle 1969; and see discussions of this arena of study in Duranti 1997.) Anna Wierzbicka has provided further crosscultural perspectives on this topic, highlighting the cultural biases that are built into the English language (Wierzbicka 2010). Clarifying the analysis of figurative ways of expression, another philosopher Charles Peirce distinguished between different types of signs (indexes, icons, and symbols), in terms of closeness to or abstraction from embodied reality, providing another tool for the analysis of pragmatics in language, that is, how speakers actually use forms of expression (Peirce 1977). Indexes reveal a tangible relationship between the index and what it points to; for example, smoke is an index of fire. Icons show a similarity between icon and what it represents; for example, road signs often visually depict what they are communicating, such as a steep incline or road work. Symbols, in Peirce’s scheme, have an arbitrary relationship to what they indicate, for example, letters of an alphabet and words that are built from them. These different relationships influence the ways in which language in practice is used and speakers or writers consciously or unconsciously operate with understanding of this in their conventional or innovative usages. In addition to the sphere of pragmatics—how language operates as action in the world—there is a further sphere of study, the sphere of metapragmatics. This sphere is concerned with the conscious use of pragmatic forms by people who are reflexively tuned in to how these forms work and how they may be manipulated. It thus refers in general to how people think about the effects of their uses of language. Metapragmatics has reemerged as a focus of study, possibly in part because the proliferation of media forms conduces toward an increase in self-consciousness (but see Cohen 1994, who stresses the importance of selfconsciousness as a cross-cultural feature of human action). Metapragmatics in turn merges further with metalinguistic awareness generally and with contexts of indexicality. In the Hagen area of the Western Highlands, rhetorical language expressions reference forms of identity, playing on an equation of individual

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leaders as speech-makers with their descent groups, and thus creating a special aura of indexicality. The speaker speaks of “I” as a category when it is not himself as an individual that is meant but the collectivity of the group. Metapragmatics as a field of study is also related to the question of language ideologies, ideas about the place of language in action, including conflict (Goldman 1983) and gender (e.g., Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Notions of what language actually does or can do in social interaction inform concepts of personhood and identity. Language ideology has developed as a prominent modality of analysis, for example, in writings by Bourdieu (1991), Gal (1989), Irvine (1989), and Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity (1998). Language ideologies are linked to social hierarchies, especially those of social class, and social ideology operates differently in non-class societies, such as those of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, where ideologies establish differentiation without class domination, for example, in contexts of gender and conflict. We have dealt with the above range of topics only briefly, in order to give readers an idea of the diversity of topics that are relevant for the study of language in practice, giving also a few elementary technical definitions to begin with. We now move on to investigate orality and literacy in some more detail.

Orality and literacy Language began in human prehistory as speech. It is also marked by the initial primacy of speech as children learn it. Adults note the timing of the acquisition of speech by children, and are concerned if acquisition is comparatively slow, because speech is a marker of social personhood. Human interactions depend for their full embodied realization on the characteristics of face-to-face relationships. However, the power of language has been enormously increased by the phenomenon of literacy, the ability to write down forms of speech and transmit them to others, and the correlative ability to read what is written. Just as speech perhaps gave humans an adaptive advantage over other primates, so literacy in general enabled new adaptations by the humans who developed it to achieve and share skills and knowledge in more explicit and codified forms than had been possible before, a result that was exponentially increased by the invention of printing and subsequently by digital technology. However, the story is not so simply one of unilineal progress or universal benefit. Literacy in hierarchical societies was first developed as a tool of control by ruling elites, counting numbers of people, resources, amounts of land, and the like, for

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military and taxation purposes, along with forms of currency that allowed for a quantification of values. Control of copies of information was also integral to how everything worked. Arguments about the functions or correlates of literacy have tended to concentrate on more recent developments in human history. The noted anthropologist Jack Goody and his collaborator Ian Watt broke ground in 1963 with an article on the effects of literacy on modes of thought. Generally, they argued that literacy produces a new kind of logical thinking because it enables a more systematic listing of steps in arguments or propositions than is available without it, both in terms of memorization and in terms of the ease of scrutiny. Thus stated, the argument has to do with a very limited and specific arena of human capacity, scarcely touching on religion, aesthetics, poetry, storytelling, or song: all of which spheres Goody actually considered in depth in later publications (see Goody 2000). Certainly, powers of speech itself go with, and depend on, powers of memory that are highly developed. Oral forms often carry with them techniques of memorization. These techniques have been intensively studied by Richmond Lattimore (1951) and many others in relation to traditions of oral epics, including the Odyssey and the Iliad of the ancient Greek poet Homer. We ourselves have investigated such techniques in Papua New Guinea in relation to oral balladic epics among the Hagen people and the Duna of the Highlands region. Performers sing these extended ballads at nighttime to immediate audiences. Each ballad recounts an elaborated form of a folktale that is well-known in ordinary spoken form, but while many people can give a version of the spoken narrative, the longer sung ballad is the prerogative of a few specialists. The sung story encapsulates vocabulary that is archaic and represents material culture going back to earlier generations. The performer’s artistry is highly appreciated, and the audience shows their attention with encouraging comments as the story line continues. The performer has recourse to numbers of standard repetitive lines that provide time for the next memory flow and for the audience also to keep up with the basic narrative. Plot variants can easily be introduced because there is no canonical or ritualized form, and the main aim is to entertain the listeners, while conveying a good deal of cultural information. The oral form does not seem to impose any absolute limit on the length of the performance (see Stewart and Strathern 2005a, b). Regular rhythms make the process of reciting easier to remember, along with the melodic patterns. What difference, then, does literacy make to such genres of expression? At the start of the discussion here a caveat needs to be entered. “Literacy” is a

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word containing a number of potential or actual characteristics: the ability to read, to write, to repeat or summarize orally or in writing what one reads, to comprehend, to review, to criticize, and the like. In other words, literacy is subject to qualitative and evaluative differences, depending on social circumstances. This caveat is germane to all of the critical discussions that emerged in response to the initial formulations of Goody and Watt. If we regard literacy simply as a technological practice, and we go on to link it to the technical inventions of different forms of writing, such as the Greek alphabet, and then continue by suggesting that this invention in itself changed society or cultural patterns, it is likely that we may be placing too much weight on a single factor as causative of others, whereas in fact the factors are all interrelated and none are unilaterally causative. This is the burden of argument taken up by Brian Street in his diatribe against Goody’s work (Street 1984). Street declared that Goody had attributed to literacy an autonomous power to change ways of thinking, whereas in Street’s view literacy was one influence among others. What we need to do, then, is specify the linked factors and delineate how they are linked together, and in doing so we may conclude that literacy is, or is not, a leading factor in the genesis of change (Scribner and Cole 1981). It is safe to say, in any case, that literacy is a strong enabling factor in many processes of change, depending on who controls it, who gets to exercise it, and for what purposes it is used. Libraries are a good example to draw on here. They may be created as archives of knowledge with access only to a few users or they may be instruments of sharing knowledge among those who can read and write. An inspiring example of a library of the latter kind is to be found tucked away in a corner of Perthshire, near to Crieff and Auchterarder in Scotland. This is the Innerpeffray Library, which we have visited on several occasions. The Library originates from collections made by its founder, David Drummond, 3rd Lord Madertie, and Archbishop Robert Hay Drummond, who commissioned the building of the Library and completed it in 1762. The Library was set up from its beginning to be a lending library, the first in Scotland, making available its books to the farming population around, for their edification and participation in contemporary affairs. Lending began in 1747 and continued until 1968, with a careful record of every borrower and what they borrowed. Most of the books in the Library belong to periods before 1800, and the Library’s stock amounts to a total of about 5,000 volumes. In June 2018, when we made a second visit there after an interval of some years, there was a new room that had on display an early book by the theological scholar John Duns Scotus, published in Venice in 1476. Such books were the fruits of growing technological abilities for producing

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materials that could then be shared by those who could read and write. Literacy, for the farmers and craftsmen around the Library, meant actual access to vital forms of knowledge and the values that went with it. Just as when we reviewed the whole issue of language and culture, language structure itself can be misleading. “Literacy” by itself does not do things. It is a noun that can take a grammatical subject position in a sentence, but that does not make it an agent. People are agents who do things, including things with literacy as the object of their actions. From this perspective literacy becomes a tool for doing things, and this in turn depends on whether it is the possession of a few or of many, and what content is given to it. The same argument applies to the Internet in a latter-day transformation of the discussions about literacy in general, since the Internet is simply a further technological version of literacy. The Internet can also stand here for the most general argument about literacy, which is that it potentially opens up a world of information that can transform people’s lives and their consciousness of their lives. We must also realize that “the Internet” is itself an ongoing human invention, not something separate from human endeavor and also manipulation. Once again, technology is not an agent but a medium of facilitation for agency. It affords possibilities or makes possible things that were previously not feasible, but it does not in itself do these things. When critics of Goody’s ideas charged him with “technological determinism,” they were themselves perhaps forgetting that an invention such as an alphabetic script is a product of motivated agency, and we must ask what the human intentions were that produced it and how it was put to use, as well as what developments it intrinsically made possible (as with, for example, any invention, such as the telephone or digital tape recorders). A very well-balanced discussion of the main issues in the debates that emerged from Goody’s work is provided by Ross Collin (Collin 2013). Collin concludes that an interaction model specifying ways that factors all influence or condition one another in the context of literacy studies is the appropriate way to go forward. He notes that some studies highlight globalizing influences, while others stress the local and historical forces at work in shaping the concomitants of literacy. He advocates a nuanced approach avoiding single-stranded arguments, and also steering clear of arguments that equate literacy with “civilization” and preliterate cultures as “primitive.” It is clear, however, that literacy works very differently in contexts where it is newly introduced compared to ones where it is long-established. Nico Besnier has given a detailed ethnographic account of the workings of introduced literacy in a small-scale Polynesian society on Nukulaelae Atoll

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(1995). Literacy came to Nukulaelae from the outside, in association with early Christian missionization by the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century. The first evangelist who came was Elekana, a Cook Islander from Rarotonga who visited in 1861 and left behind some knowledge of hymns that are still sung today. When Elekana left, it is said that the people also asked him to tear out pages from a copy of the Bible in Rarotongan so that they could keep close to his teachings by contact with the words. The expatriate missionaries later brought in trained pastors from Samoa, whose language was related to the Tuvaluan language of Nukulaelae, and who saw it as essential that the islanders should learn Samoan in order to read the Bible and follow sermons spoken in Samoan. Nukulaelae people have been exposed to a complex multilingual set of contexts since early colonial times. Their own language is a dialect of Tuvaluan that differs from other dialects, including the dialect spoken on Tarawa Island and on Funafuti, where numbers of Nukulaelae go on labor migration. Formerly, the Gilbert and Ellice islands were a single colonial unit of administration, and Gilbertese was the language predominantly used as a vernacular for communication in oral contexts. The missionary pastors in Nukulaelae, however, insisted that Samoan be used as the language of instruction for the introduced religion of Christianity, including the study of the Bible in Samoan and for church services. A diglossic situation resulted, in which Samoan was regarded as the language of literacy and high status and Nukulaelae as the language of oral everyday communication for the local islanders. Samoan was not too difficult for the islanders to learn because it is related to Tuvaluan. Samoan was used as a legal language also until the 1930s and the Samoan Bible was not replaced by a Tuvaluan translation until 1987. Words borrowed and adapted from Samoan are still found in religious and rhetorical contexts, Besnier notes. Nukulaelae is an isolated place, and the English language only gradually came to be of importance for the bulk of its people, eventually displacing Samoan as a language of status, based in the educational system. Literacy was also established in Tuvaluan and circulates as a written equivalent of its use in oral interactions, for letter writing between migrants working elsewhere and their relatives on Nukulaelae, and as the language of primary schooling. Secondary school education is available only in Vaitupu, a location that is 125 nautical miles distant from Nukulaelae, and pupils there tend to drop out of school because of feeling far from home and because of the high school fees that are charged. It is primary school that provides schoolchildren with basic skills of reading, writing, and counting that they then apply to keeping all kinds of records, writing invitations to feasts, preserving family genealogical history, and pursuing correspondence

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with kin away on labor migration in other islands. Missionaries brought with them a pejorative way of categorizing traditional culture as “darkness,” contrasted with the “light” of Christianity, and this idea is sedimented into conventional evaluations that the people themselves make, but many of the tasks literacy is put to also provide continuity with the past, preserving and guarding specialized knowledge belonging to particular family groups. Besnier adroitly extends his discussion into the context of letter writing, which turns out to be a major way of maintaining relationships of kinship between people on Nukulaelae and migrants away working elsewhere. Besnier was able to collect a large corpus of letters of this kind, and in asking about them he learned that letter senders always like to have someone carry the letter who can either read it to the intended recipient or help the recipient to understand it. Besnier points out that this means that a written form is not in itself considered more trustworthy than the oral form, and that both forms may be needed. Context is all. This point can be generalized. Literacy itself does not determine reliability of communication. In other literacy contexts, such as the legitimacy of oral history, a written form may carry more weight, depending on its provenance, because it can be cited in court cases, whereas in letter writing the personal ties are the most important factor. Letters take time and effort to compose and are taken to their destination only when a ship calls in. Writers treat the letter as a substitute for face-to-face interaction. Most letters pass among kinsfolk, and salutations in them include hopes about health and thanks to God for being alive and healthy. Older relatives try to keep in touch with younger kin away in Funafuti, and the underlying current is the flow of transactions and requests for transactions. A radio telephone link has been established with Funafuti, but it does not effectively conduce to privacy, Besnier notes. Recent experience in other Pacific islands indicates that the establishment and availability of relatively inexpensive cell phone communications greatly speed up distance interactions, so if this has happened on Nukulaelae letter writing may have fallen into decline. (See, for example, the note by Lin Haoli in our “Oceania,” second edition 2017, pp. 15–16, with references.) Also, if Islanders now have access to e-mail, that would render letters obsolete, but this would depend on costs of computers or cell phones capable of handling e-mail, Skype, Facebook, etc. As a sideline, but a significant one, we did not find any reference to stamps or a postal service on Nukulaelae, so this in itself would explain why letters needed to be delivered by a trusted messenger. In addition, however, the letters were often supplemented with oral messages, and the writers often remarked that they regretted they could not talk directly and sent messages

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of love that indicated strong affect, just like “love and kisses” at the end of letters to some relatives or friends among native English language speakers. These expressions of feeling are balanced in letters with constant reference to gifts and economic transactions that constitute the material backbone of ongoing kin relationships. Letters require that they be read as well as written, and on Nukulaelae often a letter would be read or a reading of it listened by an assembly of kin. Similarly, with church sermons, which pastors will write but deliver orally, and therefore acquire their social form of usage in the face-to-face domain. These kinds of contexts correspond to what Jack Goody called the lecto-oral domain, in which we can see literacy and orality intertwined rather than contrasted or opposed, either conceptually or in practice. This interconnection between oral and literate forms of language use underlines the point made by Ruth Finnegan in her study on the significance of performance as the context that links different aspects of language together (Finnegan 2015). Finnegan advocates an action approach to the production of meaning in which performance plays a central part. In this regard, her approach is similar to that of Dan Everett who has stressed the idea of language as a cultural tool (Everett 2012). Finnegan also perceptively stresses the importance of song as an expressive genre and explores the relationship between words and music in song performance.

Performativity and illocution This observation applies further to the domain of performative uses of language, as for example in the case of magical spells, which are often written down, but by convention must be spoken to be effective, and often also must be intoned in a distinctive way. Here performance is what determines performativity. Language usage in general frequently carries with it aspects of performance, and these are connected with intended effects. Following the initial formulations of the philosopher J. L. Austin, linguists have found it useful to conceptualize a category of “illocutionary” speech acts that automatically produce intended sets of social effects (Austin 1962), and a secondary set of acts or aspects of acts that as a result of intention or otherwise produce effects via the agency of others. These secondary effects are referred to as “perlocutionary.” For example, a boss person may tell an employee “You’re fired!”, and because the boss has a legitimate power to do this, the person loses his or her job (= illocutionary effect). As a further consequence, the person may become depressed, have to move in search of

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another job, retrain, or take revenge on the employer (= perlocutionary effects). A more cheerful example would be “I now pronounce you man and wife” or equivalent; or the conferring of an educational degree, perhaps in Latin, as “Auctoritate hac mihi commissa, admitto te in gradum doctoris philosophiae” (“By the authority that has here been invested in me, I admit you into the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”). In all cases, it is not the words themselves but the social status of the speaker of the words that makes them ritually effective, and in turn may produce a secondary cascade of effects. Illocution thus depends on power, which is extra-linguistic in character. Language reflects that power, rather than creating it, yet at the same time the power may be realized only in the pronouncement of the signifying words themselves. A general point that underlies the topics broached in this chapter as well as the whole book is that cultural preferences and values shape or influence language practices, including the ways in which literate and oral domains are put to use and what usages constitute illocution or perlocutionary effects. Anna Wierzbicka has been a prominent theorist in this arena, warning against taking meanings or values in English as universal. She is adroitly able to show how deeply philosophical and scientific arguments purporting to deal in universal human categories are in fact rooted in Anglo traditions that are not universal but culturally and historically particular, for example, the idea of a sense of right and wrong or what is meant by the word “sense” itself, or even ideas of truth and lying (see Wierzbicka 2014; and her earlier work on “Experience, Evidence, and Sense,” 2010). Her work is a salutary reminder of the importance of a kind of methodological relativism in semantics and the pitfalls of translation that we need to bear in mind when discussing language practice and pragmatics. Culture is always at work, like Dan Everett’s “dark matter.” The point helps us to understand the controversies about orality and literacy discussed earlier in this chapter. If we look on literacy as a formal technology influencing thought, this may be a result of thinking about it in terms of books and philosophy, a procedure that would have minimal relevance to the people of Nukulaelae. Also, in terms of illocution, a statement that a person is fired would have no application in a culture without bosses having power of such a kind over others. In the next chapter, we return to the topic of cognitive representations as these appear in language classifications.

5

Cognition and Categories: The Work of Roy Ellen

Languages categorize the world. This might seem a straightforward statement, but it is not. Languages do provide people with ready-made ways of talking about or dealing with reality, but in doing so they also create their own reality and afford practitioners ways in which to alter that reality by a changed arrangement of categories. The world, therefore, is not something that exists in an objective way that is simply recognized and labeled in linguistic form. Rather, linguistic forms construct the world in particular ways. This does not mean that language categories are arbitrary. For instance, many languages may have terms for birds, a recognizable category of living things, but what is included in these terms must vary in accordance with the types of birds that are found in the language area but also in terms of what is included in the general category itself, as the anthropologist Ralph Bulmer pointed out in his well-known article “Why Is the Cassowary Not a Bird?” (Bulmer 1967). Bulmer’s discussion of this intriguing problem took two forms. The first was specific to Karam (Kalam), a people who live in the northern peripheries of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. They did not classify cassowaries as birds, because they were large, very aggressive, and could not fly but ran along the ground in forest areas. In addition, because of these anomalous characteristics, they were credited with kinds of spirit powers. Second, Bulmer added a proximity principle (Douglas 1996: 145–147). Distance from human habitation and/or intrusion into human arenas of habitat control may influence classification patterns. With regard to cassowaries, these are intrinsically wild creatures of the bush that can be dangerous to humans if disturbed. They are hunted and trapped as a source of protein, and in many places, they are used also as prestigious gifts in exchange relationships. A key to how cassowaries may be regarded by people who encounter them can be found in the responses of some prominent individuals in another Highland area, the Pangia area of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Asked

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to explain why cassowaries carry a special significance, men replied that the cassowary is a man (ali); in other words, that it encapsulates male values of strength and aggression. Its name kembi is also a stand-alone signifier, without the classifier ini (“bird”) in front of it (Strathern and Stewart 2000c). We have explored shared comparative themes about cassowaries in an expanded arena of the cultures of Eastern Indonesia as well as the whole island of New Guinea. In all of the cases we examined, the cassowary was seen to be an important vehicle of symbolic experience and values. It is often connected with mythologies relating to originating spirits and their ongoing powers in the world. For example, in the Ok region (Telefomin and other places) a powerful female spirit figure Afek is connected with the cassowary (Strathern and Stewart 2000c: 53), and in the Aru Islands the cassowary, a land creature, is nevertheless connected in myth and ritual with the types of seashells that are esteemed as valuables in the world of water (2000c: 44). In Hagen (Melpa language) folk narratives women may change into cassowaries in response to life difficulties. In some stories, it is a man’s sister who experiences this transformation (Vicedom 1943–8: vol. 3). This folk theme reveals to us aspects of the cross-sex sibling relationship in Hagen, as well as of gendered relationships generally. Sisters who marry and move away connect their brothers to other families. They “go out” to marry. There is something mysterious in this process, relating to the interstitiality of women in their identities. Like cassowaries, they can be unpredictable and elude male influence. Here, also, the cassowary takes on a female aspect, whereas in other ways it has a masculine sense because of its size and strength. It is a polyvalent symbol that can be linked to various, sometimes contradictory, dimensions of experience and thought, as also remarked on by Alfred Gell (Gell 1975). Ralph Bulmer, whose essay we have cited on the classification of, and ways of conceptually understanding, cassowaries among the Karam speakers of Papua New Guinea, made it clear in his work that he was studying ethnobiology, not just linguistic classifications, but also how these classifications arose out of observation of and interaction with creatures in their environment. He made, for example, a detailed study of how the Karam classify types of frogs. Frogs form an occasional part of the diet of the Highlands people of Papua New Guinea, and in earlier times children would go on expeditions along streams to catch them and cook them up. Interest in different types, then, would be geared in to how to find them and what they tasted like. Bulmer was able to show, however, that classification depended on observation about the bodies of frogs, sizes, colors, and their habitats. The classifications made by Karam were quite detailed and

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based at least partly on a taxonomic model, always linked to observations of the behavioral patterns of the frogs. While a kind of classifying impulse can be seen to be at work, because frogs were not a primary part of Karam experience or practice, nevertheless there would have been no classifications at all if frogs were not considered to be of some practical use to people. An anthropologist who has spent much time and effort in studying classifications of natural kinds among a people of eastern Indonesia (Seram) the Nuaulu, is Roy Ellen. Ellen dedicated his book on this topic (Ellen 1993) to Ralph Bulmer, in memory of his work in the field of ethnobiology. Ellen had a number of vital concerns in this book. One was to acknowledge and document the point that innovations of classification occur over periods of time and that these entail what he calls “cognitive reorganization” (p. 214). We can illustrate this significant process also from different ranges of data regarding the Melpa language of Mount Hagen. The Melpa term for pig is kng (northern Melpa) or kung (central Melpa), with another variant used colloquially and as an affinal taboo name term kanga. (If a person has an in-law called Kng, they will use the kanga term for “pig” rather than the standard term because they may not use the name of an affine.) When outsiders introduced horses, cattle, sheep, and goats as domestic animals in Hagen, these were all classified by people under the category of kng/kung, so that kng became automatically a wider or higher level classification than it had been before. In other words, kng became repurposed in order to accommodate a new set of animals, none of them particularly like pigs in their appearance, but all large animals that were considered potentially amenable for use in ceremonial exchanges and were also potentially edible. This recategorization well illustrates the elasticity of cognition, as well as the drive to assimilate or domesticate new experiences into an existing repertoire, and to contain new experiences within a world of practice (rearing of animals and their use in exchanges). The terms for the animals themselves were simply imported into the language from various sources, so that “horse” became ot (there is no /h/ phoneme in Melpa); cattle became bulmakau, a Tok Pisin lingua franca term derived from “bull” and “cow,” and used for all cattle; sheep became tiptip (sheep-sheep, with a characteristic reduplication shared with Austronesian languages, and perhaps derived from an Austronesian-speaking coastal context); and goat became meme, a term that is mimetic of the sounds goats make. All of these new categories are invariably prefaced with kng as an overall classification, and this is not changed (at least according to observation) into kanga, so that horse remains kng ot even for those who have an affine called Kng. These details show the intricacy with which people have assimilated new experiences into their lives, both changing

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these experiences into something cognitively akin to existing categories and also quietly revolutionizing those categories themselves in doing so. In seeking to express this and many other points about cognition and practice, Ellen adopted the term “prehension” to identify the cognitive processes he was interested in. He further makes a very useful distinction between general cognitive processes or instruments that can operate across different domains, whether the analyst sees these as “mundane” or “symbolic” (p. 215), and the specifics of culturally established representations (p. 215). In his own work in ethnobiology, Ellen chose to concentrate on the classifications of animals because of his supposition that these were closely linked to the empirical experience of the natural world. This viewpoint is obviously related to that of analysts who have considered “natural kinds” to be a kind of universal category of classification and have, moreover, elected to see such classifications as organized by taxonomies. As Ellen remarks, the concept of a taxonomy involves “linked notions of rank, level, and contrast” (p. 216), and its development is tied in with the classificatory work of Linnaeus and the passage of his work into contemporary biology. Ellen notes that this concept of the taxonomy has underlain the work of scholars in “the American school of ethnosemantics” (e.g., Brent Berlin and Paul Kay 1969), and he lists many authors who have critiqued this approach, including himself (p. 217, q.v. for references, also the shrewd comments by Lucy 1992: 177–187). Ellen organizes his own critique under a number of headings. First, he remarks on confusions about what the term “taxonomy” means. Some linguists have used taxa, he says, to refer to all linguistically recognized groupings that refer to varying degrees of inclusiveness. However, it is what is meant by “varying degrees” here that is at issue. Second, therefore, it is the notion of hierarchy, and thereby contrast, that is crucial, and further an insistence that terms should be assigned to a single hierarchical level and that there is a universal set of categorical types that constitute such a hierarchy (p. 218). Here Ellen points to problems that such a universalist, and we might say etic, scheme leads to. The main problem lies clearly in what is meant by a hierarchy. If this means a unique beginner term under which a set of distinct levels are all organized, the model appears to be too systematic and determinate to fit with many folk classifications. More importantly, perhaps, instead of revealing local cognitive processes, the model may sideline these or consign them to an anomalous status. Ellen here mentions the work by Lancy and A. Strathern, based on fieldwork testing among Melpa speakers by Strathern (1981), which showed a Melpa penchant for pairing categories together without an implication that these belong to a single cognitive higher category. Many other possible organizational models are available, for

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example, in terms of classification of space with closeness or distance from the speaker being operative (reminiscent of Bulmer’s work on cassowaries). Next, there is the question of contrast. Categories, Ellen says, are not always mutually exclusive and digital. (For a classic exposition on dualistic classification in Eastern Indonesia, see the systematic work by Gregory Forth 2001.) Instead, they may be fuzzy or organized in analogical terms such as “more this than that.” Categories can thus be polythetic (p. 220), and thereby flexible. The application to data of a rigid taxonomic model fails to reveal such flexibility or fluidity of expression. The idea of cross-cutting classifications compounds confusion by placing in question the taxonomic model itself. Ellen notes here the Nuaulu category notame, glossed in English as “bat,” which the Nuaulu speak of as fruiteaters versus others but also cave dwellers versus others, and these alternative classifications overlap. There is no category that universally distinguishes fruiteaters by contrast with cave dwellers, only the general term “bats” (p. 221). Ellen’s next point, which we take to be of prime significance, is one we have also discussed above, that classifications must be related to experience and practice. Here Ellen adds the point that removing classification from practice gives the illusion that knowledge is only about perceived formal resemblances, and in turn that knowledge constitutes an abstract system. Embodiment theory, by contrast, we may add here, always makes experience and practice central to understanding. We may take here the example mentioned above of “pairing” in the Melpa language. Pairing, expressed by the term rakl (“two”), essentially refers to a kind of alliance between things that are seen as going together, including numbers themselves, so that ceremonial counting of items in exchanges is done in twos rather than single numbers. Special kinds of valued vegetables are also paired, for example, types of taro or yams or with plantains, the kinds called keninga and membokl. Such classifications reflect syndromes of prestige and appreciation. As types, they are not necessarily systematically distinguished from all other plantains or taros, etc. The most salient use of pairing has to do with the expressions of alliance between groups, at the highest level between whole tribes. At all levels such pairings represent historically contingent circumstances buttressed by particular events and processes between the groups involved, and complicated by further ties and enmities with different groups that have emerged through warfare or from intermarriages and changes of residence of persons. We do not argue, as Durkheim and Mauss originally did, that something called “society” or “social structure” has provided to the Melpa their categories of thought, such as pairing in this example. Rather, we would see pairing in all instances as an example of symbiosis and special relationality, always realized

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through experience. Paired types of special vegetables, for example, are sought out and steamed together in earth ovens for ceremonial feasting in association with life cycle or political exchanges. So, pairing is not a taxonomic process at all. It is a process of sociality (and in this regard would fit into a reinterpretation of Durkheim’s social-deterministic mode of explaining cultural patterns). Ellen, citing work by Anna Wierzbicka among others, casts doubt on the importance of taxonomic classifications as markers of thought processes. He further notes—and this is also very important—that taxonomic modes are not the exclusive modes of classification of the world that people employ, and they are not necessarily used as aids to memory or are signs of thought processes at all. There may be different processes involved at different levels of inclusiveness, as Hunn 1976 argues (in Ellen, p. 222). The category of “birdoid” (sort of bird) may be derived by inference, whereas specific kinds of “birds,” such as sparrows, etc., may be derived from direct observation. Here, we ourselves would like to comment that “pairing” does seem to be a thought process for the Melpa speakers and is therefore a marker of Melpa cognition that shows itself in a number of domains, including kin terms, group structures, evaluations of food, and religion. Pairing, of course, is not in itself a taxonomic operation. Ellen alerts us to the likelihood that a taxonomic kind of theory and methodology may induce in its proponents an inordinate value in finding taxonomic structures (p. 226). He points out that taxonomy is just one resource that people may use for making classifications and that the degree to which they do so also varies from place to place or from one domain of classification to another. Ellen gives here as an example the fact that the Nuaulu classify fungi not taxonomically but in terms of the hosts they live on, as well as other criteria (possibly edibility, taste?). Given all these considerations, Ellen suggests that instead of speaking of cognition or perception we can identify the mode of “classifying” that people employ as prehension (p. 229), meaning the total embodied processes by means of which they relate to the world around them. Ellen also speaks here of “cognitive bricolage” (p. 230) and refers to its workings as a “social process,” which emerges in language only as a partial representation of complex modes of knowledge acquisition that have their roots in bodily experience and biographical events (p. 234). We are at a far cry here from the suppositions of the ethnoscience of the 1970s, and with all this in mind we turn in the next chapter to the issue of color categories.

6

Cognition and Categories: The Work of Anna Wierzbicka

We encounter here immediately the salience of the work of Berlin and Kay, who employ exactly the kind of reifying methodology in relation to “colors” that Ellen criticized in his discussion of the use of taxonomy. In their 1969 treatment of the topic, Berlin and Kay proceeded from the idea that there are basic monolexemic “color” terms that are found universally, but that vary in their numbers in different cultures according to a definite pattern of inclusiveness. They found that all languages have terms for white and black (broadly conceived); if a language has three terms the third is red, if four it has either green or yellow; if five it has both green and yellow, and so on. They went on to suggest that as languages developed more color terms over time, this development must have followed the sequence as they observed it. As a part of their reasoning, they also suggested that black and white at first would have included a range of other colors, but in the next stage these were given their own separate terms. It is puzzling then to know why such terms would be translated as black and white in the first place, since they admittedly covered many things in addition to white and black. To deal with this issue, Kay proposed that terms should not be seen as coding “semantic primes” but rather as composing “fuzzy sets” whose boundaries could shift over time. Fuzzy sets do not have firm boundaries, and they contain examples that people may feel are more ideal than others, with approximations to such ideal norms. These ideals are then taken as exemplars of the basic color terms, within sets that are continuously graded. The upshot is that the concept of basic color terms is preserved as sets of well-defined categories, even though these are no longer seen as discrete. The complex operations and graphings of data by Paul Kay and his collaborators correspond exactly to the strictures that Roy Ellen offered with regard to taxonomy. Moreover, they are all dedicated to the ideal of preserving the analyst’s view of linguistic universals, based moreover on neurophysiological perceptions, and therefore negating the position, conventionally associated

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with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, that there are no universals, just variations from one language to another. Other authors (notably Elinor Rosch 1987) have taken the idea that some examples of a category can be considered prototypes and suggested that those examples that are not prototypes would lead over time to the emergence of further terms in the order postulated originally by Berlin and Kay purely on the basis of typological study. There remains a fundamental question of topical approach relating to authors who deploy a kind of method by using Munsell color chips and building profiles of color terminology and by asking decontextualized questions of “informants” as to how they would name different chips. This method predisposes the enquirer to finding out boundaries between categories elicited from the informants without any application to their use of such terms in their own lives. While informants no doubt bring their experience to bear on the answers they give, the chips themselves filter that experience into an etic grid designed to elicit data that will be amenable to testing in terms of the investigator’s own topical interests, which result from the very starting point of “color categories” or semantic primes. That is, they assume that there is an essential category of “color” associated fundamentally with properties of the (human) eye and its perceptions of light wavelengths. This category is then taken as the universal constraint on the representation of color in language. Anna Wierzbicka, by contrast, used another basic yardstick of experience that is broader: ideas of everyday experience of variation and alteration in the environment, conditioned by sunlight and darkness, the sky and the ground, and the like. In many ways these two approaches cannot be used to disprove each other. They simply represent different topical concerns and starting point assumptions or propositions. In an excellently contextualized study of Chinese (Mandarin) color terms, Xing (2009) lists the eleven basic terms recognized in the language (happening to correspond to the maximal list in the Berlin and Kay original protocol), and then proceeds to concentrate on the seven most commonly used terms. She provides a roster of the culturally extended meanings of the terms, and the basic processes of metaphorical and metonymic operations by which the extensions are made. Starting with white and black, she delineates clearly what the extensions are. Bá, glossed as white, becomes daylight and thence clarity of understanding (metaphor) or “funeral” (from the fact that people wear white at funerals = metonymy), or even “nothingness” or “free.” Black (héi) simply has a metaphysical extension as dark secret, bad. Red (hóng), by contrast with black, comes to have good or favorable connotations by metaphorical extension,

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although it can also mean “jealous,” from the idea that when people inordinately desire something their eyes turn red. In expounding these meanings, Xing pushes her explanations beyond physical perceptions into the realms of sociality, that is, into pragmatics as well as historical change. The color green (lù), for example, was contrasted with yellow (huáng) because yellow was the color of the Emperor’s clothes, whereas green was the color worn by common people and hence by prostitutes, taking us clearly into the context of status-signaling. Xing further pursues parallels and contrasts between Chinese and English and finds that while there are some obvious parallels, cultural factors enter; for example, in Chinese “white” came to signify “funerals” and so did not develop the meaning of “morally pure” that it has in English. Red (hóng) in Chinese has mostly positive extensions and so would not develop the negative meanings it can have in English, as in “red flag” for wrong, warning, danger, stop, and so on. In general, Xing’s study shows a useful combination of analysis of semantic and pragmatic processes. As she admits at the end of her essay, her discussion does not negate the position of the universalists on the neurophysiological constraints on perception. This is because she accepts the concept of the basic color terms, as outlined by Berlin and Kay. What she adds is a nuanced philological appreciation of how meanings develop by cultural extensions. Stephen Levinson’s work on Yélî Dnye linguistic usages takes us productively into the issue of what is meant by “basic color terms” (Levinson 2001), as well as a concise survey of work to date on the controversies surrounding the topic (up to the time of his article). He comments on Rosch’s findings for the Dani case, from the Highlands of West Papua (Irian Jaya). Rosch established the viewpoint that there are focal emphases in color terms and these fit with universalist propositions, although for the Dani she argued that there were only two basic color terms, white and black, with certain values being more focal to each of these categories than others. (For further discussion, see Deutscher 2010, and for a scholarly and sensitive case study, on the Trobriand Islands, see Senft 1987.) Technical issues of methodology further arise here. How do we know where to start with the investigation of color terms if the language of the people we are talking with does not have a general term meaning “color”? Of course, as Anna Wierzbicka has pointed out, people can perceive colors physically (because of how the eye works) but this does not mean that they will everywhere have the same conceptual set of ways of talking about what they perceive (Wierzbicka 2008). Wierzbicka’s discussion starts at the point of how people encode the world of their experience, and she takes seriously the point that if they do not

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have a term that translates as “color,” we cannot assume that color is a universal category that can simply be investigated cross-culturally. Similar arguments, we may note, surround the acrimonious controversies about the term “kinship” (see, for example, Strathern and Stewart 2011a, with references). Wierzbicka deals with the counter-objection that “the absence of a word does not prove the absence of a concept” (p. 408). The absence of words (or, perhaps also, we might add, expressions), for a particular aspect of human experiences, has sometimes been dismissed as a “lexical gap,” she notes. Rightly, she comments that such a dismissal may be an example of overprivileging English as a universal language itself. In fact, if she is right here, it would be a blatant example of the prime error, taught to all introductory courses in anthropology, of ethnocentrism, or in this instance, English language logocentrism. She also raises the question of how one could prove the existence of a concept if there is no word for it. Presumably the scholars of color would point to the Munsell chip array (surely a complex cultural artifact itself rather than anything universal). It is not that Wierzbicka’s approach is opposed to the idea of universals. Her concept of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage does posit universals, and one of these is “seeing,” she says (p. 408). This is one among sixty-five semantic elementary units of meaning that Wierzbicka and her collaborators have identified. (The list is not meant to be exhaustive.) Color, she says, emerges as a specific “molecule” of meanings when people become interested in purely “chromatic aspects” of the appearances of things, and this is often because of technological changes. One can think here of paints used in decorating houses, or colors of cars, or of clothing dyes. Cultures that do not have a term for color in general also, she says, tend not to have specialized color words (p. 410), and they may borrow such words as a result of culture change. Wierzbicka moves next to consideration of the Warlpiri language of Central Australia. The Warlpiri are a well-known people studied by anthropologists (e.g., Mervin Meggitt 1986). The Warlpiri lexicon includes terms such as yalya-yalya (blood-blood), karntwarra-karntwarra (ochre-ochre), yukuri-yukuri (grass-grass), walya-walya (earth-earth), and kunjuru-kunjuru (smoke-smoke) (p. 410). The local, landscape-oriented, and embodied meanings of these terms come from the Warlpiri ways of talking about the environment. Thus, yukuriyukuri refers not just to grass but to the brilliant appearance of grass that springs up after heavy rain, fresh new grass. Terms like this have to be understood, then, in terms of Warlpiri experience. Wierzbicka argues that in the Berlin–Kay paradigm yukuri would be glossed as “green” and classed as a “colour word” (p. 411). In other words, the putative universal meaning is not universal at all,

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but a product of a particular translation exercise that fits the Warlpiri term into a predetermined research paradigm. Wierzbicka argues, instead, that what attracts Warlpiri interest in the visual experience of things is how conspicuous things are in their environment, those that shine at a distance, those that are striking because they are not the same all over, for example, striped, and those that look like other familiar aspects of the environment, such as the yukuri terms discussed above. In asking about the environment in the Warlpiri language, one can ask “What does it look like?” but not “What color is it?” One visual contrast that the language does encode is whether something is shiny or dark in terms of high or low visibility. Brightness or high visibility appears in a number of different expressions, such as pirarrpirarrpa, a term that can cover many different “colors” (i.e., white, yellow, orange, red, silver, p. 412). Another range of words denote things that shine, for example, jararlang of rocks that shine after rain, and may be sources of water in the desert environment. Another range of Warlpiri interests has to do with the appearance of animals, many of which are striped or spotted (as camouflage?) and described as kuruwarri-kuruwarri or other terms that gloss as speckled. (The equivalent in the Melpa language of Papua New Guinea is mbilinga-mbalinga.) These kinds of contrasts, we may note, are also like those represented in indigenous Australian paintings, including how people traditionally paint their own bodies for ritual occasions. In fact, one term, kuruwarri-kuruwarri, refers to acts of painting the body linked to the Dreamtime and expressive of spiritual forces. Animal patterns, then, are linked with creative patterns tied to the origins of ritual power. Myths and tales about animals reflect these concerns. To translate all of these representations into color terms distorts the Warlpiri world. Warlpiri language usages, instead, reflect a concern with visual appearances, expressed by the reduplication of mass nouns (such as grass or blood). The basic issue here is, as with many other controversies, what are we trying to elucidate? And what are we trying to infer or demonstrate from the data? This is in line with the sentiments expressed by Roy Ellen at the conclusion of his detailed and long-term study of Nuaulu ways of describing the world of creatures, remarking that we must beware of assuming the universal applicability of the concepts of taxonomy and system. The same applies here to the concept of color. If we are trying, via translation glosses that pick on only one dimension of a term’s meaning, to call that dimension “color,” we will inevitably produce data that fit into a spectrum of so-called basic color terms. If, however, and by contrast, we are trying very hard to enter into the complex world of the people studied, we must try to follow the nuances of usage in practice. Then, as with

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the Warlpiri case, we will also enter into the local worlds of affect and social experience. These are issues that have received detailed scholarly consideration in the work of John Lucy, see in particular Lucy 1992, Chapter 5, especially pp. 184–186, with reference to the assumptions behind the work of Berlin and Kay 1969. Wierzbicka’s approach here is entirely in line with Malinowski’s view that as anthropologists we aspire to understand the “native’s” view of the world. Her suggestions about the Warlpiri life-world resonate with usages of the Melpa speakers in Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. A dominant contrast in the Melpa language is between perceptions of things or people described as kund or kundi, and those described as pombora. Kund and pombora also form a linguistic pairing. The terms can be glossed as “red” and “black,” although these glosses may appear to exemplify the kind of labeling that Wierzbicka has criticized for selecting out one dimension of meaning and filling these into a scheme of “color terms.” Kund and pombora have a complex fan of polyvalent referents and might be glossed in this respect as “light” and “dark,” with the proviso that not all things that would be considered “light” would be described as kund because some would be simply described as eng nonom (“shiny,” “bright”) and some such things could also be classified as körök, glossed as “white.” This cognitive polyvalence holds across different language and culture contexts in which the cassowary may or may not be classified as a “bird.” For example, in the Melpa language, the cassowary is classified as a bird (köi raema, where köi signifies bird and raema the cassowary) (on Melpa see, for example, Stewart, Strathern, and Trantow 2011). Among the Karam studied by Bulmer (see Chapter 5 in this book), it was not so classified, yet in both cases it held recognizably related symbolic significances; and the same for the Wiru language of Pangia, the main point being that the cassowary is semantically framed as more like humans than some other creatures are and hence corresponds to Bulmer’s proximity principle. On the classificatory plane itself, it is useful also to note that the Melpa term köi, which we have glossed as “bird,” also covers bats, which are called köi aepa. The boundaries of folk terms vary in different folk classifications. In all cases, we see a framing that has picked on certain perceptual features that are understandable but not necessary. Bats have wings and fly, and can therefore plausibly be categorized as birds, although in other taxonomic schemes they are not. A general point here is that structures of linguistic classifications do not exist in isolated taxonomic splendor. They are parts of wider arenas of cultural

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practice. This is why we have given some examples regarding cassowaries and their classification in a number of Highlands Papua New Guinea cases. Pombora in Melpa categories also can cross-cut other classifications, so that leaves can be described as nde omong wening, “tree leaf fresh, new” and nde omong pombora, “tree leaf mature, dark.” “Dark” is here contrasted with wening, “light,” rather than with kund, its conventional pair in other contrasts. In ritual and cosmic terms, the predominant pairing comes out also as kund can represent danger or hostility, as well as in other contexts a mark of fertility and alliance, while pombora can represent safety, ordinary, as well as in other contexts ancestors or aggressive solidarity. Facial decorations and shield painting tend to follow a pattern of “colors” that are in line with a preference for “red/white/ black,” expressed in earth ochers and charcoal mixed with pig grease. What we gloss as “color” is therefore also a product of available resources and technology. Finally, here, in terms of visual salience, one of the criteria that Wierzbicka identified as significant for the Warlpiri, aesthetic contrasts between red, black, and white produce designs that Melpa obviously consider to be striking because they use these as elements in their designs for facial transformation and to signal to allies and enemies alike messages of strength, vitality, and determination. Seeing kund and pombora as a basic pairing, followed by körök as an ancillary term, we can identify other “colors” as terms taken from the environment, such as leaves, the skin of types of sugarcane, dry leaves (“yellow”), blue earth (muk), and gradations such as “-like” (-mel) just as in Warlpiri usage. If we wish, we can fit such a scheme roughly into the Berlin and Kay scheme, so that we find white, black, and red as the basic terms, and others added as non-basic terms; but this does not tell us about the way the Melpa think about the kund/pombora pair, nor would the Berlin and Kay scheme predict that “red” or “black” would be paired rather than “white” or “black.” The Melpa penchant for pairing is the important element here, not the putative scheme of evolutionary development. In conclusion, the “color terms” debate shows all the points that would be revealed by the examination of further cultural domains. There is a danger in reifying and simplifying categories that are vitally complex and culturally specific, and the danger in fact begins with the problem of translation itself. We will follow this point with some consideration of “emotion” terms. In all cases, also, it is important to note that in some cultural contexts color categories get elaborated and they have to be explicitly taught to either younger people in general or older people who have to learn rosters of new terms for marketing purposes (e.g., as we have noted, for paints or car colors or clothes). There is a physiological capacity for all this, but it can be moved in one direction or another by particular cultural

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choices and development. The focus of our analysis here is on the importance of recognizing and following in detail such cultural and experiential nuances rather than the technical niceties surrounding the issue of referentiality in linguistics, and how various theorists may be ranked in terms of their supposed stances on that issue. Wierzbicka’s ethnographic work on Warlpiri ways of being in the world takes us into the heart of a cultural understanding that is based ultimately on comprehending Warlpiri experience rather than simply sets of words in the Warlpiri language. If this is “referentialist” for some linguistic anthropologists, then at least what it refers us to is Warlpiri embodied and emplaced culture. In the arena of studies of emotions, we see the same juxtaposition of apparently universal features or processes and very particular inflections and modulations that indicate special ways in which the emotions enter into social events of conflict, conflict settlement, harmony, dislike, etc. Here, another issue enters that has greatly to do with putative dichotomous differences between “cultures.” One model of the emotions suggests that these are internally generated in the individual, while another model locates them in contexts of sociality between people. Egocentric societies are then said to hold to the first model, while sociocentric societies hold to the second. Typically, and stereotypically, a distinction is made between “developed” or “evolved” societies and “simple” or “undeveloped” ones, the former seen as more individualistic, the latter as collectivist. This dichotomous contrast, much discussed and reviewed, is oversimplified and is basically a product of evolutionary schemata of analysis. All societies contain mixtures or balances between individualist and collectivist orientations. The balances do vary, of course, and appear in different domains of activity. In terms of the emotions, it is important to pay attention to ideas of the person and the body that underpin ways in which emotions are perceived and handled. Since the human body is a common factor shared by all societies, there are obviously commonalities that run across cultural differences. At the same time, cultural attitudes and values have their own characteristics. Language indexes both these commonalities and differences. The question of whether there are universals of emotions can be answered differently depending on what perspective we take. Language itself enters right at the beginning of any investigation into “the emotions” because the term already carries cultural connotations. Anna Wierzbicka, whose deconstructive work on the domain of experience labeled as “color” which we have already discussed, comments (1999) on the terms “feelings” and “emotions” in the English language. English usage entails a combination of reference in the term emotion to aspects of feeling, thinking, and

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the body. The particular form of this combination in English is not necessarily paralleled in other languages, Wierzbicka says. For example, in ordinary (nonacademic) German the term Gefühl makes no difference between mental and physical feelings. The same is true in Samoan, where lagona simply means feeling, without any distinction between the mental and the physical. In English, giving way to the “emotions” is seen as a kind of breakdown of control. In many other cultures such a notion would make no sense. (Indeed, it is an ideological rather than an experiential component of discourse in English.) At the same time, English usage also implies that “emotions” have a cognitive, or cultural, component as in “shame” or sadness (p. 27). The idea that there is a limited number of basic “emotions” that are cross-culturally shared parallels the idea of basic color terms and is susceptible to the same pitfalls related to extending English language terms across cultures. At the same time, language does not exhaust the possibilities of experience. A given language (e.g., Tahitian) may not have a term for sadness, but this does not mean that an individual Tahitian cannot feel sad, in some senses at least of the term. Wierzbicka points out (p. 33) that we need to distinguish between phenomena, concepts, and linguistic expressions, but we are always stuck with using the linguistic expressions as our yardsticks, and these are strongly culturally inflected. Wierzbicka sets up her own model for examining universals by way of a semantic primitive “feel” (FEEL in her scheme), and another “think” (THINK), and also “good” and “bad” (GOOD, BAD). She further suggests that universal distinctions are made between FEEL and THINK, although they are closely linked in experience. These guidelines provide a basis for identifying patterns exhibited across different language and culture areas. For anthropologists, it is a useful exercise to concentrate on how such universals are played out in specific ways. In a very thoughtful discussion, James Russell (1991) pointed out that the term “emotion” is itself not a crosscultural universal (as with “color” again, we should note), and there is great interest in understanding how phenomena that we label in English as though they were universal are actually conceptualized in different cases. It is also quite interesting that favorite examples have emerged in the literature, and these tend to center on a few concepts, notably including the concept of “anger.” Russell (p. 430) refers to the Ilongot concept of liget, which covers both anger and grief, as expounded by Michelle Rosaldo and also by Renato Rosaldo (M. Rosaldo 1980; R. Rosaldo 1980). Liget leads to headhunting as a means of release, the ethnographers say. In the Pacific region, Catherine Lutz’s work on Ifaluk is cited. Song for the Ifaluk signals both anger and sadness. Lutz translates it as justifiable

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anger. It can lead to inflicting violence either on others or on oneself by suicide (Russell, p. 430, referring to Lutz 1980). “Shame” is another favorite category. Russell assembles many other examples from different languages. He notes that we cannot limit ourselves to the “word for” approach because languages express things in multiple ways. Reviewing the theory of “cultural scripts” for emotion terms, he notes further that “culture specific and pancultural define two ends of a continuum” (p. 443), that is, not a simple dichotomy. He also notes that while there is much specific difference, there is also “great similarity” in terminologies, embedded in cultural scripts. In a similar vein, and drawing on her earlier work, Wierzbicka reviews evidence about “fear” and “shame” among the Gidjingali, an indigenous Australian group studied by Les Hiatt. These two concepts are included in the same term by the Gidjingali, indicating a degree of correspondence between them, but they can also be distinguished by further specifications. The connection between them for the Gidjingali is that they both indicate a wish to withdraw from or not enter into an awkward situation. Indeed, where shame is involved and is expressed in a man’s avoidance of his mother-in-law, we can suggest that there could also be an element of fear because if the man were to transgress there would be unfavorable social consequences. Finally, in this chapter we will adduce some materials from the Melpa language to juxtapose with the general arguments of Wierzbicka and Russell. The first point is that for the Melpa, thinking and feeling are both expressed by the same verb, pili. Pili refers to a whole range of actions, to think, to feel, and to sense, but one cannot in Melpa use to see (köni) as an equivalent. Köni refers only to visual action, not to understanding. Pili, however, can be used for all the senses apart from seeing. Hearing is covered by pili, for example. The unity behind these usages takes us straight into embodiment, ideas of the person, and social agency, all of which are expressed through the concept of the noman, which one can variously gloss as mind, intention, thoughts, feeling, etc. (see our earlier discussion in Chapter 3 for further background). Noman is the seat of all these activities of the person and is conventionally thought of as located in the chest near the wind pipe. Noman is also the seat of moral behavior. If it is properly aligned in the body, the breath and reason of the person go straight, if it lies across or athwart in the chest, the person does wrong. Noman enters into a host of expressions and is important for the Melpa, whether one is talking about “emotions,” “feelings,” or “thoughts.” One emotion that is said to arise often in the noman is popokl, glossed as “anger” but not seen as either absolutely good or bad. Popokl works in the way Catherine Lutz described emotions for the Ifaluk.

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That is, it is generated out of interactions; it operates between people. But it is also imaged as being inside the person’s noman. Popokl calls for social processes of mediation. If a person is popokl they may fall sick, or they may take revenge for an action that has upset them. Counter-killings in warfare were always attributed to popokl. (We have examined noman and popokl in a number of publications, as well as in Chapter 3 of the present work.) Shame, by contrast, is often spoken of as “being on the skin” of people, at the intersection between them and the world, rather than in the noman. It is a reaction to the fear that other people might ridicule one, point the finger at one, gossip about one, whether in relation to something wrong one has actually done, or in relation simply to an accusation. Shame (pipil), therefore, also operates between people, as does popokl, but it is in some ways not so deep-seated. Popokl is thought to arise in people and to demand and elicit action, and it is very deep-seated. But a sense of shame is also very important. It is what spurs people to do well in ceremonial exchanges and to keep their promises, otherwise they can be looked on as “liars” (kol rui is the verb, contrasted with kopa ni, to say the truth). These emotion concepts, then, are intricately linked to indigenous ideas of embodied action, of personhood, agency, status, and morality. We can certainly see some common cross-cultural elements in them. We can also see their specificity in the Melpa context. It is the same with all categorizations of “the world.” Languages classify the world, as we have said at the beginning of Chapter 5. At the end of the present chapter, we can conclude not only that they do so in variable and complex ways but also that they are a part of whole complexes of social action that are triggered by processes of conflict and cooperation, and that the “meanings” of “emotions” must always be sought in those social processes of “worlding,” coming to grips with problems in the experience of relationships. In the next chapter, we move to approaches that seek to explain cultural and linguistic forms by means of cognitive science.

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7

Cognitive Science and Language

Cognitive science has entered the sphere of anthropological theorizing in a number of ways recently. Cognitive approaches aim to be explanatory, that is, to interpret cultural practices as the products of underlying cognitive processes that are conceptualized as universal. They correspond in some ways to the much-older anthropological theory of the psychic unity of “mankind,” but they are supported by recent thinking in cognitive studies. Robert Logan (Logan 2007) has sought to make a synthesis of evolutionary ideas in this domain. He regards the passage from sensory ways of dealing with the world to conceptual ways as crucial to the emergence of language, and thus he sees language as based on concepts of a mental kind expressed in speech at first and later in forms of notation dependent on technologies, such as writing. Language allows meanings to be shared and stored, especially when notations are introduced, and thus leads to the emergence of what Logan calls the Extended Mind (aka Culture). Going on from his starting point, he argues that writing changed language use because it entailed a new way of storing and processing information, and thus by implication modes of thought. He thus presents a reconsidered version of the early ideas of Jack Goody on this theme. He also uses an ontological model for the development of language, citing work by Vygotsky (1962), who noted that, at a certain age, children begin to talk to themselves as a way of thinking about problems, and then internalize this process, so producing thought. He further argues that writing came into being because oral culture was no longer able to process all the information needed to operate increasingly complex social transactions. Logan also argues that writing enabled science to emerge. His approach is therefore highly motivated in content and ideology by the development of technologies such as writing (and reading). He does recognize, however, that language, whether in oral or literate form, always carries functions of both communication and thought, thus keeping discussion of it within the social realm.

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If we now posit a close relationship also between “thought” and “cognition” and further postulate a close relationship between language and cognition, we can see why cognitive science approaches also aim to explain features of linguistic identification and categorizations of experience, such as religion, sorcery, and witchcraft, long stock-in-trades of cultural and social anthropological descriptions. There has been a particular effort in this regard to revisit the question of the explanation of religion, and a string of thinkers and writers have contributed to this enterprise, beginning with Dan Sperber (Sperber 1985) and continuing with Pascal Boyer (e.g., Boyer 1990, 1994), Maurice Bloch (e.g., Bloch 2005), Harvey Whitehouse (e.g., Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007), and many others. We have examined much of this material in an earlier publication (Stewart and Strathern 2014, q.v. for details) but will explore relevant themes from the work of these authors again here, focusing on their own starting points in their analyses, such as ideas of rationality, intuition, and counter-intuition. One starting point is provided by Boyer, who has argued that religion develops from minimally counter-intuitive ideas, giving a twist to intuition and extending it, for example, by imagining ghosts as beings like living persons but that can glide through doors. Dan Sperber put the matter in a somewhat different way from Boyer, with his idea of semi-propositional representations, statements that are not intended to be absolutely correct but are like conjectures or suggestions of what might be (thus, “maybe there are ghosts that can slide through doors”). Both Sperber and Boyer are locating their arguments within a frame of rationality, in which religion is seen as not rational but is not entirely irrational either, since it deals with possible or imagined realms of reality. (See, for a general exploration of the relationship between language and religion, Downes 2011.) The “Theory of Mind” (ToM) provides an interesting take-off point for much of this theorizing, as well as for the theory of language in general as a communicative tool. This theory posits that humans operate with an assumption that communication depends on recognizing the interplay of minds among people. Cognitivists have developed a suite of such concepts, which for them further explain phenomena, such as religion, “belief ” (itself a contested category, see, for a thorough discussion, Vasquez 2011, deploying embodiment theory), sorcery, and witchcraft. The theme of embodiment, especially in relation to cognition, is carefully reviewed by Joseph (Joseph 2018) in the course of his meticulous historical review of theories regarding language, mind, and body. Joseph recapitulates the influential work of Lakoff and Johnson in this arena. He points out the difficulties of specifying the cerebral locations in which meanings

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may become connected (2018: 199), and he adds that cognitive science theories tend to privilege “nature” rather than “culture”. Joseph’s work can be read as a subtle commentary on theories of mind and body in general, as expressed in philosophical writings from ancient Greek times onward. Religion may be explained by saying that humans tend cognitively to anthropomorphize their perceptual experiences, so that they interpret shapes as being human (the “faces in the cloud” approach, as explored by Guthrie 1993). Or they argue that religious taboos and prohibitions derive from a “hazard avoidance device” that cautions people against taking risks, stemming from early human experience of the importance of looking out for and guarding against danger. Or that fears of sorcery and witchcraft are a result of psychological projections. Whitehouse has added an original point by suggesting that the facility to make connections across sectors of the brain shows the human creative capacity in cognitive powers, leading to the ability to think metaphorically, or “cross-domain analogical thinking.” Language is in some sense thus seen as a secondary product of such primary cognitive processes (however these are physically constituted in the brain), but because of its capability for categorization and labeling it becomes an instrument for the social power of such processes. In this model theorists seek to relate cognitive theories to their putative realization in language forms. The approach is comparable to the distinction between surface and deep structure in Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar in language. A different way of thinking about Whitehouse’s idea here would be to relate it to the insightful work by Lakoff and Johnson on conceptual metaphor theory, in which they explore how one conceptual domain can be mapped on another, see Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Analogical thinking is also akin to the process of semiotic abduction, as first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, in which imagination is deployed to elucidate a problem of interpretation, building out from standard procedures of induction and deduction. We suggest that this can be compared to the logic of magical spells in the Melpa language of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, in which abduction appears as a /to/ or “comparison” leading into an image that presents an ideal situation of healing. Abduction can be further related to Whitehouse’s concept of cross-domain analogical thinking. Another arena of interest lies in language socialization studies in relation to cognitive theories. Here, the argument would be that we can learn about the genesis of language in general by looking at how children learn a specific language. However, in each case the problem of extrapolation arises: what is general and what is culturally particular, including about children, in a given study? The same theories and methodological procedures always seem to be followed by cognitive theorists.

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For example, Dimitris Xygalatas has made a detailed ethnographic study of the Greek Anastenaria, fire-walking festival, taking up the question of why people practice it (Xygalatas 2012). In answering to this question, Xygalatas turns to the idea of obsessive-compulsive behavior and costly signaling theory. Both of these approaches rely on a psychologistic stance to “explanation” and are not geared to account for the obvious collective orientation of the rituals involved and their social context understood in emic terms, that is, in the terms agreed on by the actors themselves. Importing psychologistic and economistic models into richly defined traditional scenes of action may not be the most effective way of explaining what these ceremonies are about and thus actually studying them objectively. (We do not maintain here that there is no merit in trying out these approaches, only that committed exponents of them need to be able to show how they are more powerful forms of explanation than others, or that they can stand alone as forms of explanation without recourse to emic data. Of course, emic [actors’] and etic [observers’] modalities of analysis can complement each other in a broader view.) Broadening these discussions further, we can safely stress the ideological power of the linguistic process of emically labeling things in the world and thus performatively creating them “as they are.” Institutions are full of labeling categories in this way, for example, in the way they identify “Faculty” or “Staff ” or the categories established in official websites as a means of producing “Institutional Persons” who may function as avatars or advertisements for their real-life equivalents. In medical anthropology, labeling theory has been applied to categories, such as “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder” or Attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD syndrome). Linguistic theory and medical anthropology converge in this thematic arena. “Culture-bound syndromes” was a useful term invented to interpret the emergence or maintenance of ways of dealing with illness conditions that seemed to belong to particular cultures or social groups. This idea of the culture-bound syndrome is also analogous to the many debates on linguistic relativity that stemmed in American cultural anthropology from the work of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and latterday scholars, such as John Lucy. The cultural relativist stance adopted by these scholars working in the Boasian traditions contrasts strongly with the universalist imperatives in cognitive science, but this contrast is itself a product of the choice of different levels of analysis. Any particularist description could potentially be set into a universalist framework, and vice versa. However, the cognitive scientists are at somewhat of a disadvantage because their reductionist

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explanations lack the specificity and ethnographic depth of particularist accounts. In purporting to explain everything and everything in the same way, they face the risk of explaining only a small component of the data, leaving out all details that are local and distinctive, especially those pertaining to the social and political processes at work. John Lucy’s work is exemplary in this regard, because he takes themes from ethnographic contexts like those investigated by Whorf, such as nouns of mass or shape, and shows meticulously how these are conceptualized in the languages he is studying, and how this conceptualization differs from American English language usage. Lucy’s particular empirical focus is on the grammatical treatment of number, finding that expressions of number are more elaborated in American English than in Yucatec Maya and that this is consistent with general cognitive emphases in the two languages (Lucy 1992). Lucy’s work provides an important bridge between particularist and universalist stances to language and culture, because he develops a rigorous methodological approach to the study of diversity, taking into account the need for a reflexive understanding and the need to avoid setting up one ethnographic case as a model and then showing how other cases diverge from it. His careful account of the work of his predecessors is also very helpful. On the work of Franz Boas, he notes that Boas was easily able to show that specific languages make differentiations among phenomena that are culturally particular. In the muchcited example of Eskimo words on terms for snow, it is clear that the words are ecological in reference and emplaced in experience, based on observation and adaptation. In general, Boas considered that language usage influences thought, not necessarily determining it, and that speakers are not consciously aware of this influence because language use is largely automatic and not subject to conscious awareness, whereas they are more often aware about other arenas of cultural practice. Edward Sapir carried Boas’s ideas further, arguing at least in some passages that language does strongly influence the way people conceptualize the “world,” and reinforcing the idea that this is all an unconscious process and does not enter into a realm of discussion. (In this regard, language would be like what Pierre Bourdieu called the realm of “doxa,” unexamined practices in social life, Bourdieu 1977.) Benjamin Lee Whorf substantially complexified these realms of analysis, pointing out that some markers of grammatical features are overt, or explicit, whereas a considerable class of other markers are covert and are marked in more distributed and diverse ways, and still influence patterns of expression and thought. For example, in English, some nouns do not carry overt plural markers, but when used as plurals they of course take a plural verb form, which thus constitutes a simple kind of covert grammatical marker. Whorf

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also warned against simplistic acceptance of the use of grammatical classifiers, such as “noun,” “verb,” etc., that apply clearly to Indo-European languages, but may not be adequate for other language classes in the world. (See Lucy 1992: 34–35 on this point, with exact references to and quotations from the original sources in Whorf ’s work.) These observations are useful technical aids for the cross-linguistic study of languages, whether we see language as determinative of thought or otherwise. Whorf went further and questioned whether ideas of space, time, and matter are presented very differently in different languages, distinguishing between “concepts” and “percepts.” Percepts may be shared across cultures, but a given language may order concepts distinctively in terms of the contents of thought. At this point we come full circle back to labeling theory mentioned above, because Whorf ’s best-known example came from his experience as a fire inspector looking into the causes of a fire in a warehouse where gasoline drums were stored. The drums were labeled “empty,” suggesting they were innocuous, but they still contained fumes and when a cigarette was lit in their vicinity, the fumes were ignited and caused the fire. As Whorf notes, the response here was to a linguistic label and the interpretation of it by workers, not just to something “out there” in the world. Language was the intervening variable between perceiver and perceived, because conceptually empty was taken to mean harmless. Here, then, a linguistic classification did influence thought, but it did so via a cognitive mismatch that could have been avoided with more cultural knowledge. Extra-linguistic knowledge is therefore important as well as the apparent semantics of linguistic categories. (Some materials here are derived from Lucy 1992: 1–48.) Going back to Boas, it is important to realize the sophistication of his ideas as well as his meticulous scholarship on Native American languages. He saw all human societies as a part of human history and therefore calling for attention and study. He declined to specify any of them as primitive or undeveloped. He insisted that languages needed to be studied in their own right and their grammars to be related to their life circumstances. He noted that what is expressed in customary language does not limit the potential capacities of people to express thought. Taking a favorite topic of evolutionists, he remarked that some languages may have words for only one, two, and three, but this does not indicate that the people are cognitively deficient, only that they do not have a need in their life-world for higher numbers. If such a need were to emerge, they could handle it by innovation or adoption of terms from elsewhere. A cowherd may know all their animals by name and personality or appearance, and without knowing how many they are can certainly tell if one goes missing, so that naming

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functions as a form of counting (Leavitt 2010: 124–125). Analogously, in one Native American language, Kwak’wala, pronominal usages specify relations of propinquity among the speaker, the addressee, and the person spoken about. This apparent redundancy of reference is related to the importance of spatial positioning of people as an expression of social relations. Grammatical and semantic relationships in these languages are also often incorporated into complex verbs rather than occurring as freestanding modifiers (lexemes or phrases). Such a clustering of functions and meanings within the verb is a notable feature of New Guinea Highlands languages, connoting the centrality of action as a focus of interest in those cultures. This parallel with New Guinea does not seem to be by chance, since there is another shared feature specifying the source of one’s information as based on the speaker’s direct observation or on hearsay or conjecture. In the Wiru language of Pangia, this feature is marked by an obligatory infix, so that, for example, /oko/ means “says,” and /akendeko/ means “seems to say”; and /toko/ means “does,” while /tandeko/ means “appears to do.” These kinds of shared features are a product of social systems in which face-toface relations have been paramount and conflicts may need to be resolved by means of establishing who exactly has said or has done what. Another salient area of expression in Pacific languages is deixis, the practice of pointing to the placement and orientation of people in relation to each other, as well as the orientation of places themselves in relation to each other (see Senft ed. 2004 for detailed examples). When Hageners met each other on a rural pathway they would traditionally say “ui-o” [you come] and add “nim nil moklkon on nda?” [where were you and are coming?]. The conventional reply was to give a flat spatial statement, such as “na wi moklp met mbi ont” [I was up there and am on my way downhill]—enough to indicate politeness and that they were not enemies. (Melpa, Wiru language materials are taken directly from the Stewart and Strathern field language materials.) Observation of correlates of this kind between features of language and features of society should not be taken to denote deterministic relations, only kinds of fit among phenomena. And it is possible that in the quest of scholars to see determinism in the work of thinkers, such as Boas or Sapir, they may miss understanding the subtlety and complexity of the texts these thinkers produced. One thing Sapir stressed was that thought really does depend on words, and so we are in some way beholden to language in our pursuit of refining thoughts on any topic; but, as Leavitt points out (Leavitt 2010: 138), this does not mean that it is impossible to “think outside of the box,” because language itself is

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malleable and can be used innovatively. Habitually, language can, in practice, determine the way people think, but when they rethink a problem, they may realize a different way of conceptualizing it. Edward Sapir himself provided a vital clue here when he highlighted the importance of metaphor in thought, because metaphor enables comparisons to be made among things not previously brought together in people’s minds. Leavitt notes that Sapir spoke of language as providing a road or groove in which thought could run, but a road or groove is something that can be turned out from (p. 140) into a new pathway. Leavitt’s discussion of the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf is also helpful. He points out that Whorf, like Boas and Sapir, believed firmly in the idea that humans share basic cognitive capacities. In this regard, these thinkers can be placed alongside the cognitivists of today. However, Whorf ’s studies of the grammatical structures of languages, especially the Hopi language, indicated to him that there were some fundamentally different features of Hopi concepts from those that are inscribed in English (or, as he put it more broadly, Standard Average European). In particular, Hopi language deals with time distinctively, not allowing it to be cut up and segmented like other entities that can be counted in the abstract. As an example, you cannot say in Hopi “three days,” but only “on the third day,” taking the situated self as the point of perspective. Hopi language concepts reveal a particular cultural perspective engrained in the grammar. The upshot here is that while the Hopi could possibly conceptualize time in any number of ways, their language predisposes them to think of it in a particular way. Whorf was dealing here with the predispositions of habitual usage, not with absolutely determined patterns. As a general conclusion, then, it is clear that Boas, Sapir, and Whorf were all both universalists and particularists in their theoretical stances. They also wanted to impress in the minds of their readers the importance of understanding that what is naturalized in a given language is in fact a culturalized way of talking, and this can be revealed by linguistic study. Guy Deutscher has written a study intended to discredit the entire idea of “linguistic relativity,” arguing that differences in grammar merely reflect different ways of saying the same thing and that human experience is essentially the same everywhere (Deutscher 2010). He does not seem to recognize that Boas, Sapir, and Whorf all themselves carefully note that human perceptions at a general level may all be “the same,” but that apperceptions via language produce differences. How much difference and how important it is can be argued about, but Deutscher seems concerned mostly to imply that it is all nonsense. He does score a telling blow when he notes that Whorf ’s claim that there is no Hopi expression that refers directly to what we call time seems to be negated by the

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extensive work of Malotki Ekkehart in the 1983 book Hopi Time (Deutscher 2010: 143). However, the experience of sequence is not the same as an abstract concept of “time,” so the argument would need to be revisited on that basis. Deutscher may be both right and wrong here: right in the sense that in practice the Hopi work with practical notions about time that are widely shared, and wrong in the sense that he denies any difference between Hopi ideas and those of others. Deutscher also overstates his case when he says that linguistic relativity theories portray language as a prison house of cognition, when in fact the theorists we have discussed all recognize that the constraints of language are not absolute and that they are identifying habitual rather than absolute cognitive patterns. Later in his own discussion, Deutscher recognizes that this point was made by Boas long ago, to effect that relativity is about what one language obliges speakers to do, not what it allows them to do (p. 152). On the other side of the debate, he is also forced to acknowledge that some languages dramatically impose difference, citing the Matses people of Amazonia who have very elaborate obligatory rules governing evidentiality (pp. 153–155). Finally, Deutscher himself turns the whole argument around by citing examples where language obviously has influenced thought, but via experience of the environment: and so, we are back to the Eskimo and their expressions about “snow,” and Boas rises again! Ritualized uses of language have frequently entered into our discussions so far, and in the next chapter we will examine these further.

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Language and Ritual: The Merina and the Melpa

In this chapter we explore two different but related themes. One is the theme of ritual action as a kind of language of communication, in which the instruments of communication are the embodied actions of persons and the material items that form a part of these actions. The other is the theme of special performative usages of speech actions that are integral to the ritual context (a topic already broached in Chapter 4, in the section on illocution). Here we have, then, two different but related themes. One is the theme of ritual action in general as a specially marked form of communication, involving human bodies and the wider material world in which people experience their bodies. The other is the context of speech actions and their role in the ritual process. Ritualized uses of language go hand in hand with general definitions of ritual. To recapitulate remarks made elsewhere (e.g., Stewart and Strathern 2014), classic dimensions of these definitions are that ritual actions are stylized, repetitive, authorized by tradition, invariant, and separate from the intentions of the performers. All of these aspects provide useful pointers for understanding, but none of them is universal or found to the same degree. (Clearly here, as generally within anthropology, terms such as ritual are inflected by historically varying aspects of language ideology that give a positive or negative charge to the term in the usage of particular writers—writers, too, have their ideologies and micro-political purposes.) Importantly, ritual actions, like speech acts in general, do vary from one performance to another, and can be creatively molded to encompass new meanings and functions, either within or outside of earlier dimensions of action. Ritual actions in themselves encode certain meanings and values, giving them structured forms that create and express communication in language-like ways. Most often we can discern this pattern in contexts that express status hierarchy,

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complementarity, or gendered forms of marital alliance between categories of people. South-East Asian societies with definite or relatively fixed patterns of repeated marriages between groups or categories of people show this pattern very well, with numerous ways of expressing the relations between wife-givers and wife-receivers in terms of flows of valuables (see, for example, Strathern and Stewart 2011a: 107–112). Rituals, in these and other instances, have a special role to play in fixing structures of social relationships through material practices. Another element that is very important here is the element of display. Not only do rituals require that people participate in them, but they also ensure that values are on display and are therefore validated. Rituals confer legitimacy on transactions of this kind, partly by invoking an aura of cosmic forces, partly by the unambiguous forms (declarative forms) of the ritual itself. Moreover, it is not only the primary actors or subjects of the ritual that carry these values. Sometimes we speak of “spectators” of ritual performances; but, as many scholars have pointed out, the spectators are actually participants (see, for example, Schechner 1985). It is they who give the legitimacy to ritual actions. They are significant witnesses to the actual event and will help to carry the memory of it. Finally, spectators are not always an undifferentiated mass of observers. For example, at the inauguration of a new chancellor as the ritual head of a university structure, spectators wear academic regalia, are arranged hierarchically, and together make a tableau of the whole university community and its array of powers and privileges: a tradition related in essence to the arrangements in a royal court. A kind of parallel or symmetry exists between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic components of action in ceremonial contexts of this kind. The whole assembled tableau is itself a ritual statement, conveying its meanings at the immediate sensory level. This context provides a conditioning background against which all of the verbal statements that are made stand out further as constituting illocutionary remarks. In accordance with the ritual plan of the event, these remarks all lead up to and then away from a central moment at which there is a condensed affirmation of the new status the individual is entering into. This would normally involve an investiture with some special piece of material culture (such as an academic gown going with an honorary degree) and some verbal statement. In a sense, the verbal statement shadows the material act, but both elements are important and must go together: a good example of how language and material actions work together in constituting reality. This helps to explain why rituals are important, because they establish an isomorphism

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between language and reality in a way that does not apply in all contexts of language use, where it is evident that there is no one-to-one correspondence between these domains. Ritual (which includes here not simply the immediate actions of the participants, but also their ritualized established identities) establishes the truth-value of verbal statements, investing them with power. A further point is that if the names of graduands are not read out properly as required, this constitutes a serious ritual error and vitiates the legitimate efficacy of the occasion. These considerations can help us understand why language and ritual acts come together in powerful ways when the commemorations of disasters are made. In these acts of commemoration, we also see how repetitive elements of performance are built up from rudimentary beginnings, and how each stage of the ritual process over time is laden with emotions and the means of dealing with these emotions. Disasters typically involve deaths, and death is always hard to deal with because it cuts bonds of relationship that have then to be repaired, and grief turned into commemoration. In our research on disasters, we have mostly concentrated on events labeled as natural disasters, although this is in some ways a misnomer, because human actions are always involved as causative factors (see Stewart and Strathern 2015, 2018). Deaths in warfare are also often seen as disasters, with the difference that they are in addition seen as acts of sacrifice or heroism. In commemorative terms, grief is the shared factor on the part of survivors and the community at large. Verbal and non-verbal practices come into play in such performances of commemoration. At the broadest political level, commemorations come to represent the values of a whole nation, and they are one of the ways in which nations are realized in embodied terms. A tableau in which survivors of a war parade come out is combined with remembrance of those who died. A church service may be held. Dignitaries lay wreaths at shrines to the dead, often at a cenotaph, a tomb of the unknown soldiers whose bodies were not brought back from the war zone. Most of the ritual acts are not accompanied by words, but there is a time when words are added to the actions. Words clarify and focus what the point of the whole exercise is, to honor and remember the dead and the suffering of all those involved in the trauma that is the cause of grief. Words bring about a phase of political consciousness that summates and lifts the nonverbal actions into the realm of propositions, intentions, and specific references to events and their place in space-time or history. The words themselves of course are ritualized in their form, authorized, standardized, with recognizable affect, intensely condensed and encompassing the widest levels of collective

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experience. They are also spoken by persons of the highest level in the social and ritual hierarchies, thus performatively instantiating the nation in doing so. Rituals also have a history. This point was borne in on us in April 2015 in New Zealand, when we were present at the elaborate rituals commemorating the disastrous deaths of huge numbers of military servicemen from New Zealand and Australia at the Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey during the First World War. In recent years in New Zealand, these acts of commemoration have grown in scale and younger people have been drawn into them at generational removes from the event itself. The first bond established by this experience was between New Zealand and Australia, since their soldiers fought together at Gallipoli, and the New Zealanders in particular were under the direct command of the British government, whose ministers saw Gallipoli as an occasion to break the Turks, who were at that time in alliance with the Germans. Resentment against the British decision to attack at Gallipoli has led over time to seeing the event as a marker of the creation of a sense of nationality on the part of New Zealanders, in opposition to the British. The Māori people were also involved, since some of their kinsfolk were also enlisted and died in battle. The Māori now see the rituals celebrating the heroism of those who died as validatory markers of their own indigenous warriorhood traditions. A massive failure in the assault on Gallipoli and the huge losses of life on both sides of the conflict have led to New Zealanders now seeing the battle as the site where their sense of national belonging was forged through shared suffering. From our observations, this evolution of sentiment has not led to changes in the actual form of the rituals or in the language of commemoration. However, it has led to pervasive media commentaries in which the public were informed that this is now the metapragmatic significance of Gallipoli; and, in accordance with this idea, the popularity of celebrations on Anzac Day has markedly increased. Huge numbers of people also went to Gallipoli itself for the ceremonies held on the spot there. As with all rituals, multi-sensorial components are involved in war commemorations. A ritual fixture comes at the end, when a professional performer plays on the bugle The Last Post—in effect a farewell to the noble dead that marks the closure of a phase of ritual activity. No words are spoken in or around this act, but the music itself, with all its resonances, speaks eloquently to the sense of sorrow and respect for those who died. It is worth reiterating here this point about the multi-sensorial character of ritual performances. Color, sounds, smells, patterns of movement, and fixity, all combine to produce the aesthetic and emotive effects that the ritual achieves, and these are the result of the non-verbal parts of the performance. Words

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appeal to the ear only, but when the speaker is richly attired or decorated and is surrounded by others similarly attired or stands in a special building, a whole panoply of senses is energized. Words, then, translate this sensory experience into a propositional form or they make explicit a mythological foundation of the ritual, or they are important in focusing on the asserted efficacy of the ritual. Clearly, all elements are in symbolic relationship, and yet the words can operate in different material contexts, for example between different Christian denominations. Catholic services are replete with material imagery. Protestant ones rely more on the word itself as the source of experience. At the end of a service, however, when the minister or priest blesses the congregation just before they leave the church, the essential illocutionary form of the pronouncement is the same no matter what the material setting is. (In a variant, the congregation members present themselves carry out the blessing.) We use the term “illocutionary” here, although this is an expansion of the narrower sense of the term, in which the truth-value of the expression is isomorphic with the expression itself. The famous obvious example is “I name this ship.” In the minister’s closing words he or she makes a request rather than a statement: “May the grace of God go with you and be with you.” Although this is a request, it tends to have an illocutionary or a magical performative effect, as is the case with all blessings. The speaker adopts, at this liminal moment, a sacred role, assuring people of the benevolence and protection of the deity as they move beyond the safety of the church itself into the world of danger outside. In the ideological variant, the minister may invite the congregation to join together and bless one another, thus creating a kind of egalitarian “communitas” rather than a recognition of hierarchical power. This mention of illocutionary effects leads us back to a major arena of discussions regarding language and ritual, that is, the question of the power of words or utterances (see also Chapter 3 in this book). Classic contributors to this theme have been Stanley Tambiah, Maurice Bloch, and Roy Rappaport. Tambiah took as his departure point a detailed examination of magical spells recorded by Bronislaw Malinowski among the Trobrianders of Papua and dealing with magic for canoes, for beauty and strength, and for garden fertility (Malinowski 1935; Tambiah 1968). Malinowski himself long ago articulated a theory of meaning in terms of the context of the situation in which verbal performances occur, so a linguistic anthropology that proclaims this as a new approach to meaning would certainly be reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Tambiah, however, was interested in discerning the specific linguistic characteristics of such spells that gave them their ritual significance. He found that they showed features which

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anthropologists have attributed to ritual acts generally: redundancy, repetition, condensation of meanings, and the like, often with complex orchestrations of these values. He was exploring the rhetorical structure of the spells and approaching an understanding of the logic of ideas on which they were based, that is, why the Trobrianders would think them to be effective. The import of the analysis is that what is at work is basically a metaphorical mode of thinking; or, better, an imagistic mode, in which images are produced that are then treated as realities. The canoe is depicted as capable of flying across the water, for example. Relating this point to the minister’s benediction, we can see that the spells are also a kind of illocutionary statement, or they are projected as such. This is why they have a feature that we have identified in spells among the Melpa speakers of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea (see Strathern and Stewart 2010: 58–64). They are couched as simple locutionary statements; that is, they assert their reality as already in existence, not as a wish, a prayer, or a command. This, then, is how spells shortcut their way to a desired fulfillment. It would be interesting to see if this mechanism, shared by the Melpa and the Trobrianders, is found more generally. If so, it would indicate that spells tap into iconic imagery and translate this into linguistic forms which then appear as “metaphors.” (See, for an overall theoretical view, Mauss 2003, and on metaphor Ortony 1979.) The general message of Tambiah’s work was that the imputed “magical” power of words in spells lay in the characteristic forms of the words themselves. Certainly, this makes sense in terms of what we know of spells generally, since they are always found to employ special rhythmic, repetitive, and usually archaic forms of expression. Poetry, song, magic, and power are all conventionally and experientially interconnected. Tambiah’s analytical contribution was to pinpoint more precisely the structuring of Trobriand spells, making comparisons with other cases possible. At one level, we are dealing with form here, at another with content. Form constrains content, and together they constitute the power of the whole utterance. The form–content relationship is what Maurice Bloch discussed in his exposition of the powers of oratory among the Merina people of Madagascar (Bloch 1975). Bloch argued that the form of ceremonial oratory was the source of its power because it made denial, modification, or argument less viable. Narrow stylized expressions with restricted semantic content, and delivered in a rhythmic manner, both asserted authority and made it difficult to disagree with the decisions expressed. Bloch’s original argument has been much discussed and debated, especially with regard to general questions of formality and informality (e.g., Irvine 2009). Judith Irvine pointed out that formality can mean different

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things. It can mean formality of linguistic structure. It can also refer to the character of the settings in which language is used. Often, but not always, these two aspects are combined. In Bloch’s treatment the focus was on linguistic structures or the mode of delivery of linguistic communications. However, illocutionary force depends heavily on numbers of circumstantial social factors being found together in combinations, and this must be true for all illocutionary acts. This point reveals, as we have already discussed in Chapter 4, that authority and power reside in words only if those who speak them are authorized to do so and in doing so to give them illocutionary force. Here we want to pick out a few observations from this debate that are relevant to our theme of language and ritual. Bloch’s argument about formal speech by Malagasy elders was essentially that such speech functioned as a quasiillocutionary category, one that would automatically bring into being compliance with its statements. In this case, however, it becomes very clear that the efficacy of the words does not depend simply on them being spoken. As with all efficacious actions, words depend on the perceived power behind them, even if that power is simply and tautologously defined as the power of tradition itself. It is not the words only but the authority of the one who speaks them that is illocutionary. As with magical spells, however, the relevant issue is the matching of the form of speech and the function attributed to it: a function that is both aesthetic and cognitive in its application to embodied practice. Speech is often considered in the abstract as a faculty of “the mind,” but it is actually an embodied practice involving co-ordination of many body parts for its efficacy: a point more easily understood when we refer to music and song production. The power of Merina elders in Madagascar, as studied by Bloch, was underpinned by a specific cultural ideology about language categories (or a language ideology and its concomitant meta-pragmatics, to couch this in the current parlance of contemporary disciplinary terms). As Bloch explains, making reference also to the work of Elinor Keenan in his edited volume (Keenan 1975), formal oratory is described as kabary, and is the mark of a respected elder. At birth, he writes, people are seen as composed of wet and impermanent elements that are linked to individuality. As they grow older, this wet element is replaced by a dryness which is associated with ancestrality. So kabary spoken by elders automatically gains ancestral authority. The embodied aspect of this formula is powerfully signaled here, and embodiment theory needs to be added to any linguistic elements in this context, because embodiment theory holds the key to understanding personhood, which some scholars see as involved in language ideology. Moreover, kabary also means “blessing,” the granting of power to the

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group to reproduce itself and flourish over time. Bloch goes on to note that the authoritative speech of the ancestors needs to be given in a fixed form, so as to convey a sense of the ancestors speaking through the voice of the current speaker (Bloch 1998: 157). The important point here is that the aesthetic view of the ancestors becomes reembodied by being represented in the body of the elder who is speaking, and thus is informed by and informs the meaning of the body itself. (On this theme, see Johnson 2008.) Another feature of Bloch’s argument was that with formal illocutionary speech there is a (deliberate) reduction of semantic content. Only very general semantic content is displayed, and this is done to enhance the authority of the content that is preserved as the most important part of the overall message. Truth-value is connected to simplicity and authority. This last proposition, however, is one that does not need to be applied universally. In the same volume where Bloch made a pronouncement about linguistic forms of illocutionary statements, one of the present authors (AJS) compared the Merina oratorical patterns with those from the Melpa people of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, using the example of el ik, peacemaking speeches made on occasions of making amends for killings in warfare by the payment of large amounts of wealth as compensation. The relevant characteristics of el ik for our purposes here are as follows: the ability to use el ik is an acquired skill that is highly admired. It is restricted to males, and it is exercised most powerfully by men who are also established leaders. It is rhythmic and each line of it ends with the vocables o-o-o or similar endings of words. The speaker paces up and down, sometimes shouldering an ax or a spear. The speaker commands, or seeks to command, the attention of a mass of listeners, who are expected to sit (a sign of a peaceful demeanor—if some stand up, it may be to express disagreement or instigate violence that can threaten dissent and physical harm on these occasions). The speaker recites truncated episodes of history between the groups involved, explaining that they have fought or been at odds, but that now they want to make peace. The speaker also uses specialized, “high” forms of expressions, metaphors, and embodied imagery, to capture the attention of those listeners who understand this kind of elevated speech. The overall purpose is to mark out the status relations involved, to offer wealth, and to ask that it be considered sufficient for the purpose. A series of orators, both senior and junior, take up these meanings, each one expressing them in their own way but all holding strictly to the el ik form. A few men gain extra praise for their skill at this art form and its effect on participants. After the donor side make their speeches, a select few of the recipients make their response, and the event ends with the recipients taking the wealth items (pigs

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and/or money) away (Strathern 1975a; Strathern and Stewart 2000b). Needless to say, the participants all have a high meta-pragmatic awareness of the import of these ritualized sequences, which they enact, orchestrate, and energize with their performances, and the category of el ik encapsulates the linguistic ideology involved; that is, that this special category of speech action comes into play as both a marker of and a creator of sociality. What, if anything, is illocutionary in all this? In Melpa (Hagen) society all events are contingent. No one can guarantee the outcome of an event. People may take offense at some aspect of a speech or be unsatisfied with the amount of wealth given. In that sense, el ik cannot be considered illocutionary in a narrow sense. It has, however, numerous and intended perlocutionary effects. The elevated mode of speaking, and the culminating point at which speakers enter into it, clearly indicates that the intention is to seal the occasion with an official version of the truth. El ik, therefore, seeks to be illocutionary. We can either be satisfied with this conclusion, recognizing a conative strand within an illocutionary phase, or stick to the position that el ik is richly perlocutionary in its effects. In either case, it is important to note that the code adopted in el ik is not simply truncated in semantic terms. Of course, el ik does not go into every detail of the past. It is concerned to place a restricted semantic form on reality. On the other hand, it itself contains a great depth of experience and expressions about the world, and its attraction to participants depends on this aspect as well as on the displays of wealth. El ik speeches are compelling performances, and they are expected to be mind-setters for the occasion; but nothing is guaranteed in this volatile, competitive, and non-hierarchical society with patterns of long-term achieved leadership by rival “big men,” as they have been dubbed. Thus, the language used, and the language ideology and meta-pragmatics that deeply inform it, marches in step with the speakers’ understandings of the issues of power and leadership that influence how the occasion will pan out. Words and the statements they create go with the material ritual actions involved, and this whole complex determines their referentiality and the performativity that constitutes this as reality. We cannot separate language from its material and embodied aspects, but nor can we dissolve language into its contexts without recognizing its special contribution to these contexts themselves. Words and their meanings are clearly both products of ideology and producers of it. This is true not only of the categories of analysis, such as “language ideology” and “meta-pragmatics,” that we deploy as anthropologists or linguists, but also of our own highly self-aware and competitive uses of these

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terms in academic debate, including the question of how best to define the terms themselves. Naming and labeling and delimiting are instruments of power in discourse, and they make themselves available for eristic purposes. For example, in disaster studies, the issue of whether disasters can be described as “natural” or not has become a lightning rod for political attitudes. To take another context, “kinship” has for long been both a central topic in anthropology and the site of endless acrimonious argument about its definition. What is meant by the term “performative” can also lead to confusion because it can refer either to what the actors intend or to what the analyst considers to be the result of an action. And the issue of “referentiality” is another hotbed of dispute. Whereas in non-academic and popular usage, language may seem to be obviously referential, nowadays the term may be used dismissively by some practitioners to signal outmoded or discarded theories, that is, ones they do not like and are trying to obliterate and replace, rhetorically invoking the latest fashionable and prestigious viewpoint as they see it. Yet some element of referentiality must be allowed in any reasonable viewpoint on how language works in context, provided we recognize that what is referred to is a product of cognition and experience, and therefore meaning has a phenomenological dimension. Linguists construct their own competing ideologies about what language is and does in the world. Whether words convey meanings or not depends on our own “linguistic ideology” about them, for example, whether we think they encapsulate thought, and how in turn we define thought, or how we can say we think thoughts without words. A general conclusion in this chapter is that in ritual processes verbal and nonverbal actions combine to produce ritual efficacy. The body is also involved in both kinds of action, for example both in the phases of words and in the bodily hexis of the speakers, as well as in their clothing and role-marking accoutrements. It is in the assemblage of all the communicative elements at work that meaning is located. The next chapter considers the interrelations of language and ritual further, with some reference to the work of Roy Rappaport and his ecological interpretations of ritual along with the emic theme of divination and the search for “truth,” and reference to studies of shamanic practices.

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The more hierarchical a social context is, the more speech patterns will converge on the illocutionary. This point converges with some of Roy Rappaport’s work on ritual and religion as summated in his 1998 book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. In this remarkable book, Rappaport built a theory of ritual and religion as basic to the construction of humanity. Moreover, in his theory, human language capacities lie at the heart of the construction of ritual processes. Language, he points out, enables people to create worlds by the creation of words and concepts. Reality is thus expanded, and the birth of religion is made possible. However, along with language comes the possibility of telling lies, and thus the problem of ascertaining and establishing truth. Ritual processes solve this problem by establishing truth (e.g., via divination), and cosmology provides liturgical canons by which sacred truths are established. Ritual thus becomes a guarantee of truth in social relations, and its elaborate, prescribed forms mark this out. Rappaport goes on to make a distinction between indexical or selfreferential ritual messages and canonical ones which underlie or guarantee the veracity of particular performances. Indexical messages are about the state of being of performers, and Rappaport here cites his well-known exposition of ritual actions at the periodical kaiko festivals among the Maring Tsembaga group in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Maring groups traditionally held these kaiko at longish intervals of time when they were ready to kill pigs in sacrifices and announce an intention to renew hostilities against neighboring groups in order to take revenge for killings of their kinsfolk in earlier phases of fighting brought to a halt by rituals of declaring peace or truce with enemies. Allies of the group holding the kaiko come to dance and receive pork. Dancing in this way is a promise to support the hosts in the anticipated next phase of fighting. The dance is thus a ritual that communicates the truth of an intention to give very practical political assistance. Apart from highly pragmatic considerations, such dances are also thought of, we may suggest, as observed by the ancestors,

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and if the promise is not kept, misfortunes will follow. Concerns of this kind feed into what Rappaport identified as the canonical realm. Dancing also takes the place of verbal statements, it seems; whereas in Mount Hagen speeches invariably accompany political alignments. The ritual act of dancing itself takes on the function of an illocutionary statement, and as a form of ritual it is in a hierarchical relation with less significant ritual acts. Rappaport’s other main argument, that language does not simply report on realities, but is instrumental in creating them, is echoed by Thomas Dubois in his valuable exposition of features of shamanic practice, devoting a chapter to shamanic verbal acts (Dubois 2009). As he notes at the outset, language has a creative as well as an expressive capacity: “Language not only records or expresses a practitioner’s power, it also creates it” (p. 202). Shamans often have to spend a long period of apprenticeship learning and memorizing narratives that show how to communicate with spirits. Inspired performance of these narratives, spoken or sung, could be an important indicator of power. Special archaic vocabulary had to be learned. Such vocabulary may have been held to assist the shaman in gaining influence over the spirits. Dubois moves from these reflections to a consideration of shamanic chants as poems, and with this we enter into a discussion of poetic sensibility and its connection to power. Drawing on Laurel Kendall’s work with Korean shamans, he notes the category of muga songs performed in kut séances. Muga can contain myths of origins of particular shamans, they are inherited within shamanic families, and now muga are found in dreams. Dubois explicitly links this category to the category of magical spells in general and notes that muga addressed to deities had to be delivered in the proper way in order to show the authority and skill of the practicing shaman: “both the authority and the verbal dexterity of the shaman” (p. 207). Spells of this kind are often incorporated into epic songs and poems, in which folk heroes acquire powers to negotiate with the spirit world by transforming themselves into creatures. Such songs preserved indigenous knowledge long after Christianity had supplanted shamanism itself (p. 212). Dubois makes observations here that show the intricate relationships between different kinds of verbal art: spells, poems, and heroic legends or myths, revealed in oral traditions or worked into textual versions of these traditions. Old shamanic motifs and themes are sometimes preserved in the texts of epic poems or in folklore, with examples from numerous folk traditions. Throughout, he emphasizes the basic theme that appeared in Stanley Tambiah’s work: the magical power of words (Tambiah 1968; see also Chapters 3 and 8 in this book). He concludes his chapter on this topic by writing about the power of verbal skill to create images that transport the listeners in the same way as the spiritual flights

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the shaman is supposed to make: “Verbal art has the capacity to defy space and time in a manner as mysterious and inspiring as spiritual flight itself ” (p. 217). The link between language, ritual, and aesthetic genres also brings us back to Maurice Bloch’s theory of the relationship between formality of language and its compelling effects. Formality, of course, can mean different things, as the critiques of Bloch’s proposition pointed out. In particular, formality may reside either in the language itself or in the situation of communication, or in both. In the case of aesthetic genres, such as the Melpa el ik, magical spells, or heroic epics known as kang rom (Strathern and Stewart 2005a), all of these categories show formality in language and are found in highly formalized situations. Following the perspective of Dubois on verbal art, we can add an element to Bloch’s argument. These kinds of genres of speech are not simply coercive, but also persuasive, and they appeal to a variety of senses that induce co-ordination of feelings and acceptance of the messages contained in the flow of speech. The appeal here, depending on repetitions of sound and movements, visual stimuli of decorations, and often hand movements or other bodily accompaniments, is multi-sensorial and embodied. Malagasy elders’ rhetoric may rest largely on their authority as representatives of the ancestors, but the aesthetic forms they display can also be found in non-hierarchical contexts where they are brought into play more freely as devices of persuasion that in turn rely on iconic patterns of expression encapsulated in ritual sequences. The argument, therefore, is as follows: we need to unpack the concept of formality as Bloch and others have deployed it and see exactly how it functions as a rhetorical device in communicative processes. The kinds of effects achieved fall somewhere in between the categories of illocution and perlocution. There is a compulsive, immediate effect, akin to illocution, with a broader fan of further effects, such as the amelioration of conflict, the production of positive alliances, and the reinforcement of gendered relationships in public contexts, that accompany el ik speeches in Hagen. Comparing the three genres we are considering here—el ik, spells (mön), and ballads or epics (kang rom)—in terms of their effects, we find the following pattern: Illocution Perlocution El ik [Sealing of political alliance]    Audience appreciation, prestige of performer Mön Healing, prosperity, fertility   Reputation of the ritual expert Kang Rom —    Audience appreciation, prestige of performer

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All three genres are categories that only a few people specialize in. The mön skills are specifically taught or transmitted by a specialist to an apprentice, sometimes with a payment by the apprentice to the expert. El ik skills are learned by observation and by trial and error, with commentary and advice by established speakers. Kang Rom abilities are similarly learned by listening to performers and imitating them, but not as a matter of training and teaching as for mön. Performers of both these categories are informally ranked by their listeners and the ones considered best are picked out and praised, but do not gain any specific political power. Mön rituals, including their verbal component, are not performed in public, but are either entirely private, with a patient or customer, or part of a secret sequence in a spirit ritual as was in the past performed for the all-powerful Female Spirit (Amb Kor) (Strathern and Stewart 1999b). The verbal mön in fact is whispered over the patient in the case of a healing. The words are there but are barely heard even by the patient. As our analytical scheme makes clear, mön are the only category that are, in their intentions, fully illocutionary and least perlocutionary. Kang Rom do not have illocutionary functions, but they are strongly perlocutionary. El ik speeches are thought of as automatically sealing alliances, but this effect is in actuality contingent. Sometimes orators can be in the middle of making el ik, when a disturbance takes place and the event breaks up in confusion. The perceived effects of a mön spell are also, of course, contingent in practice, but the participants give the ritual an illocutionary force. The genre (kang rom) that has the most explicit aim of entertaining the listeners does not have an illocutionary function, but it is strongly perlocutionary in its emphasis on audience satisfaction or appreciation. Oral genres of expression represent an interplay between fixity and fluidity of form. This complicates any analytical attempt to make generalizations about them. What makes up the content of the Hagen kang rom genre or the Duna pikono genre may vary between performances, places of performance, and historical times (Stewart and Strathern 2005b, Strathern and Stewart 2005). Kang rom generally expound a limited number of themes, corresponding to the dangers of courtship and marriage involving the exploration of distant areas. The melodic form of kang rom could be deployed with contemporary content, but was not so in the instances we collected over many decades, with the very first recordings made in 1964–1965. Ranges of pikono from different parts of the Duna area that we have collected over many years also tend to revolve around a limited set of themes of conflict between humans and cannibal giant beings and help given to humans by a category of female spirits. However, they too are porous and can take on features of reference to contemporary life, especially

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when junior performers are experimenting with the genre. Whether such observations make it possible to decide whether either genre is intrinsically dialogic or monologic or not seems moot, because of the variations we have noted here. What is perhaps more significant is an appreciation of the great artistry and skill encapsulated in performances, meaning that the creativity of such performances may outstrip ways in which we attempt to categorize them. We give some examples of mön for healing purposes (Strathern and Stewart 2010). The first two are simple spells to achieve physical results. One is to increase the size of a female pig: At Ep, At Ambra, The hill stands out Garden soil filled with soft roots Springs up beneath the foot. (p. 63)

The spell, like almost all mön, draws upon and celebrates the characteristics of the landscape. Ep and Ambra are the actual sites of hills, the latter projecting from a swampy base with a hump-like appearance like a large pig (nowadays covered in commercial plantings of coffee trees that obscure its striking profile), the former a range of rounded hillslopes. Nearby are areas of fertile soil, where plants grow well, and the earth is soft underfoot. The idea of the spell is that the pig should grow up to stand out like these hills and its flesh should be full and soft like fertile soil. Another spell is designed to make the litters of a sow grow fast: The amaranth seedlings multiply and grow. The cucumber seedlings multiply and grow. The gourd seedlings multiply and grow.

These are all plants that seed and grow fast in good soil and ripen in a few weeks or months. The idea is that the piglets should grow as fast as these plants do. General knowledge of plants and gardens is here drawn on to provide the impetus for the spell. Spell images, such as those here cited, show both the intimate connection between the magical words and the landscape of human experience and perception and, on the other hand, the creative semiotic connection linking such perceptions to the growth of pigs. Other spells engage with cosmology, morality, and illness. A persistent motif is that if people do not fulfill obligations to sacrifice pigs to their ancestors, or if they break certain moral rules, the ancestors withdraw their protective power and

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allow wild spirits of nature, not related by kinship to humans, to “break through the fence” and make them sick. The image of the fence here is drawn again from the context of garden areas for planting rich ensembles of mixed vegetables and surrounding these with wooden stakes, bound together by plant fibers, to keep inquisitive pigs from breaking in and rooting for food. In a metathesis of this image, the spells envisage that wild spirits enter into the lives of people (their “food gardens”) and destroy their well-being by making them sick (“eating the food”). Wild spirits can do this only if the dead kin of the living open the way by allowing the fences of the gardens, that is, their protective powers, to be set aside. In this interesting transformation of ideas about ancestors, the ancestors do not themselves directly punish people, but simply withdraw their protection, allowing intrinsically hostile spirits to ravage the bodies of the living in the same way as feral pigs break into and ravage forest-edge gardens. The remedy is universal: sacrifice of pigs to the ancestors, who then renew their protection and the sick person gets better. In addition to the sacrifice, an expert can cast spells to help drive away the wild spirit. These spells construct images of the wild spirit itself and how to drive it away, telling it to go back to stony or scrub-laden places where it naturally belongs instead of intruding into the space of humans. The spirit is pictured in spells as using the junctures of river courses to make a pathway to the sick person, and the expert seeks to banish it back to the more distant big rivers in valley systems where it belongs. One spell mentions that a sacrifice of a red and a black pig has already been made, so the spirit has no reason to stay longer. Commonly, ancestral spirits are also said directly to punish their living kin for transgressions. Ien Courtens’s study of the Manes Kaya healing rite in west Ayfat, Irian Jaya (West Papua), provides an excellent example of the alternation between material ritual acts and special speech sequences. The main point that emerges here is consonant with our general exposition. The linguistic and nonlinguistic acts dovetail together as integral parts of the ritual purpose. They go together, and each sequence has its place in the overall ritual plan. The ritual, in a case studied by Courtens, was triggered by an illness of a middle-aged man that had proved resistant to herbal treatment. The sick man loses weight and has a high fever. At length he remembers that he had done something wrong. He had lent a sacred cloth belonging to his family to a relative for use in a ritual. The cloth had been duly returned, but the sick man now recalled that he had not informed his ancestors about the transaction, as he should have done by holding a ritual occasion to mark his action. The implication is that these cloths do not belong only to the living, but are held also in stewardship on behalf of the

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ancestral kin as well as the living, and are not supposed to be alienated to others once they come into the possession of a lineage. The ill man, Agus Baru, in his late fifties, seeks treatment at a mission hospital, but after three months he has still not recovered. He decides to ask help from his sister Maria, who is an indigenous healer and combines Catholic symbols with messages she receives in dreams from her dead parents. Maria now dreams of sacred cloths and a dead pig and asks Agus about it. This is the moment when Agus remembers that he had not kept the ancestors informed about the cloth he lent out and received back without telling them. Hence, they must perform a ritual to atone for this mistake which he thinks has prompted the ancestors to make him ill and prevented biomedical treatment from working to cure him. They make a site for the healing ritual in their food garden. They construct two platforms from bamboo pieces (Courtens 2001: 55 ff). In late afternoon, Maria brings a bag filled with the kain timur cloths and displays these on a woven mat. Agus arranges the cloths on the mat for the ancestors to observe. He explains (and this is interesting in terms of ritual speech) that they will have to speak slowly and clearly to enable the ancestors to hear them. He explains to the ancestors that they are preparing a feast for them, and Maria brings out a pig for sacrifice. Agus confesses publicly to the ancestors that he had done wrong. He assures them that the cloths are all safe in family hands. He invites them to join in the feast of pork and sago, and he asks them after this shared meal with their descendants to return to their mountain home. Tellingly, Agus says to them not to “eat” him but to eat the pork offered to them instead. He also takes blood from the nose of the sacrificed pig and rubs it on his chest, as a protective marker of proof that the sacrifice has been made. When the pig and other food is butchered and cooked they offer its heart, liver, and lungs to the ancestors. Agus and Maria and another close relative call out to the ancestors, naming them one by one, to come and eat and then leave. After the feast they close up the garden and do not use it for a while, to allow the ancestors to eat quietly the remainder of food left in the garden for them. The next morning Agus announces that he is better. His fever lessens, and he regains his appetite. Soon he is strong and ready to go home. For our purposes here, it is important to note the synergistic division of labor between verbal and non-verbal ritual acts. The non-verbal acts are substantive— making a platform, sacrificing a pig, preparing sago, showing cloths. They are also emplaced, in the collective food garden. The verbal acts dovetail with the non-verbal ones, adding a communicative dimension that is vital to the

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whole transaction and central to its purpose. These verbal acts are also direct locutionary and hortative statements, talking to the ancestors who are imputed to be invisibly present in the garden area which belongs to them as much as to the living. Land is ancestral, like the kain pusaka, the heirloom cloths. We can compare these cloths to the sacred stones that are central to the former “nature spirit” rituals in parts of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In the Mount Hagen area, these stones were a central ritual focus in ritual celebrations of the Amb Kor, the Female Spirit, who was thought to produce the fertility and prosperity of the land (see Stewart and Strathern 2002). Special stones were identified as houses of the Spirit or as a form of the Spirit herself. The large-scale collective rituals that were dedicated to receiving a putative “arrival” of the Spirit in a local clan area had as a central purpose, the establishment of these stones in a secluded site on the clan land. Clansmen individually found these stones and put them together in the ritual site. A leader in the ritual was motivated by having personally found one of these stones on his own land and having experienced dreams of the Spirit coming to him as a bride. The leader could not conduct the ritual by himself. Special experts were hired in to teach the clansman proper procedures and the songs that were to be sung at particular times to honor the Spirit and to activate her power on behalf of the group. These experts came from the area where the ritual was said to have originated, to the south of the central Hagen area. They spoke a different dialect or language from the central people, but they might be bilingual. Within the ritual site, which was carefully fenced off and could be entered only by the participants, four different language contexts operated: 1. The ritual expert (or experts) instructs the participants to speak of objects and actions while in the ritual site in a special vocabulary, thus marking everything off from the outside world. For example, the sacred stones are referred to not as stones (ku in the Melpa language) but as the bones of the spirit (kor ombil). Both stones and bones are emblematic of strength and continuity. By talking of the stones as bones, however, the expert signals the concept that the stones are repositories of life and enduring fertility. This kind of ritualized usage corresponds to Rappaport’s dictum that language does not simply describe the world, but creates it. If this is so, ritual contexts highlight this potentiality most clearly. The stones are volcanic stones, heavy, dark, and rounded, found in fields or rivers. In the ritual, they become the Spirit and the experts control the linguistic shifts that mark this fact. 2. The expert also instructs the participants on all the correct ritual procedures within the site. These involve actions, such as bringing in planks, marking the

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numbers of pigs each man will sacrifice in the enclosure, preparing the earth ovens, crawling into the ritual houses which they have specially constructed to showcase the stones, ritually lighting fires in the cooking pits, paying for and accepting the ritual medicines which the expert gives them to protect their bodies against female powers, decorating for their final dance, practicing the dance, and finally streaming out into the public arena in a dramatic display. Each ritual act has to be performed in concert by sets of two men, one representing the “men’s side” and the other the “women’s side” in the whole performance. The ritual as a whole displays in a palpable, embodied way the principles of pairing, collaboration, and alliance through marriage that underpin the society at large. So it is the experts who direct the whole performance, piece by piece, using both the special vocabulary and truncated orders accompanied by hand gestures. 3. The expert also performs some spells at crucial stages of the ritual. One such is when the planks of firewood are brought in. The expert recites all the different kinds of hardwoods that are brought in and the varieties of pigs to be killed. The aim is to make the oven cooking rich and productive of “grease” to enhance the fertility of the earth. 4. Finally, the expert trains the participants to join in a celebratory song from within the site, lifting up their voices in praise and for the achievement of readying everything for the final dance out of the enclosure. This concerted song performance is classified as a mön, just like the solo performance by the expert (3, above). Performances of this kind could give opportunities to particular experts to develop personal repertoires of knowledge. There were rivalries between experts and each would have special mön or magical incantations that they could make. One such expert was Ambra, of the Ulka group in the Nebilyer Valley south of Mount Hagen town. In 1965 Ambra recited an example of a very dramatic mön that he had chanted in connection with the ritual of lighting the fires in the enclosure to initiate the earth-oven cooking of pork. (Incidentally, in the 1960s these fires continued to be lit by friction from fire sticks instead of matches which by then were readily available.) Ambra’s mön gave a vivid picture of the pathways by which the Amb Kor ritual had come from the south. His mön called out to pairs of mountains and rivers along which the fires had been lit, at last reaching Ambra’s own clan area. The basic principle of the importance of origins of power is exemplified in mön of this kind, which relates the sacred pathways along the landscape that are the vectors of ritual precedence. The ritual experts in turn were the vectors through which this power of precedence was sung into being in the consciousness of

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the participants. Ambra was acting here like an Australian Aboriginal ritual specialist, singing the ancestral pathways of the Dreamtime. In conclusion, in this chapter we have explored some of the characteristics of language used in ritual practices, drawing our examples primarily from our own field experience in Papua New Guinea. The features that stand out from this exposition are (1) that ritual language mirrors the performative structure of ritual acts in general; (2) that language used in ritual approaches illocutionary significance, or at least has strong perlocutionary effects; (3) that linguistic and non-linguistic acts in ritual sequences are processually linked; and (4) that language in ritual contexts is instrumental not just in representing realities but also in creating them. (For further comparison, see Csordas 1990.) As a coda to this chapter, we want to note that we have avoided here the false dichotomy between nature and culture as an organizing device, as we have also avoided too much of a dichotomy between language and culture, following the observations of Maurice Bloch on the cognitive challenge to anthropology (Bloch 2012). Nature and culture are not opposed, they work together, often united in ritual practices, such as we have been examining here. Ritual practices are also often vehicles of the creation and exercise of power in social life, so in the next chapter we examine topics in ways in which language and power are interrelated.

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Language and Power

Language use is always closely related to the exercise of power, whether ideological power as expressed in semantic categories, such as the idea of the “institution” and its production of institutional “persons,” or discursive power as in the work of Michel Foucault (Foucault 1980). This question of power further feeds into the numerous contexts in which language usages are brought into play in the service of politics, the construction of national imaginaries, ethnic and religious conflicts, and the like, as shown in, for example, the work of Liisa Malkii (1995) and Christopher Taylor (1999) on Hutu–Tutsi conflicts in Rwanda, and Monica Heller’s work on Francophone Canada (2011), and the wider work of Heller and McElhinny on language, capitalism, and colonialism (Heller and McElhinny 2017). Malkii stressed the importance of the construction of narratives of victimhood in refugee camps occupied by Hutu in Tanzania after conflict with the higher-ranking Tutsi people. These narratives were then fed into the subsequent conflicts and into justifications of genocidal violence against the Tutsi. Christopher Taylor’s work explored this level of violence in detail, seen largely from the perspective of the Tutsi populations he knew, and looking at the inflicting of bodily injuries as a kind of communicative practice related to old ideas of fertility and its flow and blockage centered on a sacred kingly figure of Rwanda. Heller’s work brings to light the conflicts of power that shape struggles over what language or languages can acquire the status of a national language and the concomitant debates on national and local identities that are at the heart of such struggles. Benedict Anderson’s famous concept of the nation as an imagined community depends to a good extent on the language and mediabased ways in which “the nation” is projected, all exemplifying also the image of the medium itself as the message (e.g., the BBC in Britain or NPR in the United States). In turn, the construction of how an in-group is defined may involve out-group persons being seen as less than human, as sorcerers, witches, etc. How the “human” is constructed linguistically is an important matter relating

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language, power, and morality together, in a way paralleling discourse on what constitutes “the nation” in discussions about national identities. “The human” and “the nation” may be symbolically equated, especially in contexts where there is an ideological drive to set up hard boundaries between those who “belong” and those who do not. Such a drive increases in intensity when there are fears of terrorism, and religion is brought in as a putative factor in escalating violence. Media are important here in the performative constitution of images implying power and identity. We have found that a perfect potential site for this kind of process by means of assigning degrees of affiliation and of exclusion is the construction of categories in websites for academic departments in universities. It may appear that there is a large conceptual difference between an apparently innocuous context of defining who is who on an academic website and the processes of inclusion and exclusion that go with violent political conflict. Our point, however, is that pain and suffering can be inflicted in any social context where identities are assigned to people. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this argument. In a website for a department there may be an issue of whether a subdiscipline should be recognized as a separate category or not. Resources, prestige, courses, and student numbers depend on this matter. Analogously, whether a particular person is given a faculty status or not determines many likely structural outcomes of privilege, voting rights, and access to applying for grants. A Webmaster person can exercise considerable control, to the severe detriment of the individuals thus discriminated against. Websites can therefore be sites for the exercise of discursive power, set into a context that appears harmless, but in fact is committing categorical violence under cover of apparent “objectivity” or “neutrality.” (On instituted meanings, see Shore 1996 for a powerful exposition.) A further important arena of study is the question of how language is used in conflict situations, and how it can become a source either of mediating and transcending conflict or of exacerbating it (partly discussed already in Chapter 4). The category of “dangerous words” was made famous by Don Brenneis (Brenneis and Myers 1991), pointing to Pacific Island practices of using language to express hierarchy, consensus-seeking conduct, and ways of avoiding words that are so harsh that they cannot be taken back or apologized for. Another mechanism of softening conflict, through the use of concealed speech or “veiled speech,” belongs to the traditions of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea ( Strathern and Stewart 2000b; Strathern 1975a). Hagen practices may in turn be usefully compared here with Hawaiian ones described by Boggs and Chun (1990). In both cases, leadership is an essential component, but it is

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exercised differently. In Hagen, traditional society was relatively egalitarian, at least among men, and persuasion, backed up by offers of compensation, was the only means of settling a conflict without violence. In Hawaii, leaders were chiefs, seen as imbued with hereditary power or mana and protected by tapu rules ensuring respect was paid to them. Their special status as mediators in disputes was thus strongly buttressed by their hereditary rank. Nevertheless, important similarities emerge. In both cases, settlement depended on full discussion and on avoidance of overt insult or aggression that could inflame anger or induce shame, and leaders guided the talk with this aim in mind (Strathern 1975b). Such talk was simply called ik (speech) in Hagen. The Hawaiian term is ho’oponopono, where pono, reduplicated for emphasis, refers to the ritual site where such talk was enacted. A special feature of dispute talk in Hagen was (and still is) the deployment of “concealed talk” (ik ek), practiced by leaders to move people’s feelings toward settlement of a dispute through subtle metaphorical references to history and present-day interrelations. Another category is el ik, “arrow talk,” which elaborates ceremonial oratory clinching a peacemaking ritual exchange of wealth as compensation for killings between groups (see Strathern and Stewart 1999c, 2000b, 2011b for full accounts of these practices). Another category of speech acts that fits in here is the category of gossip and rumor. We have explored this in an earlier publication (Stewart and Strathern 2004, compare also Besnier 2009). One main argument in that book was that rumor and gossip are major informal means whereby power can be exercised outside of formal or hierarchical contexts. Innuendo and slurs can play on people’s fears and suspicions of one another, especially where mystical ideas of magical aggression and hate or jealousy are in play, as in the case of communities in Papua New Guinea where ideas of witchcraft and sorcery are strong. One earlier theory of gossip emphasized its functions in relation to strengthening in-group solidarity, but the corollary of this is that by the same token it must produce hostility toward outsiders, and this works more easily if these outsiders cannot refute the rumor because they do not even know that it is being initiated until it has reached the status of an entrenched idea or they are confronted with a physical threat emanating from it. Harmful gossip can also be used as a weapon among equals vying for power in a political arena. To this category belongs the phenomenon of “fake news,” which has achieved media prominence in recent years, with endless recriminations and fact-finding checks instituted to negate it. Fake news is a kind of literate version of malicious gossip in the oral sphere, and it is harder to deal with because it is spread so widely in a literate frame that suggests its authenticity. A literate source may appear authentic merely because it

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is in a literate form, and this itself is a result of a cultural bias which is built in, for example, in legal procedures, that only literate forms and documents have any validity. A context in which gossip has reappeared in contemporary contexts in Scotland is the use of postings on local Facebook pages that are avidly scanned on an everyday basis and reenter the oral domain when people meet and share their reactions to postings, positive or negative depending on the contents and intents of the posting. Facebook can include negative postings about fellow-villagers as well as neutral weather forecasts or news of bad weather or announcements of upcoming events, such as church services. Unpopular persons can be criticized, and in a manner reminiscent of the functions of gossip against putative witches in the past, the criticism may attempt to uphold customs and to alert villagers to potential conflicts. The chief conclusions from our work on rumor and gossip were, then, that they are often instrumental in generating conflict, and they are difficult to refute and can therefore lead to serious conflict and violence. In relation to witchcraft and sorcery accusations, we found that a processual approach, tracing the genesis of accusations in small events and suggestions escalating over time by iteration and magnification, could explain effectively how these accusations can arise, and once they enter into a formal court system based on cosmological ideas they can translate into severe punishments meted out on those accused because of religious constructs of good and evil. Ethnography, nevertheless, reveals to us that such extreme results of gossip are not universal. One of the bestknown and foundational studies of witchcraft was made by the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard among the Azande people of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (as it then was) (Evans-Pritchard 1937). Accusations of forms of witchcraft were a common occurrence when he was doing his fieldwork there, and there was a mechanism for handling them. A person who wanted to find out who had caused some trouble or sickness for them could take a number of chickens into a secluded spot and administer to them in turn a portion of benge, a type of poison, asking each one a question about whose witchcraft was harming them. This chicken oracle would pinpoint the source of the witchcraft by dying when the supposed responsible person’s name was put to it. Then the consulter could take a wing of the chicken that had died and present it to the person thus identified, asking them to blow out water on the wing and so to cool their witchcraft. The accused person could always say that they were unaware that they had any witchcraft in them, but they were happy to neutralize it in the way requested, and so the matter would rest. People acknowledged that this type of oracle could be unreliable, leaving room

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for repeat consultations, or for recourse to another oracle belonging to the local chief, which was said to be more powerful and reliable. The earlier theories about gossip and its functions were not entirely wrong. Gossiping can have positive and innocuous results. In local communities in Scotland, and probably elsewhere also, certain social arenas are ones in which gossiping takes place, and these function as places of information exchange like a kind of local news service, supplementing or contradicting media sources, such as radio, television, or Facebook. Places where such information exchange occurs include the post office, the bank, or the hairdresser shop. When a community loses such amenities through closures, there is understandable annoyance, both at the loss of services and at the curtailment of sociality expressed in daily flows of information via gossip. Power in social life can of course be expressed, created, renewed, undermined, or transformed in many different ways, either verbally or otherwise, for example in material forms of architecture or objects, through sensory experience (e.g., Howes and Classen 2014), and through dance, song, or oratory, constituting or concomitant with sensory experience in ritualized contexts. Such contexts are very prominent in Pacific Island societies, and form focal aspects of culture, aesthetics, performance, and politics in these societies (see, among numerous examples, Ingjerd Hoëm 1995, on the Tokelau people and their collective competitive dance performances known as fatele). In such Pacific Island contexts, songs are politics, and this is true of the songs sung on occasions of moka exchange in Mount Hagen when competitive claims to status and achievement are made by displays of wealth in pigs given to exchange partners. The highly elaborate genre of speeches known as el ik (“arrow talk”) exemplifies this order of performance, as also do compensation speeches (tamba haka) among the Duna people of Hela Province, Papua New Guinea (Stewart and Strathern 2000; Strathern and Stewart 2000b, 2011b). Other contexts also notably reveal themselves as generative of power, indeed as Foucault pointed out in his theoretical construction of discourse, power can be diffused through the networks that constitute it rather than being exclusively centered on one actor or institution. Kinship groups exercise power over persons who belong to them by various boundary rules in relation to resources, and one of the traditional arenas of power is in the naming system geared in with the kin relationships themselves. This relationship between kin ties and personal naming practices is obscured by innovations in naming and a loss of significance in intergenerational ties. However, in some Scottish families’ customs continuity can be expressed by naming children after their grandparents. The grandparental

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relationship is expected to be warm and indulgent, and there is a kind of classic identification between grandparent and grandchild. Giving the grandchild the grandparent’s name is a way of expressing all of this. Andrew Strathern’s first name is derived from his maternal grandfather, Andrew Sharp, and his mother’s sister’s son Andrew Fergusson and his mother’s brother’s son Andrew Sharp were also named after the same grandfather, thus constituting a kind of informal network of commemoration for the shared ancestor. The name has further resonances also. It is the name of Scotland’s patron saint, St. Andrew. From its Greek etymology, the name originally means “brave, manly.” These are all latent resources that are available to be drawn upon in giving meaning to the name. Surnames also have their provenance and meaning. Strathern, for example, is a version of Strathearn, which is a locality name referring to an area in which the “Earn” river widens out in a “Strath” in Perthshire, Scotland, thus “Strath-Earn.” “Earn” is also a version of “Erin,” which refers back to Celtic origins in Ireland. The name as a whole, therefore, has complex and deep identity associations with Scotland. An interesting case study on naming comes from the fieldwork of Caroline Humphrey on Mongolia, including Inner Mongolia, which is an autonomous region of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) (Humphrey 2006). Humphrey explains at the outset that every person has a single name, carrying a message about the desired character for the person in their life course, and bestowed on them by a senior kinsperson, nowadays of the grandparental generation. The name is intended to be a unique identifier, but in practice complications emerge during the life cycle. If a child becomes sick the mother in particular is alarmed and she may institute a consultation with a local shaman in order to change the name of the child and so hide it from a hostile spirit that might be causing the sickness. Very young children are those who are most vulnerable to such spirit attacks, and indeed such children are often deliberately not given any name at all for fear of drawing unfavorable spirit attention. Once the name is given, it is supposed to be like the “destiny”(zayaa) of its bearer, but if the character or fate does not seem to fit the person, it can also be changed. The name a person has should always be respected, because the name and the person are equated. A variant of this rule relates to the etgeed “strange” or “side” name given to small children, such as “Terbish,” “not that one,” in order to fool the spirits. When the child’s hair is first cut, it will be given a genuine name. In address, names in practice are only used toward juniors, and senior persons are spoken to with kinship terms, largely because it is tabooed to address them by name in any case. Respect for names therefore seems mainly to consist in avoiding their

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use, a rule that falls most heavily on daughters-in-law in relation to the family they are married into. Respect, for a daughter-in-law, therefore carries a heavy gendered load. Mongolian language ideology attributes great power to language, and therefore linguistic practices are fraught with implications for events in the world. Hence also, then, the meaning of names in relation to the life courses of individuals. The rule that a person has only one personal name and that this name is supposed to be unique to the individual who has it makes these aspects of Mongolian practices rather unusual, but other aspects carry familiar resonances, for example, the avoidance of using the personal names of seniors, the prevalence of nicknames, and the importance of affinal name avoidances. Affinal avoidances are very commonly found around the world, notably in traditional practices of Australian indigenous people, and especially falling on a son-in-law in regard to his mother-in-law, whom he must rigorously avoid as a mark of respect and indebtedness. In Mount Hagen, in Papua New Guinea, rules of avoidance are not so severe, but name taboos are observed. The term for such taboos is mbi mawa ndoromen. Not only must the mother-in-law’s name not be used, but also, if her name is also the name of some real entity, the son-in-law has to find another term for that entity in his regular usage. For example, if the mother-inlaw’s name is Kng or Kung, “pig” (a common enough name for a female), the son-in-law must use the term Kanga whenever he refers to a pig. Requirements of this kind lead to a whole series of alternate terms in the language known as mbi rukrung, “inside names,” which affines use in order to fulfill rules of respect incumbent on them. These inside names may also be used between friends as nicknames, and there is actually a penchant for using these in preference for the use of kin terms. Finally, here, there is a whole range of further usages that give people the opportunity to establish a special relationship of friendship or solidarity by sharing a piece of food, after which they engage in a ritual of name change. First, they say “tikwakaka,” and then each declares that they are the other, they exchange identities, and after that they must not use each other’s names but address each other using the name of the food they have shared. If, for example, they have shared a piece of pork, they call each other “Kngnui,” “pork eater.” The food is usually a special one, and the usage reflects the cultural importance of food sharing and its capacity for creating dyadic social relationships as an act of choice in addition to the institutional bonds of kinship. The practice is called nuip. Someone can refer to their partner in this relationship as nanga nuip. The food name is obligatory and permanent. If either partner forgets and fails to use it, they are supposed to pay a small fine for this infringement of

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courtesy. Nuip ties express and create relations of cultural intimacy, but once created these take on aspects of formality and obligation. Informality and choice become formalized into formality and constraint. An initial intention becomes transformed into a consequence, and this is an interesting aspect of ideas of personhood. The Lutheran missionary Hermann Strauss, who learned the Hagen language very well, contributed to this field of linguistic creativity when he invented new names for persons baptized in the church by adapting their existing names and giving them a semantic twist, for example, by changing the name Kuri, meaning “white bird of paradise,” to Kuriti, meaning “one who speaks of the truth” (of the Bible). Alessandro Duranti (2015), who has carried out extensive fieldwork in Samoa, has noted a tendency there for people to avoid enquiry or speculation regarding the state of mind or intentions of individuals, and to concentrate instead on the consequences of actions. We can say the same for the Hagen area in Papua New Guinea. Intentions do not modify consequences, and consequences are what that has to be dealt with in cases of error or wrongdoing. Investigators are concerned with facts that are admitted or established by the actors, and truth thus becomes what is established by communication. People accused of something may deny it (namb roromen) and efforts are made to find out the truth, but such efforts do not run through finding out about intentions. This is why court cases in the introduced state-based legal system that rely on attempts to find out the state of mind of an accused person (depending on the idea of mens rea or guilty mind) are misconceived, based on a different concept of power and responsibility. In considering how power and language are related it is crucial therefore to understand ideas of personhood and also language ideology, or what language actually does or is said to do. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that for Hageners the mind or its state of being is unimportant. As we have earlier discussed in this book, mind (noman) is an important guiding concept in relation to choices of action, responsibility, health, and sickness. If the mind becomes filled with anger, sickness will result. In turn, evidence of the presence of anger is shown by its results in the actions of people, and by their bodily states. Noman, which includes a presumption of intentions, is therefore a crucial component of the moral human being. At the same time, there is a kind of fail-safe clause in the system of interpretation: it is considered very difficult to know what actually happens in people’s minds, and so concentration on actions is a necessary recourse in deciding methods of dealing with disruption in social relations. Thus, the Hagen system works on principles like those of the Samoans, but with a

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different modality of concepts regarding the mind and the emotional wellsprings of action. We may relate this difference to a difference in social structure. The strongly hierarchical structure of Samoan society leaves all important talk in the hands of the chiefly classes of people, who therefore handle disputes through the exercise of their hereditary powers and do not need to consider individual states of mind. Hagen society is more egalitarian, and ideas about people’s states of mind become important in managing social relations, especially in the arena of gender relations. Women are significant actors in exchange relations between groups, and if they become angry unfavorable results are likely to ensue, so that discovering anger is a crucial part of social relationships, and hence in the maintenance or alteration of power relations expressed through verbal reference to anger (popokl in the Melpa language of Hagen). Gender in general is always a significant factor in power relations and gendered language is one medium for the exercise of power. There is gender inequality in Hagen, but it is tempered by the concept of anger and the need to avert sickness stemming from anger, so here the language itself provides a kind of regulation of the effects of inequality. The issue of power in language is exemplified in a heightened way in the context of minority languages and their positionality in relation to oral and literate contexts, so we turn finally to this topic, on which we have carried out research in the UK (with emphasis on Scotland and Ireland) and the Pacific Islands (with emphasis on Papua New Guinea).

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Language, Literacy, and Change: Scots and Tok Pisin

Languages are not static. Like other social phenomena, they change over time, slowly, swiftly, or with punctuated leaps. One of the biggest arenas in language change comes historically from the emergence of literacy. Literacy itself can take many different forms, with different implications for processes of labeling, power relations, language ideology, and many other topics that have been broached in this book. An extensive critical literature has emerged since the 1960s on this theme. The whole question of translation has developed in literate contexts, for example, when the Christian Bible is translated into languages that have existed previously only in oral form (Duranti 2015, Handman 2014). Handman also deals in her work with conflicts among denominations about the translation of particular concepts. This chapter looks at some processes of change, partly to frame questions to do with the impacts of different forms of literacy on language and culture, but also to do with the development of lingua franca and minority language forms that emerge in circumstances of change and are influenced by the juxtaposition of literate and oral modes of expression. (See also, in this context, Goody 2010.) Examples will be drawn from the history of the emergence of the Scots tongue as distinct from English, and materials on the emergence of small special hybrid language forms in the Pacific, with emphasis on the development of Tok Pisin (aka pidgin English) since early colonial times in Papua New Guinea. Many debates on language and culture issues have a long history, such as the issue of literacy and its effects on language, cognition, and social relations, and in general the use of language as an expression of power and the development of hybrid vernacular forms. Cultural anthropology further concerns itself with the broad sociocultural production of meanings in contexts of communication. Within this broad field human creativity has been at work in a number of domains. For example, there is the domain of code-switching phenomena and

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their dynamics; with the conscious use of dialect forms in poetry and other forms of creative writing; and with how aesthetic forms feed into the politics of identities, especially minority identities as enclaves within larger social contexts, such as minority languages in Europe (e.g., Catalonian, Gaelic, Lowland Scots, Scots Doric, Ulster-Scots); and popular or folk language forms by contrast with “educated” or literate forms, for example, Nynorsk and Bokmål in Norway, or Dhimotiki versus Katharevousa forms of language in Greece before the 1990s. Political issues are deeply involved in the histories of all these forms, as we have ourselves experienced in work over the decades in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. It is vitally important to realize that matters of this kind form a site of intense feelings of identity within interpersonal relations. During and after the Referendum on Independence held in Scotland in 2014, issues of voice and dialect came to the fore in step with a growing sense of polarization between the English and Scottish identities. At the close of the events we heard that some people declared that they could not bear to even listen to the BBC programs spoken with English accents because these suggested an aura of partisan attitudes and assumptions that had become evident in feelings carried over from the aftermaths of history and were salient during the impassioned debates on both sides of the border between England and Scotland. Such polarizations also take place in wider contexts. When the Olympic Games were held in Brazil in 2016 there were complaints that BBC commentators concentrated unduly on English athletes rather than Scottish ones, a perception that was undoubtedly colored by the aftermaths of the events of 2014. Arguments of this kind wax and wane in step with changing political events. In the World Cup soccer championship in July 2018 antagonism between Scottish and English politicians, rooted in conflict over the “Brexit” referendum vote to leave the European Union, spilled over into a slogan “anyone but England.” Much earlier, when numbers of politicians with Scottish accents and turns of expression increased in the UK London-based Westminster Parliament, there had been a complaint about the rolled Scottish “r” sounds, marking a difference from English accents. The salience of the pronunciation of “r” is only one marker of a whole series of identity-making language usages that have recently been studied for Scotland in a comprehensive volume edited by Robert Lawson (2014). The resonance of language manifests itself immediately when a person begins to speak with others in a way and to an extent that is greater than when that person writes or reads a text, since the text is usually in a standardized form inculcated in contexts of schooling and shared widely across a nation or internationally. Spoken language, however, is learned

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in a holistic imitative way and conveys senses of identities in a rich and vivid modality that may also comprise a number of levels corresponding to stages in the speaker’s life experience. Speech, therefore, is a part of embodiment, that is, the ways in which being in the world is directly communicated by bodily means to others. Speech is also, by the same token, a part of the ecological functioning of the person in social relations with others, and all its nuances of tone, accompanying visual appearance, and kinetic gestures, add to the total embodied effect that it has. Literate communication may attempt to replicate the effects of speech by descriptive means and by writing in dialogue as the nearest thing to embodied speech or by describing how a speaker looks or their clothing and comportment. Representations of speech therefore enliven texts with the feeling of the oral context that they stem from, and this is why segments of speech are captured and brought into a literate frame. These observations apply a fortiori to the situation regarding vernacular and variant language forms enclaved within a culture that has extensive literate traditions. Such traditions also encompass forms derivative from the oral context, refashioning them or making them known in a wider context, so a symbiotic relationship may emerge between oral and literate domains. For example, a poem or essay may draw on dialect forms and preserve these as a part of a wider reservoir of usages, contributing potentially to the continuity of the oral traditions themselves. In Papua New Guinea in the 1980s, young adults who had received formal levels of secondary and tertiary education were fond of switching effortlessly between English and Tok Pisin, with occasional snatches of their indigenous vernacular forms where these were mutually understood, signifying a range of identities consciously brought into play, from the “modern” to the “traditional.” Such an interplay between the oral and the literate domains of language occurs only in societies with developed literacy and constant switches of language from oral to literate contexts and vice versa. Multi-linguality or “multidialectality” go with code-switching and playacting as ways of enacting different identities belonging to or ascribed to particular persons. The human ability to accurately reproduce sounds and attach meanings to these that they can share in a communicative field entails the possibility of using more than one code to achieve this. Local ways of speaking can be exclusive to local levels, or extended situationally, with other ways of speaking kicking in at further levels, and at the most formal or impersonal levels align with standard written usage. Inculcation through schooling further influences linguistic choices. Pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary are all involved along a cline of differences. Teachers in schools proverbially oppose the use of local forms of expression, and thus they

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influence the transmission of knowledge and ability. Generalized schooling is the enemy of linguistic diversity. A well-known witty song expresses this point, while subverting the official viewpoint presented. This popular song is in Scots language, telling a boy who is a pupil in a school to listen to the teacher and not to say “dinnae” (“dinnae say ‘dinnae’”) (“Dinnae” is Scots for “Do not.”). In successive lines, the song repeats this self-negating strategy, undermining the alien language teaching instructions with the “cultural intimacy” of the vernacular. When the boy begins to use the corrected forms of vocabulary at home, he speaks to his father about a “mouse,” as the teacher has taught him to say, but his father contradicts this and says it is not a “mouse,” because “Thon’s a moose, ye daft wee gowk” (“that’s a ‘moose’, you silly little fool”). The whole song is structured successively around this same point, meanwhile introducing the listener to pieces of Scots vocabulary. The song perfectly expresses the tension between vernacular and school English, the oral and the literate traditions, and yet at the same time it is itself making its point in a rhyming literate form. The song highlights a classic form of conflict between home culture and school culture. We have been given many anecdotes in both Ireland and Scotland of times when a teacher would use physical punishment to deter students from speaking their native vernacular, such as Scots or Ulster-Scots (the version of Scots developed by settlers in Ulster in northern parts of Ireland from the seventeenth century onward) instead of English. This kind of problem can be mediated only when political circumstances favor the encouragement rather than oppression of local identities, and when such identities are not seen as threatening to those in power. One of our interlocutors in County Donegal, a part of Ulster, commented that it was ironic how the Ulster-Scots language had been beaten out of him when he was a boy, whereas now there was a move to beat it back in by carrying out policies backed by peace and reconciliation committees sponsored by the European Union, in order to overcome sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants, partly coinciding with the separate traditions of Irish Gaelic speakers and speakers of Ulster-Scots. These policies decreed that there should be equal parity of esteem between the Irish language and the Scots language. Since English was accepted as the dominant hegemonic language, these policies did not affect it or address any aspect of its functions or roles. Similar processes took place in Scotland itself, although without such a strongly politicized context and with a different constellation of relations between Scots language and Scots Gaelic. Gaelic in Scotland is a nationally recognized minority language with a dwindling base of everyday speakers but a huge heritage in song and storytelling. Its heartlands are in the Western Isles.

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Scots belongs to all parts of Scotland, but predominantly to the mainland and especially to the Lowlands, broadly defined, by contrast with the Highlands, hence one literary designation of it is “Lallans.” The Aberdeenshire variant is often referred to as the “Doric,” this appellation derived from an implicit parallel with dialects of ancient Greek, in which Doric, spoken in Sparta in the Peloponnese, contrasts with Attic, spoken in Athens and surrounding areas. All variants of Scots are still very much alive in popular contexts of use, and they are distinctive enough to be identified as markers of regional or local identity. To illustrate the point, as we write this we have just returned from a visit to a local show in Ayrshire, Scotland, where old kinds of tractors were on display, and one farmer had brought in a rare old Allis-Chalmers tractor in which we were interested. We asked him how old it was, and as he began to reply we quickly realized that he was from the Aberdeen area, far to the north of Ayrshire, and was using the distinctive vowel sounds of his home dialect, while all around Ayrshire vowels and turns of phrase filled the air. The tractor dated from 1938, he said, which placed it among the early imports from Canada, where this type of tractor was manufactured. The tractor owner’s words and attitudes sprang vividly to life as he used his own dialect and described how the tractor had been spray-painted to restore it to its original bright orange color, and they only had to find a new steering wheel for it to make it usable. The writer and broadcaster Billy Kay, who comes from a place called Newmilns in Ayrshire, has provided an account of how the Scots language originated and developed over time. Kay is an enthusiast who has done much to raise the consciousness of his readers concerning the historical depth and complexity of the traditions of Scots language usages, and he often breaks out into pieces of the vernacular in the middle of his text written in standard English. He introduces code-switching of this kind as a deliberate device to alert the reader to the interchangeability of Scots and English as modalities of expression, while also accentuating their difference. He also does so to make the point that Scots is for him what it is in the title of his book, The Mither [mother] Tongue (2006), so that he thinks first in Scots and then translates this into English. Thus, he is bilingual as a native speaker of Scots and a speaker of English, no doubt through schooling. It should also be noted here that even when the Scots is transmuted into English and its written form becomes standardized, if Billy Kay himself or any other speaker of Scots were to read it aloud it would become again a marker of Scots identity merely from the pronunciation of vowels and consonants in the Scottish manner. The vernacular is a robust medium that can be registered in levels of modalities, ranging from Scottish English to “braid [broad] Scots,”

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or, even more distinctly, the “Scots leid.” As soon as it morphs away from standard English vocabulary, the signals of difference multiply, first perhaps by introducing words that have become commonly shared, such as “wee” or “bonny,” and later with more restricted dialect words, such as “shilpit” [“puny”] or “trauchle” [“muddle”] or “moger” [“mess”] that require specific knowledge or use of a dictionary to grasp. Literary revivals of Scots have also at times sought to bring back old usages that have gone out of common use and reestablish them as “thick” forms of vernacular entextualizing these in a contemporary textual context. The well-known work of Hugh MacDiarmid exemplifies this trend in addition to a rich panoply of devices dignifying literary Scots as a “high” form of expression. His lengthy poem The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (Kay 2006: 145) embodies an ambitious aim to recreate a literary Scots out of many sources, and exhibits great artistry and depth of knowledge in doing so, but perhaps it is useful to observe that he is drawing on both literary sources and the great reservoir of oral usages and their literate encompassment in dictionaries and other written works, such as in the eighteenth century poems by Robert Burns and his contemporaries in order to achieve his aims. MacDiarmid sought to create an authentic Scots form in his work, expressing this aim, as Kay notes, “tae be yersel’s and tae mak’ that worth bein” (Kay, p. 36) [to be yourselves, and to make that worth being], and he goes on in the next line to remark that there is no task harder than this to achieve. This, no doubt, in the context would be because of the overwhelming dominance of the English language. The Scots language, however, and its historical settings provide a powerful “intertextual” set of sources for MacDiarmid’s enterprise. Within language studies in general Richard Bauman has developed the concept of intertextuality or the relationship of one text to another (Bauman 2004: 5), stressing also that such relationships constitute the creation of a performance or display of ability. Intertextuality is related to the concept of entextualization, or how texts are created out of experience and other texts (on which, see Silverstein and Urban eds. 1996). MacDiarmid’s work demonstrates this kind of relationship to a high degree but in addition it is important to recognize the continuing input of oral traditions and usages, so that we can acknowledge “inter-orality” as well as “intertextuality,” unifying the arena that Jack Goody called the “lecto-oral domain.” We think that this is important because the future of Scots depends on its ongoing everyday oral presence as well as the recognition and genius of its literary corpus. We can testify to that oral presence in the streets of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, at farm events and meetings, in supermarkets, and on buses and in backyards, in addition to the works of centuries of poets, singers,

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and storytellers, from the Makars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to contemporary scholars, such as Billy Kay and Derrick McClure (McClure 1988, aptly titled “Why Scots Matters”), and writers in Scots, such as Sheena Blackhall (Blackhall 2003). No history of a language can be written outside of political history. Indeed, this idea is installed in the old aphorism that a language is a dialect with an army. The Scots language came into being and evolved in conjunction with patterns of migration, politics, and border relations between England and Scotland. Billy Kay remarks (op.cit., p. 43) that in the tenth century, five languages were spoken in different regions of Scotland: Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, Welsh, and what was at that time categorized as “Inglis,” spoken in the south-east. Gaelic was associated with the Gaelic rulers in Scotland, who were absorbing or conquering or setting up dynastic alliances with the Picts, so Gaelic first spread out, displacing the Welsh of the Strathclyde region and the Inglis of southern Scotland and Northumbria, although Inglis continued to be spoken in numbers of pockets, including Kyle in Ayrshire. Inglis itself as a type of Old English had roots in the Germanic language family, and this has two consequences. First, some sounds in Scots, which developed out of Inglis, are shared with Germanic forms, notably the characteristic /ch/ sound as in “och” or “ach” [oh], or “nocht” [nothing], or “nicht” [night]. A sound that is also shared with Gaelic. Second, relatedly, Scots maintains old expressions, such as “dicht” for “wipe” and “blate” for “diffident” that were once used in English but have dropped out of use. Furthermore, the systematic differences in spelling and pronunciation between Scots and English also are a result of changes in the sounds of southern English, while Scots again retains the older forms. When the Normans conquered England after 1066, the Scottish kings invited Norman leaders to settle north of the border, granting them lands in return for military support. The Normans brought their words with them, but they also took up the Inglis spoken by local populations around them. Over time new migrant settlers came from Northumbria, bringing expressions derived from Danish, and bequeathing another legacy for modern Scots, such as in “kirk” [church], “lowp” [leap], “skirl” [shrill sound], or “flit” [shift house]. As the border with England became marked by increasing hostility, and as further migrants into Scotland from the Netherlands, Flanders, and France came as economic migrants they enriched the language progressively. As well, a residue of Gaelic found a place in this language mix. By 1424, Scots replaced Latin as the official language of the Scottish Parliament (Kay, p. 50). Famous battles with the English forces led to the creation of epics, such as John Barbour’s “The Bruce,”

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celebrating the unexpected victory of the Scottish army against the English on the battlefield of Bannockburn (see also Scott 2012). Bannockburn was followed in 1320 by the Declaration of Arbroath, making the case for Scottish Independence. Hostility had increased owing to the imperialistic efforts of King Edward of England to subdue the Scots and their stubborn resistance to these attempts. By the end of the fifteenth century, Kay notes (p. 53), the appellation “Scottis” took the place of “Inglis” as the name of the language and its pathway of separate development was well-established. The Makar poets, who flourished in these times, enjoyed a milieu in which “Scottis” was spoken by all classes, and were favored by the royal court. Interestingly, there was a further aspect of their work that links them to traditions of the ancient Greek and Roman classics, because they made translations and adaptations of Virgil and others, recreating them in their own Scottish context and language. These poets included Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and William Dunbar all spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and all had knowledge of French and Latin, prestigious cultural markers. Scots was thought of as less ornate and elegant than Latin, but it was on the ascendant as the general language of the day. Scots words dating from the early times resonate over the ages and into today, as for example, the word “thole.” This means “to suffer,” endure, bear without complaint, with a sense of persisting, showing a capacity to survive. “Ye maun thole it” [you must endure it] is advice proverbially given by seniors to juniors chafing against some rule or circumstance imposed upon them. The advice implies not only that the imposition is inescapable, but also that some advantage will come from putting up with it. An old Scots poem, “He that tholes owrecomes” [he who endures overcomes] conveys this idea. The poem takes the form of an address by the poet to the readers, saying that he and his wife have been together for many years and have experienced conflicts and difficulties of poverty, but have come through it all with gladness and now in their old age their daughters look after them, and a “guid life maks a happy death, and he that tholes owrecomes” [Anonymous ed. 1890, vol. 2: 236–237, poem by John Crawford]. A whole philosophy and morality of life is thus encapsulated in this one word. The aphorism is also an example of “a world of others’ words,” because the motif appears in an inscription in gold outside a house in Edinburgh, where the Protestant reformer John Knox is supposed to have lived, as follows: “HE.YT.THOLIS.OVERCUMMIS” (Kay, p. 71). John Knox was actually a part of the Protestant movement in Scotland that gradually swung influence onto the side of the English language rather than Scots. More books were printed in English than in Scots, indicating a beginning

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of English as an international language and Scots as a national language. John Wycliffe first translated the New Testament into English and it was printed in England for distribution there and in Scotland. Kay goes out of his way to note that Murdoch Nisbet of Ayrshire had made a translation of the New Testament into Scots around 1528 (p. 77); however, it remained in manuscript form while the English version was printed and became the accepted version for common use, thus also influencing the process of Anglicization of written Scots. It must always be kept in mind that written forms have a tendency to conform to the contemporary orthodox norm or the most prestigious forms, whereas spoken forms retain and develop far greater diversity. The “entextualization” of written Scots at this time into an Anglicized version did not mean that all oral forms followed suit. Elevation of a written version and its association with seats of power, such as a royal court, does induce a kind of “diglossia,” or a split between the oral and the literate forms. With English occupying the literate sphere, Scots then tends to retreat into that reservoir of oral culture which we have already remarked on as both a limitation and a strength. We will go on later to point out that this process of confining Scots to the oral sphere is partially negated, partly magnified, by the practices of writers putting prose into English but rendering dialogue in Scots. When King James VI moved his court from Edinburgh to London in 1603, he removed also the patronage of the court for the Scottish language, and assisted in the ascendancy of English, as testified also in the version of the Bible that he sponsored. Yet, again, this process was counterbalanced in the development of the popular Border Ballads, written and recited in Scots with English influences, and preserving stories of wild conflicts and romantic entanglements, belonging to a world of passion, honor, and revenge that escaped the influence of the Church and the Bible. The dominance of English was resisted primarily by poets writing selfconsciously in Scots or in a mixture of Scots and English, but with very different feelings and orientations depending on which language was in play. Meanwhile, the vigor of the Scots language rested with its quotidian forms as much as on its literary use, and writers became bilingual, fluent in both Scots and English, but not using them interchangeably, rather as alternative expressions of complex identities and social relationships. In written form, orthographies represented Scots words in ways that made them appear to be variants of English rather than forms in themselves, and this reflected the difficulties of shaping a written Scots in a milieu permeated by English. Scots also took in more Anglicisms and lost some of its distinctive and unique forms that testified to its separate existence

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and cultural heritage. In positive terms this led to mutual enrichment, but again preservation of the Scots part of the heritage was left to the vagaries of history and local oral culture. As Kay frequently remarks, the tension between Scots and English continues today. He also notes, however, the resilience of Scots, including in his own native place in the River Irvine Valley around Newmilns, close to our own field areas, and explains that he is descended from miners of Ayrshire and Fife who were monolingual speakers of Scots. He sometimes mixes English and Scots phrases in his text, giving a sense of the vernacular breaking into the facade of English. Much of his text goes over the recurrent problems faced by Scots as a language threatened by the superior status of English, a fact that goes a long way to explain the historical sense of inferiority of some Scots in comparison to the English. In these circumstances, it has fallen to the poets more than any others, apart from contemporary scholars like Billy Kay and Derrick McClure, to keep the recognition of Scots alive, starting far back in the eighteenth century with the work of Allan Ramsay (1685–1758) and Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), and many others. Christopher MacClachlan edited a collection of poems from the eighteenth century authored by poets writing prior to the work of Robert Burns (MacClachlan 2002). He noted that at this time poets were writing in a mixture of Scots and English, and were comfortable enough doing so, but were at the same time working to create a Scots national literature. As members of a small-scale network of writers, they alluded freely to one another’s work and in addition drew on a long tradition of folk poetry and songs, adapting and extending motifs which later fed into Burns’s works. They were prime exponents, then, of Richard Bauman’s “world of others’ words,” but were adapting and recreating traditions as they went along (Bauman 2004). One type of verse passed on to Burns and made famous by him was the type dubbed by Allan Ramsay “Standard Habby,” a six-line stanza with rhyming scheme “a a a b a b” that was employed much earlier by the poet Robert Sempill in an elegy for a piper from Kilbarchan called Habbie Simpson (MacClachlan, p. x; Kay, p. 89). In general, poets addressed each other and members of their social circle in their creations, and in particular, MacClachlan notes, they drew on shared cultural themes expressed in the old songs of Scotland (p. xi). Their world of others’ words became, then, the shared currency of their own words. Songs figure prominently in Burns’s work, and they are the medium of some of his most celebrated creations, for example, “Auld Lang Syne,” sung around the world on the occasion of the New Year in the Gregorian calendar. He spent time himself working on setting his poems to song in his later years.

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While the poets kept up pride in Scots, the language in general became associated with usages of the lower classes. Thus, dialogue in novels would appear in Scots if the speakers were of this order or spoke in an old-fashioned way, whereas the main narrative would be in standard English. This is the pattern we find in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The convention enables Scott to get a great deal of the vernacular into his books, keeping alive a literary presence for Scots language in grammar, tone, and vocabulary, and tying it back into the world of orality, a world of enclaved class relations. Kay points out that this enclavement also gave poets the opportunity to express the feelings of people, such as himself, tenant farmers on big estates, or with ideas of opposition to the pro-England views of the upper classes in Edinburgh and their forms of conspicuous consumption. Burns railed against the “whunstane herts” [stony hearts] of these gentry, saying that the amount of money they wasted on cards would be sufficient to fill the larders of the poor ten times over. Use of the vernacular was a medium for registering political opposition and reflecting on the human conditions of suffering and sympathy for the oppressed. Burns also expresses this sentiment in his “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” poem, in which he likens the social rank of aristocrats to the surface stamp on guinea coins, adding in his pithy way “the man’s the gowd for a’ that” [the man is the gold for all that]. This attitude comes through strongly in the poem and is echoed by Beethoven in his “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” [all men shall be brothers], which is part of the theme song for the European Union. Burns’s ending message is that “man to man the world o’er/Shall brithers be for a’ that”. The usual way to mediate the tensions between English and Scots language forms in the eighteenth century was to deploy both, signaling bilinguality on the part of the author and expecting it in the reader. English signaled Formality/ Distance and Scots signaled Informality/Proximity. Robert Fergusson’s poem “The Daft Days” is mostly in Scots but incorporates English expressions and has one stanza in standard English, containing the poem’s main message: a celebration of mirth and unity, and “blithesome innocence” for New Year’s Day (MacClachlan ed.: 222–223). It is well-known that Burns was able to combine both speaking and writing in both Scots and English, deploying this dual capacity to good effect in his verse and his interactions with his reading public and his publishers. Early on in his life he had sufficient opportunity to encounter works of literature, poetry, and history to feed his imagination and enabled him as an adult and aspiring poet to mingle with society in Edinburgh and secure some patronage for his works. (See the account in Gilfillan ed. vol. 1, 1856: v–vii. This old source has good materials on the education of the poet-to-be, and it

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shows he had quite a range of book-knowledge, a point that must modify Burns’s playful account of himself in “The Brigs of Ayr” as “the simple bard, rough at the rustic plough.”) The rural basis of his poetry is nevertheless found in the innumerable passages where he shows knowledge of the creatures that inhabit the fields, forests, and streams, and these creatures become the source of his further reflections on life. (See, for a detailed and sympathetic set of examples, Gemmill 1928. The author was a great-uncle of one of the present authors, Andrew Strathern.) Burns’s well-known poem “To a Mouse” expresses sympathy and concern for the mouse whose nest he has unwittingly cut through with his coulter or plowshare. The first verse is in the vernacular Scots, with terms like “bickering brattle” [the noise a startled mouse makes when it is disturbed] and the description of the frightened creature itself, “Wee sleekit, cowran tim’rous beastie” [the mouse is afraid, cowers down, and its body hairs lie sleek and flat on its skin, a sign of its fear]. The second verse immediately proceeds with general thoughts in English, apologizing to the mouse for the actions of humans in destroying “nature’s social union.” It further acknowledges the shared mortality between mice and humans, following this up near to the poem’s end with the famous vernacular lines in which the mouse’s ruined nest becomes a marker of uncertainty in life for all living things, and the best-laid plans, whether of mice or men, “gang aft agley” [often go wrong]. Finally, the poet differentiates himself from the mouse, suggesting that it is only concerned with the present, whereas he, as a human, thinks of both the past and the future, remembering hard times and fearing what the future might bring. His own history as a tenant farmer on land in Ayrshire clearly informs his lines here, but his words also reach toward a universal sentiment akin to that of the Latin poet Virgil in his line “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” [“there are tears in things and mortal matters touch the mind,” Virgil, Aeneid, Book 1, line 462]. This combination of the universal and the particular is a marker of how much poetry works and makes its impact on the sensibility of readers. First, we are given a very specific image, and then this is translated into a broader set of ideas or reflections. Scots language poetry often arrests attention from the very fact that it is written in Scots and keeps its sense of being drawn from the oral sphere. This is especially true when the vocabulary and sentiment directly represent the spoken word, as in the poems of David Rorie in his collection “The Lum Hat Wantin’ the Croon” [“The top hat without its crown”]. (Rorie 1965, first printed 1935.) Rorie uses ballad and other narrative forms to take the reader directly into the world of vernacular speech and ideas about the Devil and pacts unwisely made with him

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that draw on myth and folklore traditions to make familiar moral points. When he generalizes, the message is also clear and is the same as we saw in the poem cited above, by John Crawford, extolling patience and endurance: “Bide, lippen, thole” [“Wait, trust, endure”]. Another poet whose remarkable work belongs to this ethic of endurance and also to the rich legacy of oral culture in Scots is William Soutar, who lived from 1898 to 1943. He had been active in sports and had attended Edinburgh University, albeit rebelliously, but after military service in the First World War and possibly as a result of food poisoning while he was away he suffered from a mysterious form of spondylitis that left him bedridden from 1930 onward. His parents in Perthshire were adherents of the “Auld Licht” or conservative Secession branch of the Presbyterian Church, and they were both speakers of Scots. From them he must have learned many of the rich and idiomatic words that fill his verse. Hugh MacDiarmid wrote an appreciative Introduction to a volume of Soutar’s collected verse published in 1948. Soutar wrote humorous riddles as well as serious verse. Some of his work was in English as well as the bulk of it in Scots. Like Burns, he often draws on symbols from nature to make comments on human relations or simply to celebrate the activities of living creatures, such as a bumblebee. One of his poems is to “yellow yorlins” [yellowhammer birds], expressing how he has seen three of these bright glistening birds flitting down from an elder tree nearby, and he adds that he feels sorry for the blind, who cannot see such a sight, because a small sight like this is all that is needed for someone “to keep his hert abüne its misery” (Soutar 1948: 24). His lyrical stance comes through insistently, as in the poem “Hill Sang,” in which he invites a companion to come with him to the hills at the time of Lammas (a traditional Scottish religious holiday time in or around August, at the equinox between summer and autumn) where there is a mossy “knowe” [hillock] below a stand of heather, with bluebells “dinnlin wi’ nae sound” [rustling] soundlessly, “laverocks” [skylarks] singing, “whins” [gorse] “waggan gowdan banners” [wagging golden banners], and a little stream going on its way “chirlin owre the stanners” [murmuring over the shingles]. These are all classic themes, found as tropes in the work of other poets, such as Robert Tannahill, but here expressed in broad Scots, with a balladic ring that is distinctive of Soutar’s poetic voice. (On Tannahill, the “weaver poet,” who lived 1774–1810, see Robert Tannahill 1874.) A contemporary poet who has followed the traditions of writing in Scots is Rab Wilson, born in 1960, whose home place is New Cumnock in Ayrshire. He was employed in the Ayrshire coal mines until the time of the Miners’ Strike in 1984, after which he acquired a training to be a psychiatric nurse. He is a well-known

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writer and is a member of the Scots Language Society’s National Committee. His poems frequently discuss local individuals and their experiences in the mines and the Strike. One such poem is titled “Helen Gray” and has the local place name Cumnock also as an identifier of the subject’s home. The strikers’ wives managed as best they could and would have “a greet and a sang tae cheer wirsels up” [a cry and a song to cheer ourselves up], and they learned to distrust everything they saw in the news media, and after the Strike “we kent whit wis whit” [we knew what was what] (Wilson 2006: 70).Wilson also writes in English (e.g., 2006: 26, Asylum Seekers), and has translated some of the Latin poet Horace’s satires into lively Scots, as well as an earlier translation into Scots of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” His poems in Scots teem with local references and praise of local resources, such as the Ayrshire potatoes he celebrates in “At Tarelgin Fairm Road” (p. 62), noting that the ones from Girvan become available earliest in the season: “Girvan Tatties, here today!” As we write this in Scotland during the month of July, the season for new potatoes in Ayrshire has come again, and we recognize the enthusiasm with which Wilson greets them in his verse. We have given only a small selection of a complex heritage of expression in Scots literature. Earlier we have devoted a chapter to poems and landscapes in our “Minorities and Memories” book (Stewart and Strathern n.d., forthcoming, Strathern and Stewart 2001). This chapter has an appraisal of the poetic writings in Scots of Violet Jacob, a poet of Angus County who belonged to a landowning family but who learned to love the Scots language by talking with the gardeners on the estate, and she expressed her deepest feelings of identification in her Scots poems. It seems that in a diglossic situation it is often the minority language that lends itself to such inner expression of self. Violet Jacob’s English language poems by contrast seem less intense than her ones in Scots. Poetry and song are in general apt media for the presentation of self. Jacob’s tone is complemented by the work of Marion Angus (see Angus and Jacob 2006), who lived from 1865 to 1945, almost exactly paralleling Violet Jacob’s lifetime of 1863 to 1946. She valued lyric poetry most keenly, and both her Scots and her English language poems show her intense involvement with the landscape and her ability to depict it. Both poets also show a strong involvement with ideas of spirits of the old folk cultures concerning faeries, witches, and warlocks, and how these ideas were a part of their total response to their surroundings (see, for example, her poem “Patrick,” in Angus and Jacob 2006: 75). We have been discussing the use of Scots in poetry mainly, but we will turn now to a remarkable work that comprises a whole full-length historical work written in a version of Scots cognate with the language of Rab Wilson’s works,

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which we have already discussed. This is the book by James Andrew Begg (Begg 2013). Begg combines Scots and English, by starting with a prelude in English belonging to the present and then shifting into Scots with a series of narratives about events going back to the times of the Covenanters, religious dissenters of the seventeenth century, whose experiences and sufferings are inscribed on the landscapes of Ayrshire and Galloway Counties in the South-West of Scotland. There are thirty historical chapters, each with a separate story, and stretching in time from 1666 to 1894. The stories include accounts of the lives of miners, farmers, landowners, shepherds, martyrs, and weavers, a huge cross section of experiences and hardships, all set into the landscapes of Ayrshire around the author’s own area of New Cumnock. He provides a glossary of Scots to assist readers, and a set of genealogies of families whose lives enter into the narratives, including a genealogy of the poet Robert Burns. His overall purpose is simply to display the humanity of the characters in the book, and to stress the sentiment from Burns that carries this message: The Man’s the Gowd for A’ That [The Man Is the Gold for All That]. Chapter 8 in the book is set in 1768 and has as its theme the Lowland Clearances, a topic that has come to the fore in recent years, with the realization that the well-known Highlands Clearances of peasants from their lands by the landlords in order to make space for herds of sheep kept in enclosed field areas was paralleled from the mid-eighteenth century onward by similar processes in the Lowlands of Scotland, including the island of Arran off the Ayrshire coast. In poignant and straight-speaking Scots, sprinkled with bits of English, and writing about one Adam Begg, no doubt a forerunner of himself, James Andrew Begg describes a time when Adam’s tenant farmer father died, and the family had been warned that their long-held tenancy of Netherwood farm would not be renewed in another twelve months, by the new owner based in the town of Ayr, a “writer” (lawyer). The story continues: “It was a bitter sair dunt for twa auld men nearin the en o their warkin days, but they’d seen it comin.” [It was a bitter and painful blow for two old men nearing the end of their working days, but they had seen it coming.] The two men were of the Begg family and had worked hard all their lives to wrest a living from the land. They saw that the landlords were becoming more greedy and following an ostentatious lifestyle, “an the puir tenants had tae pey for it” [and the poor tenants had to pay for it]. A classic, archetypal story, and to understand the Scots language character of it all, it needs to be pronounced aloud while reading; while to understand the passion conveyed in the story, knowledge of the historical context is also needed, within which the voices and embodied sufferings of the protagonists reveal themselves and come through in what in Rab Wilson’s phrase constitutes

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an “accent o’ the mind.” The effect for a local reader is increased by use of the names of all the surrounding villages, such as Sorn, and their colloquial versions, such as “Gawston” for Galston (compare “Cautrin” or “Cautern” for Catrine). It is interesting to consider what might be meant by the term “speech community” in relation to these materials. We need to recognize sliding scales of meaning for this term, from high levels of “communicative competence,” in Dell Hymes’s nomenclature, to lower levels, for both speaking (“speech”) and the literate domain (“reading” and “writing”). Bilinguality or multi-dialectality also comes into play, and to graph all these capacities and their interconnections would be very complex, if even possible. For our treatment here, it is enough to point to this complexity and conclude that the idea of a bounded and exclusive speech community does not adequately grasp the empirical situation in which people live and adjust their communicative practices. The situation becomes more complicated again when we go on to consider the variety of Scots that has developed in the region of Ulster in the six counties of Ulster divided between what is Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. (See, in general, Stewart and Strathern 2005c.) This variety of Scots took shape after the “Plantation of Ulster” onward from the early seventeenth century. Scots settlers from the south-west of Scotland came in the train of landowning families granted land by the Crown from 1603 onward. English settlers also came, and occupied areas mostly separate from those of Scottish identity, so that the Scots language was maintained, morphing into different forms of pronunciation through influence, not from standard English, but from Irish and Irish English ways of speaking. Vocabulary and grammatical forms could take on an Irish inflection, but are noticeably derivable from Scots origins, with a highly distinctive regional signature, such that this form of Ulster-Scots, as it is known, stands out in its oral manifestation from the Scots forms historically and currently present in Scotland itself. When in “lecto-form” (to coin this term) it looks strongly like any kind of Scots. The Plantation of Ulster came about as a deliberate act of occupation of lands appropriated by the British Crown (in the person of King James VI from the early seventeenth century), to take over control after the defeat and flight of the indigenous Irish Earls in conflicts with the British military forces along with the Ulster-Scots of the day. The situation laid down the preconditions for the subsequent long drawn out struggles over power, land, and politics that continue in the background or the foreground of public life in Northern Ireland and the Republic today. Language issues also continue, entangled with the political turns of events. A result of the 1998 Good Friday inter-government Agreement

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was that vernacular languages, that is, Irish Gaelic and Ulster-Scots, should be given parity of esteem in Northern Ireland. Following on this policy-creation, an official body, the Ulster-Scots Agency, was set up in Belfast and embarked on a program of cultural development in the language that was planned to be an integral part. The main focus of the Agency has been on the sponsorship of public events and celebrations of dress and dancing pertaining to the Scottishderived traditions of the Ulster-Scots as an aesthetic and cultural category in their own right, with efforts to adjust their relationships with the Orange Order institution, well-known for its Protestant sectarian and pro-UK tenets. The effort has been to transform the Orange Order parades that commemorate the victory of Protestant forces at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 over the Catholic army of James II, into nonsectarian occasions of cultural celebration, with some emphasis on the historically very strong Scottish connections. Along with such initiatives there has been a parallel set of activities stemming from European Union funds to promote cross-community and cross-border activities conducive to peace and reconciliation between historically opposed categories of people. In the middle of all this, the Ulster-Scots language occupies an awkward existential space that is unique to itself and is different from the situation of Scots language in Scotland itself. In Scotland, where the language is still very strong in the oral sphere, its preservation and promotion is not a high priority of the Scottish Government, while there is official support for Scottish Gaelic. In the Republic of Ireland Irish Gaelic is an official national language taught in schools, and in Northern Ireland, Gaelic has also received cultural support. The Ulster-Scots Agency was entrusted with the task of sponsoring projects that would enhance the standing of Ulster-Scots culture and give it a legitimate identity in an Irish and English dominated milieu. The Ulster-Scots Language Society and the Ulster-Scots Academy were also set up and have been able to strengthen the main purposes of the Agency. A considerable amount of scholarly work has underpinned these aims. Robert Gregg, in association with Michael Montgomery, mapped out the geographical contours of the language (see Montgomery and Gregg 1997, also Montgomery 1999 and 2003.) Major work has been done by Philip Robinson with his grammatical study (Robinson 1997) and his translations from the New Testament and original prose writings. John Hewitt (Hewitt 1974) definitively brought to attention the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Rhyming Weaver poets, who wrote verse after the manner of their contemporary Robert Burns in the “Habby” format (rhyming aaabab), and also the Scottish “weaver poet.” Robert Tannahill, while also creatively and independently representing their own local areas in Ulster

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(see, for example, poems by Hugh Porter 1992, James Orr 1992, and Samuel Thomson 1992). Sarah Leech’s work contributes to this tradition from Raphoe in County Donegal in the Republic (Leech 2006), with poems full of local references composed in both Scots and English. Cecil Frances Alexander contributes to this tradition uniquely with her full-length ballad “The Legend of Stumpie’s Brae,” set on a hillside location near to St. Johnston, also in County Donegal (Alexander 2003). The well-known Ulster-Scot poet James Fenton has provided a dictionary based on his acquaintance with the language in his native place, County Antrim, in Northern Ireland (Fenton 1990). We can testify to the strength of attachment to the language in Antrim, because once we were traveling through a rural area there and we stopped at a farm to buy eggs. The girl we spoke to ran in to get her father and he came out and after we had exchanged a few friendly words he announced that “We here are not Irish, you know, we are Ulster-Scots.” Antrim is certainly a stronghold of Ulster-Scots, and the accent with which people there speak is close to the Scots spoken in South-West Scotland itself. A long-running program on Radio Ulster and Radio Foyle, with the title “A Kist of Wurds” [A Chest of Words] continuously presented memorable Scots and Ulster-Scots oral readings for interested local readers, at the same time educating listeners if need be on the language forms it featured. Ulster-Scots language is also known as Ullans, on the model of Lallans, which has been used as a literary term to identify Lowland Scots. (The “U” refers to Ulster in “Ullans,” and “Lallans” is itself a vernacular rendering of Lowlands. Hence the title of the series of writings put out as “A Blad O’ Ulster-Scotch frae Ullans” [some pieces in Ulster-Scots from the Ullans magazine].) Michael Montgomery (2003: 124) points out that Ulster-Scots is a spoken language and its vital continuity depends on its maintenance in that form, an observation that is also true of Scots in Scotland. Nevertheless, the creation and/ or preservation of literary forms is intertwined with the oral sphere. The UlsterScots Agency has sponsored a whole series of books by local speakers of the language, and when faced with the problem of an orthography they have simply taken the spellings of authors themselves. One of these authors, John M’Gimpsey Johnston, explains his own philosophy about this issue, as follows: “Wi nae ‘rules’ o spellin here, ye’ll can fin the real wye o taakin Ulstèr-Scotch the day, fur it is a leevin language wi differin twusts tae it fae airt tae airt” (from the Foreword to his book, Johnston 2005). [With no rules of spelling here, you can find the real way of speaking Ulster-Scots today, for it is a living language with different twists to it from area to area.] Frank Ferguson has edited a large collection of Ulster-Scots writings, from 1603 onward, and he includes a poem by John Clifford, who lived

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1900–1983, and wrote in the Scots of his native East Antrim in Northern Ireland (Ferguson 2008). The poem gives a lively sketch of the Hiring Fair held each year at Larne after the harvest had been secured, and how young people would dress themselves up to go there and seek employment, but with an eye open also for a likely marriage partner: “These sonsy, dacent, weel-wrought lasses, though a wee bit blate, are no sich asses.” [These friendly, decent, well-built girls are a little shy, but they’re not fools.] They are keen to find a good marriage partner for themselves, as well as finding work at the hiring fair and negotiating the “erles” (the old hiring payment or wage agreed on). Ferguson points out that the Scots language terms in this poem derive directly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They could have been taken from the poems of Robert Burns or the Rhyming Weaver poets and at the same time they belong to the contemporary Antrim vernacular, as also to the Scots of today in Ayrshire or Galloway in Scotland. “Blate” for “shy” is in common oral use; and “sonsy” for “friendly” or “jolly” is a poetic term echoing Burns’s well-known “Address to a Haggis” poem, in which he hails the haggis with its honest “sonsie” appearance. Today, Ulster-Scots continues to be spoken in many parts of Northern Ireland and in East Donegal in the Republic of Ireland around St. Johnston and Raphoe, for example, but it is generally mixed a good deal with Irish English accents and English vocabulary. This camouflaging or muffling effect on the language also contributes to the opinions of some people that it does not really exist. Philip Robinson, who from his home place in Greyabbey in County Down has done a great deal to increase knowledge of Ulster-Scots, has provided a small test sheet of some pieces of vocabulary that are diagnostic of Ulster-Scots language usages by contrast with English or Ulster-English (Robinson 2003). First, Robinson lucidly points out that Ulster-English dialect contains a series of words, such as “wee” and “thon” [“small” and “that”], that are Scots-derived and because of the interweaving of immigrant Scots in the Plantation of Ulster from the early 1600s on, such words have found their way into general usage in Ulster. However, there are whole further ranges of vocabulary that are not used other than in the specific Ulster-Scots traditions, both oral and written. Robinson cites here “nicht” [night], “cannae” [cannot], and “gye” [very]. Markers of this kind, we may note, can appear in large numbers or in small within any utterance or text. From the smallest to the largest set they equally signal a message of Scottish identity, but a layering of identities can be communicated. The more Scots words and forms of grammatical expressions there are that occur, the more culturally intimate and culturally demanding the message is, and the closer the whole expression comes to a self-indexicality or self-deictic character. Robinson continues with a list of

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sixty-seven words in English and their equivalents in Ulster-English dialect and in Ulster-Scots. The first twenty-two words, he says, are Scots-derived words that are, however, used regularly by ranges of speakers throughout Ulster. For the remaining forty-five words, the Ulster-Scot versions differ from the English or Ulster-English words. All of these forty-five words are, then, diagnostic of the Ulster-Scots language. The words contain the characteristic vowel differences in nouns that belong to Scots generally, for example “stane” for “stone.” They also contain, by the same token, Scots grammatical forms that have been preserved in Scots and replaced in English with newer forms, for example, “cannae” for “can’t.” Finally, they comprise pieces of vocabulary not shared at all with English or Ulster-English, for example, “dicht” meaning “wipe.” Readers were invited by Robinson to test themselves on the sixty-seven word list, and the higher the overall number of Ulster-Scots words they were familiar with the closer they would be to belonging to an Ulster-Scots-speaking community. In our own case, our familiarity, both literate and oral, with Scots generally, meant that we understood all but one of the Ulster-Scots words (the one being “gulder” for shout, shared with Ulster-English, a variant of “goller” or “holler” in English), while not being acquainted with one of the Ulster-English ones, “skiff ” for wipe (Scots “dicht”). Robinson constructed his test as an objective measure of language knowledge and use in order to settle emotive and political issues surrounding the category of Ulster-Scots, in which some people deny that it exists at all as a valid category, while others may promote it without really being able to pinpoint what it is in linguistic terms. Robinson’s list clearly shows that Ulster-Scots is a local version of Scots in general, historically transported to Ulster and permeating usages there in other speech communities. Amusingly, he comments on a low score level by saying “Ye cud dae wi a bit mair lairnin” [you could do with a bit more instruction]. Ulster-Scots is a language situated in an ecological environment that renders it somewhat contested because of patterns of political history in which it is at risk of being associated with particular political ideologies, although the scholarly work on it shows that it is a historic and heritage language in its own right, always existing, however, in a political field of relationships that determine its trajectory of survival or development. A part of this ecology is that there is overlap with the Ulster form of English, so that the boundaries with English are not always clear, and consequently it could be swallowed up or obliterated if it were not specifically supported, as the Ulster-Scots Agency has sought to do. Its distinctiveness resides in the traditional Scottish forms which it encapsulates.

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Language issues are often inextricably linked to politics. In this context, it is interesting to consider what the aftermaths of the Brexit process in the UK may continue to be. The recognition of Ulster-Scots as a category has been dependent on peacemaking initiatives brokered between the European Union, the UK, and the Republic of Ireland. With Brexit, what will happen to language policies and the politics that shape their directions? In Scotland itself, what will Brexit mean for the status of the Scots Language and the gathering of identities around it? Answers to such questions will depend on the overall directions taken by political events themselves. There are some parallels and contrasts here with the development of pidgin and creole language forms. These emerge in circumstances of intercultural communication that call forth bridging language usages between a dominant language and the language of the dominated. They issue, however, in a dynamic set of creative changes in which a hybrid vernacular adopts vocabulary from numbers of sources while shaping grammatical forms that relate to the indigenous or dominated categories of speakers. Over time as the political and cultural circumstances change further, the new vernacular form becomes a vehicle for a wider spread of communication among ethnic groups, facilitated by the easy assimilation of vocabulary from the dominant source coupled with grammar that is shared among various previously dominant groups. Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea is a strong example of this kind of process. “Pisin” is said to derive from the English word “business” reflecting its beginnings in part as a trade language in coastal areas of northern New Guinea. Arriving in the Highlands of New Guinea as “Pisin,” it was translated by speakers of Melpa in Mount Hagen as Kὃi Ik, “bird talk,” since Pisin means “bird.” Its origins go back further, to the nineteenth century in Queensland in Australia, where Pacific Islanders were forcibly transported as laborers on sugarcane plantations and interacted minimally with Australian plantation owners and workers. This practice of labor conscription continued in modified forms over time in coastal areas of New Guinea, turning into labor migration patterns, with young people, mostly male, being recruited out of innumerable villages on the coast and in the interior. Migrants came from different areas and learned to speak with each other via the new medium of Pisin, enriching and stabilizing it as it was passed down among those brought together on plantations of copra and cocoa products. Up to 1918 in northern coastal parts, plantations were run by German traders protected by German imperial governing institutions, and fragments of the German language entered the new lingua franca. Testifying to the German colonial domination of the time is the expression in Tok Pisin of

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“raus” and the verb form “rausim” [“get out” and “to remove, expel, get rid of ”], reflecting the separate life-worlds of the laborers and their masters, in which the laborers were segregated from the colonial class of foreigners. Numbers of words also entered from the Tolai and other coastal Austronesian languages where the plantations and port towns were situated, for example, “kina” for pearl shell, a type of valuable. Words entered with a characteristic Austronesian reduplication as a way of expressing emphasis, for example, “hariap hariap” [very quickly]. Other words came from the work of Christian missions, for example, “marimari” [sorry for, show compassion, a Christian virtue expressed in an Austronesian vocabulary and reduplicated]. The grammar of Pisin developed by taking pieces of English and repurposing them as parts of grammar, following emergent usages in early colonial times. Thus, for example, the word “him” changed to an enclitic “-im” and was used as a marker of a transitive verb usage. “Baimbai” [by and by] was shortened to “bai” and became a general marker for the future tense of a verb. “Pinis” [from “finish”] became a marker of a completed action, for example, “Yu kam pinis, ah?” [so, you have arrived, eh?]. Word order in Pisin remains different from English in certain respects, for example, “Yupela laik igo wea nau?” [you (plural) want to go where now?]. The phonology and spelling of words are more straightforward than in English or German, with five vowels, a e i o u, all pronounced in a standard way. With a simplified and consistent grammar and an ability to assimilate ranges of new vocabulary, Tok Pisin is relatively easy to learn, and was rapidly spread across the whole of Papua New Guinea, becoming accepted as a national language after Papua New Guinea was granted political Independence from Australia in September 1975. While Tok Pisin rapidly flourished in response to a changing ecology of circumstances, an early version of it with German as a base vocabulary, Unserdeutsch [“Our German”], and dating from the time of German rule in northern New Guinea up to 1918, declined after the German colonial presence went away. Unlike Tok Pisin (TP), Unserdeutsch (UD) was from the beginning developed in a small-scale enclave environment. Children who were the offspring of German men and indigenous women from various language areas were brought into residence in a Catholic mission station where the nuns spoke German. These children developed their own form of language, drawing on grammatical forms that came from TP (and probably also from some knowledge of indigenous languages), but using vocabulary from German, creating a hybrid form special to their own tiny community that was not shared by the missionary staff. This form must have continued to be passed down to the descendants of this ancestral set of enclaved speakers for some time,

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but many of its remaining speakers went to Australia after Papua New Guinea became an independent nation in 1975. About a hundred speakers remain, mostly bilingual in UD and one other language or multilingual and married in to other groups, including presumably Australians through whom they could obtain residence rights. The researchers who have tracked down this unique language form (Craig Volker and Professor Peter Maitz of the University of Augsburg in Germany, see Maitz and Volker 2017) were interested in it because it began as a creole form, being the only language fully learned (in fact, created by) the children originally involved. (See, for another study of pidgin German forms, Mühlhӓusler 1984.) TP itself has become a creole for some but not all of its speakers in the complex contemporary society of Papua New Guinea (see Smith 2002, and compare Mühlhӓusler 1985). It is a creole for numbers of people in areas where it has effectively displaced former indigenous languages, especially in places where the indigenous language may have had only a few hundred speakers and labor migration caused many young men to move out from their villages, later returning with news of the outside world and promoting TP as a means of accessing that world (see the detailed study of one such place, Gapun village in the Sepik area by Don Kulick 1992). TP also has a dictionary and grammar done by Father Francis Mihalic (Mihalic 1971), has a newspaper, Wantok Niuspepa, and in addition to translations of the New Testament used widely by churches, it was the language into which a translation of a well-known ethnography by Peter Lawrence was made by Bill Tomasetti. This book (Lawrence 1964) was a famous study of “cargo cult” movements in Madang Province, and Tomasetti aimed in his translation to show the potential for TP to become a literary as well as an oral language form, using bits of TP in novel ways, such as “as-tinktink” for fundamental ideas or theories (Tomasetti 1986). Tomasetti’s work remains an isolated tour de force, while subsequently the knowledge of English has become much more widespread among younger generations and the need for this kind of development of TP is less great. On a field visit to Mount Hagen from December 2017 to January 2018 we found that there was a huge increase in English language knowledge, and that English was displacing TP as a favored oral language, while TP remains popular as a marker of vernacular identity, in a manner similar to the relationship between Scots language and English language in Scotland, with the difference that Scots does have a huge literary tradition of its own. Broad oral Scots can in some ways be regarded as a creole form, balanced by almost universal bilinguality with English. The prognosis for TP is that it will remain popular as a source

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of vernacular identity and a code-switching resource for expressing cultural intimacy. The parallel with Scots here is clear. The general conclusion is that processes of enclavement and resilient responses to these processes lead to similar ecological results for languages regardless of substantive differences between cases. We have also found that pidgin and creole languages offer a wonderful laboratory for tracking how new language forms emerge in response to new functional situations, with their gradual development of new grammatical morphemes and words, their combination of cultural influences, and their capacity to grow exponentially as popular intergroup modes of communication in changing political circumstances. Pidgins also often, although not always, signal also language loss. Don Kulick’s work on language loss in Papua New Guinea (Kulick 1992) and Barbra Meek’s work (Meek 2010) on language revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan community may be referred to here. Factors of globalization are also invariably involved in processes of language change, death, and transformation (see Crystal 2002 for a deeply informed discussion of these topics). Language endangerment, language loss, and language revitalization are important general topics, and we add here another set of references: Evans (2010), Grenoble and Whaley (2006), and Thomason and Kaufman (1988). In a field visit to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, December 2018– January 2019, we discovered a number of ongoing processes of linguistic change, constituting language mixing: As TP is employed in new contexts, speakers incorporate into it whole phrases or “chunks” of English. These expressions draw into themselves the senses of empowerment linked to the English language. Younger people who have received phonetic training also pronounce the English words very accurately and may jump directly from TP to English. As our more senior collaborators informed us, however, a concomitant of this process is a loss of ability to decode the more hidden aspects of the indigenous vernacular itself. Younger speakers, we were told, understand only standard meanings and cannot grasp “concealed talk,” tok bokis in TP, or ik ek in the Hagen Melpa language. Orators publicly use ik ek as a way of communicating underlying identities and values or emplacement in a landscape, as when they speak of old practices of enskillment, such as hunting marsupials, in the forest and juxtapose these practices with modern schooling. We listened to speeches in this vein when the governor of the Western Highlands Province took us to visit a new high school under construction in an area backing onto forest land. References to hunting particular marsupials were a way of signaling old values and their relationship to contemporary schooling. Younger people, however, would not grasp the

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metaphoric significance of these indirect forms of expression. A loss of cultural depth is entailed between the generations, accompanied by the intrusion of new concepts linked to politics, economics, and the contemporary world. For ourselves as field workers, appreciation and comprehension of the subtleties of cultural expression remain vital, and investigators who in the past worked without such knowledge would have missed the underlying meanings of what they heard and would be inclined to impose their own understandings in the absence of grasping what their interlocutors were telling them.

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Excursions, Translations, and Explorations

The relationship between language and culture is not fixed but dynamic. In answer to the overall question that we broached at the beginning of this book, there is no single algorithm or model that can yield a definitive or fixed pattern of relationships between language and culture. We have instead examined a more grounded set of issues, centering on cultural classifications, cognition, ritual, cognitive science, expressions of power, and the significance of minority languages and enclaved forms of expression in creolizing languages contexts. Seeking a general way of expressing what we have found throughout our explorations, we would like to draw, from the rich panoply of expressions in the Melpa language of Papua New Guinea, the concept of “pairing,” or “making twos,” “rakl.” “Pairing” in Melpa brings together both opposites and equivalents. So, language and culture make a rakl, a relationship that does not equate them or subsume them into each other but grants to them a creative alliance, or dialogue, forming a kind of unity as well as difference between them. Languages are important markers of the continuity of cultural difference, and this means that there are always problems of effective translation between them. English itself is multicultural, but there are still many problems of translation between English and other languages. Translation problems raise crucially the question of incommensurability or commensurability between terms in different languages. (See, in general George Steiner 1975.) There will always be aspects of both commensurability and incommensurability because of the complexity of meanings in any lexeme, so once again complexity wins out against simplicity, the array of particulars against universal elements, even though we can recognize the coexistence of both. It is pertinent to note further here how issues that are classic in language and culture studies, notably the arguments about universal versus particular features, are today increasingly transposed into contexts of globalization, with

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particular reference to the dominance of English as an international language. As always, however, globalization is not a simple, but a layered and variable phenomenon. The phenomenon itself is better described as glocalization, in line with the current theoretical understandings in anthropology as a whole. Looking at English as a globally diffused language, scholars sometimes refer to it as Globish (and in line with our observations here this might better be described as “glocalish”). Using the term “international English” signifies the fact that English now belongs to many different regions of the world. Clearly, literate English is likely to be less variable than oral English, as it already is in Britain or the UK itself. It is within the oral realm that languages may suffer death, transformation, or regenerative change, and this point shows again the importance of studying language dynamics from the point of view of both orality and literacy, as well as the interaction between other major languages and English (see for Japan Mizumura 2015, trans. by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). More than ever in the past, it is important to continue witnessing both to the ongoing facts of cross-cultural variability and to the value of these patterns of difference and variation in the production of humanity and of the ways that humans find of coming to terms with and respecting one another. Our studies of the Scots language and of Tok Pisin point in this direction. The comprehensive work of David Crystal in the field of varieties of English is exemplary in this regard (see, for example, Crystal 2007). The global dominance of English, itself now challenged by the spread of Chinese, does not, as we have noted, remove the long-term problems of translation. Language appears in numbers of potential or actual forms and there is an interesting exploration of how extreme problems of translation can emerge over time in a short story by Ted Chiang entitled “Story of Your Life” (2010). In this story the protagonist is a linguist who is called on to find a way to communicate with a mysterious set of alien beings who have arrived in spacecrafts. The aliens’ intentions are unknown, and the US Army is engaged in trying to assess whether they are a threat or not. Their mode of communication is opaque, and the linguist is asked to cooperate with another investigator to unravel the problem of understanding their language. The aliens display images on large mirror-like screens which they manipulate and change in response to communications from the linguist, and they do so by making sophisticated statements through these images rather than with words. Studying these image variations, the linguist is able to understand their messages and to communicate with them. The aliens have seven symmetrical limbs and are thus called Heptapods by the humans. The linguist determines that they have separate languages: Heptapod A (speech)

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and Heptapod B (writing). As she becomes fluent in these languages she finds that Heptapod B has changed her mode of thought in relation to time, giving her knowledge of the future, including her own future, which is predetermined. This experience stays with her for her entire life. The aliens leave as mysteriously as they had come, but the linguist is altered by her communications with them. The whole study is an example of extreme difference in language forms and extreme effects of a radically different language on the human mind. It is a metaphor for all of the more ordinary problems of translation which occur between human languages themselves, such as are explored, for example, by Dan Everett and by Anna Wierzbicka in their writings that we have discussed in this book. Translation can therefore be seen as an attempt to make commensurate meanings that are in some ways incommensurate. At the least, this constitutes a cross-cultural warning about assumptions of shared meanings or language universals. This is a huge topic that has been pursued many times by linguists and philosophers and is at the heart of contentions between universalists and particularists in this field. In whatever way the Heptapod languages were constructed, they obviously reflected a very different spatio-temporal ecology from the human language of the linguist investigating them. We may recall here Benjamin Lee Whorf ’s suggestion that major grammatical differences between English and the Hopi language revealed different ways of conceptualizing space and time. A feature of Whorf ’s discussion was that because of these language differences the Hopi ecological life-world would markedly differ from that of an English language speaker. Beyond the problem of translation, then, there is the question of how the use of language is a part of the ecological adaptation of people to their varying environments. We can speak here of an “ecological turn” in the study of language that has been called eco-linguistics. The approach enables a new way of looking at language and culture through the lens of ecological perceptions and experience of the world. Scholars who have developed this branch of study include Peter Mühlhӓusler (2003), Alwin Fill (2006), and Mark Garner (2004). Studies of shamanistic practices and other religious practices generally from around the world also point us to complex ecological perceptions that relate space and time in highly varying ways. If we regard ecology as a construction of the mind and its interactions with the world we find that visions, dreams, and images of a spatio-temporal kind abound in ways that are unique to these performative contexts. We can recognize that such images are a part of wider eco-cosmologies that inform peoples’ living interactions with their worlds (see,

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for example, Stewart, Strathern, Riboli, and Torri, n.d.). These interactions also find expression in the forms of language that identify peoples’ relationship to place in significant ways. We come here to the familiar arena of theory regarding place, embodiment, and emplacement. Adding a specific concept of ecology to this arena of interest enables us to look at emplacement in both cosmological and environmental terms (Stewart and Strathern 2018). Recognition of this point further allows us to look at the questions of sustainability of practices over time in relation to the environment. Language is an immediate tool for conceptualizing such ecological issues. We have only here to remember Franz Boas’s disquisition on “Eskimo words for snow” to realize in general that ecology is actually at the heart of semantics. Another ecological feature here is how language acts a bridge between perceived worlds, enabling communication with spirit entities in the wider cosmos. Rituals of prayer, invocation, magical incantations, spells for inducing fertility and averting disasters all belong to this genre (Stewart and Strathern 2014). In particular, the powers of song, percussive beating, and the sounds of musical instruments enhance this projective capability of language, sending notes into the environment to reach the awareness of spirit forces within a landscape or along water courses or the air. Language is thus again an important component of eco-cosmological relations. This process is interactive, since the environment itself is always speaking, communicating, and transmitting forms of information. Recognition of this point helps us to extend the parameters of our understanding of language beyond the technicalities of semantics and syntax and into the wider world of experience. This kind of comprehension takes us also into the world of diversity in linguistic expressions that long ago caught the attention of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1999, originally published 1836). We are taking this perspective further in a project with the title “How the Planet Speaks: Ecology, Language, and Mind” (Stewart and Strathern n.d.), with an echo in recognition of the work of Gregory Bateson (2000, originally published in 1972). Finally, here, ecology has generally been taken to refer to the material environment in which we live, and this environment contains very notably all the machines that humans have built and that subsequently act as agents in the world themselves, especially in the Information Technology arena of computing, robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, with all the developing language terms and ritual procedures that populate this brave new world. In this book we have traveled from the review of significant topics in the analysis of natural languages, concentrating on spoken forms and how these

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have been influenced by the advent of literacy and its latter-day variant manifestations. When language is distributed among a range of “actants,” humans, and other agents of communication, we are peering toward the future of humanity itself and of language too and ways of rethinking questions of consciousness and identities, in which dynamically changing language usages will continue to play a vital and endlessly fascinating part in an evolving global ecosphere.

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Further Readings on the Topic of Language and Culture Ahearn, Laura M. 2012. Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Bauman, Richard 2004. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Boateng, Boatema 2011. The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited and introduction by John B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brison, Karen J. 1992. Just Talk: Gossip, Meetings, and Power in a Papua New Guinea Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Michael F. 2003. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cummins, W. A. 2001. The Lost Language of the Picts. Balgavies: The Pinkfoot Press. Duranti, Alessandro 1994. From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Errington, J. Joseph 1998. Shifting Languages: Interaction and Identity in Javanese Indonesia. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Everett, Daniel L. 2012. Language: The Cultural Tool. New York: Pantheon Books. Goody, Jack 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamers, Josiane F., and Michel H. A. Blanc 2000. Bilinguality and Bilingualism, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Harper, Norman 2009. Spikkin Doric: A Doric Word Book. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Harrison, John 1888. The Scot in Ulster: Sketch of the History of the Scottish Population of Ulster. Belfast: Ullans Press, 2009. Henryson, Robert 1952. Selected Poems. For the Saltire Society. Edited by David Murison. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd. Hutchins, Edwin 1980. Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ingold, Tim 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. Lacey, Roderic John 1975. Oral Traditions as History: An Exploration of Oral Sources among the Enga of the New Guinea Highlands (Doctoral dissertation). Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Jeff 2005. Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence. London: Pluto Press. Lutz, Catherine A., and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.) 1990. Language and the Politics of Emotion. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction Series. General Editors Paul Ekman and Klaus R. Scherer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCool, Sam 1982. Sam McCool’s New Pittsburghese: How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher. Pittsburgh, PA: Goodwill Industries. Milner, G. B. Samoan Dictionary. New Zealand: Pasifika Press. Montgomery, Michael 2009. Guid Wittins Frae Doctèr Luik: The Gospel According to Luke in Ulster-Scots. Belfast: Ullans Press. Montgomery, Michael, and Anne Smyth (eds.) 2003. A Blad O’ Ulstèr-Scotch Frae Ullans: Ulster-Scots Culture, Language and Literature. Belfast: The Ullans Press. Robinson, Philip 2005. Alang tha Shore. Ulster-Scots Living Writers Series vol. 5. Belfast: Ullans Press. Schneider, David M. 1995. Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Stories. Edited, transcribed, and introduction by Richard Handler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, Tom (ed.) 1970. The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. Introduction by Tom Scott. London: Penguin Books. Taussig, Michael 2009. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Tryon, Darrell T., and Jean-Michel Charpentier 2004. Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth and Development. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 132. Walter Bisang, Hans Henrich Hock, and Werner Winter. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Index Allis-Chalmers 93 Amb Kor 72, 76–7 Anastenaria 52 ancestral spirit(s) 13, 74 animal(s) 8, 33–4, 41, 54 Artificial Intelligence xii, 118 Auld Lang Syne 98 Austronesian 7, 33, 110 Ayrshire 93–5, 97–8, 100–3, 107 ballad(s) 24, 71, 97, 100, 106 Begg, James Andrew 103 Brexit 90, 109 Burns, Robert 94, 98–101, 103, 105, 107 cassowaries 31–2, 35, 43 Catrine 104 cell phone 28 Chinese 38–9, 116 Christianity 27–8, 70 churches 19 classification(s) xii, 6–7, 9, 13, 17, 30–6, 43, 54, 115 code-switching 5, 89, 91, 93, 112 cognitive polyvalence 42 color(s) 32, 37–45, 62, 93 communicative competence 5, 104 conceptual metaphor theory 51 conflict(s) 8, 19, 23, 44, 47, 55, 62, 71–2, 79–82, 89–90, 92, 96–7, 104 consciousness 3, 13, 22, 26, 61, 77, 93, 119 cosmology 70, 73 creativity xi, 17–18, 73, 86, 89 creole 4, 109, 111–12 cross-domain analogical thinking 51 cultural grammar xii, 4 culture-bound syndrome 52 dancing 69–70, 105 dangerous words 80 dark matter xii, 1–6, 9, 30 dialect(s) 4, 27, 76, 90–1, 93–5, 107, 108

diglossia 97 disaster(s) 61, 68, 118 divination 68–9 dream(s) 70, 75–6, 117 Duna 24, 72, 83 eco-linguistics 117 ecology 108, 110, 117–18 el ik 66–7, 71–2, 81, 83 embodied action(s) 19, 47, 59 embodiment 15, 17–18, 46, 50, 91, 118 embodiment theory xii, 35, 50, 65 emotion(s) 18, 43–7, 61 English 4, 19, 21–2, 27, 29–30, 35, 39–40, 44–5, 53, 56, 89–112, 115–17 environment(s) xii, 4–5, 9, 11, 17, 32, 38, 40–1, 43, 57, 108, 110, 117–18 European Union 90, 92, 99, 105, 109 Extended Mind 49 facial decorations 43 fake news 81 fear(s) 46–7, 51, 80–1, 84, 100 formality 64–5, 71, 86, 99 Gaelic 90, 92, 95, 105 gender(ed) 23, 32, 60, 71, 85, 87 German(ic) 22, 45, 95, 109–11 Gidjingali 46 gift(s) 16–17, 29, 31 gift-giving 16 globalization 4, 112, 115–16 Globish 116 gossip(ing) 47, 81–3 grammatical classifiers 54 Hawaii(an) 80–1 healing ix, 51, 71–5 Heptapod 116–17 history 24, 27–8, 54, 61–2, 66, 81, 89–90, 95, 98–100, 108

132 Hopi 56–7, 117 hunter-gatherer(s) 8–10 Ifaluk 45–6 ik ek 81, 112 illocution 22, 29–30, 59, 71 illocutionary force 65, 72 illocutionary speech 66 Ilongot 45 Inner Mongolia x, 84 Innerpeffray 25 Internet 26 intertextuality 94 kabary 65 Kabyle 15, 17 kang rom 71–2 Karam 31–3, 42 kin 6, 18–19, 28–9, 36, 74–5, 83, 85 kinship xii, 6, 9, 28, 40, 68, 74, 83–5 Knox, John 96 Kwak’wala 55 labeling theory 52, 54 landscape(s) 10, 40, 73, 77, 102–3, 112, 118 language ideology 5, 23, 59, 65, 67, 85–6, 89 language loss 112 Latin 30, 95–6, 100, 102 lecto-oral domain 22, 29, 94 letter writing 27–8 literacy vii, xii, 5, 19, 23–30, 89, 91, 116, 119 magical spells 15, 29, 51, 63, 65, 70–1 making twos 115 Malagasy 65, 71 Mandarin 38 Manes Kaya 74 Māori 62 Melpa vii, 3–4, 10–11, 13, 21, 32–47, 49–57, 59–64, 41–3, 46–7, 51, 55, 59, 64, 66–7, 69, 71, 76, 87, 109, 112, 115 Merina vii, 59, 64–6 metaphor(s) 38, 51, 56, 64, 66 metaphoric significance 113 metapragmatics 22–3 migrant(s) 27–8, 95, 109

Index minority identities xii, 90 missionaries 27–8 missionary 27, 86, 110 mön 71–3 Mount Hagen 3, 10, 16–18, 33, 42, 51, 64, 66, 70, 76–7, 80, 83, 85, 109, 111 multi-sensorial components 62 myth(s) 13, 32, 41, 70, 101 mythology 10 naming practices 83 narrative memory 9 New Cumnock 101, 103 Newmilns 93, 98 Nisbet, Murdoch 97 noman 17–19, 46–7, 86 Normans 95 Nuaulu 35–6, 41 Nukulaelae 26–9 orality 22–3, 29–30, 94, 99, 116 pairing(s) 34–6, 42–3, 77, 115 Pangia 4, 11, 31, 42, 55 Papua New Guinea 4–5, 15–18, 23–4, 31–2, 41–3, 51, 64, 66, 69, 76, 78, 80–1, 83, 85–7, 89, 91, 109–12, 115 performance(s) 22, 24, 29, 59–63, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 77, 83, 94 performances of commemoration 61 performativity xii, 29, 67 personhood 22–3, 47, 65, 86 Perthshire 25, 84, 101 pikono 72 Piraha 3, 12 Plantation of Ulster 104, 107 poetry 64, 90, 98–100, 102 popokl 17–19, 46–7, 87 potatoes 102 practice theory xii, 15–16, 19 prehension 34, 36, 113 rakl 35, 115 Raphoe 106–7 Rarotonga 27 rationality 50 recursion 7, 10, 12 referentiality 44, 67–8 religion 24, 27, 36, 50–1, 69, 80

Index revenge 18, 30, 47, 69, 97 Rhyming Weaver poets 105, 107 rumor 81–2 St. Johnston 106–7 Samoa(n) 27, 45, 86–7 Scotland 5, 25, 82–4, 87, 90, 92–3, 95–8, 102–7, 109, 111 Scots vii, 4–5, 89–90, 92–109, 111–12, 116 semantic primes 37–8 semiotic abduction 51 sensory experience 63, 83 shaman 70–1, 84 shamanic practices 68, 70, 117 shame 17, 45–7, 81 sickness 18, 82, 84, 86–7 song(s) 24, 29, 45, 64–5, 70, 76–7, 83, 92, 98–9, 102, 118 sorcery 50–1, 81–2 speech community(ies) 4–5, 15, 104, 108 Standard Habby 98 story-telling 10 Strathearn 84

133

taxonomy 34, 36 Telefomin 32 Theory of Mind 50 Tok Pisin vii, 4–5, 33, 89, 91, 109–10, 116 Trobrianders 15, 63–4 Tsembaga 69 Ulster-Scots 5, 90, 92, 104–9 Ulster-Scots Agency 105, 108 universal grammar xii, 3, 7, 12, 21 Unserdeutsch 110 utility 2, 12 Virgil 96, 100 Warlpiri 40–4 website(s) 52, 80 Wiru 4, 11, 42, 55 witchcraft 50–1, 81–2 women 32, 77, 87, 110 Yucatec Maya 53

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136

137

138