The Matrix

of Language
New York London
First published 1996 by Westview Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The matrix of language: contemporary linguistic anthropology I edited
by Donald Brenneis and Ronald K.S. Macaulay
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-2320-7. - ISBN 0-8133-2321-5 (pbk.)
1. Anthropological linguistics. I. Brenneis, Donald Lawrence,
1946- . II. Macaulay, Ronald K.S.
P35.M29 1996
306.4'4'089-dc20 95-43947
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-8133-2321-3 (pbk)

Dedicated to the memory of Ruth Barker,
colleague and friend
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1

Part One
Learning Language, Learning Culture 7

2 What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills

at Home and School, Shirley Brice Heath 12
3 Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem-Solving
Through Co-Narration, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith,
and Carolyn Taylor 39
4 Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse,
Steven Feld and Bambi B. Schieffelin 56

Part Two
Gender, Power, and Discourse 75
5 A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication,
Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker 81
6 Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers: Uses of Speech by
Men and Women in a Malagasy Community,
Elinor Keenan (Ochs) 99
7 The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation,
Penelope Eckert 116

Part Three
Genre, Style, Performance 139
8 Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb, A. L. Becker 142
9 ''Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You":
A Contextual Study of Expressive Lying, Richard Bauman 160
10 Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos,
Disorder, and Narrative Discourses, Jose E. Lim6n 182

vii
viii Contents

Part Four
Language as Social Practice 205
11 Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in
Fiji Indian Conversation, Donald Brenneis 209
12 Reflections on a Meeting: Structure, Language, and the
Polity in a Small-Scale Society, Fred R. Myers 234
13 When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy,
Judith T. Irvine 258
14 Monoglot "Standard" in America: Standardization and
Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony, Michael Silverstein 284
15 The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness
of Grammar, Jane H. Hill 307

About the Book and Editors 325

About the Contributors 327
Credits 329
Index 331
Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Michael Silverstein for suggesting our title, the contribu-
tors for the many ways in which they have stimulated our thinking, the readers for
Westview Press for their helpful comments, and our students in Language in
Culture for the delight, exasperation, and engagement they have shown over the
years and the ways in which they have shaped this volume. Our thanks also go to
Dean Birkenkamp and Jim Grode of Westview Press for their help and encour-
agement.

Donald Brenneis
Ronald K.S. Macaulay
1
Introduction

Since language enters into almost every facet of human experience, it is hardly
surprising that it should be examined from a wide variety of perspectives.
Philosophers, teachers, lawyers, advertisers, historians, politicians, comedians, and
poets, to mention but a few, take a professional interest in language. Within the
scientific study of language (linguistics) there is also great diversity, but the pur-
pose of the present volume may best be clarified by contrasting four approaches
to the study of language that are currently adopted by scholars.
The approach that is dominant in most U.S. university departments is that as-
sociated with the theories of Noam Chomsky. Starting with the publication of
Syntactic Structures in 1957, Chomsky has placed the emphasis on studying "the
system of knowledge attained and internally represented in the mind/brain"
(1986:24). Central to Chomsky's purposes is a characterization of the universal
qualities of language, that is, the features of language that make it possible for any
normal infant to develop a knowledge of any human language, under widely vary-
ing conditions. Chomsky's approach requires a high degree of idealization:
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a com-
pletely homeogeneous speech community" (1965: 3). In contrast, the authors of
the chapters in this book are concerned with the speech of imperfect human be-
ings in communities in which there is great diversity of speech.
A second approach, which deals with the "investigation of language within the
social context of the community in which it is spoken" (Labov 1966:3), is that of
sociolinguists. Most sociolinguists follow Labov's example in using quantitative
methods to study the correlation of linguistic features with social factors.
Quantitative measures and the asterisks of statistical significance will be rare (but
not totally absent) in the pages that follow. Sociolinguists have generally concen-
trated on phonological and morphological features, and the central focus of
Labov's work has been tracking sound changes in progress. The chapters in the
present volume are less concerned with linguistic form and more with how lan-
guage is used. The empirical work of the scholars represented here relies more on
observation and the qualitative analysis of texts than on counting occurrences of
variables.
A third approach to language is that employed by the practitioners of
Conversation Analysis. The conversation analysts examine the ways in which
speakers accomplish the remarkable task of participating in the fluent exchange of

1
2 Introduction

utterances in a turn-taking schema that requires split-second timing and yet is ac-
complished without strain by almost every member of a speech community. The
conversation analysts, however, for the most part deliberately ignore the social
context in which the conversation takes pface. In their own way, they are as con-
cerned with abstract features as theoretical linguists, such as Chomsky.
The approach that characterizes the chapters in this volume sometimes falls
under the rubric of ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1974) and sometimes under
linguistic anthropology (Schieffelin 1993). Schieffelin summarized some of the
interests of scholars in this discipline:

In studies of language socialization, we look at how persons are socialized to use lan-
guage(s) and socialized through language(s), throughout the life cycle, in households,
workplaces and educational settings. How language is used in constituting power rela-
tionships, for example, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, in constructing ethnicity,
gender and social class, are matters of concern. (1993:1)

Other areas of interest examined in this volume are verbal art and performance,
including narrative, joking, and humor.
Theoretical linguists, taking physical science as the model for the scientific
study of language, have, as it were, attempted to study language through a micro-
scope, on the assumption that the universal structural characteristics of language
can be identified in this way. Just as the specimen on the slide is often a fragment
separated from a larger body, the forms of language studied by linguists using this
approach are isolated from any actual situation in which they might have been
used and examined as abstract, decontexualized, static examples. This approach
emphasizes the importance of form over function.
An alternative scientific model for the description of language is that of the
natural scientist studying animal behavior. In such an approach, the linguist ob-
serves how individuals in a society use language and attempts to create a coherent
description of this usage. (The pioneer in this approach was Bronislaw
Malinowski [1884-1942] whose work laid the foundations for anthropological
linguistics.) Scholars working in this tradition take a dynamic view of language,
seeing meaning, not in terms of dictionary definitions but as something socially
negotiated. As M. M. Bakhtin pointed out, "it is not, after all, out of a dictionary
that the speaker gets his words" rather he hears them "in other people's mouths,
in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions" (Bakhtin 1981:294).
The ethnography of speaking lies at the core of a range of perspectives often la-
beled discourse analysis. Characteristic of these perspectives is a commitment to
the thoroughgoing analysis of talk-and other uses of language-as social prac-
tice. Language is taken to be firmly lodged not only in immediate contexts of per-
formance and use but within broader relationships often characterized by dispar-
ities in and contests over power and inflected by past events.
In one sense discourse analysis denotes a cluster of related techniques for de-
scribing what goes on when people speak with or to each other. Transcripts of ac-
Introduction 3

tual talk play an important role in such descriptions as they make the detailed
consideration of the contents and styles of particular events. Several of the chap-
ters in this book provide detailed examples of such transcript analysis, whether in
dinner table conversations (Ochs, Smith, and Taylor) or gossip (Brenneis). Other
pieces, for example, Silverstein's examination of the notion of"standard language"
or Feld and Schieffelin's consideration of "hardness" in Kaluli culture highlight
particular key terms within specific discourses. Although scholars in other fields
such as cultural studies often use discourse analysis to convey primarily this latter,
meaning-focused sense (see Williams 1976 for examples of this strategy at its
best), the linguistic anthropological studies represented here suggest the value of
a fuller picture in which both the content and conduct of communication figure
significantly.
In addition to denoting a range of techniques, discourse analysis often connotes
a theoretical orientation within which language is seen as both reflecting and con-
sequential for relationships of conflict, cooperation, and dominance within soci-
ety. The chapters in Part Two illuminate the complexities of these relationships-
and of how they might be studied-in regard to the question of gender and
power. Several of the chapters in Part Three are concerned, at least in part, with
the political meanings and implications of particular genres, as in Lim6n's con-
sideration of joking in south Texas. The political· dimensions of discourse lie at the
heart of Part Four, although the chapters are concerned with a wide range of
points at which language and power intersect. Brenneis and Myers, for example,
are concerned with the constitutive role of particular communicative events, that
is, with how they weave an interactional web, making both specific relationships
and broader sociability possible. Other pieces, for example, Hill's, consider the
complex ties among economic and political position and history, consciousness,
and identity. In all cases, however, the critical nexus is discourse, language as a so-
cial activity, both embodying old relationships and offering at times the possib,il-
ities of transformation.
Rather than trying to encompass the entire range of issues within linguistic an-
thropology, in this volume we have selected four general and intersecting topics as
the organizational framework. We believe that these four clearly heuristic topics
speak in useful ways to each other and intersect with other fields, for example,
psychology, gender and feminist studies, literature and folklore, political theory,
and sociocultural anthropology more generally. They provide a range of method-
ological models for students to consider and, perhaps, employ and help them to
triangulate toward a better understanding of the interaction of language, culture,
and social practice at the heart of linguistic anthropology as a field. We have not
excerpted sections from the chapters, so that readers can have the chance to un-
derstand and evaluate the authors' strategies, arguments, and empirical data as
fully as possible.
The first topical cluster deals with language socialization and the broader ques-
tions of social and cultural knowledge: How is learning language (and that cluster
4 Introduction

oflocal theories and social practices with which it is entangled) linked to becom-
ing a member of a community? Given that children are innately endowed with a
language acquisition capacity, what role do caregivers play in their language de-
velopment? Is it possible that some forms of early language socialization are mal-
adapted for the roles speakers will be asked to play in later life?
The second topical cluster has to do with issues of gender and language. Central
to these pieces is an ongoing debate about the relationship between culture and
power in explaining differences between men's and women's speech in various so-
cieties. The chapters in this part reflect a range of theoretical and methodological
perspectives. One of our broader goals in Part Two is to help students engage in
principled ways with contentious issues and to suggest some methods through
which they can explore and add to the discussion. There are also enough caution-
ary examples in the published literature to discourage premature interpretive
claims.
The third part, dealing with genre, style, and performance, draws primarily
upon work in the ethnography of speaking. Central questions here focus on the
role of verbal art and performance, including such critical genres as narrative, jok-
ing, and humor. The chapters illustrate the usefulness and complexity of under-
standing situated language through a genre-based approach. This part also raises
methodological questions for social science more generally.
Finally, the fourth topic focuses on the relationship between language and so-
cial.and political life. Several of the chapters deal with language and power in face-
to-face communities, viewing language as both reflective of and active in consti-
tuting political relationships. The other chapters are concerned with the broader
political economy of language, treating such issues as the economic implications
of verbal skill, linguistic ideology, and code-switching as a nexus of identity and
consciousness. Part Four comes closest to a classic focus of language and culture
studies-the relationship between language and thought. These studies, however,
locate such connections in the flow of everyday social life and interaction, and not
in a more abstract and decontextualized notion of cognition.
It is our hope that those who use this reader will approach the chapters and the
topics with a constructively critical frame of mind. There is much to be learned
from these studies in terms of both the assumptions and methodologies employed
and also from the conclusions of the investigations. But the study of language as
a dynamic, contextualized social phenomenon is still in its infancy. There is much
work to be done, but with help of pioneers like the scholars represented in this
collection, anyone can take up the challenge set out by Edward Sapir sixty-six
years ago: "Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be under-
stood as such.... It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused,
and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject
matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpreta-
tion of human conduct in general.'' (1929:214)
Introduction 5

References
Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael
Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- - - . 1986. Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC:
Center for Applied Linguistics.
Sapir, Edward. 1929. "The status oflinguistics as a science," Language 5:207-214.
Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1993. "The current state and fate of linguistic anthropology;'
Anthropology Newsletter 34(4): 1, 19-20.
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Part One
Learning Language,
Learning Culture
"Ethnocentrism is that state of mind in which the ways of one's own group seem
natural and right for all human beings everywhere" (Brown and Lenneberg
1954:454). Nowhere is this more true than in the study oflanguage development.
Since the 1960s the study of how children develop the communication skills that
distinguish human beings from other creatures has been a growth industry in the
United States. The classic work is Roger Brown's study of three children in
Cambridge, Massachusetts (Brown 1973). Through examining samples of speech
from the children at regular intervals Brown was able to document their progress
in developing certain skills in the use of language. Brown was influenced by the
views of Noam Chomsky (1965) and consequently concentrated on the children's
mastery of certain linguistic structures. There was no attempt to study the cir-
cumstances in which the children were developing these skills.
One linguistic anthropologist, Martha Ward, set out to explore the "real-life
conditions under which children learn their language" (Ward 1971:2). She chose
a plantation settlement, called Rosepoint in the study, west of New Orleans on the
Mississippi River, with a predominantly English-speaking population. She found
that the methodology that had proved so fruitful for Brown at Harvard was use-
less in Rosepoint:

For the first two months of this project attempts to elicit spontaneous speech from the
children met with defeat, with or without the tape recorder. The readiness to show off,
the constant flow of speech, and the mother-child interaction so common in middle-
class children were nowhere in evidence. The children appeared to speak as little to their
parents as to the investigator. One twenty-eight-month male spoke three words in as
many months. Meanwhile, the mothers complained that the verbal precocity of their
children was driving them up the wall. (Ward 1971:15)

Despite this apparently unfavorable situation and the apparent contradiction be-
tween mothers' reports and Ward's own formal observations, the children suc-
ceeded in developing linguistic skills.
Shirley Brice Heath had the time in which to undertake a more extended ethno-
graphic study in the Piedmont Carolinas communities she discusses. Heath de-
voted nine years to this study, which is fully reported in Heath 1983. Heath con-

7
8 Learning Language, Learning Culture

trasts the language socialization of children in th~ee communities: Maintown, a

mainstream middle-class community, Roadville, a blue-collar white community,
and Trackton, a poorer, working-class black community. Heath makes it quite
clear that each of the three communities provides a locally appropriate and effec-
tive form oflanguage socialization for their children-until the children enter the
school system. Then it becomes clear that the Maintown children have a distinct
advantage because their socialization has prepared them for the culture of the
school. In interestingly different ways the children of Roadville and Trackton are
less well-prepared for the situation they will encounter at school. Unfortunately,
the teachers are equally less well-prepared to deal with the children from Roadville
and Trackton. In her full-length account (1983:284-287) Heath describes how a
dedicated and imaginative teacher succeeded with a group of black first-grade
children who were deemed "potential failures" on the basis of their performance
on reading readiness tests. But the success was short-lived because the children
went on to "regular" classes in which the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure
proved yet again to be justified. It is a further justification for Basil Bernstein's
warning that we need to rethink the schools as if the middle-class child did not
exist (Bernstein 1961:306).
Heath's chapter in the present volume draws attention to the kinds of activities
that are taken as "normal" in mainstream U.S. middle-class families. She asks how
the middle-class child is socialized into the analytical, field-independent learning
style that is frequently presented as that which correlates with academic achieve-
ment and success in school. Manuel Ramirez and Alfredo Castaneda {1974) sug-
gest that an important factor is a match between the teaching style of the teacher
and the learning style of the child. They also draw attention to the mainstream
bias in the use of the terms field independent and field dependent. They point out
that the bias would be reversed if the term for field dependent were field sensitive
and its contrary field insensitive. It is, of course, those who have been successful
academically who chose the label field independent for their own learning style.
Katherine Nelson (1973) draws attention to a similar possibility of match or mis-
match between the very young child's learning style and the mother's expectations
and practice. It is a cautionary reminder that not all differences of this kind can
be related to social or cultural categories since Nelson's families were all main-
stream middle-class white U.S. Americans.
One of the ironies that future historians will note is that Chomsky and his dis-
ciples have in theory emphasized the universal aspects oflanguage acquisition but
in practice they have tended to base their views on how middle-class U.S.
Americans socialize their children. Heath shows the difference in the socialization
of the children in Maintown, Roadville, and Trackton. Where the Maintown chil-
dren are encouraged to be curious about the world around them, the Roadville
children are expected to see the world very clearly in terms of true versus false,
right versus wrong, and the Trackton children are rewarded for being entertain-
ing, imaginative, and socially adept.
Learning Language, Learning Culture 9

Steven Feld and Bambi Schieffelin describe a different kind of socialization

among the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea. The Kaluli emphasize the need for the
child to learn to use language for practical reasons, to halaido, "hard words:' Kaluli
adults train their children to do this by telling the child exactly what to say in a
particular situation. Word play is considered "bird talk" and discouraged. The
Kaluli adults place great importance on correct behavior and early language in-
struction is intended to reinforce this behavior. The four approaches to language
socialization described in these two chapters are interesting for their similarities
and differences:

1. In Maintown and Roadville and among the Kaluli the adults are very con-
cerned about their children's language development and intervene to guide
it in the right direction. Trackton adults assume that the children will learn
from observation and example; they do not provide explicit instruction.
2. The Maintown and Roadville children are brought up in the relative isola-
tion of single-family homes. The Trackton and Kaluli children spend most
of their time in a wider social context, which includes adults who are not
part of their immediate family.
3. Maintown and Roadville adults interpret very young children's unclear ut-
terances. Trackton and Kaluli adults ignore or discourage such utterances.
4. Roadville and Kaluli adults give specific instructions to children on what to
say in particular situations. Maintown adults are more likely to try to elicit
the appropriate form from the child. Trackton adults are less concerned
about encouraging language development.
5. Maintown and Trackton adults encourage their children to use language
imaginatively and creatively. Roadville and Kaluli adults explicitly discour-
age this.
6. In all four communities the adults pay more attention to what the children
are doing with language than to linguistic form.

These two chapters provide a window into the circumstances in which children
develop linguistic skills. Chomsky has claimed that children are genetically en-
dowed with a language acquisition device that enables them to develop these skills
in a predictable manner regardless of the efforts of the adults around them. One
of the questions that these chapters raise is: Do they support or refute Chomsky's
view?
Language development does not cease at the age of three or four. In their chap-
ter, Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor show how family members solve
problems by discussing them in a narrative framework. Most accounts of narra-
tives deal with the structure of narratives told by a single speaker (Bauman 1986;
Johnstone 1990; Labov and Waletzky 1967; Labov 1981). Ochs et al., however, are
concerned with co-narration in which the "story" is socially negotiated by the par-
ticipants. They show how a story that starts out in one direction can end up with
10 Learning Language, Learning Culture

a rather different conclusion because of the contribution of other participants.

The question of who is "entitled" to tell a particular story (Shuman 1986) thus be-
comes negotiable. In this chapter, Ochs et al. take the analysis of speech events
(Hymes 1974) to a more refined level than Heath or Feld and Schieffelin do in
theirs. Whereas the latter deal with "types" of interaction, Ochs et al. deal with two
specific examples. As in all empirical work, there is a trade-off. Ochs et al. provide
details of a kind that are glossed over in the other chapters, but they provide no
comparative data. We do not know how typical their examples are or whether
there are differences in family style that can be related to social categories.

Suggestions for Further Reading

The articles in The Development of Language, edited by J. B. Gleason, give a good overview
of research in the area of children's language acquisition. C. Snow and C. Ferguson (eds.),
Talking to Children, R. Scollon's Conversations with a One-year-Old, and L. Bloom, The
Transition from Infancy to Language give good accounts of children's early language devel-
opment. Chomsky's Knowledge of Language provides a comprehensive introduction to his
views; see also his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Two other books that deal with children's
early syntactic development are L. Bloom, Language Development and M. Bowerman, Early
Syntactic Development. Children's later syntactic development is discussed in C. Chomsky,
Acquisition of Syntax from 5 to 10 and in S. Romaine, The Language of Children and
Adolescents. D. Slobin (ed.), A Cross-cultural Study of Language Acquisition, provides a wide
range of information on children learning languages other than English. E. Ochs's Culture
and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan
Village and B. Schieffelin, The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of
Kaluli Children give insightful accounts oflanguage development in non-English-speaking
communities.

References
Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, Basil. 1961. "Social class and linguistic development: A theory of social learning."
In A. H. Halsey, J. Floud, and A. Anderson, eds., Education, Economy, and Society. New
York: Free Press, 288-314.
Bloom, Lois. 1970. Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- - - . 1993. The Transition from Infancy to Language: Acquiring the Power of Expression.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, Melissa. 1973. Early Syntactic Development: A Cross-Linguistic Study with
Special Reference to Finnish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Brown, Roger, and Eric Lenneberg. 1954. "A study in language and cognition:' Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:454-462.
Learning Language, Learning Culture 11

Chomsky, Carol. 1969. The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
-.- - . 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gleason, Jean Berko, ed. 1989. The Development of Language (2nd edition). Columbus, OH:
Merrill.
Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and
Classrooms. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Johnstone, Barbara. 1990. Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Labov, William. 1981. "Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative:' In Deborah
Tannen, ed., Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press: 219-247.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal
experience." In June Helm, ed., Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: University of
Washington Press: 12-44.
Nelson, Katherine E. 1973. Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development 39 (1-2) (Serial No. 149).
Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and Language Development: Language Acquisition and Language
Socialization in a Samoan Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramirez III, Manuel, and Alfredo Castaneda. 1974. Cultural Democracy, Bicognitive
Development, and Education. New York: Academic Press.
Romaine, Suzanne. 1984. The Language of Children and Adolescents: The Acquisition of
Communicative Competence. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of
Kaluli Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scollon, Ronald. 1976. Conversations with a One-Year-Old. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Shuman, Amy. 1986. Story-telling Rights: The Uses of Oral and Written Texts by Urban
Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slobin, Dan, ed. 1985. A Cross-cultural Study of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Snow, Catherine E., and Charles A. Ferguson, eds. 1977. Talking to Children: Language Input
and Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ward, Martha Coonfield. 1971. Them Children: A Study in Language Learning. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. ·
2
What No Bedtime Story
Means: Narrative Skills at
Home and School
SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH

In the preface to S/Z, Roland Barthes' work on ways in which readers read,
Richard Howard writes: "We require an education in literature ... in order to dis-
cover that what we have assumed-with the complicity of our teachers-was na-
ture is in fact culture, that what was given is no more than a }'Vay of taking' (em-
phasis not in the original; Howard 1974:ix). 1 This statement reminds us that the
culture children learn as they grow up is, in fact, "ways of taking" meaning from
the environment around them. The means of making sense from books and re-
lating their contents to knowledge about the real world is but one "way of taking"
that is often interpreted as "natural" rather than learned. The quote also reminds
us that teachers (and researchers alike) have not recognized that ways of taking
from books are as much a part of learned behavior as are ways of eating, sitting,
playing games, and building houses.
As school-oriented parents and their children interact in the pre-school years,
adults give their children, through modeling and specific instruction, ways of tak-
ing from books which seem natural in school and in numerous institutional set-
tings such as banks, post offices, businesses, or government offices. These main-
stream ways exist in societies around the world that rely on formal educational
systems to prepare children for participation in settings involving literacy. In some
communities these ways of schools and institutions are very similar to the ways
learned at home; in other communities the ways of school are merely an overlay
on the home-taught ways and may be in conflict with them.'
Yet little is actually known about what goes on in story-reading and other liter-
acy-related interactions between adults and preschoolers in communities around
the world. Specifically, though there are numerous diary accounts and experi-
mental studies of the preschool reading experiences of mainstream middle-class
children, we know little about the specific literacy features of the environment
upon which the school expects to draw. Just how does what is frequently termed
"the literate tradition" envelope the child in knowledge about interrelationships

12
Narrative Skills at Home and School 13

between oral and written language, between knowing something and knowing
ways of labeling and displaying it? We have even less information about the vari-
ety of ways children from non-mainstream homes learn about reading, writing,
and using oral language to display knowledge in their preschool environment. The
general view has been that whatever it is that mainstream school-oriented homes
have, these other homes do not have it; thus these children are not from the liter-
ate tradition and are not likely to succeed in school.
A key concept for the empirical study of ways of taking meaning from written
sources across communities is that of literacy events: occasions in which written
language is integral to the nature of participants' interactions and their interpre-
tive processes and strategies. Familiar literacy events for mainstream preschoolers
are bedtime stories, reading cereal boxes, stop signs, and television ads, and inter-
preting instructions for commercial games and toys. In such literacy events, par-
ticipants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and
about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and
sharing knowledge in literacy events.
This paper briefly summarizes the ways of taking from printed stories families
teach their preschoolers in a cluster of mainstream school-oriented neighbor-
hoods of a city in the Southeastern region of the United States. We then describe
two quite different ways of taking used in the homes of two English-speaking
communities in the same region that do not follow the school-expected patterns
of bookreading and reinforcement of these patterns in oral storytelling. Two as-
sumptions underlie this paper and are treated in detail in the ethnography of
these communities (Heath 1983): ( 1) Each community's ways of taking from the
printed word and using this knowledge are interdependent with the ways children
learn to talk in their social interactions with caregivers. (2) There is little or nova-
lidity to the time-honored dichotomy of"the literate tradition" and "the oral tra-
dition:' This paper suggests a frame of reference for both the community patterns
and the paths of development children in different communities follow in their
literacy orientations.

Mainstream School-Oriented Bookreading

Children growing up in mainstream communities are expected to develop habits
and values which attest to their membership in a "literate society." Children learn
certain customs, beliefs, and skills in early enculturation experiences with written
materials: the bedtime story is a major literacy event which helps set patterns of
behavior that recur repeatedly through the life of mainstream children and adults.
In both popular and scholarly literature, the "bedtime story" is widely accepted
as a given-a natural way for parents to interact with their child at bedtime.
Commercial publishing houses, television advertising, and children's magazines
make much of this familiar ritual, and many of their sales pitches are based on the
assumption that in spite of the intrusion of television into many patterns of in-
teraction between parents and children, this ritual remains. Few parents are fully
14 Shirley Brice Heath

conscious of what bedtime storyreading means as preparation for the kinds of

learning and displays of knowledge expected in school. Ninio and Bruner (1978),
in their longitudinal study of one mainstream middle-class mother-infant dyad in
joint picture-book reading, strongly suggest a universal role ofbookreading in the
achievement of labeling by children.
In a series of "reading cycles;' mother and child alternate turns in a dialogue:
the mother directs the child's attention to the book and/or asks what-questions
and/or labels items on the page. The items to which the what-questions are di-
rected and labels given are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional
objects, so that the child has to resolve the conflict between perceiving these as
two-dimensional objects and as representations of a three-dimensional visual set-
ting. The child does so "by assigning a privileged, autonomous status to pictures
as visual objects" (1978: 5). The arbitrariness of the picture, its decontextualiza-
tion, and its existence as something which cannot be grasped and manipulated
like its "real" counterparts is learned through the routines of structured interac-
tional dialogue in which mother and child take turns playing a labeling game. In
a "scaffolding" dialogue (cf. Cazden 1979), the mother points and asks "What is
x?" and the child vocalizes and/or gives a nonverbal signal of attention. The
mother then provides verbal feedback and a label. Before the age of two, the child
is socialized into the "initiation-reply-evaluation sequences" repeatedly described
as the central structural feature of classroom lessons (e.g., Sinclair and Coulthard
1975; Griffin and Humphry 1978; Mehan 1979). Teachers ask their students ques-
tions which have answers prespecified in the mind of the teacher. Students re-
spond, and teachers provide feedback, usually in the form of an evaluation.
Training in ways of responding to this pattern begins very early in the labeling ac-
tivities of mainstream parents and children.

Maintown Ways
This patterning of "incipient literacy" (Scollon and Scollon 1979) is similar in
many ways to that of the families of fifteen primary-level school teachers in
Maintown, a cluster of middle-class neighborhoods in a city of the Piedmont
Carolinas. These families (all of whom identify themselves as "typical," "middle-
class," or "mainstream;') had preschool children, and the mother in each family
was either teaching in local public schools at the time of the study (early 1970s),
or had taught in the academic year preceding participation in the study. Through
a research dyad approach, using teacher-mothers as researchers with the ethnog-
rapher, the teacher-mothers audio-recorded their children's interactions in their
primary network-mothers, fathers, grandparents, maids, siblings, and frequent
visitors to the home. Children were expected to learn the following rules in liter-
acy events in these nuclear households:

1. As early as six months of age, children give attention to books and informa-
tion derived from books. Their rooms contain bookcases and are decorated
Narrative Skills at Home and School 15

with murals, bedspreads, mobiles, and stuffed animals which represent char-
acters found in books. Even when these characters have their origin in tele-
vision programs, adults also provide books which either repeat or extend the
characters' activities on television.
2. Children, from the age of six months, acknowledge questions about books.
Adults expand nonverbal responses and vocalizations from infants into fully
formed grammatical sentences. When children begin to verbalize about the
contents of books, adults extend their questions from simple requests for la-
bels (What's that? Who's that?) to ask about the attributes of these items
(What does the doggie say? What color is the ball?)
3. From the time they start to talk, children respond to conversational allusions
to the content of books; they act as question-answerers who have a knowledge
of books. For example, a fuzzy black dog on the street is likened by an adult
to Blackie in a child's book: "Look, there's a Blackie. Do you think he's look-
ing for a boy?" Adults strive to maintain with children a running commen-
tary on any event or object which can be book-related, thus modeling for
them the extension of familiar items and events from books to new situa-
tional contexts.
4. Beyond two years of age, children use their knowledge of what books do to le-
gitimate their departures from "truth." Adults encourage and reward "book
talk;' even when it is not directly relevant to an ongoing conversation.
Children are allowed to suspend reality, to tell stories which are not true, to
ascribe fiction-like features to everyday objects.
5. Preschool children accept book and book-related activities as entertainment.
When preschoolers are "captive audiences" (e.g., waiting in a doctor's office,
putting a toy together, or preparing for bed), adults reach for books. If there
are no books present, they talk about other objects as though they were pic-
tures in books. For example, adults point to items, and ask children to name,
describe, and compare them to familiar objects in their environment. Adults
often ask children to state their likes or dislikes, their view of events, and so
forth, at the end of the captive audience period. These affective questions
often take place while the next activity is already underway (e.g., moving to-
ward the doctor's office, putting the new toy away, or being tucked into bed),
and adults do not insist on answers.
6. Preschoolers announce their own factual and fictive narratives unless they are
given in response to direct adult elicitation. Adults judge as most acceptable
those narratives which open by orienting the listener to setting and main
character. Narratives which are fictional are usually marked by formulaic
openings, a particular prosody, or the borrowing of episodes in story books.
7. When children are about three years old, adults discourage the highly inter-
active participative role in bookreading children have hitherto played and
children listen and wait as an audience. No longer does either adult or child
repeatedly break into the story with questions and comments. Instead, chil-
16 Shirley Brice Heath

dren must listen, store what they hear, and on cue from the adult, answer a
question. Thus, children begin to formulate "practice" questions as they wait
for the break and the expected formulaic-type questions from the adult. It is
at this stage that children often choose to "read" to adults rather than to be
read to.

A pervasive pattern of all these features is the authority which books and book-
related activities have in the lives of both the preschoolers and members of their
primary network. Any initiation of a literacy event by a preschooler makes an in-
terruption, an untruth, a diverting of attention from the matter at hand (whether
it be an uneaten plate of food, a messy room, or an avoidance of going to bed) ac-
ceptable. Adults jump at openings their children give them for pursuing talk about
books and reading.
In this study, writing was found to be somewhat less acceptable as an "any-time
activity;' since adults have rigid rules about times, places, and materials for writ-
ing. The only restrictions on bookreading concern taking good care of books: they
should not be wet, torn, drawn on, or lost. In their talk to children about books,
and in their explanations of why they buy children's books, adults link school suc-
cess to "learning to love books;' "learning what books can do for you;' and "learn-
ing to entertain yourself and to work independently:' Many of the adults also
openly expressed a fascination with children's books "nowadays." They generally
judged them as more diverse, wide-ranging, challenging, and exciting than books
they had as children.

The Mainstream Pattern. A close look at the way bedtime story routines in
Maintown taught children how to take meaning from books raises a heavy sense of
the familiar in all of us who have acquired mainstream habits and values.
Throughout a lifetime, any school-successful individual moves through the same
processes described above thousands of times. Reading for comprehension in-
volves an internal replaying of the same types of questions adults ask children of
bedtime stories. We seek what-explanations, asking what the topic is, establishing it
as predictable and recognizing it in new situational contexts by classifying and cat-
egorizing it in our mind with other phenomena. The what-explanation is replayed
in learning to pick out topic sentences, write outlines, and answer standardized
tests which ask for the correct titles to stories, and so on. In learning to read in
school, children move through a sequence of skills designed to teach what-expla-
nations. There is a tight linear order of instruction which recapitulates the bedtime
story pattern of breaking down the story into small bits of information and teach-
ing children to handle sets of related skills in isolated sequential hierarchies.
In each individual reading episode in the primary years of schooling, children
must move through what-explanations before they can provide reason-explana-
tions or affective commentaries. Questions about why a particular event occurred
or why a specific action was right or wrong come at the end of primary-level read-
Narrative Skills at Home and School 17

ing lessons, just as they come at the end of bedtime stories. Throughout the pri-
mary grade levels, what-explanations predominate, reason-explanations come
with increasing frequency in the upper grades, and affective comments most often
come in the extra-credit portions of the reading workbook or at the end of the list
of suggested activities in text books across grade levels. This sequence character-
izes the total school career. High school freshmen who are judged poor in com-
positional and reading skills spend most of their time on what-explanations and
practice in advanced versions of bedtime story questions and answers. They are
given little or no chance to use reason-giving explanations or assessments of the
actions of stories. Reason-explanations result in configurational rather than hier-
archical skills, are not predictable, and thus do not present content with a high de-
gree of redundancy. Reason-giving explanations tend to rely on detailed knowl-
edge of a specific domain. This detail is often unpredictable to teachers, and is not
as highly valued as is knowledge which covers a particular area of knowledge with
less detail but offers opportunity for extending the knowledge to larger and re-
lated concerns. For example, a primary-level student whose father owns a turkey
farm may respond with reason-explanations to a story about a turkey. His knowl-
edge is intensive and covers details perhaps not known to the teacher and not
judged as relevant to the story. The knowledge is unpredictable and questions
about it do not continue to repeat the common core of content knowledge of the
story. Thus such configured knowledge is encouraged only for the "extras" of
reading-an extra-credit oral report or a creative picture and story about turkeys.
This kind of knowledge is allowed to be used once the hierarchical what-explana-
tions have been mastered and displayed in a particular situation and, in the course
of one's academic career, only when one has shown full mastery of the hierarchi-
cal skills and subsets of related skills which underlie what-explanations. Thus, re-
liable and successful participation in the ways of taking from books that teachers
view as natural must, in the usual school way of doing things, precede other ways
of taking from books.
These various ways of taking are sometimes referred to as "cognitive styles" or
"learning styles:' It is generally accepted in the research literature that they are in-
fluenced by early socialization experiences and correlated with such features of
the society in which the child is reared as social organization, reliance on author-
ity, male-female roles, and so on. These styles are often seen as two contrasting
types, most frequently termed "field independent-field dependent" (Witkin et al.
1966) or "analytic-relational" (Kagan, Sigel, and Moss 1963; Cohen 1968, 1969,
1971). The analytic field-independent style is generally presented as that which
correlates positively with high achievement and general academic and social suc-
cess in school. Several studies discuss ways in which this style is played out in
school-in preferred ways of responding to pictures and written text and select-
ing from among a choice of answers to test items.
Yet, we know little about how behaviors associated with either of the di-
chotomized cognitive styles (field-dependent/relational and field-independent/
18 Shirley Brice Heath

analytic) were learned in early patterns of socialization. To be sure, there are vast
individual differences which may cause an individual to behave so as to be cate-
gorized as having one or the other of these learning styles. But much of the liter-
ature on learning styles suggests a preference for one or the other is learned in the
social group in which the child is reared and in connection with other ways of be-
having found in that culture. But how is a child socialized into an analytic/field-
independent style? What kinds of interactions does he enter into with his parents
and the stimuli of his environment which contribute to the development of such '
a style of learning? How do these interactions mold selective attention practices
such as "sensitivity to parts of objects:' "awareness of obscure, abstract, nonobvi-
ous features:' and identification of "abstractions based on the features of items"
(Cohen 1969: 844--45)? Since the predominant stimuli used in school to judge the
presence and extent of these selective attention practices are written materials, it
is clear that the literacy orientation of preschool children is central to these ques-
tions.
The foregoing descriptions of how Maintown parents socialize their children
into a literacy orientation fit closely those provided by Scallon and Scallon for
their own child Rachel. Through similar practices, Rachel was "literate before she
learned to read" (1979: 6). She knew, before the age of two, how to focus on a book
and not on herself. Even when she told a story about herself, she moved herself
out of the text and saw herself as author, as someone different from the central
character of her story. She learned to pay close attention to the parts of objects, to
name them, and to provide a running commentary on features of her environ-
ment. She learned to manipulate the contexts of items, her own activities, and lan-
guage to achieve book-like, decontextualized, repeatable effects (such as puns).
Many references in her talk were from written sources; others were modeled on
stories and questions about these stories. The substance of her knowledge, as well
as her ways of framing knowledge orally, derived from her familiarity with books
and bookreading. No doubt, this development began by labeling in the dialogue
cycles of reading (Ninio and Bruner 1978), and it will continue for Rachel in her
preschool years along many of the same patterns described by Cochran-Smith
(1981) for a mainstream nursery school. There teacher and students negotiated
story-reading through the scaffolding of teachers' questions and running com-
mentaries which replayed the structure and sequence of story-reading learned in
their mainstream homes.
Close analyses of how mainstream school-oriented children come to learn to
take from books at home suggest that such children learn not only how to take
meaning from books, but also how to talk about it. In doing the latter, they re-
peatedly practice routines which parallel those of classroom interaction. By the
time they enter school, they have had continuous experience as information-
givers; they have learned how to perform in those interactions which surround lit-
erate sources throughout school. They have had years of practice in interaction
situations that are the heart of reading-both learning to read and reading to
Narrative Skills at Home and School 19

learn in school. They have developed habits of performing which enable them to
run through the hierarchy of preferred knowledge about a literate source and the
appropriate sequence of skills to be displayed in showing knowledge of a subject.
They have developed ways of decontextualizing and surrounding with explana-
tory prose the knowledge gained from selective attention to objects.
They have learned to listen, waiting for the appropriate cue which signals it is
their turn to show off this knowledge. They have learned the rules for getting cer-
tain services from parents (or teachers) in the reading interaction (Merritt 1979).
In nursery school, they continue to practice these interaction patterns in a group
rather than in a dyadic situation. There they learn additional signals and behav-
iors necessary for getting a turn in a group, and responding to a central reader and
to a set of centrally defined reading tasks. In short, most of their waking hours
during the preschool years have enculturated them into: (1) all those habits asso-
ciated with what-explanations, (2) selective attention to items of the written text,
and (3) appropriate interactional styles for orally displaying all the know-how of
their literate orientation to the environment. This learning has been finely tuned
and its habits are highly interdependent. Patterns of behaviors learned in one set-
ting or at one stage reappear again and again as these children learn to use oral
and written language in literacy events and to bring their knowledge to bear in
school-acceptable ways.

Alternative Patterns of Literacy Events

But what corresponds to the mainstream pattern of learning in communities that
do not have this finely tuned, consistent, repetitive, and continuous pattern of
training? Are there ways of behaving which achieve other social and cognitive
aims in other sociocultural groups?
The data below are summarized from an ethnography of two communities-
Roadville and Trackton-located only a few miles from Maintown's neighbor-
hoods in the Piedmont Carolinas. Roadville is a white working-class community
of families steeped for four generations in the life of the textile mill.- Trackton is a
working-class black community whose older generations have been brought up
on the land, either farming their own land or working for other landowners.
However, in the past decade, they have found work in the textile mills. Children of
both communities are unsuccessful in school; yet both communities place a high
value on success in school, believing earnestly in the personal and vocational re-
wards school can bring and urging their children "to get ahead" by doing well in
school. Both Roadville and Trackton are literate communities in the sense that the
residents of each are able to read printed and written materials in their daily lives,
and on occasion they produce written messages as part of the total pattern of
communication in the community. In both communities, children go to school
with certain expectancies of print and, in Trackton especially, children have a keen
sense that reading is something one does to learn something one needs to know
20 Shirley Brice Heath

(Heath 1980). In both groups, residents turn from spoken to written uses oflan-
guage and vice versa as the occasion demands, and the two modes of expression
seem to supplement and reinforce each other. Nonetheless there are radical dif- .
ferences between the two communities in the ways in which children and adults
interact in the preschool years; each of the two communities also differs from
Maintown. Roadville and Trackton view children's learning of language from two
radically different perspectives: in Trackton, children "learn to talk;' in Roadville,
adults "teach them how to talk."

Roadville
In Roadville, babies are brought home from the hospital to rooms decorated with
colorful, mechanical, musical, and literacy-based stimuli. The walls are decorated
with pictures based on nursery rhymes, and from an early age, children are held
and prompted to "see" the wall decorations. Adults recite nursery rhymes as they
twirl the mobile made of nursery-rhyme characters. The items of the child's envi-
ronment promote exploration of colors, shapes, and textures: a stuffed ball with
sections of fabrics of different colors and textures is in the crib; stuffed animals
vary in texture, size, and shape. Neighbors, friends from church, and relatives
come to visit and talk to the baby, and about him to those who will listen. The
baby is fictionalized in the talk to him: "But this baby wants to go to sleep, does-
n't he? Yes, see those little eyes gettin' heavy:' As the child grows older, adults
pounce oh word-like sounds and turn them into "words;' repeating the "words;'
and expanding them into well-formed sentences. Before they can talk, children are
introduced to visitors and prompted to provide all the expected politeness for-
mulas, such as "Bye-bye;' "Thank you," and so forth. As soon as they can talk, chil-
dren are reminded about these formulas, and book or television characters known
to be "polite" are involved as reinforcement.
In each Roadville home, preschoolers first have cloth books, featuring a single
object on each page. They later acquire books which provide sounds, smells, and
different textures or opportunities for practicing small motor skills (closing zip-
pers, buttoning buttons, etc.). A typical collection for a two-year-old consisted of
a dozen or so books--eight featured either the alphabet or numbers, others were
books of nursery rhymes, simplified Bible stories, oi: "real-life" stories about boys
and girls (usually taking care of their pets or exploring a particular feature of their
environment). Books based on Sesame Street characters were favorite gifts for
three- and four-year-olds.
Reading and reading-related activities occur most frequently before naps or at
bedtime in the evening. Occasionally an adult or older child will read to a fussy
child while the mother prepares dinner or changes a bed. On weekends, fathers
sometimes read with their children for brief periods of time, but they generally
prefer to play games or play with the children's toys in their interactions. The fol-
lowing episode illustrates the language and social interactional aspects of these
Narrative Skills at Home and School 21

bedtime events; the episode takes place between Wendy (2;3 at the time of this
episode) and Aunt Sue who is putting her to bed.

[Aunt Sue (AS) picks up book, while Wendy (W) crawls about the floor,
ostensibly looking for something]
W: uh uh
AS: Wendy, we're gonna read, uh, read this story, come on, hop up here on this
bed.
[Wendy climbs up on the bed, sits on top of the pillow, and picks up her
teddy bear]
[Aunt Sue opens book, points to puppy]
AS: Do you remember what this book is about? See the puppy? What does the
puppy do?
[Wendy plays with the bear, glancing occasionally at pages of the book, as
Aunt Sue turns. Wendy seems to be waiting for something in the book]
AS: See the puppy?
[Aunt Sue points to the puppy in the book and looks at Wendy to see if she
is watching]
W: uh huh, yea, yes ma' am
AS: Puppy sees the ant, he's a li'l
[Wendy drops the bear and turns to book.]
fellow. Can you see that ant? Puppy has a little ball.
W: ant bite puppy
-[Wendy points to ant, pushing hard on the book]
AS: No, the ant won't bite the puppy, the [turns page] puppy wants to play
with the ant, see?
[Wendy tries to turn the page back; AS won't let her, and Wendy starts to
squirm and fuss]
AS: Look here, here's someone else, the puppy
[Wendy climbs down off the bed and gets another book]
W: read this one
AS: Okay, you get back up here now. [Wendy gets back on bed]
AS: This book is your ABC book. See the A, look, here, on your spread, there's
an A. You find the A. [The second book is a cloth book, old and tattered,
and long a favorite of Wendy's. It features an apple on the cover, and its
front page has an ABC block and ball. Through the book, there is a single
item on each page, with a large representation of the first letter of the word
commonly used to name the item. As AS turns the page, Wendy begins to
crawl about on her quilt, which shows ABC blocks interspersed with balls
and apples. Wendy points to each of the Xs on the blanket and begins talk-
ing to herself. AS reads the book, looks up, and sees Wendy pointing to the
Xs in her quilt.]
AS: That's an A, can you find the A on your blanket?
22 Shirley Brice Heath

W: there it is, this one, there's the hole too. [pokes her finger through a place
where the threads have broken in the quilting]
AS: [AS points to ball in book] Stop that, find the ball, see, here's another ball.

This episode characterizes the early orientation of Roadville children to the

written word. Bookreading time focuses on letters of the alphabet, numbers,
names of basic items pictured in books, and simplified retellings of stories in the
words of the adult. If the content or story plot seems too complicated for the
child, the adult tells the story in short, simple sentences, frequently laced with re-
quests that the child give what-explanations.
Wendy's favorite books are those with which she can participate: that is, those
to which she can answer, provide labels, point to items, give animal sounds, and
"read" the material back to anyone who will listen to her. She memorizes the pas-
sages and often knows when to turn the pages to show that she is "reading:' She
holds the book in her lap, starts at the beginning, and often reads the title,
"Puppy:'
Adults and children use either the title of the book or phrases such as "the book
about a puppy" to refer to reading material. When Wendy acquires a new book,
adults introduce the book with phrases such.as "This is a book about a duck, a lit-
tle yellow duck. See the duck. Duck goes quack quack:' On introducing a book,
adults sometimes ask the child to recall when they have seen a "real" specimen
such as that one treated in the book: "Remember the duck on the College lake?"
The child often shows no sign of linking the yellow fluffy duck in the book with
the large brown and gray mallards on the lake, and the adult makes no efforts to
explain that two such disparate looking objects go by the same name.
As Wendy grows older, she wants to "talk" during the long stories, Bible stories,
and carry out the participation she so enjoyed with the alphabet books. However,
by the time she reaches three and a half, Wendy is restrained from such wide-rang-
ing participation. When she interrupts, she is told:

Wendy, stop that, you be quiet when someone is reading to you. You listen; now sit still
and be quiet.

Often Wendy immediately gets down and runs away into the next room saying
"no, no." When this happens, her father goes to get her, pats her bottom, and puts
her down hard on the sofa beside him. "Now you're gonna learn to listen:' During
the third and fourth years, this pattern occurs more and more frequently; only
when Wendy can capture an aunt who does not visit often does she bring out the
old books and participate with them. Otherwise, parents, Aunt Sue, and other
adults insist that she be read a story and that she "listen" quietly.
When Wendy and her parents watch television, eat cereal, visit the grocery
store, or go to church, adults point out and talk about many types of written ma-
terial. On the way to the grocery, Wendy (3;8) sits in the backseat, and when her
Narrative Skills at Home and School 23

mother stops at a corner, Wendy says "Stop." Her mother says "Yes, that's a stop
sign." Wendy has, however, misread a yield sign as stop. Her mother offers no ex-
planation of what the actual message on the sign is, yet when she comes to the
sign, she stops to yield to an oncoming car. Her mother, when asked why she had
not given Wendy the word "yield;' said it was too hard, Wendy would not under-
stand, and "it's not a word we use like stop:'
Wendy recognized animal cracker boxes as early as 10 months, and later, as her
mother began buying other varieties, Wendy would see the box in the grocery
store and yell "Cook cook." Her mother would say, "Yes, those are cookies. Does
Wendy want a cookie?" One day Wendy saw a new type of cracker box, and
screeched "Cook cook:' Her father opened the box and gave Wendy a cracker and
waited for her reaction. She started the "cookie;' then took it to her mother, say-
ing "You eat." The mother joined in the game and said "Don't you want your
cookie?" Wendy said "No cookie. You eat:' "But Wendy, it's a cookie box, see?", and
her mother pointed to the C of crackers on the box. Wendy paid no attention and
ran off into another room.
In Roadville's literacy events, the rules for cooperative discourse around print
are repeatedly practiced, coached, and rewarded in the preschool years. Adults in
Roadville believe that instilling in children the proper use of words and under-
standing of the meaning of the written word are important for both their educa-
tional and religious success. Adults repeat aspects of the learning of literacy events
they have known as children. In the words of one Roadville parent: "It was then
that I began to learn ... when my daddy kept insisting I read it, say it right. It was
then that I did right, in his view:'
The path of development for such performance can be described in three over-
lapping stages. In the first, children are introduced to discrete bits and pieces of
books-separate items, letters of the alphabet, shapes, colors, and commonly rep-
resented items in books for children (apple, baby, ball, etc.). The latter are usually
decontextualized, not pictured in their ordinary contexts, and they are repre-
sented in two-dimensional flat line drawings. During this stage, children must
participate as predictable information-givers and respond to questions that ask
for specific and discrete bits of information about the written matter. In these lit-
eracy events, specific features of the two"dimensional items in books which are
different from their "real" counterparts are not pointed out. A ball in a book is flat;
a duck in a book is yellow and fluffy; trucks, cars, dogs, and trees talk in books. No
mention is made of the fact that such features do not fit these objects in reality.
Children are not encouraged to move their understanding of books into other sit-
uational contexts or to apply it in their general knowledge of the world about
them.
In the second stage, adults demand an acceptance of the power of print to en-
tertain, inform, and instruct. When Wendy could no longer participate by con-
tributing her knowledge at any point in the literacy event, she learned to recog-
nize bookreading as a performance. The adult exhibited the book to Wendy: she
24 Shirley Brice Heath

was to be entertained, to learn from the information conveyed in the material, and
to remember the book's content for the sequential followup questioning, as op-
posed to ongoing cooperative participatory questions.
In the third stage, Wendy was introduced to preschool workbooks which pro-
vided story information and was asked questions or provided exercises and games
based on the content of the stories or pictures. Follow-the-number coloring books
and preschool "push-out and paste" workbooks on shapes, colors, and letters of
the alphabet reinforced repeatedly that the written word could be taken apart into
small pieces and one item linked to another by following rules. She had practice
in the linear, sequential nature of books: begin at the beginning, stay in the lines
for coloring, draw straight lines to link one item to another, write your answers on
lines, keep your letters straight, match the cutout letter to diagrams of letter
shapes.
The differences between Roadville and Maintown are substantial. Roadville
adults do not extend either the content or the habits of literacy events beyond
bookreading. They do not, upon seeing an item or event in the real world, remind
children of a similar event in a book and launch a running commentary on simi-
larities and differences. When a game is played or a chore done, adults do not use
literate sources. Mothers cook without written recipes most of the time; if they use
a recipe from a written source, they do so usually only after confirmation and al-
teration by friends who have tried the recipe. Directions to games are read, but not
carefully followed, and they are not talked about in a series of questions and an-
swers which try to establish their meaning. Instead, in the putting together of toys
or the playing of games, the abilities or preferences of one party prevail. For ex-
ample, if an adult knows how to put a toy together, he does so; he does not talk
about the process, refer to the written material and "translate" for the child, or try
to sequence steps so the child can do it.3 Adults do not talk about the steps and -
procedures of how to do things; if a father wants his preschooler to learn to hold
a miniature bat or throw a ball, he says "Do it this waY:' He does not break up "this
way" into such steps as "Put your fingers around here:' "Keep your thumb in this
position:' "Never hold it above this line:' Over and over again, adults do a task and
children observe and try it, being reinforced only by commands such as "Do it like
this," "Watch that thumb:'
Adults at tasks do not provide a running verbal commentary on what they are
doing. They do not draw the attention of the child to specific features of the se-
quences of skills or the attributes of items. They do not ask questions of the child,
except questions which are directive or scolding in nature, ("Did you bring the
ball?" "Didn't you hear what I said?"). Many of their commands contain idioms
which are not explained: "Put it up;' or "Put that away now" (meaning to put it in
the place where it usually belongs}, or "Loosen up;' said to a four-year-old boy try-
ing to learn to bat a ball. Explanations which move beyond the listing of names of
items and their features are rarely offered by adults. Children do not ask questions
of the type "But I don't understand. What is that?" They appear willing to keep
Narrative Skills at Home and School 25

trying, and if there is ambiguity in a set of commands, they ask a question such as
"You want me to do this?" (demonstrating their current efforts), or they try to find
a way of diverting attention from the task at hand.
Both boys and girls during their preschool years are included in many adult ac-
tivities, ranging from going to church to fishing and camping. They spend a lot of
time observing and asking for turns to try specific tasks, such as putting a worm
on the hook or cutting cookies. Sometimes adults say "No, you're not old enough:'
But if they agree to the child's attempt at the task, they watch and give directives
and evaluations: "That's right, don't twist the cutter:' "Turn like this." "Don't try to
scrape it up now, let me do that:' Talk about the task does not segment its skills
and identify them, nor does it link the particular task or item at hand to other
tasks. Reason-explanations such as "If you twist the cutter, the cookies will be
rough on the edge;' are rarely given, or asked for.
Neither Roadville adults nor children shift the context of items in their talk.
They do not tell stories which fictionalize themselves or familiar events. They re-
ject Sunday School materials which attempt to translate Biblical events into a
modern-day setting. In Roadville, a story must be invited or announced by some-
one other than the storyteller, and only certain community members are desig-
nated good storytellers. A story is recognized by the group as a story about one
and all. It is a true story, an actual event which occurred to either the storyteller
or to someone else present. The marked behavior of the storyteller and audience
alike is seen as exemplifying the weaknesses of all and the need for persistence in
overcoming such weaknesses. The sources of stories are personal experience. They
are tales of transgressions which make the point of reiterating the expected norms
of behavior of man, woman, fisherman, worker, and Christian. They are true to
the facts of the event.
Roadville parents provide their children with books; they read to them and ask
questions about the books' contents. They choose books which emphasize nurs-
ery rhymes, alphabet learning, animals, and simplified Bible stories, and they re-
quire their children to repeat from these books and to answer formulaic questions
about their contents. Roadville adults also ask questions about oral stories which
have a point relevant to some marked behavior of a child. They use proverbs and
summary statements to remind their children of stories and to call on them for
simple comparisons of the stories' contents to their own situations. Roadville par-
ents coach children in their telling of a story, forcing them to tell about an inci-
dent as it has been pre-composed or pre-scripted in the head of the adult. Thus,
in Roadville, children come to know a story as either an accounting from a book,
or a factual account of a real event in which some type of marked behavior oc-
curred and there is a lesson to be learned. Any fictionalized account of a real event
is viewed as a lie; reality is better than fiction. Roadville's church and community
life admit no story other than that which meets the definition internal to the
group. Thus children cannot decontextualize their knowledge or fictionalize
events known to them and shift them about into other frames.
26 Shirley Brice Heath

When these children go to school they perform well in the initial stages of each
of the three early grades. They often know portions of the alphabet, some colors
and numbers, can recognize their names, and tell someone their address and their
parents' names. They will sit still and listen to a story, and they know how to an-
swer questions asking for what-explanations. They do well in reading workbook
exercises which ask for identification of specific portions of words, items from the
story, or the linking of two items, letters, or parts of words on the same page.
When the teacher reaches the end of story-reading or the reading circle and asks
questions such as "What did you like about the story?': relatively few Roadville
children answer. If asked questions such as "What would you have done if you had
been Billy [a story's main character)?", Roadville children most frequently say "I
don't know" or shrug their shoulders.
Near the end of each year, and increasingly as they move through the early pri-
mary grades, Roadville children can handle successfully the initial stages of
lessons. But when they move ahead to extra-credit items or to activities consid-
ered more advanced and requiring more independence, they are stumped. They
turn frequently to teachers asking "Do you want me to do this? What do I do
here?" If asked to write a creative story or tell it into a tape recorder, they retell sto-
ries from books; they do not create their own. They rarely provide emotional or
personal commentary on their accounting of real events or book stories. They are
rarely able to take knowledge learned in one context and shift it to another; they
do not compare two items or events and point out similarities and differences.
They find it difficult either to hold one feature of an event constant and shift all
others or to hold all features constant but one. For example, they are puzzled by
questions such as "What would have happened if Billy had not told the policemen
what happened?" They do not know how to move events or items out of a given
frame. To a question such as "What habits of the Hopi Indians might they be able
to take with them when they move to a city?", they provide lists of features of life
of the Hopi on the reservation. They do not take these items, consider their ap-
propriateness in an urban setting, and evaluate the hypothetical outcome. In gen-
eral, they find this type of question impossible to answer, and they do not know
how to ask teachers to help them take apart the questions to figure out the an-
swers. Thus their initial successes in reading, being good students, following or-
ders, and adhering to school norms of participating in lessons begin to fall away
rapidly about the time they enter the fourth grade. As the importance and fre-
quency of questions and reading habits with which they are familiar decline in the
higher grades, they have no way of keeping up or of seeking help in learning what
it is they do not even know they don't know.

Trackton
Babies in Trackton come home from the hospital to an environment which is al-
most entirely human. There are no cribs, car beds, or car seats, and only an occa-
Narrative Skills at Home and School 27

sional high chair or infant seat. Infants are held during their waking hours, occa-
sionally while they sleep, and they usually sleep in the bed with parents until they
are about two years of age. They are held, their faces fondled, their cheeks pinched,
and they eat and sleep in the midst of human talk and noise from the television,
stereo, and radio. Encapsuled in an almost totally human world, they are in the
midst of constant human communication, verbal and nonverbal. They literally
feel the body signals of shifts in emotion of those who hold them almost contin-
uously; they are talked about and kept in the midst of talk about topics that range
over any subject. As children make cooing or babbling sounds, adults refer to this
as "noise;' and no attempt is made to interpret these sounds as words or commu-
nicative attempts on the part of the baby. Adults believe they should not have to
depend on their babies to tell them what they need or when they are uncomfort-
able; adults know, children only "come to know:'
When a child can crawl and move about on his own, he plays with the house-
hold objects deemed safe for him-pot lids, spoons, plastic food containers. Only
at Christmas time are there special toys for very young children; these are usually
trucks, balls, doll babies, or plastic cars, but rarely blocks, puzzles, or books. As
children become completely mobile, they demand ride toys or electronic and me-
chanical toys they see on television. They never request nor do they receive ma-
nipulative toys, such as puzzles, blocks, take-apart toys or literacy-based items,
such as books or letter games.
Adults read newspapers, mail, calendars, circulars (political and civic-events re-
lated), school materials sent home to parents, brochures advertising new cars, tele-
vision sets, or other products, and the Bible and other church-related materials.
There are no reading materials especially for children (with the exception of chil-
dren's Sunday School materials), and adults do not sit and read to children. Since
children are usually left to sleep whenever and wherever they fall asleep, there is
no bedtime or naptime as such. At night, they are put to bed when adults go to
bed or whenever the person holding them gets tired. Thus, going to bed is not
framed in any special routine. Sometimes in a play activity during the day, an
older sibling will read to a younger child, but the latter soon loses interest and
squirms away to play. Older children often try to "play school" with younger chil-
dren, reading to them from books and trying to ask questions about what they
have read. Adults look on these efforts with amusement and do not try to con-
vince the small child to sit still and listen.
Signs from very young children of attention to the nonverbal behaviors of oth-
ers are rewarded by extra fondling, laughter, and cuddling from adults. For exam-
ple, when an infant shows signs of recognizing a family member's voice on the
phone by bouncing up and down in the arms of the adult who is talking on the
phone, adults comment on this to others present and kiss and nudge the child. Yet
when children utter sounds or combinations of sounds which could be inter-
preted as words, adults pay no attention. Often by the time they are twelve months
old, children approximate words or phrases of adults' speech; adults respond by
28 Shirley Brice Heath

laughing or giving special attention to the child and crediting him with "sound-
ing like" the person being imitated. When children learn to walk and imitate the
walk of members of the community, they are rewarded by comments on their ac-
tivities: "He walks just like Toby when he's tuckered out:'
Children between the ages of twelve and twenty-four months often imitate the
tune or "general Gestalt" (Peters 1977) of complete utterances they hear around
them. They pick up and repeat chunks (usually the ends) of phrasal and clausal
utterances of speakers around them. They seem to remember fragments of speech
and repeat these without active production. In this first stage of language learn-
ing, the repetition stage, they imitate the intonation contours and general shap-
ing of the utterances they repeat. Lem 1;2 in the following example illustrates this
pattern.

Mother: [talking to neighbor on porch while Lem plays with a truck on

the porch nearby] But they won't call back, won't happen =
Lem: =call back
Neighbor: Sam's going over there Saturday, he'll pick up a form=
Lem: =pick up on, pick up on [Lem here appears to have heard form
as on]

The adults pay no attention to Lem's "talk:' and their talk, in fact, often overlaps
his repetitions.
In the second stage, repetition with variation, Trackton children manipulate
pieces of conversation they pick up. They incorporate chunks of language from
others into their own ongoing dialogue, applying productive rules, inserting new
nouns and verbs for those used in the adults' chunks. They also play with rhyming
patterns and varying intonation contours.

Mother: She went to the doctor again.

Lem (2;2): [in a sing-song fashion] went to de doctor, doctor, tractor, dis my
tractor, doctor on a tractor, went to de doctor.

Lem creates a monologue, incorporating the conversation about him into his own
talk as he plays. Adults pay no attention to his chatter unless it gets so noisy as to
interfere with their talk.
In the third stage, participation, children begin to enter the ongoing conversa-
tions about them. They do so by attracting the adult's attention with a tug on the
arm or pant leg, and they help make themselves understood by providing non-
verbal reinforcements to help recreate a scene they want the listener to remember.
For example, if adults are talking, and a child interrupts with seemingly unintel-
ligible utterances, the child will make gestures, extra sounds, or act out some out-
standing features of the scene he is trying to get the adult to remember. Children
try to create a context, a scene, for the understanding of their utterance.
Narrative Skills at Home and School 29

This third stage illustrates a pattern in the children's response to their environ-
ment and their ways of letting others know their knowledge of the environment.
Once they are in the third stage, their communicative efforts are accepted by com-
munity members, and adults respond directly to the child, instead of talking to
others about the child's activities as they have done in the past. Children continue
to practice for conversational participation by playing, when alone, both parts of
dialogues, imitating gestures as well as intonation patterns of adults. By 2;6 all
children in the community can imitate the walk and talk of others in the com-
munity, or frequent visitors such as the man who comes around to read the gas
meters. They can feign anger, sadness, fussing, remorse, silliness, or any of a wide
range of expressive behaviors. They often use the same chunks of language for
varying effects, depending on nonverbal support to give the language different
meanings or cast it in a different key (Hymes 1974). Girls between three and four
years of age take part in extraordinarily complex stepping and clapping patterns
and simple repetitions of hand clap games played by older girls. From the time
they are old enough to stand alone, they are encouraged in their participation by
siblings and older children in the community. These games require anticipation
and recognition of cues for upcoming behaviors, and the young girls learn to
watch for these cues and to come in with the appropriate words and movements
at the right time.
Preschool children are not asked for what-explanations of their environment.
Instead, they are asked a preponderance of analogical questions which call for
non-specific comparisons of one item, event, or person with another: "What's that
like?" Other types of questions ask for specific information known to the child but
not the adults: "Where'd you get that from?" "What do you want?" "How come
you did that?" (Heath 1982a). Adults explain their use of these types of questions
by expressing their sense of children: they are "comers;' coming into their learn-
ing by experiencing what knowing about things means. As one parent of a two-
year-old boy put it: "Ain't no use me tellin' 'im: learn this, learn that, what's this,
what's that? He just gotta learn, gotta know; he see one thing one place one time,
he know how it go, see sump'n like it again, maybe it be the same, maybe it won't:'
Children are expected to learn how to know when the form belies the meaning,
and to know contexts of items and to use their understanding of these contexts to
draw parallels between items and events. Parents do not believe they have a tutor-
ing role in this learning; they provide the experiences on which the child draws
and reward signs of their successfully coming to know.
Trackton children's early stories illustrate how they respond to adult views of
them as "comers:' The children learn to tell stories by drawing heavily on their
abilities to render a context, to set a stage, and to call on the audience's power to
join in the imaginative creation of story. Between the ages of two and four years,
the children, in a monologue-like fashion, tell stories about things in their lives,
events they see and hear, and situations in which they have been involved. They
produce these spontaneously during play with other children or in the presence of
30 Shirley Brice Heath

adults. Sometimes they make an effort to attract the attention of listeners before
they begin the story, but often they do not. Lem, playing off the edge of the porch,
when he was about two and a half years of age, heard a bell in the distance. He
stopped, looked at Nellie and Benjy, his older siblings, who were nearby and said:

Way
Far
Now
It a church bell
Ringin'
Dey singin'
Ringin'
You hear it?
I hear it
Far
Now.

Lem had been taken to church the previous Sunday and had been much im-
pressed by the church bell. He had sat on his mother's lap and joined in the
singing, rocking to and fro on her lap, and clapping his hands. His story, which is
like a poem in its imagery and line-like prosody, is in response to the current stim-
ulus of a distant bell. As he tells the story, he sways back and forth.
This story, somewhat longer than those usually reported from other social
groups for children as young as Lem,4 has some features which have come to char-
acterize fully-developed narratives or stories. It recapitulates in its verbal outline
the sequence of events being recalled by the storyteller. At church, the bell rang
while the people sang. In the line "It a church bell;' Lem provides his story's topic,
and a brief summary of what is to come. This line serves a function similar to the
formulae often used by older children to open a story: "This is a story about (a
church bell)." Lem gives only the slightest hint of story setting or orientation to the
listener; where and when the story took place are capsuled in "Way, Far."
Preschoolers in Trackton almost never hear "Once upon a time there was a _ "
stories, and they rarely provide definitive orientations for their stories. They seem
to assume listeners "know" the situation in which the narrative takes place.
Similarly, preschoolers in Trackton do not close off their stories with formulaic
endings. Lem poetically balances his opening and closing in an inclusion, begin-
ning "Way, Far, Now." and ending "Far, Now:: The effect is one of closure, but there
is no clearcut announcement of closure. Throughout the presentation of action
and result of action in their stories, Trackton preschoolers invite the audience to re-
spond or evaluate the story's actions. Lem asks "You hear it?" which may refer ei-
ther to the current stimulus or to yesterday's bell, since Lem does not productively
use past tense endings for any verbs at this stage in his language development.
Narrative Skills at Home and School 31

Preschool storytellers have several ways of inviting audience evaluation and in-
terest. They may themselves express an emotional response to the story's actions;
they may have another character or narrator in the story do so often using alliter-
ative language play; or they may detail actions and results through direct discourse
or sound effects and gestures. All these methods of calling attention to the story
and its telling distinguish the speech event as a story, an occasion for audience and
storyteller to interact pleasantly, and not simply to hear an ordinary recounting of
events or actions.
Trackton children must be aggressive in inserting their stories into an ongoing
stream of discourse. Storytelling is highly competitive. Everyone in a conversation
may want to tell a story, so only the most aggressive wins out. The content ranges
widely, and there is "truth" only in the universals of human experience. Fact is
often hard to find, though it is usually the seed of the story. Trackton stories often
have no point-no obvious beginning or ending; they go on as long as the audi-
ence enjoys and tolerates the storyteller's entertainment.
Trackton adults do not separate out the elements of the environment around
their children to tune their attentions selectively. They do not simplify their lan-
guage, focus on single-word utterances by young children, label items or features
of objects in either books or the environment at large. Instead, children are con-
tinuously contextualized, presented with almost continuous communication.
From this ongoing, multiple-channeled stream of stimuli, they must themselves
select, practice, and determine rules of production and structuring. For language,
they do so by first repeating, catching chunks of sounds, intonation contours, and
practicing these without specific reinforcement or evaluation. But practice mate-
rial and models are continuously available. Next the children seem to begin to sort
out the productive rules for speech and practice what they hear about them with
variation. Finally, they work their way into conversations, hooking their meanings
for listeners into a familiar context by recreating scenes through gestures, special
sound effects, etc. These characteristics continue in their story-poems and their
participation in jump-rope rhymes. Because adults do not select out, name, and
describe features of th:~ environment for the young, children must perceive situa-
tions, determine how units of the situations are related to each other, recognize
these relations in other situations, and reason through what it will take to show
their correlation of one situation with another. The children can answer questions
such as "What's that like?" ["It's like Doug's car") but they can rarely name the
specific feature or features which make two items or events alike. For example, in
the case of saying a car seen on the street is "like Doug's car;' a child may be bas-
ing the analogy on the fact that this car has a flat tire and Doug's also had one last
week. But the child does not name (and is not asked to name) what is alike be-
tween the two cars.
Children seem to develop connections between situations or items not by spec-
ification of labels and features in the situations, but by configuration links.
32 Shirley Brice Heath

Recognition of similar general shapes or patterns of links seen in one situation

and connected to another, seem to be the means by which children set scenes in
their nonverbal representations of individuals, and later in their verbal chunking,
then segmentation and production of rules for putting together isolated units.
They do not decontextualize; instead they heavily contextualize nonverbal and
verbal language. They fictionalize their "true stories:' but they do so by asking the
audience to identify with the story through making parallels from their own ex-
periences. When adults read, they often do so in a group. One person, reading
aloud, for example, from a brochure on a new car decodes the text, displays illus-
trations and photographs, and listeners relate the text's meaning to their experi-
ences asking questions and expressing opinions. Finally, the group as a whole syn-
thesizes the written text and the negotiated oral discourse to construct a meaning
for the brochure (Heath 1982b).
When Trackton children go to school, they face unfamiliar types of questions
which ask for what-explanations. They are asked as individuals to identify items
by name, and to label features such as shape, color, size, number. The stimuli to
which they are to give these responses are two-dimensional flat representations
which are often highly stylized and bear little resemblance to the "real" items.
Trackton children generally score in the lowest percentile range on the
Metropolitan Reading Readiness tests. They do not sit at their desks and complete
reading workbook pages; neither do they tolerate questions about reading mate-
rials which are structured along the usual lesson format. Their contributions are
in the form of "I had a duck at my house one time:' "Why'd he do that?" or they
imitate the sound effects teachers may produce in stories they read to the children.
By the end of the first three primary grades, their general language arts scores have
qeen consistently low, except for those few who have begun to adapt to and ,adopt
some of the behaviors they have had to learn in school. But the majority not only
fail to learn the content of lessons, they also do not adopt the social interactional
rules for school literacy events. Print in isolation bears little authority in their
world. The kinds of questions asked of reading books are unfamiliar. The chil-
dren's abilities to metaphorically link two events or situations and to recreate
scenes are not tapped in the school; in fact, these abilities often cause difficulties, be-
cause they enable children to see parallels teachers did not intend, and indeed,
may not recognize until the children point them out (Heath 1978).
By the end of the lessons or by the time in their total school career when rea-
son-explanations and affective statements call for the creative comparison of two
or more situations, it is too late for many Trackton children. They have not picked
up along the way the composition and comprehension skills they need to trans-
late their analogical skills into a channel teachers can accept. They seem not to
know how to take meaning from reading; they do not observe the rules of linear-
ity in writing, and their expression of themselves on paper is very limited. Orally
taped stories are often much better, but these rarely count as much as written
compositions. Thus, Trackton children continue to collect very low or failing
Narrative Skills at Home and School 33

grades, and many decide by the end of the sixth grade to stop trying and turn their
attention to the heavy peer socialization which usually begins in these years.

From Community to Classroom

A recent review of trends in research on learning pointed out that "learning to
read through using and learning from language has been less systematically stud-
ied than the decoding process" (Glaser 1979: 7). Put another way, how children
learn to use language to read to learn has been less systematically studied than de-
coding skills. Learning how to take meaning from writing before one learns to
read involves repeated practice in using and learning from language through ap-
propriate participation in literacy events such as exhibitor/questioner and specta-
tor/respondent dyads (Scollon and Scollon 1979) or group negotiation of the
meaning of a written text. Children have to learn to select, hold, and retrieve con-
tent from books and other written or printed texts in accordance with their com-
munity's rules or "ways of taking:' and the children's learning follows community
paths of language socialization. In each society, certain kinds of childhood partic-
ipation in literacy events may precede others, as the developmental sequence
builds toward the whole complex of home and community behaviors character-
istic of the society. The ways of taking employed in the school may in turn build
directly on the preschool development, may require substantial adaptation on the
part of the children, or may even run directly counter to aspects of the commu-
nity's pattern.

At Home. In Maintown homes, the construction of knowledge in the earliest

preschool years depends in large part on labeling procedures and what-explana-
tions. Maintown families, like other mainstream families, continue this kind of
classification and knowledge construction throughout the child's environment
and into the school years, calling it into play in response to new items in the en-
vironment and in running commentaries on old items as they compare to new
ones. This pattern of linking old and new knowledge is reinforced in narrative
tales which fictionalize the teller's events or recapitulate a story from a book. Thus
for these children the bedtime story is simply an early link in a long chain of in-
terrelated patterns of taking meaning from the environment. Moreover, along this
chain, the focus is on the individual as respondent and cooperative negotiator of
meaning from books. In particular, children learn that written language may rep-
resent not only descriptions of real events, but decontextualized logical proposi-
tions, and the occurrence of this kind of information in print or in writing legit-
imates a response in which one brings to the interpretation of written text selected
knowledge from the real world. Moreover, readers must recognize how certain
types of questions assert the priority of meanings in the written word over reality.
The "real" comes into play only after prescribed decontextualized meanings; af-
fective responses and reason-explanations follow conventional presuppositions
which stand behind what-explanations.
34 Shirley Brice Heath

Roadville also provides labels, features, and what-explanations, and prescribes

listening and performing behaviors for preschoolers. However, Roadville adults
do not carry on or sustain in continually overlapping and interdependent fashion
the linking of ways of taking meaning from books to ways of relating that knowl-
edge to other aspects of the environment. They do not encourage decontextual-
ization; in fact, they proscribe it in their own stories about themselves and their
requirements of stories from children. They do not themselves make analytic
statements or assert universal truths, except those related to their religious faith.
They lace their stories ~ith synthetic (nonanalytic) statements which express, de-
scribe, and synthesize actual real-life materials. Things do not have to follow log-
ically so long as they fit the past experience of individuals in the community. Thus
children learn to look for a specific moral in stories and to expect that story to fit
their facts of reality explicitly. When they themselves recount an event, they do the
same, constructing the story of a real event according to coaching by adults who
want to construct the story as they saw it.
Trackton is like neither Maintown nor Roadville. There are no bedtime stories;
in fact, there are few occasions for reading to or with children specifically. Instead,
during the time. these activities would take place in mainstream and Roadville
homes, Trackton children are enveloped in different kinds of social interactions.
They are held, fed, talked about, and rewarded for nonverbal, and later verbal, ren-
derings of events they witness. Trackton adults value and respond favorably when
children show they have come to know how to use language to show correspon-
dence in function, style, configuration, and positioning between two different
things or situations. Analogical questions are asked ofTrackton children, although
the implicit questions of structure and function these embody are never made ex-
plicit. Children do not have labels or names of attributes of items and events
pointed out for them, and they are asked for reason-explanations not what-expla-
nations. Individuals express their personal responses and recreate corresponding
situations with often only a minimal adherence to the germ of truth of a story.
Children come to recognize similarities of patterning, though they do not name
lines, points, or items which are similar between two items or situations. They are
familiar with group literacy events in which several community members orally
negotiate the meaning of a written text.

At School. In the early reading stages, and in later requirements for reading to
learn at more advanced stages, children from the three communities respond dif-
ferently, because they have learned different methods and degrees of taking from
books. In comparison to Maintown children, the habits Roadville children learned
in bookreading and toy-related episodes have not continued for them through
other activities and types of reinforcement in their environment. They have had
less exposure to both the content of books and ways of learning from books than
have mainstream children. Thus their need in schools is not necessarily for an in-
tensification of presentation of labels, a slowing down of the sequence of intro-
Narrative Skills at Home and School 35

ducing what-explanations in connection with bookreading. Instead they need ex-

tension of t11:ese habits to other domains and to opportunities for practicing habits
such as producing running commentaries, creating exhibitor/questioner and spec-
tator/respondent roles. Perhaps most important, Roadville children need to have
articulated for them distinctions in discourse strategies and structures. Narratives of
real events have certain strategies and structures; imaginary tales, flights of fantasy,
and affective expressions have others. Their community's view of narrative dis-
course style is very narrow and demands a passive role in both creation of and re-
sponse to the account of events. Moreover, these children have to be reintroduced
to a participant frame of reference to a book. Though initially they were participants
in bookreading, they have been trained into passive roles since the age of three
years, and they must learn once again to be active information-givers, taking from
books and linking that knowledge to other aspects of their environment.
Trackton students present an additional set of alternatives for procedures in the
early primary grades. Since they usually have few of the expected "natural" skills
of taking meaning from books, they must not only learn these, but also retain their
analogical reasoning practices for use in some of the later stages of learning to read.
They must learn to adapt the creativity in language, metaphor, fictionalization,
recreation of scenes and exploration of functions and settings of items they bring to
school. These children already use narrative skills highly rewarded in the upper
primary grades. They distinguish a fictionalized story from a real-life narrative.
They know that telling a story can be in many ways related to play; it suspends re-
ality, and frames an old event in a new context; it calls on audience participation
to recognize the setting and participants. They must now learn as individuals to re-
count factual events in a straightforward way and recognize appropriate occasions for
reason-explanations and affective expressions. Trackton children seem to have
skipped learning to label, list features, and give what-explanations. Thus they need
to have the mainstream or school habits presented in familiar activities with expla-
nations related to their own habits of taking meaning from the environment. Such
"simple;' "natural" things as distinctions between two-dimensional and three-di-
mensional objects may need to be explained to help Trackton children learn the
stylization and decontextualization which characterizes books.
To lay out in more specific detail how Roadville and Trackton's ways of know-
ing can be used along with those of mainstreamers goes beyond the scope of this
paper. However, it must be admitted that a range of alternatives to ways of learn-
ing and displaying knowledge characterizes all highly school-successful adults in
the advanced stages of their careers. Knowing more about how these alternatives
are learned at early ages in different sociocultural conditions can help the school
to provide opportunities for all students to avail themselves of these alternatives
early in their school careers. For example, mainstream children can benefit from
early exposure to Trackton's creative, highly analogical styles of telling stories and
giving explanations, and they can add the Roadville true story with strict chronic-
ity and explicit moral to their repertoire of narrative types.
36 Shirley Brice Heath

In conclusion, if we want to understand the place of literacy in human societies

and ways children acquire the literacy orientations of their communities, we must
recognize two postulates of literacy and language development.

1. Strict dichotomization between oral and literate traditions is a construct of

researchers, not an accurate portrayal of reality across cultures.
2. A unilinear model of development in the acquisition of language structures
and uses cannot adequately account for culturally diverse ways of acquiring
knowledge or developing cognitive styles.

Roadville and Trackton tell us that the mainstream type of literacy orientation is
not the only type even among Western societies. They also tell us that the main-
stream ways of acquiring communicative competence do not offer a universally
applicable model of development. They offer proof of Hymes' assertion a decade
ago that "it is impossible to generalize validly about 'oral' vs. 'literate' cultures as
uniform types" (Hymes 1973: 54).
Yet in spite of such warnings and analyses of the uses and functions of writing
in the specific proposals for comparative development and organization of cul-
tural systems (cf. Basso 1974: 432), the majority of research on literacy has fo-
cused on differences in class, amount of education, and level of civilization among
groups having different literacy characteristics.
"We need, in short, a great deal of ethnography" (Hymes 1973: 57) to provide
descriptions of the ways different social groups "take" knowledge from the envi-
ronment. For written sources, these ways of taking may be analyzed in terms of
types of literacy events, such as group negotiation of meaning from written texts,
individual "looking things up" in reference books, writing family records in Bibles,
and the dozens of other types of occasions when books or other written materials
are integral to interpretation in an interaction. These must in turn be analyzed in
terms of the specific features of literacy events, such as labeling, what-explanation,
affective comments, reason-explanations, and many other possibilities. Literacy
events must also be interpreted in relation to the larger sociocultural patterns
which they may exemplify or reflect. For example, ethnography must describe lit-
eracy events in their sociocultural contexts, so we may come to understand how
such patterns as time and space usage, caregiving roles, and age and sex segrega-
tion are interdependent with the types and features of literacy events a commu-
nity develops. It is only on the basis of such thorough-going ethnography that fur-
ther progress is possible toward understanding cross-cultural patterns of oral and
written language uses and paths of development of communicative competence.

Notes
1. First presented at the Terman Conference on Teaching at Stanford University, 1980,
this paper has benefitted from cooperation with M. Cochran-Smith of the University of
Pennsylvania. She shares an appreciation of the relevance of Roland Barthes' work for stud-
Narrative Skills at Home and School 37

ies of the socialization of young children into literacy; her research (1981) on the story-
reading practices of a mainstream school-oriented nursery school provides a much needed
detailed account of early school orientation to literacy.
2. Terms such as mainstream or middle-class cultures or social groups are frequently
used in both popular and scholarly writings without careful definition. Moreover, numer-
ous studies of behavioral phenomena (for example, mother-child interactions in language
learning) either do not specify that the subjects being described are drawn from main-
stream groups or do not recognize the importance of this limitation. As a result, findings
from this group are often regarded as universal. For a discussion of this problem, see
Chanan and Gilchrist 1974, Payne and Bennett 1977. In general, the literature characterizes
this group as school-oriented, aspiring toward upward mobility through formal institu-
tions, and providing enculturation which positively values routines of promptness, linear-
ity (in habits ranging from furniture arrangement to entrance into a movie theater), and
evaluative and judgmental responses to behaviors which deviate from their norms.
In the United States, mainstream families tend to locate in neighborhoods and suburbs
around cities. Their social interactions center not in their immediate neighborhoods, but
around voluntary associations across the city. Thus a cluster of mainstream families (and
not a community-which usually implies a specific geographic territory as the locus of a
majority of social interactions) is the unit of comparison used here with the Trackton and
Roadville communities.
3. Behind this discussion are findings from cross-cultural psychologists who have stud-
ied the links between verbalization of task and demonstration of skills in a hierarchical se-
quence, e.g., Childs and Greenfield 1980; see Goody 1979 on the use of questions in learn-
ing tasks unrelated to a familiarity with books.
4. Cf. Umiker-Sebeok's (1979) descriptions of stories of mainstream middle-class chil-
dren, ages 3-5 and Sutton-Smith 1981.

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3
Detective Stories at
Dinnertime: Problem-Solving
Through Co-Narration
ELINOR OCHS, RUTH SMITH, AND CAROLYN TAYLOR

I. Introduction
A. Goals

For over a year, our research group' has been going into homes in the early
evening for several hours, video- and audio- recording families eating dinner,
relaxing, and putting children to bed. We are analyzing ways in which white,
English-speaking American families varying in social class solve problems
through talk. The present analysis is based on over a hundred hours of recorded
interactions, approximately eight hours for each of 14 families (8 high SES and 6
low SES) from our initial corpus.
In this paper, our focus is on narrative as a problem-solving discourse activity.
Our concern is the interface of cognitive and social activity, as outlined in
Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky 1978, 1981, Wertsch 1985, Rogoff Lave 1984). Our
data indicate how problem-solving through story-telling is a socially-accom-
plished cognitive activity: family members articulate solutions to problems posed
by narrated events and at times work together to articulate the narrative problem
itself. Such joint cognizing can be seen as part of what families do-what makes a
family an 'activity system' (Engestrom, 1987, to appear). Thus, joint problem-solv-
ing through narrative gives structure to family roles, relationships, values, and
world views.

B. The Activity of Dinner

1. Dinner as an Opportunity Space. While narratives are told among family
members in numerous settings, dinnertime is a. preferred moment for this activ-
ity in many American families. Dinnertime is a time when adults and children
often come together after being apart throughout the day, a somewhat unique
time period for many families wherein there is some assurance of a relatively cap-
tive audience for sounding things out. Dinnertime is thus an opportunity space-

39
40 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Tuylor

a temporal, spatial, and social moment which provides for the possibility of joint
activity among family members. Families use this opportunity space in different
ways: some families talk more than others; some talk only about eating; others use
the moment to make plans or recount the day's events. Whatever direction the talk
takes, dinnertime is a potential forum for generating both knowledge and social
order/disorder through interaction with other family members. Dinnertime thus
provides a crystallization of family processes, what activity theorists (Leontyev
1981, Wertsch 1985) might call a 'genetically primary example' of family life.

2. Dinner Arrangements. Physical arrangements for eating dinner vary across the
households in our study and within households in the course of a single evening. As
illustrated in Figure 3.1, dinner arrangements vary in terms of three dimensions:
time, space, and activity focus. In terms of the temporal dimension, dinners may be
staggered or synchronous. That is, family members may eat at different times or
concurrently. In some families, children and adults eat when they are hungry and
not necessarily at the same time. Families often do not eat at the same time every
day of the week. Second, dinners may vary spatially in that family members may be
dispersed or assembled while eating. Sometimes children eat in one room or one
part of a room and one or more adults eat elsewhere. Third, dinners vary in terms
of whether family members are overtly attending to different activities or share the
same activity focus. For example, certain members may be watching television as
they eat, while others are talking to one another. In other families, all members, at
least on the surface, appear to be engaged in the same activity focus, either as rati-
fied participants in the same conversation or as co-viewers of the same TV program.
Dinners characterized by features along the right side of Figure 3.1 (i.e. family
members eating at same time and place and sharing activity focus) are more cen-
tralized and tend to be more formal and last longer than dinners characterized by
features on the left side of Figure 3.1 (i.e. family members eating at different times
and places and engaging in different activities).

3. Dinner and Talk. These different dinner arrangements have implications for
the amount and kind of talk that takes place at dinnertime (cf. Feiring and Lewis,
1987). The more centralized dinners promote more extensive problem-solving
through talk. Family members who sit down together to eat appear to use a wider
range of problem-solving genres-not only stories, but plans and arguments as
well. With respect to stories, centralized dinners tend to promote longer stories,

Dimensions Arrangement Types

Decentralized Centralized
Temporal Staggered vs. Synchronous
Spatial Dispersed vs. Assembled
Activity focus Diverse vs. Shared
Figure 3.1 Dinner Arrangements
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 41

with more audience involvement in sorting out problems, solutions and stances.
Stories in the decentralized dinners tend to fill one page or less of transcript and
do not significantly involve other interlocutors in problem-solving. In contrast,
stories in centralized dinners can fill several pages; in one example, a narrative
threads through 46 pages of a 64-page dinner transcript as family members work
through unresolved aspects of a narrative situation over a 40-minute period.
In this sense, families who eat together exploit the opportunity space differently
from families who decentralize dinnertime. Centralized dinners appear to provide
an enduring moment in which family members can help one another to sort out
problematic events in their lives through co-narration. The resulting narratives, as
we shall see, differ markedly from narratives in which a story line is presented in
an orderly fashion, where settings are fixed at the outset of the telling and events
are chronologically and causally ordered.
Centralized dinner arrangements tend to promote more than co-narrated sto-
ries; they also promote opportunities for adults to exert power over children.
Relative to decentralized dinner arrangements, centralized dinners appear more
ritualized, entailing conformity to numerous eating conventions. Many dinners
involve opening and closing rituals, such as saying grace and asking permission to
be excused. Further conventions include where to sit, how to sit, which utensils to
use, how close the serving dish should be from the plate, how much food one
should serve oneself, how to request food, how to respond to offers of food, when
to speak vis-a-vis eating, the order of eating different foods, which foods must be
eaten, quantity of food which must be eaten off plate and so on. Each of these con-
ventions may become a locus for compliance-gaining negotiation between adults
and children. In this sense, centralized dinners provide a greater opportunity
space for the exertion of social control over children. In contrast, decentralized
dinners empower children to organize their own dinner activities. Decen-
tralization seems to allow children greater freedom while exposing them less to
adult narrative styles and problem-solving approaches.

II. Narratives
A. Approaches to Narrative
Studies of narrative tend to be either cognitive or sociological. Cognitive studies
focus on stories as problem-solving genres. While definitions of what constitutes
a story differ, most studies emphasize that stories contain one central problematic
event-sometimes called 'an initiating event'-which precipitates a series of ac-
tions and reactions. The presentation of the core narrative problem and its reso-
lution or non-resolution entails several story components, including: setting, ini-
tiating event, internal response, attempt, consequence, and reactions (Stein 1979,
Stein & Policastro 1984, Trabasso et al. 1984). In these studies, a major interest is
the cause-effect relations among components and their mental representation by
children and adults.
42 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Thylor

Sociological studies focus on social consequences or social production of a

story. For example, Labov and others have demonstrated how narrators restruc-
ture their biographies through careful reframing of past events (Labov, 1984;
Fisher, 1985a, 1985b; Schiffrin; 1987). Other studies have emphasized the role of
the audience as co-author of the narrative (Duranti 1986, Goodwin l 986a, l 986b,
Haviland 1986, Jefferson 1978, Lerner 1987, Mandelbaum 1987a, 1987b, Sacks
1964-72). These studies look at the co-construction of stories and consider the
impact of audience's (story recipients') participation on the telling of stories. In
this framework, recipients as well as tellers impact the life of a story in various
ways: they may derail a story, encourage its continuation and elaboration, or
change its direction.
Our approach is synthetic, recognizing the importance of both cognitive and
sociological approaches to narrative and their implications for each other. In par-
ticular, cognitive approaches tend to focus on individual tellings and retellings of
stories without attending to the fact that stories are often if not typically collabo-
ratively produced, i.e. co-narrated, by those participating in the social interaction.
On the other hand, sociological approaches emphasize co-narration but do not
link co-narration to co-cognition, specifically to the joint working out of prob-
lems. Our study will demonstrate both that narrative components are constituted,
ordered, and clarified through social collaboration and that problem-solving mo-
tivates co-narration. We believe, in other words, that the activity of co-narration
stimulates problem-solving, while the activity of problem-solving stimulates co-
narration. To see how this mutual stimulation manifests itself, we turn to dinner
narratives in American households.

B. Detective Stories
1. Introduction. The stories in our corpus differ in the degree to which story
problems are reformulated in the course of storytelling. Certain tellings involve
extensive participation of other family members in a groping process to make
sense out of the problem underlying the narrative's initiating event. We call such
narratives 'detective stories' in the sense that there is missing information felt by
some co-narrator(s) to be vital to understanding the problem that motivates ac-
tions and reactions of protagonists and others in the storytelling situation. Co-
narrators return, sometimes again and again, like Lieutenant Columbo, to pieces
of the narrative problem in an effort to find 'truth' through 'cross-examination' of
the details, sometimes struggling for an illuminating shift in perspective.
The co-narrated detective stories in our corpus differ from stories in which a
story problem is laid out by an authoritative teller whose perspective on the prob-
lem is relatively undisputed (cf Lerner 1987 and Mandelbaum 1987a and 1987b
for extended discussion). In the latter cases, the perspective on a story problem,
that is, the version of an initiating event presented by an authoritative teller, is
more or less sustained throughout the telling. In detective stories, however, au-
thority to define a narrative problem is not vested solely in a single knowing teller.
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 43

A story problem is scrutinized in the course of the telling: other co-present par-
ticipants, even those who do not have direct knowledge of the narrated events,
probe for or contribute information relevant to clarifying a narrative problem.
This new information may or may not lead to a reformulated perspective on a
narrative problem. When family co-narrators do overtly adopt a novel perspective
on a narrative problem, we see evidence of a paradigm shift. Such cognitive shifts
are socially engendered and have social implications, reaffirming the family as a
dynamic activity system capable of working through problems.
Besides subverting the notion of one authoritative teller, detective stories also
impact the organization of story components. In detective stories, there are at
least two versions of a narrative problem that emerge. A story with a setting, an
initiating event and subsequent responses is presented and could be treated by
those co-present as complete; however, the mark of the detective story is that
somebody persists in examining the narrative problem beyond this point, elicit-
ing or introducing relevant information not provided in the initial version of the
story. Sometimes the 'missing' information is presented immediately following
the first version of a story, e.g. example (1) below. In other cases, the 'missing' in-
formation surfaces much later and, as we shall see in example (2), may be ex-
tracted from other stories that involve relevant characters or events. Turning two
or more seemingly inconsequential stories, or bits and pieces, into one detective
story requires someone who makes a commitment-someone who persists, who
makes connections, who draws inferences. The information which surfaces may
lead to a reanalysis of the earlier story's central problem. Such information thus
recontextualizes the earlier story as not the story but a story, i.e. only one version
of the narrated events.
We believe that talk which recontextualizes earlier storytelling is storytelling as
well. Our analysis of detective storytelling illustrates our more general view that
storytelling in conversation is dynamic and open-ended. Stories often do not
come in neat packages. Recent research suggests that story beginnings are socially
negotiated (Lerner 1987; Mandelbaum 1987a, 1987b). In detective stories, we see
that 'the end' is also socially negotiated.
Our working hypothesis is that detective stories are typical of everyday narra-
tion. They grow out of the process of grappling with life's incomplete under-
standings. Initial narrators often seek the kind of co-narration that both helps fur-
ther their own comprehension of their stories and give meaning to their stories
and their lives.

2. The Role of Slow Disclosure. The structure of detective stories in conversation

parallels that of certain literary and cinematic tales. Such stories are particularly
characterized by a strategy known as 'slow disclosure; that is, the gradual emer-
gence of relevant information or the "prolonged delay in giving away crucial facts
in a story" (Sharff 1982: 119). For film directors and writers, slow disclosure is a
conscious technique for drawing audiences into some unfolding problem; its
44 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Tuylor

strategic use creates rhetorical and powerful effects, such as heightened tension. In
the narratives we are examining, slow disclosure does not appear to be a conscious
technique but rather an outcome of problem-solving through co-narration.
Critical elements of the narrated events are slowly disclosed through joint atten-
tion to particular parts of the narrative, especially through the probing contribu-
tions of intimates.
For example, the setting, which provides physical and psychological back-
ground to understanding the narrative problem, may be probed and subsequently
elaborated or revised through further co-narration. Experiences and events criti-
cal to assessing the psychological setting-beliefs, values and attitudes-may not
even be treated by initial tellers as relevant or desirable to reveal at the outset of
the narrative. While family members can assume some of this information be-
cause of familiarity with the narrator and the narrative circumstances, they also
depend on the talk itself to index parts of the psychological setting. These may
prove critical to their assessments and thus to the evolution of the narrative itself.
New settings present opportunities for co-narrators to recontextualize the initiat-
ing event and the responses and reactions it incurs. Thus, co-constructed, unfold-
ing settings orient and re-orient a story throughout its telling.
Slow disclosure of elements such as psychological setting may result in part
from a preference of initial tellers to present narrated events in a way that portrays
themselves in the most complimentary light. We refer to this preference as the
'looking good' constraint on storytelling.
Example (1) is a relatively simple illustration of slow disclosure and the 'look-
ing good' constraint operating in a detective story, showing how settings unfold
through co-narration:
(1) Detention Narrative-Family B Dinner #2, p 12-14
Mother, Father, and two children-Lucy, 9 years and Chuck, 6 years-are seated
around dinner table; they have been discussing degrees of familiarity a person can
have with colleagues at work or school and Chuck has offered, as an example, that
he knows Mrs. Arnold, the school principal, very well and Mother has commented
that she is a good person to know.

Lucy: I don't think Mrs. Arnold is being fair because um

Mother: Bill?
Father: (?
Lucy: When we were back in school um-this girl-she
pulled um Valerie's dress up to here ((gestures with
hand across chest)) in front of the boys
Mother: mhm?
Lucy: She only-all she did was get a day in detention
Mother: mhm?-You think she should have gotten suspended?
(pause)
Lucy: at least-that's-
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 45

Mother: mhm?
Lucy: not allowed in school
(pause)
Father: ((clears throat)) hm-(fortunately capital)
punishment is still=
Chuck: Was it a girl Lucy who did it or a boy=
[
Father: =beyond the (pri-/reach of) elementary
school principals
Chuck: =that did that
[
Mother: (?
Chuck: hm?
Mother: (Lucy) was really embarrassed ( (talking while
eating)) (I mean you really) would have liked to
kill the girl-huh? Cuz you were upset with her?
But you were held back because you thought your
school was goin to do it and the school didn't
do it and you feel upset
(pause)
Chuck: I think she should be in there for a whole MONTH
or so well maybe (pause) each day she have to go
there-each day each day each day even if the-
[
Lucy: If you go to
detention more than three times then you get
suspended
Father: ((head leaning forward)) More than how many times?
Lucy: Three
Father: ((nods))
(pause)
Chuck: Lucy-you only went to it once-right?
Father: ((clears throat))
((Lucy arches her back, eyes open wide, looks at
Chuck, shocked, starts shaking her head;
father immediately looks up at her))
Father: You can tell us can't you?
[
Mother: I'm listening
Lucy: ((low to Chuck)) (thanks)-( (louder)) yeah-that
was-
Mother: was in detention once?-
Lucy: once
46 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn 'Tu.ylor

Mother: in Mr. Dodge's year

Chuck: only once that's all
[
Mother: ( ) in the playground?
Father: hm
Chuck: Lucy if you get a second a third and a fourth that
means you're out-right?
Mother: Well no honey not every year-( you're allowed) to
start new every year
(pause)
Father: like the statute of limitations
(fairly long pause)
Mother: things run out after a while
In this narrative, the information that Lucy, the initial narrator, was once pun-
ished by Mrs. Arnold, the principal of her school, is a critical aspect of the setting,
because it illuminates Lucy's psychological stance towards the same principal's
punishment of another student's misdemeanor. Lucy at first does not present her
own past misdemeanor as part of the setting but simply situates the initiating
event in a physical setting ("When we were back in school ... "). In line with the
'looking good' constraint, Lucy would probably never have disclosed this person-
ally damaging critical background information.
Prior to this disclosure, family members had only Lucy's version of the narrated
problem as data for interpreting her reactions. Presumably Lucy felt the way she
did only because of the morally offensive nature of the misdemeanor. This is the
interpretation her mother promotes, co-constructing the telling of her daughter's
internal responses and emotional reactions. A joint sense of moral indignation
stimulates increasingly drastic proposals for punishment-from "suspension" to
"at least (suspension)" to "would have liked to kill the girl"-until Lucy's younger
brother elicits the crucial background information by asking his sister, "Lucy, you
only went to it [detention] once, right?" Lucy glares at her brother, mumbles to
her parents and grudgingly admits to going to detention.
This new co-authored setting recontextualizes both the narrative problem and
Lucy's reactions: Now the principal is not fair because the principal gave the same
punishment-one day's detention-to both Lucy and the horrid girl who com-
mitted a far more serious transgression than Lucy presumably had. Thus we see
how co-participants in the telling of a story"assist" one another in bringing a nar-
rative problem into focus. Such assistance, however, is not always welcome: it may
subvert the initial narrator's attempt to look good. In this case, the narrative seems
to have backfired on Lucy and left her damaged by the account, further indexed
by her sudden inarticulateness after the revelation.
3. Paradigm-Shifting Detective Stories. In the case of the Detention narrative,
there is no overt evidence that the family has in fact used the newly disclosed set-
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 47

ting to reanalyze the problem embedded in the initiating event, i.e. they do not
overtly use the knowledge of Lucy's own misdemeanor and one day's detention to
reframe the morally untenable misdemeanor (the pulling up of the dress) in a
new context: It is more serious than the wrongdoing committed by Lucy in the
past. The family's doubletake does lead to a softening of response towards trans-
gressors, now that Lucy is included in this category, but then the topic is abruptly
dropped.
In other narratives, however, co-tellers display through talk their realization
that there is a problem with earlier framings of the problem. Attending to the un-
folding disclosures, co-narrators negotiate and in some cases adopt an entirely
new perspective, or even a new paradigm, for considering a narrated problem.
The adoption of a new paradigm is akin to scientific paradigm shifts of the sort
noted by Kuhn (1962, 1977).
Paradigm-shifting through co-narration is illustrated in example (2), a very
complex detective story extending over 40 minutes of dinnertime talk and still
going on during clean-up. The initial narrator of this story is Marie, the mother
in the family being recorded and director of a day care center in their home. Her
story grows out of an incident which has just occurred prior to dinner in which
Bev, the mother of one of the day-care children, presents Marie with $320. The
evolving issue which drives the narrative concerns the meaning of this act-the
definition of the narrative problem. Is it payment for one month's child care? Or
is it a penalty fee for pulling the child out of the school without two weeks' notice?
As Marie first reports the incident, only the first of these questions arises between
Marie and Bev:
(2-a) Bev Narrative-7:17 p.m., F Dinner #1, p 18-19
Mother (Marie), Father (Jon) and 3 children-Adam, 9, Julie, 5, and Eric. 3-
seated around dinner table; food has been distributed, Jon has said grace, and a
family friend has just left.

Marie: Bev walked up and handed me three twenty

Jon: mhm
Marie: And I thought she only owed me eighty-and she said
she didn't want a receipt and I went in and got the
receipt book and she only owed me eighty
((Marie holds her corn, looks intently at Jon))
Jon: mmhm
Marie: n she was real happy about that (pause) ((Marie
starts to eat corn, then stops)) She says "no
no no no no, I don't need a receipt" -
Julie: (Mom look/May I have the)
[
Marie: and just hands me three twenty
(long pause)
48 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Tuylor

((sounds of eating corn on the cob))

Marie: I-took my book-out though cuz she hardly ever-
makes ((laughing)) mistakes-I thought maybe I
wrote it wrong but I went back and got three
receipts
Adam: (No::) ((to cat))
[
Marie: and they all were
Jon: mhm
Marie: in-you know-what do you call that?
Adam: Daddy, is the (pepper ? )
[
Jon: consecutive order?
Marie: Yeah-mhm
Jon: (Cat) are you hungry-Has he been (fed) today?

In this initial version, Marie views the narrative problem as whether or not Bev
was in arrears. Her reported internal response was one of self-doubt, grounded in
the belief that Bev hardly ever makes mistakes. In keeping with the 'looking good'
constraint, this version reveals Marie as an honest businessperson. The telling thus
far provokes minimal involvement from Marie's husband, Jon.
After a considerable interval-IS minutes of attention to eating, other narra-
tions, etc., alternate reformulations of the Bev-narrative problem emerge in piece-
meal fashion. The reformulations grow out of a second narrative about Bev, in-
troduced by Marie, in which Bev is characterized as opportunistic. At this point,
Jon is drawn in as an active co-narrator.
(2-b) Bev Narrative- 7:35 p.m., Bev/Family Dinner #1, p 43-45
Wherein Jon is elaborating on the second narrative, equating Bev's receiving
unwarranted insurance benefits after an accident with the behavior of a customer
who gets excessive change back from a grocery clerk.

Jon: you're supposed to think "Hey, that's great" and walk

out the store ((laughing) )-n she gave me back-
twenty dollars too much cuz she must've thought I
gave her a fifty
Marie: mhm
Jon: youknow-
Marie: mm
Jon: and you're not supposed to consider yer-consider
whether or not that comes out of her pay if the
drawer doesn't balance at the end of the night or=
[
Marie: (I know)
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 49

Jon: =whether it's the ethic-RIGHT thing to do is to say

"Hey lady you-you:-gave me too much money"
Marie: ((pointing index finger to Jon, hand extended from
elbow)) Well, you know what-you know what though=
[
Jon: it's (just) not in anymore=
Marie: =I started questioning was the fact she gave me -
[
Jon: =it's gone to even to the extreme?
Marie: no--no:tice-she just called up after the accident
and said
Jon: Yeah "I'm not coming anymore"
[
Marie: "That's it"-no--no two weeks' pay-not=
[ 1
Jon: (Marie)
Marie: =no consideration-(without ever?
[
Jon: ( (wiping mouth)) She did all that when she paid
you the three hundred and twenty dollars =
((Marie with hand to mouth, reflective; Julie gets up and goes
to the kitchen))
Jon: =she didn't do that by mistake-she wanted to see how you felt
about it and she felt she owed you
[
Marie: No: way no no no no-no
((Marie shakes head and hand No as well))
[
Jon: Oh no? You don't
think so?
Marie: No
Jon: Oh
[
Marie: She thought she had not paid me for the month of
June-and she's paying me from-
the first week of June=
[
Jon: eh I would read it-Oh eh
Marie: =to:-the-the ending-the third of
[ 1
Adam?: ( ? )

Jon: You had said that she never

50 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Thylor

made a mistake in the past? though didn't you she was

always very-good about that
Marie: ((with index finger pointed out to Jon)) No-she she's
made one mistake in the past-but=
[
Jon: ohohhuhuh
Marie: =her record i:s-very few mistakes?= ((moves raised
finger horizontally to indicate passage of time))
Jon: hmhm (okay)

In the height of portraying Bev as opportunistic, Marie suddenly brings up

'new' information relevant to the initiating event in the first story about Bev, i.e.
Bev's handing over $320 to Marie. Marie recalls Bev's failure to give two weeks'
notice before pulling her daughter out of child care. Jon and Marie now attribute
to Bev different intentions concerning the $320 in light of Bev's knowledge of the
two weeks' notice requirement. Their discussion prefaces a reconceptualization of
the problem embedded in the act of handing over $320.
(2-c) Bev Narrative-7:40 p.m., Bev/Family F dinner #1, p 55-58
The kids have just remembered that Dad had promised them ice cream if they ate
a good dinner, and Marie has encouraged them to chant "Haagen Dazs" over and
over until Jon submits to taking them to the ice cream store. In the throes of these
negotiations, Marie abruptly returns again to the unresolved narrative problem.

Marie: ((head on hand, elbow on table)) You know Jon-I verbally

did tell Bev two weeks' notice Do you think I shouldov
stuck to that? or to have done what I did?
Jon: When I say something I stick to it unless she:-
s-brings it up. If I set a policy and I-and-they=
Jon: ((Adam goes toward living room, bouncing a ball))
=accept that policy-unless they have reason to
change it and and say=
[
Adam: (Let's go outside and play)
Jon: =something? I do not change it-I don't
automatically assume "We:ll it's not the right thing to do"
If I were to do that eh - I would be saying in the first place
I should never have mentioned it=
((Julie and Eric leave table to join Adam))
Jon: =I should never have set the policy if I didn't believe
in it-If I thought it was-a hardship on people I
shouldn'a brought it up?-shoulda kept my mouth shut
-If I: say there's a two weeks' notice required-I
automatically charge em for two weeks' notice without
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 51

thinking twice? about it-I say and it "You-you

need-Your pay will include till such and such a
date because of the two neek-weeks' notice that's
required:' I:f THE: Y feel hardship it's on thei:r
part-it's-THEIRS to say "Marie-I really-you
know-I didn't expect this to happen 'n I'm sorry
( (softly)) I didn't give you two weeks' notice but it
was really un-avoidable"-a:nd you can say "We:ll-
okay I'll split the difference with you-(it's har-)
a one week's notice"=

Marie: see you know in one way wi- in one (instance)

[
Jon: =and then they s- if they push it
Marie: ((pointing to Jon)) she owed me that money-but I just
didn't feel right?=
[
Jon: well you're-you
Marie: =taking it on that (principle) cuz she (wanted)-She
thought she was paying for something that she didn't
[
Jon: You: give her the
money and then you let it bother you then you -
then you get all ups-set-You'll be upset for weeks
[
Marie: no no no I'm not upset-it's just
((Marie says this calmly but waving of corn cob, then plops corn
cob down and raps knuckles on table))
Adam: ((from outside)) Julie-go get Spirit [the dog] out
Julie: ((from living room)) Why:?
Marie: I guess I just wish I would have said-I'm not upset with
what happened-I just wanted-I think I=
[
Adam: ((from outside))(?
Marie: =would feel better if I had said something

In this passage, Marie and Jon take the reanalysis of the problem one step fur-
ther, a step we propose constitutes a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift is a result
of problem-solving enriched through co-narration. Jon and Marie's earlier dis-
pute over Bev and the two weeks' notice sets in motion a shift in perspective. The
issue of the two weeks' notice has continued to haunt Marie, as indicated by her
abrupt re-introduction of the topic. Here Marie emphatically confirms that she
did indeed make the two-week rule very explicit to Bev prior to the initiating
52 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn Tuylor

event. Marie uses this new piece of the setting to reformulate the narrative prob-
lem in terms of a new dilemma, namely whether she should have insisted that Bev
give her the $320 to compensate for the lack of a two-week notice or should have
kept quiet. This reformulation evidences, for us, a paradigm shift, wherein the
$320 is now rightfully Marie's and not Bev's. (Marie: "In one instance she owed
me that monlly ... ";Jon: "You give her the money ... ") The reformulation casts
Marie's way of responding to Bev's handing her $320 in a new light. Whereas
Marie's action of taking out the receipt book and proving that Bev was not in ar-
rears successfully resolved the first formulation of the narrated problem, the
newly formulated definition of the problem makes that action seem inadequate.
This inadequacy is articulated by both Marie ("I think I would feel better if I had
said something") and Jon ("If I: say there's a two weeks' notice required-I auto-
matically charge em for two weeks' notice without thinking twice") and leads to
Jon's subsequently chiding Marie for feeling upset.
A critical factor in determining whether or not a detective story takes on the di-
mensions of a paradigm shift is the uptake of listeners and their willingness to ac-
tively enter the narrating process. Our data demonstrate that important missing
information surfaces in the throes of collaborative narration. For example,
Marie's rather sudden recall of the two-week notice in (2-b) overlaps with Jon's
active involvement in assessing Bev's insurance dealings, as if inspired by the en-
ergy and support of the collaboration. When a new paradigm is internalized by a
narrator, as Marie seems to have internalized the reconstituted problem, we see an
exemplar of the Vygotskian passage from interpersonal to intrapersonal knowl-
edge, through co-narration. The presence of family members, apparently facili-
tated in the more centralized family dinners around a common table, leads to so-
cially accomplished problem-solving and thereby transports narrative
co-construction into the arena of joint and individual cognition.

C. Social Consequences of Narrative Practices

It is widely recognized that narratives strengthen social relationships and a gen-
eral sense of co-membership by providing a medium for illustrating common be-
liefs, values, and attitudes of tellers and audiences. Research on co-narration
demonstrates further that beliefs, values, and attitudes are not so much transmit-
ted from teller to audience as they are collectively and dialogically engendered (see
Holquist 1983). Audiences are co-authors and as such co-owners of the narratives
and the moral and other premises that these narratives illustrate. They co-own the
narrative as an interactional product and more importantly share control over
cognitive and verbal tools fundamental to problem-solving itself. Co-ownership is
not a relationship that one enters into lightly as it involves sharing control and a
commitment however temporary both to the activities of co-narration/co-prob-
lem-solving and to the product, i.e. the story. For this reason, interlocutors vary
the extent and type of their narrative involvement.
Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration 53

Detective stories, particularly paradigm-shifting ones, display considerable cog-

nitive, affective and linguistic involvement from interlocutors. Such extensive in-
volvement structures and restructures social relationships among co-narrators
and impacts the balance of power in the social unit. Interlocutors co-own the
story in the sense that they participate in re-perspectizing the fundamental narra-
tive problem. As such, they take on shared responsibility for the story as a prod-
uct, with or without the invitation of the initial teller. Entitlement to tell a story is
thus not the exclusive right of an initial teller (Lerner 1987, Mandelbaum 1987a,
1987b). Even those who have not directly experienced the narrative events can ac-
quire entitlement through expanding, querying, correcting, or challenging exist-
ing formulations of the narrative problem.
This sharing of narrative 'rights' evidences a sharing of power. At the same
time, such sharing makes participants' perceptions of the world vulnerable to
co-authored change. In detective stories, the sharing of narrative rights empow-
ers co-present interlocutors to co-author one another's biographies, i.e. to con-
struct collectively one party's past experience through co-narration. Such recon-
struction (or deconstruction) potentially threatens a teller's drive to 'look good'.
It is our hypothesis that this vulnerability serves as a constraint on full-fledged
participation in detective storytelling. Whether participants undertake extended
'detecting' appears to be a function of the participants' willingness to commit
time and energy and of an initial teller's willingness to risk vulnerability. And
that is where the prolonged, centralized dinner may be a last holdout for famil-
ial co-authorship. Through the activity of co-authoring detective stories, family
members construct perspectives and evoke values. Each exercise of narrative
rights and practices reconstitutes family relationships and the family itself as an
activity system.

III. Concluding Remark

Collaboration in the form of detective storytelling is akin to scaffolding and joint
problem-solving practices characteristic of American middle-class care-giver-
child interactions (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984, Wertsch & Hickmann 1987). Such
practices empower intimates to influence each other's perceptions of the world
and, in so doing, to socialize one another. In our view, the co-narrated detective
story is not only a vehicle for the socialization of family values and the family's
sense of order/disorder in the world; it is also an object itself of socialization.
Children and others sitting at dinner tables and participating in co-narration are
being socialized into ways of articulating and solving problems through social
construction of a genre. Families who sit together for the duration of a meal have
a potential opportunity space for socializing this mode of problem-solving-and
certain families do just that, exploiting narratives to co-construct new paradigms
which order and reorder their everyday lives.
54 Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, & Carolyn 'Illylor

Notes
This paper is the result of the equal work of the three authors.
1. This research project ("Discourse Processes in American Families") is funded by
NICHD (grant no.I ROH HD 20992-0lAl). Members of the research team include E. Ochs
and T. Weisner (co-P.I:s), M. Bernstein, D. Rudolph, R. Smith, and C. Taylor (research as-
sistants).

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4
Hard Words: A Functional
Basis for Kaluli Discourse
STEVEN FELD AND BAMBI B. SCHIEFFELIN

0. Introduction. This paper is concerned with cultural constructions that frame

appropriate Kaluli discourse and with some kinds of discourse that operate within
that frame. We begin with ethnographic and metalinguistic materials scaffolding
the Kaluli notion of'hardness', the Kaluli conception of language and speech, and
the specific idea of 'hard words'. These constructs illustrate the pervasive charac-
ter of a Kaluli distinction between 'langue' and 'parole'. Based on these systematic
notions of language form, socialization, and behavior we analyze some situated
discourse examples that indicate both how these cultural constructions are
learned and how they operate in everyday interactions.

0.1 People and Place. The Kaluli people are part of a population of about 1,200
who live in several hundred square miles of tropical rain forest just north of the
slopes of Mt. Bosavi, on the Great Papuan Plateau of Papua New Guinea (E. L.
Schieffelin 1976). They are one of four culturally identical but dialectically differ-
ent subgroups who collectively refer to themselves as Bosavi kalu 'Bosavi people'.
The Kaluli reside in longhouse communities made up of about 15 families (60-90
people), separated by an hour or so walk over forest trails. Subsistence is orga-
nized around swidden horticulture, the processing of wild sago palm to make a
staple starch, and hunting and fishing. In broad terms, Kaluli society is highly
egalitarian, lacking in the 'big man' social organization characteristic of the Papua
New Guinea Highlands. Men and women utilize extensive networks of obligation
and reciprocity in the organization of work and sociable interaction.
Kaluli is one of four dialects of Bosavi, a non-Austronesian verb-final ergative
language. Most speakers are monolingual. While Tok Pisin (Neo Melanesian), is
known by some younger men, it is almost never heard in daily discourse. Recently
introduced literacy programs have affected few people.
Kaluli everyday life is overtly focused around verbal interaction. Talk is thought
of and used as a means of control, manipulation, expression, assertion, and ap-
peal. It gets you what you want, need, or feel owed. Extensive demarcation of
kinds of speaking and speech acts further substantiate the observation that Kaluli

56
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 57

are energetically verbal; talk is a primary way to be social, and a primary indica-
tor of social competence (B. B. Schieffelin 1979; B. B. Schieffelin and Feld 1979).
More generally, the realm of sound yields the most elaborated forms of Kaluli
expression. In the tropical forest and village longhouse it is difficult to find audi-
tory privacy or quiet. Greetings, comings and goings, announcements, arguments,
meetings, and all soundings are projected into aurally public space. No compara-
ble variety, salience, or exuberance exists for Kaluli visual or choreographic modes
of expressions.

1. 'Hard; 'Words; 'Hard Words': Putting a Construction on Life and Language.

1.1 Halaido 'Hard'. Halaido 'hard' is a pervasive Kaluli notion that applies broadly
in three cultural-semantic domains. The first is growth and maturation, where the
socializing interactions in the acquisition of language are what 'makes (it) hard'
(halaido domeki); the development of strong teeth and bones in the uncoordi-
nated infant who is 'without understanding' (asugo andoma) is a process of'hard-
ening' (halaidan). In these cases, the process of becoming 'hard' is a literal and
metaphoric construct for physical and mental development and for cultural so-
cialization. A second domain for halaido is the fully adult consequence of this
maturation process. A kalu halaido or 'hard man' is one who is strong, assertive,
and not a witch; a major component in this person's projection of his 'hardness'
is the acquisition and command of to halaido 'hard words', the fully developed ca-
pacity for language. 1 The final area in which halaido is prominent is dramatic
style. In ceremonial performance, songs are intended to be evocative and make the
audience weep. The climax in the development of aesthetic tension, where the
manner of singing and the textual elements coalesce, is what promotes the 'hard-
ening' (again, halaido domeki) of a song. A performance that does not 'harden' will
not move listeners to tears and will not be considered successful. Furthermore, the
ability to 'harden' a song is an important compositional (particularly in textual
craft) and performative skill.
The cultural construction and prominence of halaido in Kaluli growth, adult-
hood, and presentational style can in part be traced to an origin myth which tells
how the world was once muddy and soft; a megapode and Goura pigeon together
stamped on the ground to make it hard. Like the hardening of the land which
symbolizes the necessity of physical and geographical formation, the hardening of
body, language, character, and dramatic style symbolizes the necessity of human
socialization in order to develop cultural competence.
One term used in opposition to halaido is taiyo 'soft'. Within this oppositional
frame, taiyo is 'soft' in the senses of: mushy foods, things which decay and rot, or
debilitation. It signifies a stage in the process of decay, and all connotations with
this state are unpleasant. Food taboos constrain the eating of certain soft sub-
stances (such as eggs) while young lest one not 'harden'. Children, moreover, do
not eat the meat of certain birds who have 'soft' voices or redundant and other-
SB Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

wise strange calls, lest their language not harden and they grow up to speak unin-
telligible sounds. (On the topic of children's food taboos vis-a-vis hardness, see B.
B. Schieffelin 1979:62-65, and Feld 1982:Chapter 2.) Similarly tabooed are all an-
imal and vegetable foods which are yellow; like the leaves of plants, things yellow
as they decay. Witches are said to have yellow soft hearts, while the hearts of'hard
men' are dark and firm (E. L. Schieffelin 1976:79, 128). In short, the passage from
'hardness' to 'softness' is undesirable, synonymous with debilitation, vulnerability,
and decay, states which must be avoided. The desired progression in all things is
from softness (infant) to hardness (adult); once hard in body, language, and dra-
matic style, Kaluli must stay that way.
Another term utilized in opposition to halaido is halaidoma 'unhard', 'without
hardness', formed by the word 'hard' plus the negative particle -ma. Something
which is potentially hard-or which should be, but is not-is 'unhard'. For in-
stance, when one of us was learning the Bosavi language (SF), his verbal behavior
was judged as to halaidoma and his mistakes greeted assuringly with tow:>
halaidcscge 'when your language has hardened'. Never was this speech ability re-
ferred to as *to taiyo 'soft words', a construction which was laughed at when sug-
gested. 'Soft words' is neither an appropriate nor utterable phrase; language is ei-
ther 'hard' or 'unhard', i.e. in the process of hardening, or in the state of becoming
unhard, as in sickness or delirium.

1.2 To 'Words/language: Kaluli observe a langue/parole distinction. This is

marked by the distribution of the terms to and tolcma 'words', 'language' and im-
perative 'talk words/language' (langue) and sama imperative 'speak' (parole). 2 To
and tolcma refer to the systematic form of language or its capacity; in contrast,
sama refers to the manner or act of speaking. To illustrate langue we examine the
items in (1).
(1) Bosavi to Bosavi language
bali to 'turned over words' = systematic linguistic
irony/euphemism, metaphor, or obfuscation
malolo to 'narrated/told words' (= myths and stories)
mugu to 'taboo words'

In these examples, the noun to refers to the system or form of talk. All of these
nominal forms can be followed by the habitual verbs salan 'one speaks/says', asu-
lan 'one understands', or dadan 'one hears'. These indicate that one may speak, un-
derstand, or hear any of these systems of talk or different languages. The use of
tolcma contrasts with constructions using sama ('parole'), for instance; (here with
sama in the present habitual form salan).
(2) w:moli-salan one speaks secretly, stealthily
tede-salan one speaks in a deep voice
hala-salan one speaks with mispronunciations

In these instances (and a multitude of similarly constructed ones), salan concerns

the behavior of speaking, or some description of how speaking is performed.
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 59

to
'words' 'language'

I
tolema
/""~ge','•p""1~y~

to + -clcma

~ sama
'words 1

de
'like that' 'speak/say'
(imperative)
Figure 4.1

From our analysis the Kaluli theory of language and speech is one is which to
'words' are the prime substance of language; tolcma is the doing or speaking of
words.
As can be seen in Figure 4.1, tolcma is formed by adding to 'words' and -elcma,
imperative 'do/say/speak like that'. The item elcma is the contracted form of
elcsama, 'like that' plus the imperative 'say/speak'. Many Kaluli verbs are formed
in this way, by adding a substance or onomatopoeic root to -elcma. For instance,
the verb for 'weep' is yclcma, composed by contracting the onomatopoeic repre-
sentation of the sound of weeping, ye, and the imperative 'say/speak like that'
(Feld 1982:Chapters 3 and 4 contain materials on these formations in Kaluli met-
alinguistics; B. B. Schieffelin 1979:Chapter 3 contains materials on elcma and elc-
sama in interaction).
Everyday interactions make clear that the contrast between these two notions is
salient for Kaluli. To take a simple instance, SF was once questioning some men
about the fact that certain birds are claimed to speak some Bosavi words. He asked
about b::>lo, the friarbird in the Kaluli myth about how birds received human
tongues.
(3a) B:>lo-w:>, Bosavi to salano?
'As for b:>lo, does he speak Bosavi words/language?'
Two answers followed:
(3b) Bosavi to salan.
'He speaks Bosavi words/language.'

Mugu tolan.
'He talks taboo language.'

The first response is the usual specific one ('parole'), while the second was a re-
sponse from a Christian referring to the way the systematic form of b::>lo's talk con-
sists of words Christians consider taboo ('langue'). Yet in the context oflistening to
a tape recording of specific calls by b::>lo, the same man noted, mugu to salab 'he is
speaking/saying taboo words/language', implying: in that specific instance.
60 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

In everyday talk the distribution of inflected verb forms for sama and tolema
further exemplifies the importance of speaking as a situational act and language
as a fundamental capacity. Part of the paradigm includes the items in (4).

(4) tolema sama imperative immediate

tolebi sdebi imperative future
tolomeno sdemeno future first person
tolab salab present third person
tolan salan habitual third person

but:
*tobl SJbl present first person
*tob sip past

The fact that the present first person form and past form are blocked for tolema
is consistent with the general nature of to as 'words/language' and tolema as 'talk'.
Moreover, *tobl contrasts with:
towJ sJbl 'I speak/say words/language'
towJ mJtolan 'It doesn't talk words/language' (can be said only about animals whose
communication is assumed to be a system based upon a substance other than
'words'.)
*de tob
*de tolema
de sip 'said like that'
de sama 'say like that'

Use of 'like that' is also blocked with to and tolema because of lack of reference to
a specific situation or context.
The metalinguistic area provides further examples of the distribution and fur-
ther evidence for the cohesiveness of ways of describing related modalities of
soundmaking. In one example across modalities, gese, the root of gesema 'make
one feel sorrow or pity' is only blocked for tolema as illustrated in (5).

(5) gese-salan one speaks sadly (plaintively; with descending intonation)

gese-yelan one weeps sadly (plaintively; with descending intonation)
gese-holan one whistles sadly (plaintively; with descending intonation)
gese-molan one sings sadly (plaintively; with descending intonation)
but:
*gese-tolan inappropriate because gese describes the manner of speaking and is
not applicable to the system or capacity of talk

In these cases the verbs deal with modes of soundip.aking while the adverbs de-
scribe the manner of performance; like other verbs of soundmaking, sama refers
to the behavioral aspect of speech; to and tolema refer to its form and capacity.
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 61

A major area of metalinguistic denomination is marked by use of sa. By itself,

sa means 'waterfall'; the term also prefixes all verbs of soundmaking to indicate
that the sound has an 'inside' or text. This usage derives from the metaphor that
texts are composed 'like a waterfall flowing into a waterpool'; the sound is 'out-
side' and the text, like a waterfall, is the part that flows down and inside. Verbs of
soundmaking turn into musical or compositional terms when prefixed by sa in
this way, as in (6) (with verbs all in a present habitual form).
(6) salan 'one speaks' sa-salan 'one speaks inside the words/one speak poetically'
ydan 'one weeps' sa-ydan 'one weeps with text'
holan 'one whistles' sa-holan 'one whistles with words in mind'
molan 'one sings' sa-molan 'one sings inside' i.e. 'one composes'
but:
tolan 'one talks' *sa-tolan inappropriate because one cannot have an
inner text to language capacity

Sa-salan, sa-sama, and sa-siyo all indicate an intention to mean more than what is
said. To and tolema do not participate in this paradigm; *sa-to and *sa-tolema are
blocked because there cannot be an 'inside' or inner text to the capacity or system of
language. 'Insides' are specific and contextual, related to situated performances only.

1.3 To halaido, 'Hard Words/Talk/Language: Given the cultural importance and

pervasiveness of 'hardness' as a construct underlying mature social process and
capacity, and the role of 'hardness' in the distinction Kaluli observe between
langue and parole, we turn to the specific importance of 'hard words'. In the most
general sense, to halaido is the system of and capacity for grammatically well-
formed and socially appropriate language. It is the substance of what Kaluli adults
know and act upon in their verbal behaviors. It is what is normally acquired, the
competence to perform, what Kaluli should 'have in mind' when they speak. The
opposite of to halaido is not *to taiyo 'soft words'; when language is in the process
of forming, it is to halaidoma 'unhard words'.
Nevertheless, when asked if there is any language which is neither hard nor in
the process of becoming hard, Kaluli indicate that such is the situation for the lan-
guage of song. 3 This is a special poetic system called :>be g:>n:> to 'bird sound
words'. Songs are said to be composed and sung from a bird's point of view, and
not a human one. They achieve their plaintive quality and ability to move people
to tears in this way because birds are the spirit reflections of Kaluli dead. Song lan-
guage is thus not human and hard, but birdlike, sad, sentimental, reflective.
The contrast between to halaido 'hard words' and :>be g:>n:> to 'bird sound
words' is basic. 'Hard words' are assertive and direct language forms which engage
speakers in face-to-face talk that is interactive and mutual, and are intended to get
speakers what they want or need out of social situations. On the other hand, 'bird
sound words' are reflective and nostalgic, and are supposed to make a listener em-
pathize with a speaker's message without necessarily or generally responding to it
62 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

verbally. 'Bird sound words' involve linguistic means that communicate affect by
revealing the speaker's state of mind and moving a listener to feel sympathy for
that state.
It is not the case that the difference between these two constructs is simply one
of referential/expressive or ordinary/nonordinary. Certain message forms and
contents can appear in either; the different way that messages are interpreted de-
pends on judgments about intention deriving from contextual constraints, as well
as from placement in an ongoing textual chain. Consider example (7).
(7) DowJ ge oba hanaya?
'Father, where are you going?'

There are numerous daily contexts in which this might be uttered by a person to
someone called 'father'. Depending on the intonational contour, the utterance
could be a request for information, a challenge, or a rhetorical question-all of
which might be benign or threatening. However, when we shift from conversation
to song usage, the implications shift radically and the audience immediately
knows that the message is that a father has died and left someone behind. The per-
son asking the question is in the resultant state of abandonment and appealing to
the audience for sympathy. The form of the words is 'hard' in the sense that they
ilre well formed and could be uttered in appropriate daily situations. However, in
a song context the words show their 'inside', sa, and this is why they are 'bird sound
words'. What is implied in the saying context and manner of saying is more im"
portant than the referential equivalents of the words which are said.
2. Learning and Speaking 'Hard Words:
2.1 Imperatives. To exemplify how the process of learning the model for dis-
course is the learning of'speaking' and 'hard words', we turn to some discourse ex-
amples from tape-recorded family interactions. While these examples involve
much adult-child speech, the same forms are used among adults (though perhaps
not as frequently or with the same concentration in an episode, since child-adult
speech involves more direction and repetition). Imperatives form an important
class of examples since they provide major instances of learning by instruction. In
addition to indicating specific rhetorical strategies for getting what one wants, im-
peratives teach directness, control, speaking out, sequencing, and cohesion in the
flow of talk. 4 This is further strengthened by the unambiguous relation of
speaker/addressee in imperatives, as evidenced by frequent deletion of the op-
tional subject pronoun or a vocative. Moreover, imperatives are favored forms for
requesting both actions and objects because Kaluli does not express requests in-
directly with forms like 'would you, could you'. Additionally, language structure
provides great flexibility, range, and specificity for imperatives. For example,
Kaluli morphologically differentiates present and future imperative, marking iter-
ative and punctual action, with various degrees of emphasis or seriousness, all of
which can be indicated for single, dual, or plural subjects.
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 63

In the examples that follow, sama, elcma, and to/tolcma clearly distribute ac-
cording to whether specific instances of speaking or general prescriptions to talk
are encouraged.
For the Kaluli infant, involvement in verbal interactions starts about a week
after birth. A mother holds her infant so that it faces another child; she moves the
infant as one might a ventriloquist's dummy, speaking for it in a nasalized falsetto
voice. Her speech is well formed and clearly articulated, with the complexity of a
4-year-old's speech. The child to whom the baby is 'speaking' engages in conver-
sation directed to the baby for as long as interest can be maintained. Through
these verbal interactions the baby is presented as a person, an individual, and is
made to appear more independent and mature than it actually is, largely through
the mother's speech and her manipulation of the infant's body. These 'three-party'
interactions, as well as the much less frequent direct talk between mother and in-
fant, are said to 'give words/language understanding or meaning' (to samiab).
The use of language and rhetoric in interaction are the major means of social
manipulation and control in Kaluli life. Thus, one of the most important achieve-
ments in childhood is to learn to speak Kaluli effectively to a variety of individu-
als with whom one participates in everyday activities. Kaluli say that language (to)
has begun once the young child uses two critical words, n:J 'mother' and bo
'breast'. Children who only name other people, animals, or objects are said to do
so 'to no purpose' (ba madali); they are not considered to have begun to use lan-
guage. This is evidence for the essentially social view of language taken by the
Kaluli, a view which emphasizes not only the learning and using of words per se,
but the use of specific words to express the first social relationship a person has,
namely, the mother-child relationship mediated by food from the breast. This is a
basic theme in Kaluli social life. The giving and receiving of food is a major way
in which relationships are mediated and validated (E. L. Schieffelin 1976; Feld and
B. B. Schieffelin 1980).
Once a child has begun to use the words 'mother' and 'breast', Kaluli begin to
'show language' (to widan). Kaluli say that children must be 'shown language' by
other Kaluli speakers, principally by the mother. Kaluli use no baby talk lexicon as
such, and claim that children must hear to halaido 'hard language', if they are to
learn to speak correctly. When a Kaluli adult wants a child to say something in an
ongoing interaction, a specific model is provided for what the child is to say, fol-
lowed by the imperative 'say like that' elcma. The word elcma is a contraction of
ck 'like this/that' and sama 'say/speak' present imperative. While the adult occa-
sionally asks the child to repeat utterances directly back to him or her, correcting
the child's language or initiating a game, the vast majority of these directives to
speak concern instructions to the child to say something to someone else. 5 An ex-
ample of this type of interaction is given in (8).
(8) Meli (female, 25 months) and her mother are in the house. Mother has tried to get
Meli into an elema routine, and Meli has been distracted. Finally, she settles down.
Grandfather is not in sight.6
64 · Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

1. Mother-Meli: Sit on this. (Meli does)

now speak words.
ami to ena sama
2. Mother-Meli-++Grandfather:
Grandfather! elema
(softly) 3. Grandfather/
4. Mother-Meli:
speak more forcefully/loudly.
ogole sama
(louder) 5. Grandfather!/
6. Mother-Mdi-++Grandfather:
I'm hungry for meat! elema
7. I'm hungry for meat!/
(This continues for 14 turns, which consist of requests to grandfather to get different
foods.)

In line 1, Meli's mother encourages her to 'speak words/language' (to sama), to

engage verbally with someone. She has the addressee and utterances in mind,
which she will provide followed by the imperative 'say like that' elema. The ad-
dressee is named, but Meli does not call out loudly enough, and in line 4 her
mother tells her how to speak, using sama. This is followed by a specific utterance,
and another directive to speak, with which Meli complies. Thus, to sama refers to
the activity of speaking and saying, where a sequence of utterances are followed
by elema. While in this episode the addressee, Grandfather, is not in the vicinity
and therefore does not respond to Meli's requests, the majority of such episodes
involve responses from a third person to the child's directed utterances. These se-
quences often involve extensive and cohesive turns of talk. This 'showing the lan-
guage' helps the language 'harden' (halaido domeki) and thus is consistent with the
general goals of socialization and development: the achievement of 'hardening'
which produces an individual who is in control of himself or herself, and who is
capable of verbally controlling others.
Directives to speak, using the imperative, occur in a variety of speech situations,
but are most frequent in those involving shaming, challenging, and teasing. The
interactional sequence in (9) illustrates several of the rhetorical strategies used in
such situations, and demonstrates the sensitivity young children develop about
the consequences of what they say.

(9) Wanu (male, 27 months), his sister Binalia (5 years), cousin Mama (31h years), and
Mother are at home. The two girls (Mama and Binalia) are eating salt belonging to
another child.
1. Mother - Wanu -++ Mama:
Binalia
Whose is it?! ekma
2. Whose is it?!/
Hard Wo:nls: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 65

3. Is it yours?! clema
4. is it yours?!/
5. Who are you?! clema
6. who are you?!/
7. Binalia-+Wanu-++Mother:
Is it yours?! elema
8. is it yours?!/
9. Mother -+ Wanu -++ Marna:
Binalia
It's mine! elema
10. Marna-+Binalia: Don't speak like that!
eledo sclasabo!

Rhetorical questions, such as those found in lines 1, 3, 5, and 7 in example (9),

are frequent in family interactions involving the use of elema. They are intended
to shame the addressee so that he or she will terminate undesirable behavior.
Kaluli frequently utilize teasing, shaming, and other means of verbal confronta-
tion that focus on an addressee who cannot answer rhetorical questions without
the admission of fault. These strategies of confrontation and their component
rhetorical skills set the tone of many interactions, while the use of directives (such
as 'put the salt away') or physical intervention is much less common. Although
children may challenge adults in certain situations (and are encouraged to do so),
here Mama (age 31h) tells Binalia 'don't speak like that', referring to Binalia's at-
tempt to get Wanu to challenge his mother. When asked about that utterance,
Kaluli said that Mother could get angry and take the salt away. Thus, even children
evidence a sensitivity to how language is being used in interactions, sensing the
consequences of particular kinds of talk. This further serves the functional im-
portance of directly putting the burden on the addressee.
The use of elema in these interactions is consistent with the mother's treatment
of her preverbal infant, in which she puts words into his mouth. She pushes her
young language-learning child into social interaction, providing the words he can-
not say or may not be interested in saying. This practice provides the opportunity
. for the child to acquire the verbal skills that are needed later on, when mother has
her next baby and the child becomes part of a peer group. It is the ability not only
to repeat rhetorical questions such as 'who are you?!' 'Is it yours?!' but to use them,
spontaneously in the appropriate contexts, that lead Kaluli to comment about a
young child, to halaido momada salab 'he/she is starting to speak hard language'.
It is important to note that throughout interactions using elema, assertion pre-
vails. In teaching language, mothers are teaching their small children assertion it-
self. For Kaluli this implies strength and independence. In interactional terms this
means to request with imperatives, to challenge and confront, and to say some-
thing powerful so others will bend or give. Mothers never use elema to instruct
their children in begging, whining, or appealing to others for sympathy. In learn-
ing the types of things one says with elema, Kaluli children are learning culturally
66 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

specific ways in which to be tough, independent, and assertive, which reinforces

the cultural value of acting in a direct, controlled manner.
In addition to the imperatives sama and clema, the imperative tolema is also
used in conversations. In contrast to the act of speaking (sama), use of tokma calls
attention to the importance of verbal interaction as an activity in which children
are encouraged to participate.
(10) Meli (female, 25 months) is with her father in the house. She is not involved in any
activity. Mama is not in sight.

1. Father--+Meli-++Mama:
Mama! call out.
hole ma
2. Mama/
3. Come and talk together with
me! elema
neno to tomeni meno!
4. come and talk together with me/
(There is no response. Seeing another child)
5. Father-+ Meli: Now you and Babi go in order to talk..
ami Babi gain tome'hamana

6. (Meli puts marble in her mouth) Take out the marble!

After taking it out with your hand, you will talk!
to tokbi

In this episode, Father is trying to get Mdi established in a verbal activity, made
explicit in line 3 as a directive (clema) to invite Mama to come and talk (to tomeni
meno ). The word clema marks what is specific to be said, and the concatenated
form (tomeni 'in order to talk'+ meno 'come' imperative) marks the general ac-
tivity to take place. A similar concatenated form is used in line 5, this time direct-
ing Mdi to go in order to talk. And finally (line 6), to tolebi (future imperative) is
used to indicate what Mdi should do, but not what she will say. 7
In this situation, talking is being established as a way to engage and be social.
Parents assume the importance of integrating children into adult verbal activities
and additionally encourage the organization and maintenance of verbal ex-
changes among children themselves. This establishes talk as a topic of talk, in-
structions to talk as instructions to be social, and talk as a modality that promotes
social cohesion.
In addition to both the desire and the necessity to develop to halaido, children
must learn to converse, to kudan 'one puts language/words together'. The expres-
sion i kuduma 'put wood together', is used to tell someone how to build a success-
ful fire, by taking a stick with an ember, putting another stick to it to make con-
tact and transferring the heat. Just as putting wood and sticks together makes a
successful fire, talk must also be put together to be successful. Commenting on the
Hanl Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 67

language of a 2-year-old who wasn't collaborating with or building on the other's

utterances, a Kaluli said, to m:Jkudab 'he doesn't put language together'. The same
expression was used with regard to a conversation between two adults, in which
they had not agreed on what they were, in fact, talking about.

(11) As father is leaving Mdi (age 25 months)

my child! as for me, I'm going to converse.
nip to kudumcni
You stay here.
ge ya tcbi.

The use of to kudan in these contexts indicates the importance Kaluli attach to
verbal interactions which are mutual, collaborative, and cohesive.
As has been seen, utterances directing a child to use language (tolcma) and spec-
ifying what to say (dcma) and how to say it (sama) are used to promote and sup-
port young children's involvement with others in a variety of everyday interactions.
The Kaluli say that without this kind of direction children would not learn what to
say and how to say it. The idea is that after a child is 'shown' what to say, he or she
will spontaneously use language to respond, to initiate, sustain, and control verbal
interactions. However, children themselves initiate and participate in language in-
teractions that are unlike any that their parents have shown them. Many of these
exchanges are terminated by Kaluli mothers when they feel that these could impede
language development or promote an undesirable effect. These situations provide
an opportunity to examine what is and is not acceptable language behavior for
small children, and the cultural reasons for these differences.

(12) Meli (30V2 months) and her cousin Mama (45 months) are at home with Mdi's
mother, who is cooking and talking to several adults. Mama initiates a sequence of
word play involving Mdi which is marked by repetition, high pitch, staccato deliv-
ery, and exaggerated prosodic contours. After 10 turns this dissolves into sound
play marked by overlap within turn pairs, higher pitch, vowel lengthening and
shifting, and repetition. This continues for 15 more turns, at which point Mdi's
mother suddenly turns to the girls and says in a loud, authoritative voice:

Wai! Try to speak good talk! This is bird talk!

Wai! to nafa se sclciba! ::Jbc tow::J we!

The girls suddenly become quiet.

The mother's abrupt termination of the children's verbal/vocal interaction was

not due to mild irritation caused by the noise these girls were making, since sim-
ilar sound levels caused by other kinds of verbal activity would never have
prompted this reaction. Her response, which was consistent with that of other
Kaluli mothers in similar situations, grows out of Kaluli ideas about language de-
velopment and the broader notion of taboo.
68 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

As mentioned earlier, Kaluli have very definite ideas about appropriate verbal
behavior for language learning children. When asked about this word/sound play,
Kaluli said it had no name and was 'to no purpose'. Purposive language is encour-
aged in interactions and the vocalizations between Mdi and Mama violated these
cultural expectations.
However, in addition to their ideas about how a young child's language should
sound, Kaluli say that children and birds are connected in a number of complex
ways (Feld l 982:Chapter 2). In addition to prohibiting young children from eating
certain birds lest they, too, only 'coo' and never develop hard language, children
must not sound like birds, even in play. Thus, in order to insure that 'hard language'
develops, the mother prevents a dangerous association by terminating this vocal
activity. Furthermore, she makes it explicit to the children and to the others around
them, that children are to speak 'good talk', not 'bird talk'. It is important to em-
phasize that Mother does not want them to stop speaking, but to speak properly.
Another form of verbal behavior that is not tolerated by Kaluli mothers is the
imitation and distortion of a younger child's speech by an older child. It is im-
portant that older children do not engage in language interactions with younger
children that are contradictory to the efforts made by adults to ensure 'good talk'
and 'hard talk'. Consider example (13).

(13) Abi (271h months) and his sister Yogodo (5 1/2 years) are alone in the house, as
Mother has gone out to get wood. Following Abi's utterances, Yogodo repeats what
he says, phonologically distorting his words to tease him. When mother returns,
Yogodo continues to repeat everything Abi says to her, leaving him very confused
and frustrated. After hearing eight turns of this, mother turns to Yogodo and says:

speak words/language!
to sama

Mothers see this type of activity as not only mocking or teasing the young child's
not as yet well-formed language, but as confusing the younger child about lan-
guage, its correct form and appropriate use. Thus, an undesirable language inter-
action is terminated with the explicit directive to 'speak language' (to sama). By fo-
cusing on the form of talk rather than its specific content, the children are not
discouraged from speaking to one another but encouraged to do it properly, on
the model of 'hard words'.
By the time a child is about 31/2 years old, and dema directives have stopped,
that child's language is considered sufficiently hard so that the playing of word
and sound games with peers is acceptable. While closely timed, repetitive, formu-
laic utterances involving teasing and challenging are appropriate for older chil-
dren, mothers do not want these children negatively influencing younger ones
whose speech is not yet well developed.
(14) A mother, her son (28 months), and three siblings (ages 5-8), are sitting around a
fire cooking bits of food. The three siblings are playing a teasing game about who
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 69

will and will not eat, which involves speaking rapidly and distorting words. After
watching this for 16 turns, the little boy attempts to join the interaction by inter-
jecting nonsense syllables. The mother turns to the older children saying:

speak hard!!
halaido sama!

to which one of the older children responds (teasing): huh?, followed by the
mother's repetition with emphasis:

speak hard!!
halaido same!!

'Speak hard' implies that until this point, speech has been 'unhard: Such a refer-
ence is always to speech in an ongoing context. In this situation, as in many oth-
ers like it, mothers are careful that their young children do not sound less mature
than they actually are in their speaking. This is consistent with the goals of lan-
guage socialization: to enable children to be independent and assertive by the time
that they are 3-3112 years old. Independence and assertion in speech and action are
functionally valued in this egalitarian society; ability to speak out is one impor-
tant way to get what one needs.
Next, we examine situations with negative imperatives, where sclesabo (sama)
and tolesabo (tolema) are used. The use of sclesabo'don't say (that/it)' (parole) im-
plies that one knows or suspects what is about to be said, and is telling another
not to say that thing. It is also used with reference to a specific body of knowledge
or secrets. One may say 'don't say that' or 'don't tell them' with reference to spe-
cific information. Note example (15).
(15) A number of people are socializing and eating in the longhouse. A guest enters,
having walked through the muddy jungle paths; leeches have attached themselves
to his ankles. A child runs up to alert the guest to this fact, and an adult intervenes,
saying: scksabo! 'don't say it!', thus directing the child not to say the speech specific
word 'leech' while others are enjoying their meal. Kaluli etiquette strongly pro-
hibits the saying of this word while people are eating.

The use of sclesabo contrasts with the use of tolesabo. Tolesabo means 'don't
talk' in the sense, 'be quiet', 'shut up', or 'don't engage in language' (langue). The
meaning is 'stop talking' or 'do something else besides engage in language'.

(16) Isa (age 8) is teasing her brother Wanu (32 months) about who will be his wife.
Father tells him to counter her teasing with:

1. Father-+Wanu-++lsa:
no! clcma
2. no!/
3. that's mother! clcma
70 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Scbieffelin

4. that's mother!/
5. One doesn't speak/say like
that! elcma
eledo m:Jsalano!
6. One doesn't speak/say like that!/
7. Father-+Isa: girl, Isa, you ...
that's being bad.
Shut up! Shut up!
tolesabowo!

In this sequence, an adult uses elema to instruct a young child in how to provide
an appropriate response to his sister's teasing. In addition, in line 5 the child is di-
rected to say 'one doesn't say that', calling attention to the inappropriateness of
what is being said. This response is yet another way to counter teasing. In such in-
teractions the conventions of language use are made explicit to younger members
who may not as yet know them or may need to be reminded of them. This se-
quence ends when the father, being angry at his daughter, tells her to 'stop talking'.
This instructs the children as to what is and is not out of bounds and further
draws attention to the social need to control the flow of talk by forcefully ending
undesirable speech.
A final example completes the point that in some interactions the issue is not
to say what you want to say better, but to stop talking completely.

( 17) A group of children are loudly talking and playing, and mother turns to them:

Sosas, shut up!

tolesabo!

Sosas is the name of a very noisy bird, one whose sounds are considered unpleas-
ant. By comparing the children to sosas birds, the mother emphasizes the irritat-
ing nature of the group noise, further marking the general injunction to stop the
annoying verbal activity and do something else. Tolesabo is used here quite in con-
trast to selesabo; the children are being told to stop the activity of talking, not to
stop saying specific things.
In these examples of learning and speaking 'hard words', children are provided
both with an explicit cultural model of the importance of verbal activity, and with
the importance of saying or not saying the right thing. Functionally, such a model
promotes social integration into a coherent world constructed upon the impor-
tance of direct, controlled, forceful face-to-face communication. Kaluli children
learn to focus upon what they want and need, even when this requires challenge
or confrontation. They learn that discourse is a means to social ends, and they
openly utilize sequential talk following that model. Imperatives are often heard in
the language of adults to children and adults to each other, and the ability to uti-
lize language in interaction requires an understanding of when to demand specific
speech and when to demand verbal closure.
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 71

When something has been said or done, or might be said or done, the ability to
refer appropriately, report, or challenge is one consequence of the way Kaluli learn
'hard words'. Such situations continually reflect the choice of formulations about
what has been said in order to focus the specifics of the situation. If one reports
benignly to another that 'someone said something to me ... ',and the listener im-
mediately wants to challenge the substance of the remarks, a common interrup-
tion at this point would be ba madali siy:J 'it was said for no reason'. Remarks on
the truth or intentions of what was said are very commonly the subject of initial
interruptions in conversation, immediately letting the speaker know the listener's
point of view on the reported speech. Remarks about the circumstances of what
has been said must be formulated with siy:J 'said', or de siy:J, 'said like that'; these
refer to a specific instance of speech or the 'said' of a report in a certain context.
*Tob can never appear in these situations because one cannot have the capacity
or system of language in the past; in fact, the construction is inappropriate in any
utterance about the language of deceased persons.
More pointed rhetorical strategies for dealing with the reports or references of
speakers are formulated with two common phrases: ge siy::>W:J dadaye?! 'Did you
hear what I said?!' and ge oba siy::>W:J? 'What did you say?' While these can be re-
quests for information, confirmation, or acknowledgment, they are often found
breaking into or responding to the stream of discourse in order to focus reaction
and challenge what is being said. Neither construction can be formulated with to
and tolema, as both exemplify the necessity of controlling a specific instance of
speaking.
Rhetorical challenge can be pushed a degree farther; escalation to threat is an
important way not just to register response but to prohibit or shame someone
who is doing something that is inappropriate or not approved of. In such cases the
threat is registered simply with: sameib! 'someone will say (something)!' Theim-
plicit threat is that someone will say 'who are you?!', 'is it yours?!', or other pointed
rhetorical questions that shame the addressee. Use of sameib! to control interac-
tions that may get out of hand, rather than use of physical control, emphasizes the
concern Kaluli exhibit about speaking as an instrument of social action and ac-
complishment. Such a threat cannot be formulated with *tolomeib! because it is
the implied 'something' that will be said that is so important to shaming as a reg-
ulatory action.
In these examples of learning, speaking, and controlling 'hard words', it is clear
that Kaluli must understand when it is appropriate to talk about language, and
when it is appropriate to talk about speaking. Kaluli discourse then is taught and
utilized as an integration of linguistic and metalinguistic practice which is shaped
and scaffolded by having a place in a culturally coherent world of beliefs about
'hardness', control, direct action, and assertion. Kaluli discourse must be analyzed
in relation to the belief system that constructs its organization and goals, as well
as the social ends which it accomplishes for participants. Cultural analysis then is
an explicit manner of connecting form and function. We have found that con-
72 Steven Feld & Bambi B. Schieffelin

structing an analysis from the bottom up satisfies both the demands of ethno-
graphically situated explications and the demands of explaining the ordinary and
routine ways that Kaluli interactions actualize cultural expectations about lan-
guage use and meaningful social behavior.

3. Closure. To close a story, a speech (or, in a recent adaptation among the few
literate Kaluli, a letter), Kaluli utilize the phrase ni tow:> bm 'my talk/words/lan-
guage are finished'. It is fitting that we close this paper by explicating why this
phrase is appropriate and why the contrasting *ni siy::>w::> bm 'what I have said is
finished' is inappropriate and not utterable.
For Kaluli, verbal closure implies directly that there is nothing left to talk about,
at least for the moment. What is finished is the action of language, the invocation
of words, the activity of talk. No such boundary is appropriately imposed upon
the 'said' of speaking in a specific setting, which is always open-ended and ongo-
ing. Verbal activities are closed by a boundary on talk, not a boundary on what has
been said. The function of reaching closure, again, underscores the direct manner
in which Kaluli control situations and behaviors by viewing talk as a socially or-
ganized and goal-directed actualization of the capacity for language, 'hard words'.
Nitow::>bm.

Notes
Fieldwork in Bosavi during 1975-1977 was supported by the National Science Foundation,
the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Ai"chives of Traditional
Music, and the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. We gratefully acknowledge their as-
sistance. Detailed reports of our separate work are Feld (1982) and B. B. Schieffelin (1979).
The order of author's names was determined by geomancy.

1. Kalu specifically means 'man' (opposing kesale 'women') but can generally refer to
'person' or 'people'. Kaluli see the ideal form of 'hardness' modeled on maleness; women,
however, are clearly supposed to be competent language users. Sex role socialization is clear
in the speech of mothers to children; little boys are encouraged to use language to be de-
manding, while little girls are encouraged to use language to be more complacent. These is-
sues are addressed in detail in B. B. Schieffelin (1979: Chapter 2).
2. It is worth noting that, in contrast to some aspects of metalinguistics, Kaluli do not
directly verbalize about the importance of a distinction between to and sama. The clear
langue/parole distinction is consistent, however, in all of our elicited or tape-recorded nat-
urally occurring data. Further discussion of how this distinction affects Kaluli poetic con-
cepts can be found in Feld (1982:Chapter 4).
3. There is one additional context where the term to halaido or halaido to is found. This
is in the talk of debate, heated discourse, anger, dispute, or confrontation (as, for example,
in a bridewealth negotiation). This sense of to halaido is far less prominent than the
broader usage. The morphological marking -ait is used only to indicate anger; it is not
prominent in our sample of recorded speech (83 hours of family interactions, 50 hours of
song, myth, texted weeping, and more formal modes).
Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse 73

4. We are speaking here about interactions in an assertive frame. These characterizations

do not apply equally to frames of appeal. On Kaluli assertion and appeal, see E. L.
Schieffelin ( 1976:117-134) and B. B. Schieffelin ( 1979:Chapters 3 and 4).
5. In casual adult interactions, elema may be used to direct a response to a speaker who
is slow to respond to teasing or joking. A more marked and deliberate adult usage occurs
in funerary weeping, where women improvise sung-wept texts to a deceased person lying
before them. Often these texts contain lines like, 'Look up to the treetops, dema ... ', indi-
cating that the weeper is telling the deceased to say these words back to her. The grammat-
icality and pragmatics here rest on the notion that while the deceased is next to the woman
in body, he or she is going elsewhere in spirit, in the form of a bird. The commanded words
marked with dema must therefore be in the form of an appropriate utterance to a living
person from one who is now a bird. 'Look up to the treetops' is such a line because it indi-
cates that from then on the weeper will only see the deceased as a bird in the treetops. Feld
(1982:Chapter 3) contains an analysis of dema in sung-texted-weeping.
6. Transcription conventions are described in B. B. Schieffelin (1979). Child speech is on
the right and the speech of others plus contextual notes are on the left. Single arrow indi-
cates speaker to addressee; double arrow indicates speaker to addressee who is to address a
third party. Kaluli glosses are provided only where to, tolema, dema, and sama, or other
forms of these verbs, are used. Full transcripts of all examples with morpheme by mor-
pheme glosses can be obtained by writing to the authors.
7. The use of concatenated forms also appears with sama, particularly in interactions
with elema, where the child is too far from the intended addressee and is told to 'go in order
to speak', semeni hamana.

References
Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics and song in Kaluli ex-
pression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Feld, Steven, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1980. Sociolinguistic dimensions of Kaluli relation-
ship terms. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting, American Anthropological
Association.
Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1979. How Kaluli children learn what to say, what to do, and how to
feel: An ethnographic study of the development of communicative competence.
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.
[To appear: Cambridge University Press.]
Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Steven Feld. 1979. Modes across codes and codes within modes:
A sociolinguistic analysis of conversation, sung-texted-weeping, and stories in Bosavi,
Papua New Guinea. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting, American Anthropological
Association.
Schieffelin, Edward L. 1976. The sorrow of the lonely and the burning of the dancers. New
York: St. Martins Press.
Part Tw-o
Gender, Power, and
Discourse

Our sex is identified at birth (if not before) and whatever happens to us afterward,
whatever we achieve through our own efforts or with the assistance of others, will
be affected by this initial identification. It is therefore not surprising that there
should be constant speculation about the contribution of this labeling to our lives.
After Lazarus, perhaps the person we most want to question is Tiresias: What is
the difference between being male or female? It is a question that has attracted the
attention of scholars in many fields, including those interested in language. The
question presupposes that there are differences, and as a result many scholars have
been so preoccupied with locating differences that they have sometimes exagger-
ated the importance of the differences they have found and ignored the similari-
ties (Macaulay 1978). In the reporting of sex differences, no news is not good
news; it is not news of any kind, and neither tenure nor promotion will follow
from the reporting of negative results. With such a bias in the system for reward-
ing positive results reporting sex differences, it is necessary to scrutinize any such
claims very carefully. In particular, it is essential to examine the methodology em-
ployed, especially the form of data collection. This is critical in all attempts to
study language use, but it is particularly problematic in looking at possible differ-
ences between males and females because the investigator may have preconcep-
tions of the situation. Two recent reviews of conflicting claims, one dealing with
whether men or women interrupt each other more (James and Clarke 1993) and
the other with whether there are gender differences in the amount of talk (James
and Drakich 1993), show how generalizing from a single context can provide mis-
leading results.
It is generally accepted that the language speakers have acquired and use will
have been affected by their experience: geographical location, family background,
education, and occupation are all significant. To the extent that the lives of males
and females differ, it is to be expected that the forms oflanguage they use will also
differ. In societies where males and females are largely segregated or where there
are significant differences in their exposure to education, it might be expected that
the linguistic differences will be great. In the United States, however, where equal
opportunity is the slogan, expectations of differences might be lower. This was the

75
76 Gender, Power, and Discourse

current view in anthropology until twenty years ago. Dell Hymes (1971:69) com-
mented: "If one were to examine the literature on 'men's and women's speech; one
would conclude that it was rare phenomenon, found mostly among extinct
American Indian tribes."
Robin Lakoff changed that with an essay (Lakoff 1973), later expanded into a
book (Lakoff 1975), in which she argued not only that there were characteristic
forms of"women's language" (see pp. 8-19) but that these forms oflanguage were
the result of the subordinate situation of women in the United States. Lakoff's ev-
idence wa8 perfectly legitimate. She reported as a participant observer on the be-
havior of the women she knew through firsthand contacts. This is exactly the
methodology adopted by Elinor Keenan (Ochs) in her study of a Malagasy com-
munity. In her chapter in this volume Ochs does not explain how she collected her
evidence but reports the results of her investigations. Similarly, Lakoff does not
explain her methods. An important difference, however, is that few U.S. scholars
will visit Madagascar to verify Ochs's findings, which will stand unchallenged
until someone goes there and produces a contrary report. By contrast, Lakoff's
observations were immediately disputed.
Scholars did not attempt to refute Lakoff's claims just by appealing to their own
observations. Instead, they used "objective" empirical methods. Where Lakoff
(1973:53) had simply asserted that there is "at least one [syntactic] rule that a
woman will use in more conversational situations than a man.... This is the rule
of tag-question formation;' Betty Lou Dubois and Isabel Crouch ( 1975) examined
the tapes of the sessions of a small professional meeting and found that all thirty-
three instances of tag questions were used by men. Although this could not refute
Lakoff's claim about the use of tag questions in "more conversational situations;'
it did provide evidence that "in at least one genuine social context, men did, and
women did not, use tag questions" (Dubois and Crouch 1975:294). The reference
to a "genuine" social context emphasizes that the speech recorded had not been
part of an artificially contrived experimental situation.
William O'Barr and Bowman Atkins (1980) also looked at a "genuine" social
context-the speech of witnesses in a superior criminal court. O'Barr and Atkins
argued that the features Lakoff found characteristic of "women's language" were
instead features of "powerless" language. Since women have traditionally been in
a subordinate situation, it would not be surprising if they should show more fea-
tures associated with lack of power. O'Barr and Atkins based their conclusions on
counting instances of the features Lakoff had cited. They found that both men and
women, as witnesses, varied in the extent to which they used these features, and
they attributed the greater frequency of use to lower status.
Counting instances of a feature requires a decision about what is important.
For example, O'Barr and Atkins chose to count the use of"Sir" as an address form
as "an indication of more polite speech," and consequently as an example of"pow-
erless" language. Although this may be a justifiable assumption, it is important to
emphasize that features do not come labeled as "powerless" or "powerful"; that is
Gender, Power, and Discourse 77

a judgment of the investigator. It is also likely that any single form will be used in
several functions. For example, Janet Holmes ( 1984), in her study of tag questions,
distinguished between their use as (1) expressing uncertainty, (2) being facilitative
(positively polite), and (3) softening negative comments. She found that in her
New Zealand sample women used tag questions more frequently than men in the
facilitative function, whereas men used tag questions more often than women to
express uncertainty or to soften a negative comment. It is, consequently, not
enough simply to count instances of the occurrence of a form; it is also necessary
to look at the context in which the form is used and the function it performs.
Another example of looking at function as well as form is Daniel Maltz and
Ruth Borker's claim (this volume) that "minimal responses such as nods and com-
ments like 'yes' and 'mm hmm'" may indicate something different when used by
men and women. They suggested that women may use such minimal responses
simply to indicate that they are listening, whereas men are more likely to indicate
agreement in this way. Maltz and Borker argue that differences of this kind can
lead to "massive miscommunication" between men and women. They also suggest
that the source of this miscommunication lies in the different kinds of socializa-
tion that boys and girls receive from their peer groups in the period, roughly age
5 to 15, "when boys and girls interact socially primarily with members of their
own sex:' Maltz and Borker claimed that "women and men have different cultural
rules for friendly conversation" as a result of these early experiences.
Maltz and Borker do not provide any original research findings to support their
view of cross-cultural miscommunication between men and women, though they
refer to some examples in the work of other scholars and suggest important areas
for future research. Aki Uchida (1992) criticizes Maltz and Borker's approach for
assuming "that same-sex rules will directly be carried over to mixed-sex interac-
tion." She also argues that Maltz and Borker ignore the dimension of power, which
is intertwined with the relationships between men and women. Uchida believes
that "the problem of how to conceptualize gender has so far been dealt with in
most language research in a too simplistic way:'
Penelope Eckert (this volume) observes that "like age, sex is a biological cate-
gory that serves as a fundamental basis for the differentiation of roles, norms, and
expectations in all societies. It is these roles, norms, and expectations that consti-
tute gender, the social construction of sex." She pointed out that "when people do
compete in the role domain of the other sex, it is specifically their gender identity
that gets called into question:' She gives the example that "in the upper class, what
is called effeminacy may be seen as the conscientious rejection of physical power
by those who exercise real global power by appropriating the physical power of
others:' Eckert examines the "general misconception" that women's speech is
more conservative than men's. By looking at an actual situation of two social cat-
egories in a Detroit high school, Eckert was able to show how the girls take the
lead in certain linguistic changes because they are the ones "who must rely more
on symbolic manifestations of social membership than boys." In her investigation,
78 Gender, Power, and Discourse

Eckert combined the methods of participant observation with the collection of

tape-recorded individual sociolinguistic interviews. Accordingly, she has quanti-
tative data on the use of certain linguistic features and at the same time she has
been able to observe the dynamics of social interaction.
Uchida (1992) notes that "it is very often the case that whenever a framework
for analysis is presented using American examples, it is assumed to be universal
until proven otherwise:' Ochs's account of women's language in a Malagasy com-
munity provides evidence contradictory to any claim that women are universally
"more polite" in their use of language than men. It was the Malagasy men who
were more conservative in their speech and who preferred indirectness to direct-
ness. Keenan (Ochs)'s chapter in this volume provides a warning for those who
wish to make universal claims about gender roles from sex differences.
The chapters in this part, dealing with gender differences in the use of language,
thus raise some fundamental points about the study of language variation:

1. There are fashions in research, as in most social activities. This can be help-
ful in focusing attention on certain kinds of questions but can also lead to
the neglect of other aspects of the situation. In any investigation it is impor-
tant to consider what other factors than those being studied might affect the
situation.
2. It is normal for an investigator to bring preconceptions to the study of any
topic. Random searching for patterns is unlikely to be very productive.
Although these preconceptions are useful in focusing attention ~n poten-
tially interesting factors, they should be examined for possible bias that
might distort the research.
3. Different kinds of methodology are appropriate for investigating certain sit-
uations. The trade-off is roughly the richness of firsthand observation ver-
sus the "objectivity" of large-scale surveys. Even a small-scale study can pro-
vide valuable results if carried out carefully.
4. Where quantitative methods are employed it is essential to look closely at
which items are being counted, how and why they are selected, and whether
the items have been correctly identified. In choosing which items to count,
preference should be given (other things being equal) to those items that can
be identified clearly by different investigators. This reduces the danger of
subjective bias in counting instances.
5. A major problem for all linguistic investigation lies in the distinction be-
tween form and function. All forms have several functions. It is relatively
easy to count forms; it is much harder to identify (and justify the identifica-
tion of) functions. However, the trade-off is that accounts of functional dif-
ferences are often more interesting than descriptions of formal differences.
6. Social categories are not given. They must be justified with reference to the
particular situation. Members of a society belong to several social categories
simultaneously and the effect of their membership in any one category can-
Gender, Power, and Discourse 79

not be totally separated from the effects of their membership in any other
categories.
7. Claims made on the evidence from one particular situation may not be valid
in other situations even when they appear to be similar.
8. Scholars can differ in their interpretation of the results from an investiga-
tion.

Suggestions for Further Reading

There are a number of useful textbooks and collections of articles: J. Coates, Women, Men,
and Language; J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds.), Women in their Speech Communities; D.
Graddol and J. Swann, Gender Voices; M. R. Key, Male/Female Language; S. McConnell-
Ginet, R. Borker, and N. Furman (eds.), Women and Language in Literature and Society; S.
U. Philips, S. Steele, and C. Tanz (eds.), Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative
Perspective; D. Tannen .(ed.), Gender and Conversational Interaction; B. Thorne and N.
Henley (eds.), Language and Sex; and B. Thorne, C. Kramarae, and N. Henley (eds.),
Language, Gender and Society. A good example of a carefully controlled study is B. Preisler,
Linguistic Sex Roles in Conversation. P. Eckert and S. McConnell-Ginet provide a different
perspective in "Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-
based practice."

References
Coates, Jennifer. 1986. Women, Men, and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Sex.
London: Longman.
Coates, Jennifer, and Deborah Cameron, eds. 1989. Women in their Speech Communities:
New Perspectives on Language and Sex. London: Longman.
Dubois, Betty Lou, and Isabel Crouch. 1975. "The question of tag questions in women's
speech: They don't really use more of them, do they?" Language in Society 4:289-294.
Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. "Think practically and look locally:
Language and gender as community-based practice:' Annual Review of Anthropology
21:461-490.
Graddol, David, and Joan Swann. 1989. Gender Voices. Oxford: Blackwell.
Holmes, Janet. 1984. "Hedging your bets and sitting on the fence: some evidence for hedges
as support structures." Te Reo 27:47-62.
Hymes, Dell. 1971. "Sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking." In Edwin Ardener,
ed., Social Anthropology and Language, London: Tavistock: 47-93.
James, Deborah, and Sandra Clarke. 1993. "Women, men, and interruptions: A critical
overview:' In Deborah Tannen, ed., Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York:
Oxford University Press: 231-280.
James, Deborah, and Janice Drakich. 1993. "Understanding gender differences in amount
of talk: A critical review." In Deborah Tannen, ed., Gender and Conversational
Interaction. NewYork: Oxford University Press: 281-312.
Key, Mary Ritchie. 1975. Male/Female Language. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press.
Lakoff, Robin. 1973. "Language and woman's place:' Language in Society 2:45-80.
- - - . 1975. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper.
BO Gender, Power, and Discourse

Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1978. "The myth of female superiority in language:' Journal of Child
Language 5:353-363.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds. 1980. Women and Language
in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger.
O'Barr, William M., and Bowman K. Atkins. 1980." 'Women's language' or 'powerless lan-
guage'?" In Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds. Women and
Language in Literature and Society. New York: Praeger, 93-110.
Philips, Susan U., Susan Steele, and Christine Tanz, eds. 1987. Language, Gender, and Sex in
Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Preisler, Bent. 1986. Linguistic Sex Roles in Conversation: Social Variation in the Expression
of Tentativeness in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tannen, Deborah, ed. 1993. Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Thorne, Barrie, and Nancy Henley, eds. 1975. Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance.
Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Thorne, Barrie, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds. 1983. Language, Gender, and
Society. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Uchida, Aki. 1992. "When 'difference' is 'dominance': a critique of the 'anti-power-based'
cultural approach to sex differences:' Language in Society 21:547-568.
5
A Cultural Approach to
Male-Female
Miscommunication
DANIEL N. MALTZ AND RUTH A. BORKER

Introduction
This chapter presents what we believe to be a useful new framework for examin-
ing differences in the speaking patterns of American men and women. It is based
not on new data, but on a reexamination of a wide variety of material already
available in the scholarly literature. Our starting problem is the nature of the dif-
ferent roles of male and female speakers in informal cross-sex conversations in
American English. Our attempts to think about this problem have taken us to pre-
liminary examination of a wide variety of fields often on or beyond the margins
of our present competencies: children's speech, children's play, styles and patterns
of friendship, conversational turn-taking, discourse analysis, and interethnic com-
munication. The research which most influenced the development of our present
model includes John Gumperz's work on problems in interethnic communication
(1982) and Marjorie Goodwin's study of the linguistic aspects of play among
black children in Philadelphia (1978, 1980a, 1980b).
Our major argument is that the general approach recently developed for the
study of difficulties in cross-ethnic communication can be applied to cross-sex
communication as well. We prefer to think of the difficulties in both cross-sex and
cross-ethnic communication as two examples of the same larger phenomenon:
cultural difference and miscommunication.

The Problem of Cross-Sex Conversation

Study after study has shown that when men and women attempt to interact as
equals in friendly cross-sex conversations they do not play the same role in inter-
action, even when there is no apparent element of flirting. We hope to explore
some of these differences, examine the explanations that have been offered, and
provide an alternative explanation for them.
The primary data on cross-sex conversations come from two general sources:
social psychology studies from the 1950s such as Soskin and John's (1963) re-

81
82 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borlrer

search on two young married couples and Strodbeck and Mann's (1956) research
on jury deliberations, and more recent sociolinguistic studies from the University
of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania by Candace
West (Zimmerman and West 1975; West and Zimmerman 1977; West 1979),
Pamela Fishman (1978), and Lynette Hirschman (1973).

Women's Features
Several striking differences in male and female contributions to cross-sex conver-
sation have been noticed in these studies.
First, women display a greater tendency to ask questions. Fishman (1978:400)
comments that "at times I felt that all women did was ask questions;' and
Hirschman (1973:10) notes that "several of the female-male conversations fell
into a question-answer pattern with the females asking the males questions:'
Fishman (1978:408) sees this question-asking tendency as an example of a sec-
ond, more general characteristic of women's speech, doing more of the routine
"shitwork" involved in maintaining routine social interaction, doing more to fa-
cilitate the flow of conversation (Hirschman 1973:3). Women are more likely than
men to make utterances that demand or encourage responses from their fellow
speakers and are therefore, in Fishman's words, "more actively engaged in insur-
ing interaction than the men" (1978:404). In the earlier social psychology studies,
these features have been coded under the general category of "positive reactions"
including solidarity, tension release, and agreeing (Strodbeck and Mann 1956).
Third, women show a greater tendency to make use of positive minimal re-
sponses, especially"mm hmm" (Hirschman 1973:8), and are more likely to insert
"such comments throughout streams of talk rather than [simply] at the end"
(Fishman 1978:402).
Fourth, women are more likely to adopt a strategy of "silent protest" after they
have been interrupted or have received a delayed minimal response (Zimmerman
and West 1975; West and Zimmerman 1977:524).
Fifth, women show a greater tendency to use the pronouns "you" and "we;' which
explicitly acknowledge the existence of the other speaker (Hirschman 1973:6).

Men's Features
Contrasting contributions to cross-sex conversations have been observed and de-
scribed for men.
First, men are more likely to interrupt the speech of their conversational part-
ners, that is, to interrupt the speech of women (Zimmerman and West 1975; West
and Zimmerman 1977; West 1979).
Second, they are more likely to challenge or dispute their partners' utterances
(Hirschman 1973:11).
Third, they are more likely to ignore the comments of the other speaker, that is,
to offer no response or acknowledgment at all (Hirschman 1973:11), to respond
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 83

slowly in what has been described as a "delayed minimal response" (Zimmerman

and West 1975:118), or to respond unenthusiastically (Fishman 1978).
Fourth, men use more mechanisms for controlling the topic of conversation,
including both topic development and the introduction of new topics, than do
women (Zimmerman and West 1975).
Finally, men make more direct declarations of fact or opinion than do women
(Fishman 1978:402), including suggestions, opinions, and "statements of orienta-
tion" as Strodbeck and Mann (1956) describe them, or "statements of focus and
directives" as they are described by Soskin and John (1963).

Explanations Offered
Most explanations for these features have focused on differences in the social
power or in the personalities of men and women. One variant of the social power
argument, presented by West (Zimmerman and West 1975; West and Zimmerman
1977), is that men's dominance in conversation parallels their dominance in soci-
ety. Men enjoy power in society and also in conversation. The two levels are seen
as part of a single social-political system. West sees interruptions and topic con-
trol as male displays of power-a power based in the larger social order but rein-
forced and expressed in face-to-face interaction with women. A second variant of
this argument, stated by Fishman (1978), is that while the differential power of
men and women is crucial, the specific mechanism through which it enters con-
versation is sex-role definition. Sex roles serve to obscure the issue of power for
participants, but the fact is, Fishman argues, that norms of appropriate behavior
for women and men serve to give power and interactional control to men while
keeping it from women. To be socially acceptable as women, women cannot exert
control and must actually support men in their control. In this casting of the so-
cial power argument, men are not necessarily seen to be consciously flaunting
power, but simply reaping the rewards given them by the social system. In both
variants, the link between macro and micro levels of social life is seen as direct and
unproblematic, and the focus of explanation is the general social order.
Sex roles have also been central in psychological explanations. The primary ad-
vocate of the psychological position has been Robin Lakoff (1975). Basically,
Lakoff asserts that, having been taught to speak and act like 'ladies; women be-
come as unassertive and insecure as they have been made to sound. The impossi-
ble task of trying to be both women and adults, which Lakoff sees as culturally in-
compatible, saps women of confidence and strength. As a result, they come to
produce the speech they do, not just because it is how women are supposed to
speak, but because it fits with the personalities they develop as a consequence of
sex-role requirements.
The problem with these explanations is that they do not provide a means of ex-
plaining why these specific features appear as opposed to any number of others,
nor do they allow us to differentiate between various types of male-female interac-
84 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

tion. They do not really tell us why and how these specific interactional phenom-
ena are linked to the general fact that men dominate within our social system.

An Alternative Explanation: Sociolinguistic Subcultures

Our approach to cross-sex communication patterns is somewhat different from
those that have been previously proposed. We place the stress not on psychologi-
cal differences or power differentials, although these may make some contribu-
tion, but rather on a notion of cultural differences between men and women in
their conceptions of friendly conversation, their rules for engaging in it, and,
probably most important, their rules for interpreting it. We argue that American
men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned
to do different things with words in a conversation, so that when they attempt to
carry on conversations with one another, even if both parties are attempting to
treat one another as equals, cultural miscommunication results.
The idea of distinct male and female subcultures is not a new one for anthro-
pology. It has been persuasively argued again, and again for those parts of the
world such as the Middle East and southern Europe in which men and women
spend most of their lives spatially and interactionally segregated. The strongest
case for sociolinguistic subcultures has been made by Susan Harding from her re-
search in rural Spain (1975).
The major premise on which Harding builds her argument is that speech is
a means for dealing with social and psychological situations. When men and
women have different experiences and operate in different social contexts, they
tend to develop different genres of speech and different skills for doing things
with words. In the Spanish village in which she worked, the sexual division
of labor was strong, with men involved in agricultural tasks and public politics
while women were involved in a series of networks of personal relations with
their children, their husbands, and their female neighbors. While men developed
their verbal skills in economic negotiations and public political argument,
women became more verbally adept at a quite different mode of interactional
manipulation with words: gossip, social analysis, subtle information gathering
through a carefully developed technique of verbal prying, and a kind of second-
guessing the thoughts of others (commonly known as 'women's intuition')
through a skillful monitoring of the speech of others. The different social needs
of men and women, she argues, have led them to sexually differentiated commu-
nicative cultures, with each sex learning a different set of skills for manipulating
words effectively.
The question that Harding does not ask, however, is, if men and women pos-
sess different subcultural rules for speaking, what happens if and when they try to
interact with each other? It is here that we turn to the research on interethnic mis-
communication.
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 85

Interethnic Communication
Recent research (Gumperz 1977, 1978a, 1978b, 1979; Gumperz and Tannen 1979)
has shown that systematic problems develop in communication when speakers of
different speech cultures interact and that these problems are the result of differ-
ences in systems of conversational inference and the cues for signalling speech acts
and speaker's intent. Conversation is a negotiated activity. It progresses in large
part because of shared assumptions about what is going on.
Examining interactions between English-English and Indian-English speakers
in Britain (Gumperz 1977, 1978a, 1979; Gumperz et al. 1977), Gumperz found
that differences in cues resulted in systematic miscommunication over whether a
question was being asked, whether an argument was being made, whether a per-
son was being rude or polite, whether a speaker was relinquishing the floor or in-
terrupting, whether and what a speaker was emphasizing, whether interactants
were angry, concerned, or indifferent. Rather than being seen as problems in com-
munication, the frustrating encounters that resulted were usually chalked up as
personality clashes or interpreted in the light of racial stereotypes which tended to
exacerbate already bad relations.
To take a simple case, Gumperz ( 1977) reports that Indian women working at
a cafeteria, when offering food, used a falling intonation, e.g. "gr~vy," which to
them indicated a question, something like "do you want gravy?" Both Indian and
English workers saw a question as an appropriate polite form, but to English-
English speakers a falling intonation signalled not a question, which for them is
signalled by a rising intonation such as "gr<}vy;' but a declarative statement, which
was both inappropriate and extremely rude.
A major advantage of Gumperz's framework is that it does not assume that
problems are the result of bad faith, but rather sees them as the result of individ-
uals wrongly interpreting cues according to their own rules.

The Interpretation of Minimal Responses

How might Gumperz's approach to the study of conflicting rules for interpreting
conversation be applied to the communication between men and women? A sim-
ple example will illustrate our basic approach: the case of positive minimal re-
sponses. Minimal responses such as nods and comments like "yes" and "mm
hmm" are common features of conversational interaction. Our claim, based on
our attempts to understand personal experience, is that these minimal responses
have significantly different meanings for men and women, leading to occasionally
serious miscommunication.
We hypothesize that for women a minimal response of this type means simply
something like "I'm listening to you; please continue;' and that for men it has a
somewhat stronger meaning such as "I agree with you" or at least "I follow your
86 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

argument so far:' The fact that women use these responses more often than men
is in part simply that women are listening more often than men are agreeing.
But our hypothesis explains more than simple differential frequency of usage.
Different rules can lead to repeated misunderstandings. Imagine' a male speaker
who is receiving repeated nods or "mm hmm"s from the woman he is speaking to.
She is merely indicating that she is listening, but he thinks she is agreeing with
everything he says. Now imagine a female speaker who is receiving only occasional
nods and "mm hmm"s from the man she is speaking to. He is indicating that he
doesn't always agree; she thinks he isn't always listening.
What is appealing about this short example is that it seems to explain two of the
most common complaints in male-female interaction: (1) men who think that
women are always agreeing with them and then conclude that it's impossible to
tell what a woman really thinks, and (2) women who get upset with men who
never seem to be listening. What we think we have here are two separate rules for
conversational maintenance which come into conflict and cause massive miscom-
munication.

Sources of Different Cultures

A probable objection that many people will have to our discussion so far is that
American men and women interact with one another far too often to possess dif-
ferent subcultures. What we need to explain is how it is that men and women can
come to possess different cultural assumptions about friendly conversation.
Our explanation is really quite simple. It is based on the idea that by the time
we have become adults we possess a wide variety of rules for interacting in differ-
ent situations. Different sets of these rules were learned at different times and in
different contexts. We have rules for dealing with people in dominant or subordi-
nate social positions, rules which we first learned as young children interacting
with our parents and teachers. We have rules for flirting and other sexual en-
counters which we probably started learning at or near adolescence. We have rules
for dealing with service personnel and bureaucrats, rules we began learning when
we first ventured into the public domain. Finally, we have rules for friendly inter-
action, for carrying on friendly conversation. What is striking about these last
rules is that they were learned not from adults but from peers, and that they were
learned during precisely that time period, approximately age 5 to 15, when boys
and girls interact socially primarily with members of their own sex.
The idea that girls and boys in contemporary America learn different ways of
speaking by the age of five or earlier has been postulated by Robin Lakoff (1975),
demonstrated by Andrea Meditch (1975), and more fully explored by Adelaide
Haas (1979). Haas's research on school-age children shows the early appearance
of important male-female differences in patterns of language use, including a
male tendency toward direct requests and information giving and a female ten-
dency toward compliance (1979:107).
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication .87

But the process of acquiring gender-specific speech and behavior patterns by

school-age children is more complex than the simple copying of adult "gender-
lects" by preschoolers. Psychologists Brooks-Gunn and Matthews (1979) have la-
beled this process the "consolidation of sex roles"; we call it learning of gender-
specific 'cultures:
Among school-age children, patterns of friendly social interaction are learned
not so much from adults as from members of one's peer group, and a major fea-
ture of most middle-childhood peer groups is homogeneity; "they are either all-
boy or all-girl" (Brooks-Gunn and Matthews 1979). Members of each sex are
learning self-consciously to differentiate their behavior from that of the other sex
and to exaggerate these differences. The process can be profitably compared to ac-
cent divergence in which members of two groups that wish to become clearly dis-
tinguished from one another socially acquire increasingly divergent ways of
speaking. 1
Because they learn these gender-specific cultures from their age-mates, children
tend to develop stereotypes and extreme versions of adult behavior patterns. For
a boy learning to behave in a masculine way, for example, Ruth Hartley (1959,
quoted in Brooks-Gunn and Matthews 1979:203) argues that:

both the information and the practice he gets are distorted. Since his peers have no bet-
ter sources of information than he has, all they can do is pool the impressions and anx-
ieties they derived from their early training. Thus, the picture they draw is oversimpli-
fied and overemphasized. It is a picture drawn in black and white, with little or no
modulation and it is incomplete, including a few of the many elements that go to make
up the role of the mature male.

What we hope to argue is that boys and girls learn to use language in different
ways because of the very different social contexts in which they learn how to carry
on friendly conversation. Almost anyone who remembers being a child, has
worked with school-age children, or has had an opportunity to observe school-
age children can vouch for the fact that groups of girls and groups of boys inter-
act and play in different ways. Systematic observations of children's play have
tended to confirm these well-known differences in the ways girls and boys learn
to interact with their friends.
In a major study of sex differences in the play of school-age children, for ex-
ample, sociologist Janet Lever (1976) observed the following six differences be-
tween the play of boys and that of girls: (1) girls more often play indoors; (2) boys
tend to play in larger groups; (3) boys' play groups tend to include a wider age
range of participants; (4) girls play in predominantly male games more often than
vice versa; (5) boys more often play competitive games, and (6) girls' games tend
to last a shorter period of time than boys' games.
It is by examining these differences in the social organization of play and the
accompanying differences in the patterns of social interaction they entail, we
argue, that we can learn about the sources of male-female differences in patterns
88 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

of language use. And it is these same patterns, learned in childhood and carried
over into adulthood as the bases for patterns of single-sex friendship relations, we
contend, that are potential sources of miscommunication in cross-sex interaction.

The World of Girls

Our own experience and studies such as Goodwin's (1980b) of black children and
Lever's (1976, 1978) of white children suggest a complex offeatures of girls' play
and the speech within it. Girls play in small groups, most often in pairs (Lever
1976; Eder and Hallinan 1978; Brooks-Gunn and Matthews 1979), and their play
groups tend to be remarkably homogeneous in terms of age. Their play is often in
private or semi-private settings that require participants be invited in. Play is co-
operative and activities are usually organized in noncompetitive ways (Lever 1976;
Goodwin l 980b). Differentiation between girls is not made in terms of power, but
relative closeness. Friendship is seen by girls as involving intimacy, equality, mu-
tual commitment, and loyalty. The idea of 'best friend' is central for girls.
Relationships between girls are to some extent in opposition to one another, and
new relationships are often formed at the expense of old ones. As Brooks-Gunn
and Matthews (1979:280) observe, "friendships tend to be exclusive, with a few
girls being exceptionally close to one another. Because of this breakups tend to be
highly emotional;' and Goodwin (l 980a: 172) notes that "the non-hierarchical
framework of the girls provides a fertile ground for rather intricate processes of
alliance formation between equals against some other party:'
There is a basic contradiction in the structure of girls' social relationships.
Friends are supposed to be equal and everyone is supposed to get along, but in fact
they don't always. Conflict must be resolved, but a girl cannot assert social power
or superiority as an individual to resolve it. Lever (1976), studying fifth-graders,
found that girls simply could not deal with quarrels and that when conflict arose
they made no attempt to settle it; the group just broke up. What girls learn to do
with speech is cope with the contradiction created by an ideology of equality and
cooperation and a social reality that includes difference and conflict. As they grow
up they learn increasingly subtle ways of balancing the conflicting pressures cre-
ated by a female social world and a female friendship ideology.
Basically girls learn to do three things with words: ( 1) to create and maintain
relationships of closeness and equality, (2) to criticize others in acceptable ways,
and (3) to interpret accurately the speech of other girls.
To a large extent friendships among girls are formed through talk. Girls need to
learn to give support, to recognize the speech rights of others, to let others speak,
and to acknowledge what they say in order to establish and maintain relationships
of equality and closeness. In activities they need to learn to create cooperation
through speech. Goodwin (1980a) found that inclusive forms such as "let's;"'we
gonna;' "we could;' and "we gotta" predominated in task-oriented activities.
Furthermore, she found that most girls in the group she studied made suggestions
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 89

and that the other girls usually agreed to them. But girls also learn to exchange in-
formation and confidences to create and maintain relationships of closeness. The
exchange of personal thoughts not only expresses closeness but mutual commit-
ment as well. Brooks-Gunn and Matthews (1979:280) note of adolescent girls:
much time is spent talking, reflecting, and sharing intimate thought. Loyalty is of cen-
tral concern to the 12- to 14-year old girl, presumably because, if innermost secrets are
shared, the friend may have 'dangerous knowledge' at her disposal.

Friendships are not only formed through particular types of talk, but are ended
through talk as well. As Lever ( 1976:4) says of'best friends; "sharing secrets binds
the union together, and 'telling' the secrets to outsiders is symbolic of the 'break-
up'."
Secondly, girls learn to criticize and argue with other girls without seeming
overly aggressive, without being perceived as either 'bossy' or 'mean; terms girls
use to evaluate one another's speech and actions. Bossiness, ordering others
around, is not legitimate because it denies equality. Goodwin (1980a) points out
that girls talked very negatively about the use of commands to equals, seeing it as
appropriate only in role play or in unequal relationships such as those with
younger siblings. Girls learn to direct things without seeming bossy, or they learn
not to direct. While disputes are common, girls learn to phrase their arguments in
terms of group needs and situational requirements rather than personal power or
desire (Goodwin 1980a). Meanness is used by girls to describe nonlegitimate acts
of exclusion, turning on someone, or withholding friendship. Excluding is a fre-
quent occurrence (Eder and Hallinan 1978), but girls learn over time to discour-
age or even drive away other girls in ways that don't seem to be just personal
whim. Cutting someone is justified in terms of the target's failure to meet group
norms and a girl often rejects another using speech that is seemingly supportive
on the surface. Conflict and criticism are risky in the world of girls because they
can both rebound against the critic and can threaten social relationships. Girls
learn to hide the source of criticism; they present it as coming from someone else
or make it indirectly through a third party (Goodwin 1980a, 1980b).
Finally, girls must learn to decipher the degree of closeness being offered by
other girls, to recognize what is being withheld, and to recognize criticism. Girls
who don't actually read these cues run the risk of public censure or ridicule
(Goodwin 1980). Since the currency of closeness is the exchange of secrets which
can be used against a girl, she must learn to read the intent and loyalty of others
and to do so continuously, given the system of shifting alliances and indirect ex-
pressions of conflict. Girls must become increasingly sophisticated in reading the
motives of others, in determining when closeness is real, when conventional, and
when false, and to respond appropriately. They must learn who to confide in, what
to confide, and who not to approach. Given the indirect expression of conflict,
girls must learn to read relationships and situations sensitively. Learning to get
things right is a fundamental skill for social success, if not just social survival.
90 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

The World of Boys

Boys play in larger, more hierarchically organized groups than do girls. Relative sta-
tus in this ever-fluctuating hierarchy is the main thing that boys learn to manipu-
late in their interactions with their peers. Nondominant boys are rarely excluded
from play but are made to feel the inferiority of their status positions in no uncer-
tain terms. And since hierarchies fluctuate over time and over situation, every boy
gets his chance to be victimized and must learn to take it. The social world of boys
is one of posturing and counterposturing. In this world, speech is used in three
major ways: (1) to assert one's position of dominance, (2) to attract and maintain
an audience, and (3) to assert oneself when other speakers have the floor.
The use of speech for the expression of dominance is the most straightforward
and probably the best-documented sociolinguistic pattern in boys' peer groups.
Even ethological studies of human dominance patterns have made extensive use
of various speech behaviors as indices of dominance. Richard Savin-Williams
(1976), for example, in his study of dominance patterns among boys in a summer
camp uses the following speech interactions as measures of dominance: ( 1) giving
of verbal commands or orders, such as "Get up;' "Give it to me," or "You go over
there"; (2) name calling and other forms of verbal ridicule, such as "You're a dolt";
(3) verbal threats or boasts of authority, such as "If you don't shut up, I'm gonna
come over and bust your teeth in"; (4) refusals to obey orders; and (5) winning a
verbal argument as in the sequence: "I was here first" I "Tough;' or in more elab-
orate forms of verbal dueling such as the 'dozens: 2
The same patterns of verbally asserting one's dominance and challenging the
dominance claims of others form the central element in Goodwin's (1980a) ob-
servations of boys' play in Philadelphia. What is easy to forget in thinking about
this use of words as weapons, however, is that the most successful boy in such in-
teraction is not the one who is most aggressive and uses the most power-wielding
forms of speech, but the boy who uses these forms most successfully. The simple
use of assertiveness and aggression in boys' play is the sign not of a leader but of
a bully. The skillful speaker in a boys' group is considerably more likable and bet-
ter liked by his peers than is a simple bully. Social success among boys is based on
knowing both how and when to use words to express power as well as knowing
when not to use them. A successful leader will use speech to put challengers in
their place and to remind followers periodically of their nondominant position,
but will not browbeat unnecessarily and will therefore gain the respect rather than
the fear of less dominant boys.
A second sociolinguistic aspect of friendly interaction between boys is using
words to gain and maintain an audience. Storytelling, joke telling, and other nar-
rative performance events are common features of the social interaction of boys.
But actual transcripts of such storytelling events collected by Harvey Sacks (Sacks
1974; Jefferson 1978) and Goodwin (1980a), as opposed to stories told directly to
interviewers, reveal a suggestive feature of storytelling activities among boys: audi-
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 91

ence behavior is not overtly supportive. The storyteller is frequently faced with
mockery, challenges and side comments on his story. A major sociolinguistic skill
which a boy must apparently learn in interacting with his peers is to ride out this
series of challenges, maintain his audience, and successfully get to the end of his
stoty. In Sacks's account (1974) of some teenage boys involved in the telling of a
dirty joke, for example, the narrator is challenged for his taste in jokes (an impli-
cation that he doesn't know a dirty joke from a non-dirty one) and for the poten-
tial ambiguity of his opening line "Three brothers married three sisters;' not, as
Sacks seems to imply, because audience members are really confused, but just to
hassle the speaker. Through catches,' put-downs, the building of suspense, or other
interest-grabbing devices, the speaker learns to control his audience. He also learns
to continue when he gets no encouragement whatever, pausing slightly at various
points for possible audience response but going on if there is nothing but silence.
A final sociolinguistic skill which boys must learn from interacting with other
boys is how to act as audience members in the types of storytelling situations just
discussed. As audience member as well as storyteller, a boy must learn to assert
himself and his opinions. Boys seem to respond to the storytelling of other boys
not so much with questions on deeper implications or with minimal response en-
couragement as with side comments and challenges. These are not meant pri-
marily to interrupt, to change topic, or to change the direction of the narrative it-
self, but to assert the identity of the individual audience member.

Women's Speech
The structures and strategies in women's conversation show a marked continuity
with the talk of girls. The key logic suggested by Kalcik's (1975) study of women's
rap groups, Hirschman's ( 1973) study of students and Abrahams's ( 1975) work on
black women is that women's conversation is interactional. In friendly talk,
women are negotiating and expressing a relationship, one that should be in the
form of support and closeness, but which may also involve criticism and distance.
Women orient themselves to the person they are talking to and expect such ori-
entation in return. As interaction, conversation requires participation from those
involved and back-and-forth movement between participants. Getting the floor is
not seen as particularly problematic; that should come about automatically. What
is problematic is getting people engaged and keeping them engaged-maintain-
ing the conversation and the interaction.
This conception of conversation leads to a number of characteristic speech
strategies and gives a particular dynamic to women's talk. First, women tend to
use personal and inclusive pronouns, such as 'you' and 'we' (Hirschman 1973).
Second, women give off and look for signs of engagement such as nods and min-
imal response (Kalcik 1975; Hirschman 1973). Third, women give more extended
signs of interest and attention, such as interjecting comments or questions during
a speaker's discourse. These sometimes take the form of interruptions. In fact,
92 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

both Hirschman (1973) and Kalcik (1975) found that interruptions were ex-
tremely common, despite women's concern with politeness and decorum (Kalcik
1975). Kalcik (1975) comments that women often asked permission to speak but
were concerned that each speaker be allowed to finish and that all present got a
chance to speak. These interruptions were clearly not seen as attempts to grab the
floor but as calls for elaboration and development, and were taken as signs of sup-
port and interest. Fourth, women at the beginning of their utterances explicitly
acknowledge and respond to what has been said by others. Fifth, women attempt
to link their utterance to the one preceding it by building on the previous utter-
ance or talking about something parallel or related to it. Kalcik (1975) talks about
strategies of tying together, filling in, and serializing as signs of women's desire to
create continuity in conversation, and Hirschman (1973) describes elaboration as
a key dynamic of women's talk.
While the idiom of much of women's friendly talk is that of support, the ele-
ments of criticism, competition, and conflict do occur in it. But as with girls, these
tend to take forms that fit the friendship idiom. Abrahams (1975) points out that
while 'talking smart' is clearly one way women talk to women as well as to men,
between women it tends to take a more playful form, to be more indirect and
metaphoric in its phrasing and less prolonged than similar talk between men.
Smartness, as he points out, puts distance in a relationship (Abrahams 1975). The
target of criticism, whether present or not, is made out to be the one violating
group norms and values (Abrahams 1975). Overt competitiveness is also dis-
guised. As Kalcik (1975) points out, some stories that build on preceding ones are
attempts to cap the original speaker, but they tend to have a form similar to sup-
portive ones. It is the intent more than the form that differs. Intent is a central el-
ement in the concept of 'bitchiness; one of women's terms for evaluating their
talk, and it relates to this contradiction between form and intent, whether putting
negative messages in overtly positive forms or acting supportive face to face while
not being so elsewhere.
These strategies and the interactional orientation of women's talk give their
conversation a particular dynamic. While there is often an unfinished quality to
particular utterances. (Kalcik 1975), there is a progressive development to the
overall conversation. The conversation grows out of the interaction of its partici-
pants, rather than being directed by a single individual or series of individuals. In
her very stimulating discussion, KalCik (1975) argues that this is true as well for
many of the narratives women tell in conversation. She shows how narrative "ker-
nels" serve as conversational resources for individual women and the group as a
whole. How and if a "kernel story" is developed by the narrator and/or audience
on a particular occasion is a function of the conversational context from which it
emerges (Kalcik 1975:8), and it takes very different forms at different tellings. Not
only is the dynamic of women's conversation one of elaboration and continuity,
but the idiom of support can give it a distinctive tone as well. Hannerz (1969:96),
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 93

for example, contrasts the "tone of relaxed sweetness, sometimes bordering on the
saccharine;' that characterizes approving talk between women, to the heated ar-
gument found among men. Kalcik (1975:6) even goes so far as to suggest that
there is an "underlying esthetic or organizing principle" of "harmony'' being ex-
pressed in women's friendly talk.

Men's Speech
The speaking patterns of men, and of women for that matter, vary greatly from
one North American subculture to another. As Gerry Philipsen (1975:13) sum-
marizes it, "talk is not everywhere valued equally; nor is it anywhere valued
equally in all social contexts:' There are striking cultural variations between sub-
cultures in whether men consider certain modes of speech appropriate for deal-
ing with women, children, authority figures, or strangers; there are differences in
performance rules for storytelling and joke telling; there are differences in the
context of men's speech; and there are differences in the rules for distinguishing
aggressive joking from true aggression.
But more surprising than these differences are the apparent similarities across
subcultures in the patterns of friendly interaction between men and the resem-
blances between these patterns and those observed for boys. Research reports on
the speaking patterns of men among urban blacks (Hannerz 1969), rural
Newfoundlanders (Faris 1966; Bauman 1972), and urban blue-collar whites
(Philipsen 1975; LeMasters 1975) point again and again to the same three fea-
tures: storytelling, arguing and verbal posturing.
Narratives such as jokes and stories are highly valued, especially when they are
well performed for an audience. In Newfoundland, for example, Faris (1966:242)
comments that "the reason 'news' is rarely passed between two men meeting in the
road-it is simply not to one's advantage to relay information to such a small au-
dience." Loud and aggressive argument is a second common feature of male-male
speech. Such arguments, which may include shouting, wagering, name-calling,
and verbal threats (Faris 1966:245), are often, as Hannerz (1969:86) describes
them, "debates over minor questions oflittle direct import to anyone;' enjoyed for
their own sake and not taken as signs of real conflict. Practical jokes, challenges,
put-downs, insults, and other forms of verbal aggression are a third feature of
men's speech, accepted as normal among friends. LeMasters (1975:140), for ex-
ample, describes life in a working-class tavern in the Midwest as follows:
It seems clear that status at the Oasis is related to the ability to "dish it out" in the rapid-
fire exchange called "joshing": you have to have a quick retort, and preferably one that
puts you "one up" on your opponent. People who can't compete in the game lose status.

Thus challenges rather than statements of support are a typical way for men to re-
spond to the speech of other men.
94 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

What Is Happening in Cross-Sex Conversation

What we are suggesting is that women and men have different cultural rules for
friendly conversation and that these rules come into conflict when women and
men attempt to talk to each other as friends and equals in casual conversation. We
can think of at least five areas, in addition to that of minimal responses already
discussed, in which men and women probably possess different conversational
rules, so that miscommunication is likely to occur in cross-sex interaction.
1. There are two interpretations of the meaning of questions. Women seem to
see questions as a part of conversational maintenance, while men seem to
view them primarily as requests for information.
2. There are two conventions for beginning an utterance and linking it to the
preceding utterance. Women's rules seem to call for an explicit acknowledg-
ment of what has been said and making a connection to it. Men seem to have
no such rule and in fact some male strategies call for ignoring the preceding
comments.
3. There are different interpretations of displays of verbal aggressiveness.
Women seem to interpret overt aggressiveness as personally directed, nega-
tive, and disruptive. Men seem to view it as one conventional organizing
structure for conversational flow.
4. There are two understandings of topic flow and topic shift. The literature on
storytelling in particular seems to indicate that men operate with a system
in which topic is fairly narrowly defined and adhered to until finished and
in which shifts between topics are abrupt, while women have a system in
which topic is developed progressively and shifts gradually. These two sys-
tems imply very different rules for and interpretations of side comments,
with major potential for miscommunication.
5. There appear to be two different attitudes towards problem sharing and ad-
vice giving. Women tend to discuss problems with one another, sharing ex-
periences and offering reassurances. Men, in contrast, tend to hear women,
and other men, who present them with problems as making explicit requests
for solutions. They respond by giving advice, by acting as experts, lecturing
to their audiences.4

Conclusions
Our purpose in this paper has been to present a framework for thinking about
and tying together a number of strands in the analysis of differences between male
and female conversational styles. We hope to prove the intellectual value of this
framework by demonstrating its ability to do two things: to serve as a model both
of and for sociolinguistic research.
As a model of past research findings, the power of our approach lies in its abil-
ity to suggest new explanations of previous findings on cross-sex communication
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 95

while linking these findings to a wide range of other fields, including the study of
language acquisition, of play, of friendship, of storytelling, of cross-cultural mis-
communication, and of discourse analysis. Differences in the social interaction
patterns of boys and girls appear to be widely known but rarely utilized in exam-
inations of sociolinguistic acquisition or in explanations of observed gender dif-
ferences in patterns of adult speech. Our proposed framework should serve to link
together these and other known facts in new ways.
As a model for future research, we hope our framework will be even more
promising. It suggests to us a number of potential research problems which re-
main to be investigated. Sociolinguistic studies of school-age children, especially
studies of the use of speech in informal peer interaction, appear to be much rarer
than studies of young children, although such studies may be of greater relevance
for the understanding of adult patterns, particularly those related to gender. Our
framework also suggests the need for many more studies of single-sex conversa-
tions among adults, trying to make more explicit some of the differences in con-
versational rules suggested by present research. Finally, the argument we have
been making suggests a number of specific problems that appear to be highly
promising lines for future research:

1. A study of the sociolinguistic socialization of 'tomboys' to see how they

combine male and female patterns of speech and interaction;
2. An examination of the conversational patterns of lesbians and gay men to
see how these relate to the sex-related patterns of the dominant culture;
3. An examination of the conversational patterns of the elderly to see to what
extent speech differences persist after power differences have become in-
significant;
4. A study of children's cultural concepts for talking about speech and the ways
these shape the acquisition of speech styles (for example, how does the con-
cept of 'bossiness' define a form of behavior which little girls must learn to
recognize, then censure, and finally avoid?);
5. An examination of 'assertiveness training' programs for women to see
whether they are really teaching women the speaking skills that politically
skillful men learn in boyhood or are merely teaching women how to act like
bossy little girls or bullying little boys and not feel guilty about it.

We conclude this paper by reemphasizing three of the major ways in which we

feel that an anthropological perspective on culture and social organization can
prove useful for further research on differences between men's and women's
speech.
First, an anthropological approach to culture and cultural rules forces us to re-
examine the way we interpret what is going on in conversations. The rules for in-
terpreting conversation are·, after all, culturally determined. There may be more
than one way of understanding what is happening in a particular conversation
96 Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Burker

and we must be careful about the rules we use for interpreting cross-sex conver-
sations, in which the two participants may not fully share their rules of conversa-
tional inference.
Second, a concern with the relation between cultural rules and their social con-
texts leads us to think seriously about differences in different kinds of talk, ways
of categorizing interactional situations, and ways in which conversational patterns
may function as strategies for dealing with specific aspects of one's social world.
Different types of interaction lead to different ways of speaking. The rules for
friendly conversation between equals are different from those for service encoun-
ters, for flirting, for t~aching, or for polite formal interaction. And even within the
apparently uniform domain of friendly interaction, we argue that there are sys-
tematic differences between men and women in the way friendship is defined and
thus in the conversational strategies that result.
Third and finally, our analysis suggests a different way of thinking about the
connection between the gender-related behavior of children and that of adults.
Most discussions of sex-role socialization have been based on the premise that
gender differences are greatest for adults and that these adult differences are
learned gradually throughout childhood. Our analysis, on the other hand, would
suggest that at least some aspects of behavior are most strongly gender-differenti-
ated during childhood and that adult patterns of friendly interaction, for exam-
ple, involve learning to overcome at least partially some of the gender-specific cul-
tural patterns typical of childhood.

Notes
1. The analogy between the sociolinguistic processes of dialect divergence and gender-
lect divergence was pointed out to us by Ron Macaulay.
2. In the strict sense the term, 'dozens' refers to a culturally specific form of stylized ar-
gument through the exchange of insults that has been extensively documented by a variety
of students of American black culture and is most frequently practiced by boys in their
teens and pre-teens. Recently folklorist Simon Bronner (1978) has made a convincing case
for the existence of a highly similar but independently derived form of insult exchange
known as 'ranking', 'mocks', or 'cutting' among white American adolescents. What we find
striking and worthy of note is the tendency for both black and white versions of the dozens
to be practiced primarily by boys.
3. 'Catches' are a form of verbal play in which the main speaker ends up tricking a mem-
ber of his or her audience into a vulnerable or ridiculous position. In an article on the folk-
lore of black children in South Philadelphia, Roger Abrahams ( 1963) distinguishes between
catches which are purely verbal and tricks in which the second player is forced into a posi-
tion of being not only verbally but also physically abused as in the following example of a
catch which is also a trick:
A: Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me-Tight
Went up the hill to spend the night.
Adam and Eve came down the hill.
Who was left?
A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication 97

B: Pinch-Me-Tight
[A pinches B]
What is significant about both catches and tricks is that they allow for the expression of
playful aggression and that they produce a temporary hierarchical relation between a win-
ner and loser, but invite the loser to attempt to get revenge by responding with a counter-
trick.
4. We thank Kitty Julien for first pointing out to us the tendency of male friends to give
advice to women who are not necessarily seeking it and Niyi Akinnaso for pointing out that
the sex difference among Yoruba speakers in Nigeria in the way people respond verbally to
the problems of others is similar to that among English speakers in the U.S.

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6
Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers:
Uses of Speech
by Men and Women
in a Malagasy Community
ELINOR KEENAN (OCHS)

The Community
Namoizamanga is a hamlet composed of twenty-four households, situated in the
southern central plateau of Madagascar. This area is generally referred to as
Vakinankaratra; 1 meaning 'broken by the Ankaratra: The Ankaratra Mountains do
in fact form a natural boundary in the north. They separate this area somewhat
from other parts of the central plateau area. This separation has sociological sig-
nificance in that the people of this community and communities nearby identify
themselves as Vakinankaratra. The present generation recognize an historical link
with the dominant plateau group, the Merina, but choose a separate social identity.
A partial explanation for this parochialism lies in the nature of the ties which
brought these people formerly in contact. In the late eighteenth century and into
the nineteenth century, people of the Vakinankaratra were conquered by the
Merina and brought north as slaves. When the French abolished ownership of
slaves and the existence of a slave class (andevo), many slaves moved back into the
traditional homeland of their ancestors. A villager speaks of this time with great
difficulty and embarrassment. The people know themselves to be former andevo
and are known by others to be such, but the term itself is almost never used. To
address or refer to someone as andevo is a grave insult. Genealogical reckoning is
shallow, typically going back two to three generations. With some exceptions,
local histories begin with the settling of ancestors into these villages in the early
part of this century.
Within the village, fixed distinctions in social status are few. All members of a
community (who are part of a household) are considered havana (kinsmen).
Those outside the community are vahiny (guests, strangers). Within the havana
group, those adults who have taken a spouse, especially those with children, are
considered to be ray-aman-dreny (elders; literally 'father-and mother') of the

99
100 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

community. A respected adult without spouse or children can be a ray-aman-

dreny, but the status typically implies these qualifications. Decisions which affect
a family or the community are usually handled by these ray-aman-dreny.
Traditionally, village leadership is not fixed with any one particular individual.
Superimposed on this communal framework is a hierarchy of government of-
ficials who represent the national political party in power. These officials collect
taxes, regulate elections, and act as general liaisons between the government and
the people in their sphere of authority. These officials are referred to by.French
terms: chef d'hameau (head of a hamlet), chef de village (head of those hamlets
which compose an official village), chef de quartier (head of those villages which
compose a quartier) and so on.

Linguistic Repertoire of the Community

The language spoken throughout Madagascar, in various dialects, is Malagasy. It
is a verb-first, subject-final language belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian
subfamily of languages. The people of Namoizamanga speak the major dialect of
the island, Merina. French is taught in local schools but few villagers, and no
adults, speak fluently. Nonetheless sets of French terms may be employed to com-
municate specific information in particular activities. For example, French direc-
tional terms are used almost exclusively in giving orders to cows (see Bloch MS.).
We will see below that this specific use of French can be understood in terms of
the speech norms we shall present.
There are two major modes of speech use distinguished by the villagers. First,
there is resaka. This term refers to teny-an-dava'andro (everyday speaking). Resaka
is also characterized as teny tsotra (simple talk). The specific kinds of speech be-
havior covered by the term reseka are numerous. Tafatafa (gossip), fiarahabana
(greetings), fangatahana (requests), fiantsoana (calling out), fierana (consulta-
tions), dinika {discussion), mitapatap'ahitra (examine closely; literally 'to break
grass'), for example, are resaka.
Resaka contrasts with kabary, which refers both to ceremonial speech situations
and to the highly stylized mode of speech which characterizes such situations.
Kabary speech is governed by a series of well known rules which concern the se-
quencing and content of particular speeches. Kabary is characteristic of formal
speech situations. Fanambadiana (marriages),fandevenana (burials),famadihana
(ancestral bone-turnings), famorana (circumcisions), for example, use a specific
kabary as part of the ritual. But any situation can become 'ceremonial' if one
chooses to use the kabary format, as in for example the expression of gratitude by
guest to host, or in the expression of sympathy in visiting mourners or the ill.
We consider resaka and kabary to be contrastive speech uses of the same gener-
ality. This consideration is based on comparison of these terms in unsolicited
speech of the villagers themselves. In particular, these two modes of speech usage
are frequently contrasted with each other by speechmakers. The contrast appears
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 101

in that part of a kabary in which the speechmaker is expected to convey his in-
ability, unworthiness as a speechmaker. He does this frequently by claiming that
his words are not kabary but resaka.

Avoidance of Direct Affront as a Social Norm

Status as a Norm
Particular uses of speech by a villager are constrained to some extent by notions
of what is expected behavior in particular situations. For example, in the
Vakinankaratra, one is expected (in many social situations) to avoid open and di-
rect confrontation with another. One is expected not to affront another, not to put
an individual in an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation. It is this sort of ex-
pected behavior which I am considering as a behavioral norm, relative to partic-
ular situations.
When one conducts oneself in violation of these expectations, as in directly
confronting another, the action is censured by other villagers. For example, chil-
dren who confront strangers (vahiny) by making direct demands of them are rep-
rimanded by their mothers or elder siblings. An adult who insults (manevateva)
another openly is ignored by those sympathetic to the injured party. In one case
for example, a family who had offended other members of the village with direct
insults was physically cut off from most village social life. The footpath running
between their house and the rest of the village was blocked. Sisal shrubs were
placed across the passage. No member of the village helped the family with rice-
planting, whereas normally groups of men and groups of women from each
household cooperatively worked each other's fields.
Another form of public censure is to speak of offensive conduct as causing hen-
atra (shame). One who has caused henatra is thought to mangala-baraka (to steal
honor) from one's family or community. One who has caused henatra is the cen-
ter of much gossip (tafatafa). One strives not to bring henatra upon himself or
other individuals, and one way to reduce the risk of henatra is to act in ways which
support the norm of non-confrontation.

Expression of the Non-Confrontation Norm in Speech Interaction

Affront can result from a number of interpersonal actions: catching an individual
off-guard, unexpectedly, is an affronting action, for example. Thus, in
Namoizamanga, to enter another's house without any warning is always inappro-
priate. If the callers are havana (kinsmen or neighbors), they shout haody, which
signals to those inside the house that they are about to receive visitors. Those in-
side respond to this signal by saying mandrosoa (enter!). This exchange confirms
that those inside the house are, in principle, ready to receive the callers. Such an
exchange allows those inside the house a moment of preparation to rise from their
beds, dress, stop eating, or the like. On the other hand, if the guests are not ha-
vana, they may in addition send a messenger ahead to ascertain whether or not
102 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

these others can receive them. It is highly offensive then to catch one unawares, as
this may put him in a disadvantaged position.
Equally inappropriate is an open and direct expression of anger or disagree-
ment. Physical fighting among adults is almost non-existent. Small boys have
mock fights, but these are always playful, never angry. Typically anger or disap-
proval is not directed toward the relevant person or persons. Rather, each side tells
sympathetic associates of their sentiments, and these sentiments are then made
known to the other side by intermediaries. Disputes then are often resolved by in-
termediaries, such as local elders or persons in the area known to be mpanao fi-
havanana (restorers of relationships). These persons are invited by some person
associated with both sides to resolve the dispute.
We should note also that the censuring behavior referred to above is subject to
the norm of non-confrontation. Thus, with one important exception to be dis-
cussed below, censure is not communicated directly and openly to an adult viola-
tor of a norm.
Similarly criticism leveled by speechmakers at each other during kabary per-
formances is also subject to the nonconfrontation norm. Many kabary perfor-
mances involve at least two speechmakers (mpikabary) who engage in a ritualized
dialogue which varies according to the nature of the occasion. Usually the second
speaker or group of speakers represents the listener group to whom the first
speaker addresses himself. The second speaker normally affirms his (his group's)
support for and solidarity with the first speaker and his group. However, there are
occasions when the second speechmaker wishes to criticize the first one. For ex-
ample, if the first has made some error in the sequence of speech acts which con-
stitute the kabary or has given some incorrect information, the second speech-
maker will usually point this out. In so doing he enhances his status as one
knowledgeable in matters of the kabary. Thus the kabary functions on two levels
at once. On one level, it is concerned with the ritual at hand: marriage request, fu-
neral, circumcision. And on a second level it is a forum displaying the skill and
knowledge of the speakers. An able speechmaker excels by revealing an intimate
acquaintance with kabary format and with the range of proverbs (ohabolana) and
traditional sayings (hainteny) associated with the particular event.
One way of expressing expertise is to dispute some aspect of the kabary han-
dled by the other speechmaker. But the expression of disagreement must be done
delicately. It must be shown that an error has been made, but it must not be shown
too bluntly or explicitly. The second speechmaker must avoid confronting the first
with explicit criticism. In fact, if the second speechmaker were to directly confront
the first he would bring henatra upon himself and his group. On the other hand,
the more subtlythe criticism is couched, the greater his status as speechmaker be-
comes. So, rather than making explicit verbal attacks, the speechmaker makes use
of a number of stylistic techniques. First, he softens the negative intent of his re-
marks by prefacing them with compliments. For example:
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 103

Thank you very much, sir. The first part of your talk has already been received in peace
and happiness. I am in accordance and agreement with you on this, sir. You were given
permission to speak and what you said gave me courage and strength. You said things
skillfully but not pretentiously. You originate words but also recognize what is tradi-
tional. But as for myself I am not an originator of words at all but a borrower. I am more
comfortable carrying the spade and basket. You, on the other hand, have smoothed out
all faults in the speech; you have woven the holes together. You have shown respect to
the elders and respect to the young as well. This is finished. But ... (Criticism begins.)

Second, criticisms are usually not simply stated but rather alluded to. Proverbs,
poetry, traditional expressions are all brought in to reveal bit by bit the direction
of the utterance. The same kind of proverbs, poetry, and traditional expressions
are used over and over again for these purposes, so that the other speechmaker
knows exactly what is being implied by each stylistic device. For example, a criti-
cism might typically begin with the proverb Atao hady voamangan'Ikirijavola ka
potsika amin'ny amboamasony (Done like Ikirijavola digging sweet potatoes: the
digging stick jabbed straight into a potato eye). This proverb refers to a similar be-
havior performed by the other speaker. It implies that the other speaker has
rushed into the kabary too swiftly and too abruptly. Like Ikirijavola who has
spoiled the sweet potato, the other speaker has mishandled some part of the
kabary. The proper way of digging sweet potatoes calls for a careful loosening of
the earth which surrounds the root. And the proper way of performing a kabary
calls for a careful treatment of each kabary segment. If such a criticism were ut-
tered in all its explicitness the other speechmaker and his group would take of-
fense. They might choose to leave rather than bear this loss of face. In making use
of a more allusive frame, the speechmaker not only displays his knowledge and
skill, he also allows the kabary to continue and maintains the flow of communi-
cation between the two groups.
Accusations (fiampangana, or more usually manome tsiny [give guilt]) are an-
other form of speech behavior subject to this norm in that they are rarely made in
an explicit and open manner. Typically suspicions are communicated in conver-
sation and gossip, but explicit accusations are rare. One is not even directly ac-
cused when, as they say, one is caught tratra am-body om by (caught in the act; LIT
'caught on the back of the cow'). Thus one is rarely held accountable for having
done something wrong as others hesitate to confront that person with that infor-
mation.
The hesitation to commit oneself explicitly to an idea or opinion is itself an im-
portant behavioral norm in this community. One is noncommittal for fear that an
action openly advocated might have consequences that would have to be borne
alone. One avoids accusation because one does not wish to be responsible for pro-
viding that information. If the wrongdoer is to be pointed out, the rest of the com-
munity must share the responsibility for the act, and they must share any guilt that
may result. One speechmaker gave this account of what occurs in such situations:
104 Elinor Kee~an (Ochs)

Even if someone was caught in the act of doing something wrong, then you cannot di-
rectly point at this person to dishonor him directly. You must use special expressions or
go about it in a roundabout way. But if by chance there are people who demand that this
wrongdoer be pointed out directly, then the speaker must say directly in the kabary who
the person is. But because he must speak directly the speaker must ask the people to lift
all guilt from him (aza tsiny). If there is someone in the audience who wants to know
more, who doesn't understand, then he may respond during a break in the talk, 'It is not
clear to us, sir. It is hard to distinguish the domestic cat from the wild cat. They are the
same whether calico or yellow or grey. And if it is the wild cat who steals the chicken, we
cannot tell him from the others. The wild cat steals the chicken but the domestic cat gets
its tail cut off. So point directly to the wild cat:
In general then one avoids confronting another with negative or unpleasant in-
formation. Disputes, criticisms, accusations are typically not straightforward.
Disputes are often carried through mediators. Criticisms are veiled in metaphor.
Accusations are left imprecise, unless the group is willing to share responsibility
for the act of accusation. Direct affront indicates a lowering or absence of respect
on the part of the affronter. In public situations, however, show of respect is ex-
pected. And, in formal public situations such as the kabary performance, it is
obligatory. Every speechmaker interviewed stressed the importance of respect:

• In the kabary, it is not good to speak directly. If you speak directly the kabary
is a kabarin-jaza (child's kabary) and there is no respect and honor.
• Speakers are not afraid to explain to one another, to answer with wisdom.
But the censurer must be careful not to dishonor or mock or lower in pub-
lic that speaker, because this was fady (taboo) for our ancestors.
• A kabary which blames, disgraces is not a kabary fankasitrahana (kabary of
agreement) but a kabary fankahalana (kabary of hatred). And the audience
leaves. 'This is a kabary ratsy (bad kabary); they say.

Direct affront, then, risks censure of others. Directness is associated with the
ways of children and with things contrary to tradition. A speechmaker who af-
fronts may be left without an audience. His status as speechmaker is lowered.
Direct affront can bring henatra and possibly tsiny (guilt). These considerations
help to explain the general hesitation to openly accuse, criticize, or dispute.
. The norm of avoidance of explicit and direct affront underlies other speech acts
as well. The speech acts of fandidiana (ordering) and fangatahana (asking), for ex-
ample, are affected. These speech acts are particular sorts of interpersonal direc-
tives (my terminology): they are used to get someone to do something. The use of
an interpersonal directive creates an active confrontation situation. The person
directed (ordered, asked) is confronted with having to comply with the directive
or with having to reject it. And the director (orderer, asker) is confronted with the
possibility that his authority to direct will not be acknowledged. A directive which
is too explicit may affront the person directed. An explicit rejection of the direc-
tive may affront the director.
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 105

We consider fandidiana (ordering) and the ways the possibility of affront can
be reduced.
First, the order is typically softened by a number of verbal niceties. The order is
typically preceded by the word mba (please). It is typically followed by the word
kely, usually translated as 'small' but here just a softening word which reduces the
harshness of the speech act. These verbal softeners convey respect to the person
ordered. In so doing, they transform the order into a more egalitarian type of en-
counter where personal affront is less likely.
A more important way in which the orderer shapes the speech act of fandidi-
ana is in the handling of imperatives. Orders are frequently formed by impera-
tives. What is interesting is that the speaker has a choice of three distinct forms of
imperative to use: the active imperative, the passive imperative, and the circum-
stantial imperative.
These imperative forms correspond to the three verb voices in Malagasy. The
active and passive voices operate much the same as in Indo-European languages.
The passive voice takes some object of the active sentence and makes it a superfi-
cial subject. The third verb voice, the circumstantial, operates in much the same
way. The circumstantial voice makes a superficial subject out of a constituent
which refers to some circumstance-place, time, instrument, etc.-of the action.
Thus, the active declarative sentence:

Manasa ny lamba amin' ny savony Rasoa.

'Rasoa is washing the clothes with the soap.'
(LIT washes the clothes with the soap Rasoa.)

becomes in the passive voice:

Sasan-dRasoa amin'ny savony ny lamba.

'The clothes are washed by Rasoa with the soap.'
(LIT washed by Rasoa with the soap the clothes.)

The direct object of the active sentence is moved to subject position (indicated by
underlining), and the verb form is modified. In the circumstantial voice, the in-
strumental constituent of the active is moved to subject position, and its case
marker (amin'ny) is dropped. Again the verb form is modified:

Anasan-dRasoa ny lamba ny savonv.

'The soap is used by Rasoa to wash the clothes.'
(LIT washes Rasoa the clothes the soap.)

The three forms of imperative operate in a similar fashion. In the active im-
perative:

Manasa ny lamba amin'ny savony.

'Wash the clothes with the soap.'
106 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

the person addressed ('you' in this example) is the subject. In the passive imperative:

Sasao ny lamba amin'ny savony.

'Have the clothes washed with the soap.'
(LIT have washed the clothes with the soap.)

it is the object of the active order 'the clothes' which is the subject. Likewise, the
circumstantial imperative makes the instrumental complement 'the soap' the sub-
ject of the order:

Anasao lamba ny savony.

'The soap is to be used to wash clothes.'
(LIT have-washed-with clothes the soap.)
But although these three forms of imperative are available to the speaker, they
are not used with equal ease in ordering. In cases where all three are grammati-
cally possible, the speaker prefers to use the passive or the circumstantial voice.
(This preference holds for declaratives as well.) The active imperative differs from
both the passive and circumstantial in that the person ordered is the subject of the
utterance. In the passive and circumstantial imperative, on the other hand, em-
phasis is withdrawn from the person ordered by making some other aspect of the
order the subject. Thus the passive imperative topicalizes the object of the ac-
tion-what is to be done rather than who is to do it. And the circumstantial im-
perative stresses the instrument or place or person for whom the action is to be
accomplished rather than who is to accomplish the action.
To use the active imperative where it is grammatically possible to use the pas-
sive or circumstantial causes affront. The active imperative is considered harsh
and abrupt, without respect. It is the socially marked form of imperative. The pas-
sive and circumstantial forms of imperative convey greater deference and are nor-
mally more appropriate in giving orders to persons. They avoid stressing the per-
son ordered and, in so doing, reduce the risk of an unsuccessful, unpleasant social
encounter.
A third way of mitigating an order lies in the interesting syntactic possibility
Malagasy affords of focusing on some particular part of the action ordered.
Syntactically the focus operation relates (1) and (2) below:
(1) Narian'i John ny fotsy.
'The white ones were thrown out by John.'
(LIT: thrown out by John the white.)
(2) Ny fotsy no narian' i John.
'It was the white (ones) that were thrown out by John.'

The semantic effect of moving the constituent ny fotsy (the white ones) to the front
and inserting the abstract particle no is exactly that indicated by its English trans-
lation. That is, in the focused sentence, (2), it is the information in the phrase 'the
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 107

white ones' which is most prominent; it is only that information which can be nat-
urally questioned or denied. That is, the question Ny fotsy ve no narian 'i John?
(Was it the white ones that John threw out?) questions only the identity of the ob-
jects thrown out, not whether there were any. Similarly Tsy ny fotsy no narian'i John
(It wasn't the white ones that were thrown out by John) still implies that John
threw out something-it only denies that the things thrown out were the white
ones. Notice however that if we question or deny sentence ( 1) we are not permit-
ted to infer that John threw out something. For example Tsy narian'i John ny fotsy
(The white ones were not thrown out by John) leaves open the possibility that John
did not throw out anything at all. Thus focusing on a part of a sentence raises that
information to the level of explicit assertion and relegates the rest to the level of
presupposition, a level which is much less accessible to questioning and denial.
What is interesting in Malagasy is that this focus operation applies also to im-
peratives. Thus in addition to the unmarked passive imperative ario ny fotsy
(roughly: have the white ones thrown out) we find Ny fotsy no ario (roughly: it's the
white ones which are to be thrown out [by you] ) . The latter order differs in mean-
ing from the former in essentially the same way as the focused declarative (2) dif-
fers from the unfocused one (1). Specifically the focused order basically presup-
poses that something is to be thrown out and asserts that it is the white things.
Thus in focused orders, the speaker focuses on some aspect of the action or-
dered-such as the object which will be affected by the order or some circum-
stance of the ordered action-rather than the order itself. The order is taken for
granted, that is, presupposed, and the immediate issue in the utterance is the iden-
tity of the objects affected by the order. In this way, the speaker can give an order
with minimum stress on the fact that it is an order which he is giving. Through
the use of the focus operation the speaker is able to shift the attention of the lis-
teners away from the fact that the utterance is an order. This provides the ad-
dressee with the option of failing to execute the order by calling into question the
identity of the objects rather than by refusing to execute the order. That is, one
might naturally respond to Ny fotsy no ario (it's the white ones you're to throw
out) by questioning Ny fotsy sa ny mainty? (The white ones, or the black ones?).
Thus, since the identity of the object to be thrown out has been made the issue, it
is possible to 'disagree' with an order without actually refusing to execute it-and
thus without directly challenging the authority of the orderer or explicitly assert-
ing one's own power.
The risk of affront through direct confrontation is minimized in fangatahana
(askings) as well. To understand the operation of this norm in this speech act, we
must break it down into at least two unnamed modes of use. These two modes are
distinguished on the basis of the social category of the asker and the one asked
and on the nature of the service or property asked for. One mode of asking ap-
plies to situations in which the asker and one asked are havana (kinsmen) and in
which what is being asked for is some ordinary minor service (expected of ha-
vana) or some ordinary, not uncommon piece of property, such as tobacco or hair
108 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

grease. Let us call this category of things asked for category A. A second mode of
asking applies to more than one social category and to more than one goods and
services category. First of all, it applies to all fangatahana in which the asker and
asked are vahiny (non-kinsmen) regardless of the goods and services asked for.
Secondly, it applies to fangatahana between havana where the good or service
asked for is not minor or ordinary or automatically expected of havana. Let us call
this category of things category B. For example, a havana asking to borrow an-
other's plough or wagon would use this mode of fangatahana. This second mode
of use then applies to vahiny for category A or B things and to havana for category
B things only.
vahiny havana
Mode 1 A
Mode2 AorB B

These two modes of use differ in the degree to which the one asked is obligated
to comply with the directive. Havana asked for category A goods and services are
obligated to comply. They must provide these goods and services, provided they are
in a position to. This obligation is a basic behavioral expression of the havana re-
lationship. Another verbal expression of the havana relationship is the greeting
which one havana gives another when entering his or her house: Inona no masaka?
(What's cooking?) This expression is taken as a demand for a cooked meal, in par-
ticular, for rice. Close havana have the right to this food. Many times there is no
cooked food in the house, and the visitor does not really expect to eat. He demands
just out of form, to emphasize the kind of tie which exists between them. Similarly,
a havana expects another havana to provide him or her with tobacco or sweets or
other goods which belong to this category. This kind of ob.ligation is not expected
among vahiny, however, nor among havana for category B goods and services.
Where a strong obligation to comply with the directive does not exist, the per-
son asked is thought to be in a superior position relative to the asker; the one
asked has the right to refuse the asker. This difference in status is well understood
by speechmakers, who are often put in the position of asking for things in public
kabary. In every kabary, the speechmaker asks for the blessing and support of the
audience, permission to speak, guilt to be lifted, and so on. And in these parts of
every kabary, the speechmaker stresses his inferiority in an elaborate manner.

When I ask for the guilt and blame to be lifted from me (for standing here before you),
I am not an originator of words but a preserver only of tradition, a successor to my fa-
ther by accident. And not only this, I am like a small cricket, not master of the tall plant
or able to perch on the tip of the tall plant like the sopanga cricket, but my destiny is to
stay on the ground because I am the tsimbotry cricket, an orphan with no ancestors. I
am not the prince of birds, the railovy, but the tsikirity bird who trails behind in the
flock, for I am not an originator of words but a borrower and a preserver of tradition
and by accident replace others. So I ask for the guilt and taboo to be lifted, respected gen-
tlemen and all those facing (me) at this moment.
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 109

One kabary is a fangatahana in itself. That is the kabary vody ondry, the marriage
request. The askers are the boy's family and those asked are the girl's family, and the
marriage of the girl to the boy is what is asked for. The kabary itself is an elaborate
expression of the second mode of fangatahana, where the speaker for the boy's
family is considered to be much lower than that of the speaker for the girl's family.
A speechmaker made these comments to me concerning this relationship:
You should use teny malemy (soft words) when you make requests. You shouldn't be like
a boaster or person on the same level as the other. It is our fomba, custom, to think of
requesters, in this case, the boy's family, as lower than the requested, for example, the el-
ders of the girl's family. Even if the girl's speaker is unskilled, you must put yourself in a
lower position and appear to lose the kabary (that is, to appear less knowledgeable) to
give honor to the girl's side of the family.

In the second mode of fangatahana, then, the one asked has in principle the op-
tion of refusing to comply. In the first mode, the one asked is rather obligated to
comply. The risk o( affront to the asker is much higher in the second mode than
in the first because of this option. That is, a havana who asks another havana for
a category A item is not risking loss of face. He knows the other must comply if
possible. On the other hand, where rejection is a possibility as in the second mode
of fangatahana, affront is also a possibility. Given this, the asker acts in ways which
minimize the risk of personal affront. In particular, the asker avoids directly con-
fronting the one asked with having to comply with the directive or having to re-
ject it. He avoids putting the one asked on the spot.
First, direct affront is avoided in this mode of fangatahana, which I shall call the
request mode, in that the request is often not presented by the actual requester( s)
but by a stand-in who represents the actual requester(s). This is formalized in re-
quest kabary where speechmakers are employed to represent others. This arrange-
ment does not place the actual requester and the one requested in a direct rela-
tionship. The actual requester is saved from any possible affront which could
result from the request.
Second, the request mode is typically formulated and presented in a veiled
manner. The asker does not make it explicit that he is requesting some object or
service from the other. Rather, that which is desired is alluded to in the conversa-
tional context. Often a request is signaled by an abrupt change in conversational
topic. The new topic moves the speaker or speakers to make reference to what is
desired from the listener(s). Young boys suddenly speak of a journey to be made
that evening and describe the blackness of the night and their lack of candles.
Women will chatter about the poor quality of Malagasy soap in relation to
European soap in my presence. Men will moan over the shortage of funds for a
particular project. The host or listener is expected to pick up these cues and sat-
isfy the request.
A consequence of this format is that neither the requester nor the requestee is
committed to a particular action. That is, in alluding to, rather than openly spec-
110 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

ifying the thing requested, the requester does not commit himself to making the
request and is not so open to the rebuff of having the request denied. He may in-
tend the utterance to be taken as a request, but he does not make this explicit.
This lack of commitment, of course, allows the person requested the same op-
tion. He is not obligated to recognize the utterance as a request. He may choose
just how he wishes to define the activity and need not commit himself to any re-
sponse at all. Thus the party to whom the request is directed is not forced to deny
the request (if that is his intention) and, in so doing, cause great loss of face on
both sides. The allusive format, then, enables the one requested to deny the re-
quest (by 'misinterpreting' it) without affront.
Where the risk of affront is minimal, as in the first mode of fangatahana, these
constraints do not exist. The asking is relatively direct and explicit, and there are
no stand-in requesters. Havana are able to ask for category A items in this man-
ner because compliance, if possible, is assured. The asker is not faced with a pos-
sible loss of face or rebuff. The one asked may only grudgingly give up tobacco
from the market but he does give in to the fangatahana. Where affront is a risk,
then,fangatahana are inexplicit and indirectly presented (mode 2). Where affront
is not a risk or is a minimal risk, fangatahana are straightforward.

Women as Norm-Breakers
According to the norm, one avoids putting another individual in an uncomfort-
able or unpleasant position, where loss of face could result. One shows respect to
the other by avoiding this type of confrontation. Women, however, do not appear
to operate according to these community ground rules for speaking. In particular
they are associated with the direct and open expression of anger towards others.
Their social behavior contrasts sharply with men in this respect. Men tend not to
express their sentiments openly. They admire others who use language subtly.
They behave in public in such a way as to promote interpersonal ease. In short,
they avoid creating unpleasant face-to-face encounters. Women, on the other
hand, tend to speak in a more straightforward manner. They express feelings of
anger or criticism directly to the relevant party. Both men and women agree that
women have lavalela, a long tongue.
Men acknowledge this difference in the speechways of men and women. They
consider the use of speech by men to be more skillful than that by women. What
is not acknowledged is that men often make use of this difference. In other words,
men often use women to confront others with some unpleasant information.
Women communicate sentiments which men share but dislike expressing. Men
are associated with the maintenance of good communication in a relationship,
and women are associated with the expression of socially damaging information.
In one instance, for example, the young boys of the village played ball against the
side of a newly whitewashed house. They chipped off patches of color. The land-
lord returned, observed this situation but after an entire day in the village, said
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 111

only, 'If you don't patch that, things might not go well between us: The next day
he returned with his wife. As she approached the village, she accosted the first per-
son she saw (which happened to be the eldest man in the village) with accusations.
She told everyone within hearing range of their anger and just what must be done
to repair the wall. This outburst caused a great deal of grumbling and unpleasant
feelings among the villagers. But the outburst was almost expected. It was not a
shocking encounter as it came from the wife and not the landlord himself. Such a
display of anger is permissible, perhaps even appropriate, because it is initiated by
a woman.
In another instance, the oldest man in the village acquired a wife without con-
sulting other kinsmen in his village. Without a word, the old man conducted the
woman into his house. A week went by and no one said anything to him or his
woman. Then, as the old man passed in front of a gathering of women one morn-
ing, they let loose their criticism of his behavior. He looked down, made excuses,
and exhibited signs of discomfort. Then, one of the other village men approached
and began to talk of some trivial topic, as if he had been totally unaware of the
scene which had just passed. The other man marked his entrance with a change of
topic. He refused to be associated with the behavior of the women, even though
he agreed with their opinions. Women relieve some social pressure in this way, for
after these episodes generally nothing more is said. But women can never be
mpanao fihavanana (restorers of relationships) because they are thought to lack
subtlety and sensitivity and because they are associated with communication of
negative information.
In fact, women are associated with direct speech, and they are used by men
wherever this manner is useful. A man and woman are walking along the side of
a road. It is the woman who waves down our car and asks if they might have a ride.
And it is the woman who asks for information such as: Where are you going?
Where have you been? How much did that cost? All of these speech acts put the
addressee on the spot. All are potentially affronting situations.
It is in part because women are more straightforward that they are the ones
who sell village produce in the markets, and the ones who buy the everyday ne-
cessities in the markets. Buying and selling is a confrontation situation as bar-
gaining is the norm and as the seller has to declare an initial price. The seller com-
mits himself to wanting to sell by virtue of his position. Women are not afraid to
confront the buyer or seller with their opinions as to what the price ought to be ..
They bargain in an expeditious and straightforward manner. Men bargain as well,
but their manner is more subtle and ornate. The encounter is much more elabo-
rate; it can sometimes be a show, where others gather round to watch the pro-
ceedings. And, rather than lose face, the buyer will frequently walk away from the
last given price and later send a young boy back to buy the item. In this way, both
the buyer and seller have avoided an unpleasant confrontation. This kind of bar-
gaining is typical of that between men. But this kind of bargaining does not put
as many coins in the pocket as do the more rapid transactions between women.
112 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

Men sell typically those items which have a more or less fixed price. For example,
they sell all the meat in the market. Women tend to sell the more bargainable
items such as vegetables and fruit. Sometimes these stalls are manned by a hus-
band and wife. But it is typically the wife who bargains and the man who weighs
the items and collects the money. Men pride themselves on their ability to bargain
skillfully, but they leave the majority of bargaining encounters to their women.
Women use one kind of power and men another. Women initiate speech en-
counters which men shy away from. They are the ones who primarily reprimand
children. They discuss in detail the shameful behavior of others in daily gossip and
speak openly of those who mangala-baraka, steal honor away from the family.
They are associated with direct criticism and haggling in markets. They are able to
put others on the spot, to confront others with possibly offensive information
where men cannot or prefer not. Women tend to be direct and open in manner.
Men tend to conduct themselves with discretion and subtlety. Women dominate
situations where directness is called for. Men, on the other hand, dominate situa-
tions where indirectness is desirable.

Indirectness as Ideal Style

Indirectness is desirable wherever respect is called for, and affront is to be avoided.
In particular, it is desirable in all kabary (ceremonial speech situations). As men-
tioned before, the kabary performance is a formal dialogue between speechmak-
ers representing different groups, for example, the hosts of a particular ceremony
and those who have come to participate, or, as in the marriage request, the family
of the girl and the family of the boy. Each speechmaker answers the other. That is,
the first speechmaker completes one part of the kabary and the second speech-
maker responds. The first speechmaker does not proceed without the support of
the second speechmaker and the group he represents. Thus, a good deal of the
kabary is spent eliciting the approval and support of the other group and affirm-
ing this support. For example, in the opening parts of a major kabary, the speech-
maker asks for the blessing of the audience and they answer:

Mahaleova! Mahazaka! Andriamatoa of Tsy ho solafaka, tsy ho tafintohina fa dia: ma-

havita soa aman-tsara.
Go ahead! Be able! Not to slip, not to bump into things, but to finish good and well.

Furthermore, the speechmaker stresses unity of both groups by making frequent

reference to isika mianankavy (we family [inclusive of addressee]). Often reference
to the inclusive isika will occur two or three times in one passage:

Dia misaotra an'Andriamanitra isika mianankavy, nohon'ny fanomezany tombon'andro

antsika rehetra izao, ka tratry izao fotoana anankiray izay nokendrentsika mianankavy izao.
Then we family thank God for the gift of a tranquil day for us all at this time so one
time has arrived now which was envisioned by us family.
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 113

Support and unity cannot be achieved where respect is not shown by the speech-
maker. And the major way in which respect is expressed is by using indirect
speech. A speechmaker who speaks directly, bluntly, affronts his audience. This ef-
fect is recognized by speechmakers, and they often make use of traditional sayings
relevant to this behavior in the kabary it~elf. For example:
Tonga eto aminareo mianankavy izahay. Tsy mirodorodo toa omby manga, fa mitaitsika
toa vorom-potsy, mandeha mora toa akanga diso an'Andringitra, ary mandeha miandana
toy ny akoho hamonjy lapa.
We come here to you family. Not stampeding like wild bulls but approaching softly
like a white bird and slowly, proceeding carefully like a lost pigeon and proceeding
slowly like a chicken to reach the palace.

To speak indirectly is to speak with skill. Men and women alike consider indi-
rect speech to be more difficult to produce than direct speech. Most villagers can
tell you that one who speaks well manolana teny (twists words.) In kabary, a good
speechmaker miolaka (winds in and out). The meaning of the utterance becomes
clear gradually as the speaker alludes to the intent in a number of ways. This style
of speech use is referred to in a number of proverbs often used by the villagers, for
example:

Toy ny manoto, ka mamerina in-droa manan'antitra.

Like paint, one returns twice and makes it darker.

Each time a speechmaker alludes to the subject matter, the richer the meaning of
that subject becomes. A good speechmaker can return to a subject in many ways.
He is able to use proverbs (ohabolana), traditional sayings (hainteny), and elabo-
rate metaphors to this end. One measures his ability in terms of this kind of rich-
ness. Speech which is used in this manner is tsara lahatra (well arranged). Speech
which is simple and direct is teny bango tokana (speech of a single braid), that is,
unsophisticated speech.
Men alone are considered to be able speechmakers. Even in everyday resaka,
they are associated with the style of speaking required for the kabary: their re-
quests are typically delayed and inexplicit, accusations imprecise, and criticisms
subtle. They conduct themselves so as to minimize loss of face in a social situa-
tion. As women are associated with quite the opposite kind of behavior, they are
in general considered unsuitable as speechmakers. The one exception to this is the
kabary given by a woman of a boy's family to women of a girl's family in arrang-
ing for a marriage. The kabary is short and relatively simple, however, and many
times it is replaced by simple resaka. Furthermore, it is a kabary to be heard by
women only: 'When the mother of the boy speaks, it is only the women who lis-
ten. It is not right if there are men there: commented one speechmaker.
Woman are considered able in handling everyday interactions within the vil-
lage. The people with whom they interact most frequently are other women of the
114 Elinor Keenan (Ochs)

village and children. In fact, women with their young children form a semi-au-
tonomous group within the village. They work together in the fields, and they
relax together around the rice-mortars in the village courtyards. They have a more
intimate relationship with one another than do men with each other or do men
with women. (An exception to this generalization is the intimacy shown in joking
relationships such as those which obtain between brothers-in-law, brother-and
sister-in-law, and so on (M. Bloch, personal communication)). They use intimate
terms of address and talk about intimate subjects: dysentery, intestinal worms,
menstruation, malformed babies, sexual relations outside marriage. They are able
to invade each other's personal space (Goffman 1971) in a way that would be
taboo among most adult men. They dig into each other's hair looking for fleas.
They look underneath a pregnant woman's dress to peek at the bands applied by
the midwife to her womb. They bathe together in streams. Within this group, in-
timacy and directness is the norm.
Kabary, on the other hand, typically involve more than one village. They estab-
lish settings where people tsy mifankazatra (not accustomed to one another) in-
teract-distant havana (kinsmen) and vahiny (strangers). Within this group, re-
spect and indirectness are the norms.
We have, then, on the one hand, directness associated with women and chil-
dren, and on the other hand, indirectness associated with men and intervillage sit-
uations. But directness and indirectness have further association. Indirectness is
considered to be fomban'ny ntaolo (the way of one's ancestors). The use of teny
miolaka (winding speech) represents to the villager a set of social attitudes held in
the past, where respect and love for one another were always displayed. It is the
traditional Malagasy speech-way. The use of direct speech, such as that of women
and that of 'askings' between kinsmen, is associated with a loss of tradition, with
contemporary mores. It is felt that today people speak directly because they do not
value interpersonal relationships:

The people today speak more directly than the ancestors. The people before took care to
preserve relationships. Today people just say directly the faults of others, challenge the
other. The ancestors could not answer like that. They made circles around the idea.
Today few young people like the kabary and proverbs and traditional sayings. They don't
like Malagasy language but foreign languages. Children are afraid of being beneath an-
other child in knowledge of French or math. It is like our speechways were lost.... The
government should give an examination, make everyone learn these Malagasy ways and
the ways of mutual respect (speech-maker at Loharano).

As indicated in this quote, the change in speech use is thought to be due in part
to the influence of European languages, in particular of French. Children learn
foreign languages in school and they forget traditional speechways-this senti-
ment is expressed by many elders. The contrast in speech use for Europeans and
for Malagasy is evident in urban contexts, where both interact in commercial set-
tings. In these settings, the Malagasy must conform to the more direct, European-
style service encounters. For the average villager from the countryside, these en-
Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community 115

counters are not always successful. For the European or European-trained

Malagasy, these encounters are irritating and time-consuming. Some large busi-
ness firms, in fact, recognize the difference in interactional style to the extent that
particular employees are delegated to handle encounters with rural Malagasy. But
further, Malagasy are expected to handle service encounters with Europeans in
town markets, where they are the venders and Europeans form part of the clien-
tele. It is appropriate, then, that women rather than men are recruited from the
village to confront the European buyer. Directness and matter-of-factness are
characteristic of both.
This final association of directness with the use of European languages helps to
explain an important exception in the use of speech by men. There is one consis-
tent situation in which men do not conform to the ideal style of indirect speech.
When giving orders to cows, men speak in a terse and abrupt manner (Bloch MS.)
But what is interesting is that these orders are couched in French rather than
Malagasy. In particular, the French directional terms a gauche! and a droite! are
used. There exists an equivalent set of directional terms in Malagasy. We must ask,
then, why French is selected. At least a partial answer can be gained from this
analysis, for the contexts in which men address cows necessitate immediate and
direct action. For example, many tasks in cultivation are accol!lplished with cows.
And in these contexts allusive speech is not effective. It is consistent with this
analysis that men should choose to use French in such moments. Furthermore,
animals occupy a low status. They are not approached with respect. The direct use
of speech by men expresses this relationship (see also Bloch MS.)
INDIRECTNESS DIRECTNESS
Men Women
Skilled speech Unsophisticated speech
Traditional speech ways Contemporary speech ways
Malagasy language European languages

We have presented a norm and an ideal speech style. Men tend to conduct them-
selves in public in accordance with the norm. Women tend to operate outside this
norm. Further, the speech of men is thought (by men and women) to come closer
to the ideal use of speech than the speech of women. Where subtlety and delicacy
are required in social situations, men are recruited-witness the kabary. Where
directness and explicitness are desirable in social situations, women are recruited.

Notes
1. Native terms and transcriptions from the native language follow the established con-
ventions for written Malagasy.

References
Bloch, M. (MS.). Why do Malagasy cows speak French?
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public. New York: Harper & Row.
7
The Whole Woman:
Sex and Gender
Differences in Variation
PENELOPE ECKERT

The tradition of large-scale survey methodology in the study of variation has left
a gap between the linguistic data and the social practice that yields these data.
Since sociolinguistic surveys bring away little information about the communities
that produce their linguistic data, correlations of linguistic variants with survey
categories have been interpreted on the basis of general knowledge of the social
dynamics associated with those categories. The success of this approach has de-
pended on the quality of this general knowledge. The examination of variation
and socioeconomic class has benefited from sociolinguists' attention to a vast lit-
erature on class and to critical analyses of the indices by which class membership
is commonly determined. The study of gender and variation, on the other hand,
has suffered from the fact that the amount of scientific attention given to gender
over the years cannot begin to be compared with that given to class. Many current
beliefs about the role of gender in variation, therefore, are a result of substituting
popular (and unpopular) belief for social theory in the interpretation of patterns
of sex correlations with variation.
Sociolinguists are acutely aware of the complex relation between the categories
used in the socioeconomic classification of speakers and the social practice that
underlies these categories. Thus, we do not focus on the objectivized indices used
to measure class (such as salary, occupation, and education) in analyzing correla-
tions between linguistic and class differences, even when class identification is
based on these indices. Rather, we focus more and more on the relation of lan-
guage use to the everyday practice that constitutes speakers' class-based social par-
ticipation and identity in the community. Thus, explanations take into consider-
ation interacting dynamics such as social group and network membership (Labov,
1972b; Milroy, 1980), symbolic capital and the linguistic marketplace (Bourdieu
& Boltanski, 1975; Sankoff & Laberge, 1978; Thibault, 1983), and local identity
(Labov, 1972c, 1980). The same can be said to some extent of work on ethnicity
and variation, where researchers have interpreted data on ethnic differences in

116
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 117

variation in terms of complex interactions between ethnicity, group history, and

social identity (Horvath & Sankoff, 1987; Labov, 1972b; Laferriere, 1979). The
study of the sociolinguistic construction of the biological categories of age and
sex, on the other hand, has so far received less sophisticated attention (Eckert,
Edwards, & Robins, 1985). The age continuum is commonly divided into equal
chunks with no particular attention to the relation between these chunks and the
life stages that make age socially significant. Rather, when the full age span is con-
sidered in community studies, the age continuum is generally interpreted as rep-
resenting continuous apparent time. At some point, the individual's progress
through normative life stages (e.g., school, work, marriage, childrearing, retire-
ment) might be considered rather than, or in addition to, chronological age. Some
work has explored the notion of life stage. The very apparent lead of preadoles-
cents and adolescents in sound change has led some researchers to separate those
groups in community studies (Macaulay, 1977; Wolfram, 1969), and some atten-
tion has been focused on the significance of these life stages in variation (Eckert,
1988; Labov, 1972b). There has also been some speculation about changes of
speakers' relation to the linguistic marketplace in aging (Eckert, 1984; Labov,
1972a; Thibault, 1983). Most interestingly, there have been examinations of the
relation of age groups to historical periods of social change in the community
(Clermont & Cedergren, 1978; Laferriere, 1979). But taken together, these studies
are bare beginnings and do not constitute a reasoned and coherent approach to
the sociolinguistic significance of biological age.
Like age, sex is a biological category that serves as a fundamental basis for the
differentiation of roles, norms, and expectations in all societies. It is these roles,
norms, and expectations that constitute gender, the social construction of sex.
Although differences in patterns of variation between men and women are a func-
tion of gender and only indirectly a function of sex (and, indeed, such gender-
based variation occurs within, as well as between, sex groups), we have been ex-
amining the interaction between gender and variation by correlating variables
with sex rather than gender differences. This has been done because although an
individual's gender-related place in society is a multidimensional complex that
can only be characterized through careful analysis, his or her sex is generally a
readily observable binary variable, and inasmuch as sex can be said to be a rough
statistical indication of gender, it has been reasonable to substitute the biological
category for the social in sampling. However, because information about the in-
dividual's sex is easily accessible, data can be gathered without any inquiry into the
construction of gender in that community. As a result, since researchers have not
had to struggle to find the categories in question, they tend to fall back on unan-
alyzed notions about gender to interpret whatever sex correlations emerge in the
data and not to consider gender where there are no sex correlations.
Gender differences are exceedingly complex, particularly in a society and era
where women have been moving self-consciously into the marketplace and call-
ing traditional gender roles into question. Gender roles and ideologies create dif-
118 Penelope Eckert

ferent ways for men and women to experience life, culture, and society. Taking this
as a basic approach to the data on sex differences in variation, there are a few as-
sumptions one might start with. First, and perhaps most important, there is no
apparent reason to believe that there is a simple, constant relation between gender
and variation. Despite increasingly complex data on sex differences in variation,
there remains a tendency to seek a single social construction of sex that will ex-
plain all of its correlations with variation. This is reflected in the use of a single
coefficient for sex effects in variable rule or regression analyses of variation. This
perspective limits the kind of results that can be obtained, since it is restricted to
confirming the implicit hypothesis of a single type of sex effect or, worse, to indi-
cating that there is no effect at all. Second, we must carefully separate our inter-
pretation of sex differences in variation from artifacts of survey categories. I
would argue that sociolinguists tend to think of age and class as continua and gen-
der as an opposition, primarily because of the ways in which they are determined
in survey research. But just as the class effect on variation may be thought of in
terms of the binary bourgeois-working class opposition (Rickford, 1986), and just
as there is reason to believe that the age continuum is interrupted by discontinu-
ities in the effects of different life stages on people's relation to society and, hence,
on language, variation based on gender may not always be adequately accounted
for in terms of a binary opposition.

Interpretations of Sex Differences in Variation

There is a general misconception among writers who do not deal directly with
variation that women's speech is more conservative than men's. Indeed, women
do tend to be more conservative than men in their use of those vernacular forms
that represent stable social variables. On the other hand, the very earliest evidence
on variation (Gauchat, 1905) showed women leading in sound change, a finding
that has been repeated in Labov's work in New York City ( 1966) and Philadelphia
( 1984), in Cedergren's work in Panama ( 1973'), and in my own work in the Detroit
suburbs. If these trends were universal, the coefficient of the sex variable ( 1 = fe-
male, O = male) in a variable rule or regression analysis of variation would always
have positive sign for changes in progress and negative sign for stable variables.
But the picture is not quite as simple as this generalization suggests. First of all,
men do lead in some sound changes. Trudgill found men leading in most changes
in Norwich (1972a), and Labov (1972c) found men leading in some changes in
Martha's Vineyard (1972) and Philadelphia (1984). Thus, there is every reason to
assume that sex differences may vary from one variable to another. As Labov ar-
gued ( 1984), one might expect different sex correlations with old or new changes,
for instance. This could still all be represented by a single sex effect in a statistical
analysis, but the sign of the effect would depend on the particular variable.
Second, sex does not have the same effect on language use everywhere in the pop-
ulation. Women's overall lead in the population could hide a variety of complex
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 119

patterns among other social parameters, the simplest of which would be a sexual
crossover along the socioeconomic hierarchy. Labov found just such a pattern in
Philadelphia, for several vowels, with women leading at the lower end of the so-
cioeconomic hierarchy and lagging at the upper end. Statistical analyses in these
contexts require more than a single sex effect; either an interaction should be in-
cluded or separate analyses done for women and men. Not only is it a mistake to
claim that women are more or less innovative than men, but at this point in our
research it is a mistake to claim any kind of constant constraint associated with
gender. It is, above all, this mistake that characterizes much current work on sex
differences in variation. It is commonplace for sociolinguists to allow the gender
categories that they use to classify speakers (i.e., male vs. female) to guide their
thinking about the effects of gender in variation. In particular, men and women
are perceived as categorically different, indeed opposite and opposed, in their use
of linguistic variables.

Hierarchy
Labov's ( 1966) original findings in New York City clearly lined up socioeconomic
class, style, sound change, prestige, and evaluation on a single axis. The hierarchi-
cal socioeconomic continuum is also a continuum of linguistic change, wherein
extent of historical change correlates inversely with socioeconomic status. At any
place along this continuum, speech style reproduces this continuum, with each
speaker's stylistic continuum from more casual to more careful speech reflecting
a segment of the socioeconomic continuum. A causal connection between the two
is based on the assumption that speakers look upward in the socioeconomic hier-
archy for standards of correctness and feel constrained in their formal interac-
tions to "accommodate" upward. Thus, there is a folk connection between old and
new, formal and informal, better and worse, correct and incorrect. The notion of
conservatism in language, then, takes on a simultaneously historical and social
meaning. Finally, responses to matched guise tests confirm that members of the
community associate the use of linguistic variables with individuals' worth in the
marketplace. With this overwhelming stratificational emphasis in the study of
variation, sex differences in behavior placed along this continuum are seen in re-
lation to it; hence, when men and women differ in their use of sound change, this
tends to be explained in terms of their different orientation to class.
Labov and Trudgill have both emphasized a greater orientation to community
prestige norms as the main driving force in women's, as opposed to men's, lin-
guistic behavior. Trudgill's findings in Norwich led him to see women as over-
whelmingly conservative, as they showed men leading in most change.
Furthermore, women in his sample tended to overreport their use of prestige
forms and men tended to underreport theirs. He therefore argued that women
and men respond to opposed sets of norms: women to overt, standard-language
prestige norms and men to covert, vernacular prestige norms. Overt prestige at-
120 Penelope Eckert

taches to refined qualities, as associated with the cosmopolitan marketplace and

its standard language, whereas covert prestige attaches to masculine, "rough and
tough" qualities. Trudgill (1972b:l82-183) speculated that women's overt pres-
tige orientation was a result of their powerless position in society. He argued that
inasmuch as society does not allow women to advance their power or status
through action i!J. the marketplace, they are thrown upon their symbolic re-
sources, including language, to enhance their social position. This is certainly a
reasonable hypothesis, particularly since it was arrived at to explain data in
which women's speech was overwhelmingly conservative. However, what it as-
sumes more specifically is that women respond to their powerlessness by devel-
oping linguistic strategies for upward mobility, that is, that the socioeconomic
hierarchy is the focus of social strategies. There are alternative views of exactly
what social strategies are reflected in women's conservatism. An analysis that em-
phasizes the power relations implicit in the stratificational model was put forth
by Deuchar (1988), who argued that women's conservative linguistic behavior is
a function of basic power relations in society. Equating standard speech with po-
liteness, she built on Brown's (1980} and Brown and Levinson's (1987) analyses
of politeness as a face-saving strategy, arguing that the use of standard language
is a mechanism for maintaining face in interactions in which the woman is pow-
erless.
I would argue that elements of these hypotheses are correct but that they are
limited by the fact that they are designed to account for one aspect of women's lin-
guistic behavior only: those circumstances under which women's language is
more conservative than men's. Based on the multiple patterns of sex, class, and age
difference that he found in Philadelphia sound changes in progress, Labov (1984)
sought to explain why women are more conservative in their use of stable vari-
ables but less conservative in their use of changes in progress and why women lead
men in some changes and not in others. Although his data do not show women
being particularly conservative, he based his analysis on the assumption that
women's linguistic choices are driven by prestige. What he sought to explain,
therefore, are cases where women's behavior is not conservative. Based on his
Philadelphia data, Labov argued that women lag in the use of variants that are
stigmatized within the larger community, that is, stable sociolinguistic variables
and changes in progress that are sufficiently old and visible as to be stigmatized
within the larger community. Women's behavior in these cases, then, is driven by
global prestige norms. At the same time, women lead in changes that are still suf-
ficiently limited to the neighborhood and local community to carry local prestige
without having attracted a stigma in the larger Philadelphia community. In this
case, Labov argued, women's behavior is driven by local prestige norms. If this ex-
planation accounts for the Philadelphia data, it does not cover the New York City
cases of (aeh) and (oh) (Labov, 1966}, where women led in sound changes that
had grown old and stigmatized. But more important, I can see no independent
reason to seek explanations for women's behavior in prestige.
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 121

It is important to note at this point that three kinds of prestige have been put
forth so far: (a) global prestige, based on norms imposed in the standard language
marketplace; (b) covert prestige, based on opposition to those norms; and (c)
local prestige, based on membership in the local community. Although the notion
of covert prestige has come under attack, and conflated by some with local pres-
tige, I .have argued that all three of these forces play a role in variation (Eckert,
1989b). Later in this article, I suggest that not prestige but power is the most ap-
propriate underlying sociological concept for the analysis of gender-based lin-
guistic variation.

Sex Differences as Opposition

If the focus on class as a continuum has led to the interpretation of sex differences
in speech as differences in orientation to the class hierarchy, the focus on sex as a
two-way opposition has led also to interpreting sex differences as sex markers.
Brown and Levinson (1979) argued against the treatment of sociolinguistic vari-
ables as markers, pointing out that the correlations may well be masking inter-
vening variables. Although much work on phonological variation does not ex-
plicitly refer to variables as markers, the view of variables as markers is implicit
when linguists attribute individuals' use or nonuse of a variable to a desire to
stress or deny membership in the category with which it is being correlated at the
moment. Related to the view of sex differences as markers is the oppositional view
of gender differences in variation-a reification of a particular view of gender de-
riving from the ease of identifying individuals' sex category membership and re-
flecting the common expression "the opposite sex:' Two instances can serve as ex-
amples in relation to gender.
Hindle (1979) examined one female speaker's use of variables in three situa-
tions: at work, at the dinner table with her husband and a friend (Arvilla Payne,
the fieldworker), and in a weekly all-women's card-game. Based on an assumption
that speakers will implement vernacular sound changes more in egalitarian situa-
tions than in hierarchical ones, Bindle's initial hypothesis was that the speaker
would show more extreme (vernacular) forms at the dinner table with her hus-
band and a friend, because he believed social relations in that setting to be less hi-
erarchical than in the other settings. As it turned out, she showed more advanced
change in the card game. One might argue that this does not disprove Bindle's
underlying assumption, that speakers show more vernacular variants in more
egalitarian situations, since there is reason to believe that relations among a group
of women playing cards on a weekly basis are less hierarchical than those between
a husband and wife-perhaps particularly in the presence of a third person.
However, he chose to attribute the use of extreme variants in a change, in which
women lead community-wide, to accommodation to the group of women.
The theory of accommodation depends on the notion of marker, and this ex-
planation essentially asserts that the speaker's use of the change among women
122 Penelope Eckert

was an attempt to mark herself as a fellow woman. One might consider, however,
that her enhanced use of this phonological change at the card game is related to an
affirmation of-indeed, perhaps a competition among equals for-some aspect of
social identity that has nothing at all to do with gender. In other words, that these
women are together in a particular set of social relationships that happen among
women encourages them to emphasize some aspect of their social identities.
Whereas Hindle has attributed this woman's extreme use of a sound change to
accommodation to women, others have attributed similar behavior to differenti-
ation from men. Tony Kroch has argued that the curvilinear pattern frequently
found in the socioeconomic stratification of linguistic variables is due to male
speech only. Specifically, he speculated that if the sexes are examined separately,
women's speech will show a linear pattern, reflecting the regular spread of sound
change upward from the lowest socioeconomic group. The curvilinear pattern,
then, is the result of a sudden drop in the use of extreme variables by men in the
lowest socioeconomic group in relation to the adjacent higher group. This drop,
according to Kroch, is the result of an avoidance on the part of men in this so-
cioeconomic group of what they perceive as a female speech pattern. Labov ( 1984)
found the pattern that Kroch predicted for the raising of the nucleus in
Philadelphia (aw) (Figure 7.1), and Guy, Horvath, Vonwiller, Daisley, and Rogers
(1986) found it for the Australian Question Intonation (Figure 7.2).
If one were prepared to accept this argument, Guy et al:s data are more con-
vincing than Labov's. However, in both cases, one could argue that it is only the·
lower working-class men's divergence from a linear pattern that creates enough of
a woman's lead for it to acquire significance. In the case of Philadelphia (aw), aside
from the working-class men's sudden downturn in use, the men lead the women
in change in all socioeconomic groups. In the case of Australian Question
Intonation, although the women lead in the middle class, there is virtually no sex
difference in the upper working class. The lower working-class men's perception
of the pattern, then, would have to be based on the speech of women at a consid-
erable social remove-a remove that itself could be as salient as the sex difference.
I venture to believe that if the pattern had been the other way around, with the
lower working-class women showing the downturn, the typical explanation
would have attributed their conservatism to prestige factors and upward mobility.
I seriously doubt that these men's motivation for conservatism is upward mobil-
ity, just as I doubt upward mobility as an explanation for women's conservatism.
But above all, it is problematic to seek the explanation of their behavior in simple
differentiation from the "opposite" sex group.
I do not mean to argue that speakers never associate specific variables with gen-
der, nor would I argue that there are no cases in which men or women avoid vari-
ables that they perceive as inappropriately gender marked. I would not even argue
against the claim that men are more likely to avoid such variables than women,
since there are greater constraints on men to be gender-appropriate in certain
symbolic realms. However, I believe that variables that function as something like
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 123

F2(AW) WOMEN
2100 (N=52)

***
1700

1600 Unskilled Skilled Clerical Managerial Professional

Significance (vs. unskilled): *.05 **.01 ***.001

Figure 7.1 Occupation coefficients for F2 of (aw) for men and women in Philadelphia
neighborhoods (from Labov, 1984).

gender markers must have some iconic value. The Arabic palatalization discussed
by Haeri (1989) is a candidate for such a variable, although that case also points
to intervening variables (Haeri, personal communication). But, as Brown and
Levinson (1979) pointed out, a correlation with a particular social category may
mask some other attribute that is also associated with that category. One that
comes easily to mind in relation to gender is power. This could clearly apply in the
case of Australian Question Intonation. Guy et al. (1986) described this intona-
tion pattern as a confirmation-seeking strategy, which one can assume is associ-
ated with subordination regardless of sex (Baroni & d'Urso, 1984).

0.8

0.7
Proba-
0.6
bility
of 0.5
AQI use
0.4

0.3

0.2
Lower Upper Middle
Working Working
Social Class
Figure 7.2 Probability of Australian Question Intonation use by class and sex (from Guy et al., 1986:37).
124 Penelope Eckert

What I will argue is that gender does not have a uniform effect on linguistic be-
havior for the community as a whole, across variables, or for that matter for any in-
dividual. Gender, like ethnicity and class and indeed age, is a social construction and
may enter into any of a variety of interactions with other social phenomena. And al-
though sociolinguists have had some success in perceiving the social practice that
constitutes class, they have yet to think of gender in terms of social practice.
There is one important way in which gender is not equivalent to categories like
class or ethnicity. Gender and gender roles are normatively reciprocal, and al-
though men and women are supposed to be different from each other, this differ-
ence is expected to be a source of attraction. Whereas the power relations between
men and women are similar to those between dominant and subordinate classes
and ethnic groups, the day-to-day context in which these power relations are
played out is quite different. It is not a cultural norm for each working-class indi-
vidual to be paired up for life with a member of the middle class or for every black
person to be so paired up with a white person. However, our traditional gender
ideology dictates just this kind of relationship between men and women. If one
were to think of variables as social markers, then, one might expect gender mark-
ers to behave quite differently from markers of class or ethnicity. Whereas the ag-
gressive use of ethnic markers (i.e., frequent use of the most extreme variants) is
generally seen as maintaining boundaries-as preventing closeness-between
ethnic groups, the aggressive use of gender markers is not. By the same token, the
aggressive use of gender markers is not generally seen as a device for creating or
maintaining solidarity within the category. To the extent that masculine or femi-
nine behavior marks gender, its use by males and females respectively is more a
device for competing with others in the same category and creating solidarity with
those in the other category, and aggressive cross-sex behavior is seen as designed
to compete with members of the other sex for the attention of members of the
same sex.
Two other things follow from the specialization of gender roles, which may
apply also to other kinds of differences such as ethnicity.

1. To the extent that male and female roles are not only different but recipro-
cal, members of either sex category are unlikely to compete with (i.e., eval-
uate their status in relation to) members of the other. Rather, by and large,
men perceive their social status in relation to other men, whereas women
largely perceive their social status in relation to other women. 1 Thus, differ-
entiation on the basis of gender might well be sought within, rather than be-
tween, sex groups.
2. Men and women compete to establish their social status in different ways, as
dictated by the constraints placed on their sex for achieving status. This is
particularly clear where gender roles are separate, and in fact when people
do compete in the role domain of the other sex, it is specifically their gender
identity that gets called into question.
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 125

Power, Status, and Other Things

All of the currently leading hypotheses about the effects of gender on variation
recognize, however implicitly, that linguistic differences are a result of men's and
women's place in society at a particular time and place. What differs in these hy-
potheses is the specificity and the depth of the causes in society and, hence, their
changeability over time and from community to community.
Milroy ( 1980) traced sex differences in the use of vernacular variables to differ-
ences in the nature of men's and women's social networks-differences that are
themselves a result of material factors. Based on the understanding that dense,
multiplex, locally based social networks enforce the use of vernacular variables,
Milroy argued that where economic circumstances allow women to form such
networks, their speech takes on the characteristics of men's speech under the same
conditions. In this case, then, the explanation for sex differences in variation does
not lie in differences between men's and women's fundamental relations or orien-
tation to society per se, but in the differences in the circumstances in which they
normally find themselves. Closely related to the dynamics invoked by Milroy, par-
ticularly to the importance of work patterns on the nature of social networks and
to social forces behind the use of vernacular or standard language, is the notion of
marketplace. Nichols (1983) showed that differences between women as well as
between women and men can be a function of their access to jobs that determine
their participation in the standard language marketplace (Sankoff & Laberge,
1978). Both Milroy's and Nichols' examples suggest that it is the configuration of
contact and interaction created by economic conditions that ultimately deter-
mines individuals' linguistic patterns, and in both cases the linguistic patterns
may be as changeable as the economic conditions that underlie them.
The purpose of these analyses is to show that gender differences in variation
are attributable to social forces that attach to women by virtue of their place in
the economy. And whereas common sense supports this view, it is also evident
that although employment conditions may change, the underlying relations of
power and status between men and women can remain quite unchanging. So
whereas economic explanations focus on the marketplace, they attribute gender
differences in language to social forces that could presumably continue to oper-
ate on the individual speaker regardless of his or her personal relation to the
economy. Since actual power relations between men and women can be expected
to lag behind (indeed perhaps be orthogonal to) changes in relative positions in
the marketplace, one can expect such a dynamic in language to outlive any num-
ber of economic changes. One might argue that the socioeconomic hierarchy, in
this case, is the least of women's problems, since their powerless position is
brought home to them, in a very real sense, in every interaction. Women's in-
equality is built into the family, and it continues in the workplace, where women
are constantly confronted with a double bind, since neither stereotypic female
nor stereotypic male behavior is acceptable. Thus, one might expect that some
126 Penelope Eckert

gender differences in language are more resistant to small-scale economic differ-

ences. In particular, the common claim that women are more expressive with lan-
guage (Sattel, 1983) resides in deeper differences than the vagaries of the local
economy.
The domestication of female labor-according to Marx, one of the earliest
manifestations of the division of labor-involves a strict division of roles, with
men engaged in the public marketplace and women's activities restricted to the
private, domestic sphere (Elshtain, 1981; Sacks, 1974). The man competes for
goods and power in the marketplace in the name of the family and controls these
within the family. Thus, although the woman is solely responsible for maintain-
ing the domestic unit, she has no direct control over that unit's capital. Although
a man's personal worth is based on the accumulation of goods, status, and power
in the marketplace, a woman's worth is based on her ability to maintain order in,
and control over, her domestic realm. Deprived of power, women can only gain
compliance through the indirect use of a man's power or through the develop-
ment of personal influence.
Since to have personal influence without power requires moral authority,
women's influence depends primarily on the painstaking creation and elaboration
of an image of the whole self as worthy of authority. Thus, women are thrown into
the accumulation of symbolic capital. This is not to say that men are not also de-
pendent on the accumulation of symbolic capital, but that symbolic capital is the
only kind that women can accumulate with impunity. And, indeed, it becomes
part of their men's symbolic capital and hence part of the household's economic
capital. Whereas men can justify and define their status on the basis of their ac-
complishments, possessions, or institutional status, women must justify and de-
fine theirs on the basis of their overall character. This is why, in peasant commu-
nities as in working-class neighborhoods, the women who are considered local
leaders typically project a strong personality and a strong, frequently humorous,
image of knowing what is right and having things under control.
When social scientists say that women are more status conscious than men, and
when sociolinguists pick this up in explaining sex differences in speech, they are
stumbling on the fact that, deprived of power, women must satisfy themselves
with status. It would be more appropriate to say that women are more status-
bound than men. This emphasis on status consciousness suggests that women
only construe status as being hierarchical (be it glcibal or local hierarchy) and that
they assert status only to gain upward mobility. But status is not only defined hi-
erarchically; an individual's status is his or her place, however defined, in the
group or society. It is this broader status that women must assert by symbolic
means, and this assertion will be of hierarchical status when a hierarchy happens
to be salient. An important part of the explanation for women's innovative and
conservative patterns lies, therefore, in their need to assert their membership in all
of the communities in which they participate, since it is their authority, rather
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 127

than their power in that community, that assures their membership. Prestige,
then, is far too limited a concept to use for the dynamics at work in this context.
Above all, gender relations are about power and access to property and services,
and whatever symbolic means a society develops to elaborate gender differences
(such as romance and femininity) serve as obfuscation rather than explanation.
Whenever one sees sex differences in language, there is nothing to suggest that it
is not power that is at issue rather than gender per se. The claim that working-
class men's speech diverges from working-class women's speech in an effort to
avoid sounding like women reflects this ambiguity, for it raises the issue of the in-
teraction between gender and power. Gender differentiation is greatest in those
segments of society where power is the scarcest-at the lower end of the socioe-
conomic hierarchy, where women's access to power is the greatest threat to men.
There is every reason to believe that the lower working-class men's sudden down-
turn in the use of Australian Question Intonation shown in Guy et al. (1986) is an
avoidance of the linguistic expression of subordination by men in the socioeco-
nomic group that can least afford to sound subordinate.
For similar reasons of power, it is common to confuse femininity and mas-
culinity with gender, and perhaps nowhere is the link between gender and power
clearer. Femininity is a culturally defined form 0f mitigation or denial of power,
whereas masculinity is the affirmation of power. In Western society, this is per-
haps most clearly illustrated in the greater emphasis on femininity in the south,
where regional economic history has domesticized women and denied them eco-
nomic power to a greater degree than it has in the industrial north (Fox-
Genovese, 1988). The commonest forms of femininity and masculinity are re-
lated to actual physical power. Femininity is associated with small size, clothing
and adornment that inhibit and/or do not stand up to rough activity, delicacy of
movement, quiet and high pitched voice, friendly demeanor, politeness. The re-
lation between politeness and powerlessness has already been emphasized
(Brown, 1980) and surfaces in a good deal of the literature on gender differences
in language. Although all of these kinds of behavior are eschewed by men at the
lower end of the socioeconomic hierarchy, they appear increasingly in male style
as one moves up the socioeconomic hierarchy until, in the upper class, what is
called effeminacy may be seen as the conscientious rejection of physical power by
those who exercise real global power (Veblen, 1931) by appropriating the physi-
cal power of others.
The methodological consequences of these considerations is that we should ex-
pect to see larger differences in indications of social category membership among
women than among men. If women are more constrained to display their per-
sonal and social qualities and memberships, we would expect these expressions to
show up in their use of phonological variables. This necessitates either a careful
analysis of statistical interaction, or separate analysis of the data from each gender
group, before any comparison.
128 Penelope Eckert

Gender and Adolescent Social Categories

In this section, I discuss some evidence from adolescent phonological variation to
illustrate the complexity of gender in the social scheme of things. Adolescents are
quite aware of the gender differences I have discussed, particularly since they are
at a life stage in which the issue of gender roles becomes crucial. By the time they
arrive in high school, adolescent girls (particularly those who have been tomboys)
are getting over the early shock of realizing that they do not have equal access to
power. One girl told me of the satisfaction it still gives her to think back to the
time in elementary school when she and her best friend beat up the biggest male
bully in their class and of the difficult adjustment it had been to finding less direct
means of controlling boys. In fact, she was very attractive and was aware but not
particularly pleased that her power in adolescence to snub troublesome males was
as great as her past power to beat them up.
Whether or not they wielded any direct power in their childhoods, adolescent
girls know full well that their only hope is through personal authority. In sec-
ondary school, this authority is closely tied up with popularity (Eckert, 1989a,
1990), and as a result, girls worry about and seek popularity more than boys. And
although boys are far from unconcerned about popularity, they need it less to
exert influence. For a boy can indeed gain power and status through direct action,
particularly through physical prowess. Thus, when they reach high school, most
girls and boys have already accepted to some extent that they will have different
routes to social status. In many important ways, ·boys can acquire power and sta-
tus through the simple performance of tasks or display of skills. A star varsity ath-
lete, for instance, regardless of his character or appearance, can enjoy considerable
status. There is virtually nothing, however, that a girl lacking in social or physical
gifts can do that will accord her social status. In other words, whereas it is enough
for a boy to have accomplishments of the right sort, a girl must be a certain sort
of person. And just as the boy must show off his accomplishments, the girl must
display her persona. One result of this is that girls in high school are more socially
constrained than boys. Not only do they monitor their own behavior and that of
others more closely, but they maintain more rigid social boundaries, since the
threat of being associated with the wrong kind of person is far greater to the in-
dividual whose status depends on who she appears to be rather than what she
does. This difference plays itself out linguistically in the context of class-based so-
cial categories.
Two hegemonous social categories dominate adolescent social life in American
public high schools (Eckert, 1989a). These categories represent opposed class cul-
tures and arise through a conflict of norms and aspirations within the institution
of the school. Those who participate in school activities and embrace the school
as the locus of their social activities and identities constitute, in the high school, a
middle-class culture. In the Detroit area, where the research I report on was done,
members of this category are called "Jocks" whether or not they are athletes, and
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 129

they identify themselves largely in opposition to the "Burnouts." Burnouts, a

working-class culture oriented to the blue collar marketplace, do not accept the
school as the locus of their operations; rather, they rebel to some extent against
school activities and the authority they represent and orient themselves to the
local, and the neighboring urban, area. The Burnouts' hangouts are local parks,
neighborhoods, bowling alleys, and strips. They value adult experience and pre-
rogatives and pursue a direct relation with the adult community that surrounds
them. The school mediates this relation for the Jocks, on the other hand, who cen-
ter their social networks and activities in the school. The Jocks and the Burnouts
have very different means of acquiring and defining the autonomy that is so cen-
tral to adolescents. Whereas the Jocks seek autonomy in adult-like roles in the cor-
porate context provided by the school institution, the Burnouts seek it in direct
relations with the adult resources of the local area.
Within each category, girls and boys follow very different routes to achieve
power and status. The notion of resorting to the manipulation of status when
power is unavailable is in fact consciously expressed in the adolescent community.
Girls complain that boys can do real things, whereas boys complain that girls talk
and scheme rather than doing real things. By "real" things, they mean those things
that reflect skills other than the purely social and that reflect personal, and specif-
ically physical, prowess. Boys are freer in general. For example, Burnout boys can
go to Detroit alone, whereas girls must go under their protection; this seriously
curtails a Burnout girl's ability to demonstrate urban autonomy. The Jock boys
can also assert their personal autonomy through physical prowess. Although it is
not "cool" for a Jock boy to fight frequently, the public recognition that he could
is an essential part of his Jock image. In addition, Jock boys can gain public recog-
nition through varsity sports on a level that girls cannot. Thus, the girls in each
social category must devote a good deal of their activity to developing and pro-
jecting a "whole person" image designed to gain them influence within their own
social category. The female Jocks must aggressively develop a Jock image, which is
essentially friendly, outgoing, active, clean-cut, all-American. The female
Burnouts must aggressively develop a Burnout image, which is essentially tough,
urban, "experienced." As a result, the symbolic differences between Jocks and
Burnouts are clearly more important for girls than for boys. In fact, there is less
contact between the two categories among girls, and there is far greater attention
to maintaining symbolic differences on all levels-in clothing and other adorn-
ment, in demeanor, in publicly acknowledged substance use and sexual activity.
There is, therefore, every reason to predict that girls also show greater differences
than boys in their use of any linguistic variable that is associated with social cate-
gory membership or its attributes.
I have shown elsewhere that the most extreme users of phonological variables
in my adolescent data are those who have to do the greatest amount of symbolic
work to affirm their membership in groups or communities (Eckert, 1989b).
Those whose status is clearly based on "objective" criteria can afford to eschew
130 Penelope Eckert

symbolization. It does not require much of a leap of reasoning to see that women's
and men's ways of establishing their status would lead to differences in the use of
symbols. The constant competition over externals, as discussed in Maltz and
Borker (1982), would free males from the use of symbols. Women, on the other
hand, are constrained to exhibit constantly who they are rather than what they
can do, and who they are is defined with respect primarily to other women.

Phonological Variation
The following data on phonological variation among Detroit suburban adoles-
cents provide some support for the discussion of the complexity of gender con-
straints in variation. The data were gathered in individual sociolinguistic inter-
views during 2 years of participant observation in one high school in a suburb of
Detroit. During this time, I followed one graduating class through its last 2 years
of high school, tracing social networks and examining the nature of social iden-
tity in this adolescent community. The school serves a community that is almost
entirely white, and although the population includes a variety of eastern and west-
ern Europeari groups, ethnicity is downplayed in the Community and in the
school and does not determine social groups. The community covers a socioeco-
nomic span from lower working class through upper middle class, with the great-
est representation in the lower middle class.
The speakers in the Detroit area are involved in the Northern Cities Chain Shift
(Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972), a pattern of vowel shifting involving the fronting
of low vowels and the backing and lowering of mid vowels (Figure 7.3). The older
changes in this shift are the fronting of (ae) and (a), and the lowering and fronting
of (oh). The newer ones are the backing of (e) and (uh).
The following analysis is based on impressionistic phonetic transcription of the
vocalic variables from taped free-flowing interviews. 2 A number of variants were
distinguished for each vowel in the shift. Both (e) and (uh) have raised, backed,
and lowered variants. Backing is the main direction of movement of both (e) and
(uh). In each case, two degrees of backing were distinguished:

[e] > [e'] > [A]

(A] > (A'] > (:>]

Both variables also show lowering: [re] for (e) and [a] for (uh). There are also
some raised variants [e'] and [I] for (e) (the latter occurs particularly in get) and
[;)]and [U] for (uh). The lowest value for (ae) is [re']. The movement of the nu-
cleus of (ae) has clearly been toward peripherality (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972),
as the higher variants show fronting:

[re'] > [e'] > [e] > [e<] > [e]

Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 131

c A :>
(e) (uh) (oh)

re a
(ae) (a)

Figure 7.3 The Northern Cities Chain Shift

Two degrees of fronting were distinguished for (a):

[a] > [a] > [re>)

(a) also showed some raising to [a'] and [A]. Finally, three degrees of fronting were
distinguished for (oh):

[::>) > [:fv) > [a] > [a)

(oh) also fronted occasionally to [A]. Extreme variants in the main direction of
change were chosen for each of the variables to represent rule application. These
extreme variants are:

(ae) nucleus= [e) or [c"), with or without offglide

(a) [re] or [a']
(oh) [a') or [a)
(uh) [a] or[::>]
(e) [A) or [U)

The two common social correlations for phonological variables in these data
are with social category membership and sex. Sex and category affiliation are not
simply additive but manifest themselves in a variety of ways among these changes.
They interact in ways that are particularly revealing when seen in the context of
the overall pattern of linguistic change. Table 7.1 contains a cross-tabulation by
social category and sex of the percentage of advanced tokens for each vowel.
Differences in the percentages shown in Table 7.1 between boys and girls and be-
tween Jocks and Burnouts for each of the changes are displayed in Figure 7.4: one
line shows the lead of the girls over boys, whereas the other shows the lead of the
Burnouts over the Jocks, for each of the changes in the Northern Cities Shift. As
Figure 7.4 shows, the girls have the clearest lead in the oldest changes in the
Northern Cities Chain Shift whereas social category differences take over in the
later changes. Note that each line dips into negative figures once-at each end of
the shift. The boys have a slight lead in the backing of (e) and the Jocks have a
slight lead in the raising of (ae). The statistical significance of each of the differ-
132 Penelope Eckert

TABLE7.1 Percentage of advanced tokens of the five vowels for- each combination of social category
and sex (numbers of tokens in parentheses)
Boys Girls
Jocks Burnouts Jocks Burnouts
(ae) 39.7 (211)
531
35.3 (101)
286
62.2 (244)
392
62.0 (178)
287
(a) 21.4 (117)
548
22.0 (Jfo) 33.8 (152)
450
38.2 (134)
350
(oh) 7.4 Cs~) 10.2 (~) 29.8 (134)
450
38.7 (131)
338
(e) 26.2 (146)
557
33.2 (113)
340
23.8 (~) 30.9 (~)
(uh) 24.6 (ill)
496
35.3 (*4) 25.8 (3~!) 43.0 (107)
249

ences is given in Table 7.2. A treatment of variation that views variables as mark-
ers would call the fronting of (ae) and (a) "sex markers:' the backing of (uh) and
(e) "social category markers:' and the fronting of (oh) both.
In an earlier article, I expressed some puzzlement about the lack of sex differ-
ences in the backing of (uh), having expected a simple relation between sex and
any sound change (Eckert, 1988). More careful examination of the backing of
(uh), however, shows that a simplistic view of the relation between gender and
sound change prevented me from exploring other ways in which gender might be
manifested in variation. In fact, gender plays a role in four out of the five changes
in the Northern Cities Chain Shift, although it correlates only with three out of
five of the changes, and the role it plays is not the same for all changes.
As can be seen in Table 7.2 and Figure 7.4, the oldest change in the Northern
Cities Chain Shift, the raising of (ae), shows no significant association with category
membership in the sample as a whole. The same is true within each sex group taken
separately (girls: p < .96; boys: p < .22). However, the girls lead by far in this change.
The second change in the Northern Cities Shift, the fronting of (a), also shows only
a sex difference, once again with the girls leading. The lack of category effect holds
true within each sex group considered separately (girls: p < .19; boys: p < .76).

TABLE 7.2 Significance (yes or no) of social constraints on the vowel changes that constitute the
Northern Cities Chain Shift (pl-values of log-likelihood test calculated for each constraint separately
using variable rule program on data of Table 7.1)
Sex Social Category
(ae) yes (p < .001) no (p < .77)
(a) yes (p < .001) no (p < .16)
(oh)a yes (p < .0001) yes (p < .001)
(uh) nob (p < .04) yes (p < .001)
(e) no (p < .38) yes (p < .004)
a Both constraints remain significant for (oh) when the effects of the other are taken into account.
b The sex effect loses significance (p < .19) for (uh) when social category is taken into account.
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 133

The lowering and fronting of (oh) shows a significant difference by both sex
and social category, and these effects appear to operate additively in a variable rule
analysis:
Overall tendency: 0.182
boys: 0.300 girls: 0.700
Jocks: 0.452 Burnouts: 0.548

When the sexes are separated, however, it turns out that the category difference is
only significant among the girls (p < .009) and not the boys (p < .14).
In the backing of (uh), category membership correlates significantly with back-
ing for the population as a whole, with Burnouts leading, but sex does not. When
each sex is considered separately, however, it is clear that the category difference is
much greater among the girls. The backing of (e) shows a significant category dif-
ference, with the Burnouts leading, but no significant sex difference. In this case,
when the two sexes are considered separately, the category difference is the same
among the girls and among the boys.
Figure 7.5 compares the differences in the percentages in Table 7.1 between the
Jocks and Burnouts, within the girls' and boys' samples separately. None of these dif-
ferences is significant for (a) and for (ae). For (e) they are significant and identical
for the two sexes. For (oh) and (uh), however, there is a clear tendency for there to
be greater social category differentiation among the girls than among the boys.
These results throw into question general statements that women lead in sound
change or that sex differences are indicative of sound change. In fact, in my data,
the greatest sex differences occur with the older-and probably less vital-
changes, involving (ae), (a), and (oh). I would venture the following hypotheses
about the relation of gender to the older and the newer changes in these data. It
appears that in both sets of changes, the girls are using variation more than the

30

Difference in
Percentage

(ae) (a) (oh) (uh) (e)

Older Changes Newer Changes

Figure 7.4 Contrast between girls and boys and between Burnouts and Jocks as differences in percentages
when calculated for the combined data in Table 7.1.
134 Penelope Eckert

0.18 • girls
II!:! boys
0.16
0.14
0.12
Absolute Difference
0.10
of Percentage
0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.00
(ae) (a) (oh) (uh) (e)
Older Changes Newer Changes

Figure 7.5 Absolute differences ofpercentages for Burnouts and Jocks, calculated separately
for girls and boys (note that for (ae), Burnouts actually trail Jocks).

boys. In the case of the newer ones, the girls' patterns of variation show a greater
difference between Jocks and Burnouts than do the boys'. In the case of the older
ones, all girls are making far greater use than the boys of variables that are not as-
sociated with social category affiliation. I have speculated elsewhere that the newer
changes, which are more advanced closer to the urban center, are ripe for associ-
ation with counteradult norms (Eckert, 1987). The older changes, on the other
hand, which have been around for some time and are quite advanced in the adult
community, are probably not very effective as carriers of counteradult adolescent
meaning, but they have a more generalized function associated with expressive-
ness and perhaps general membership. In both cases-the girls' greater differen-
tiation of the newer changes and their greater use of older changes-the girls'
phonological behavior is consonant with their greater need to use social symbols
for self-presentation.

Conclusions
I would not, at this point, claim that the relation shown in these data between new
and old changes is necessary, particularly in view of the fact that Labov (1984)
found that women in Philadelphia led in new sound changes, whereas sex differ-
ences tended to disappear in older changes. It is apparent, then, that generaliza-
tions about the relation between sound change and gender are best deferred until
more communities have been examined.
The first clear conclusion from these data is that sex and social category are not
necessarily independent variables but that they can interact in a very significant
way. It is the nature of that interaction, which occurs here with (oh) and (uh), that
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 135

is of interest in this article. It is not the case with these phonological variables that
there are large sex differences in one category and not in the other. In other words,
sex is rarely more "salient" in one category than the other. One certainly cannot
say that the boys and/or girls are asserting their gender identities through lan-
guage more in one category than in the other. Rather, there are greater category
differences in one sex group than the other. In other words, category membership
is more salient to members of one sex than the other; girls are asserting their cat-
egory identities through language more than are the boys. This is consonant with
the fact that girls are more concerned with category membership than boys, as
well as with the fact that girls must rely more on symbolic manifestations of so-
cial membership than boys. And this is, in turn, the adolescent manifestation of
the broader generalization that women, deprived of access to real power, must
claim status through the use of symbols of social membership.
These data make it clear that the search for explanations of sex differences in
phonological variation should be redirected. All of the demographic categories
that we correlate with phonological variation are more complex than their labels
would indicate. Indeed, they are more complex than many sociolinguistic analy-
ses give them credit for. Some analyses of sex differences have suffered from lack
of information about women. But it is more important to consider that where
most analyses have fallen short has been in the confusion of social meaning with
the analyst's demographic abstractions.

Notes
This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation and the National Science Foundation
(BNS 8023291). I owe a great debt of thanks to David Sankoff for his very generous and
important help with this article. The value of his suggestions for strengthening both the
conception and the presentation of these arguments is immeasurable.

1. This is an oversimplification. Gender inequality imposes a canonical comparison,

whereby higher and lower status accrue automatically to men and women, respectively. It
is this inequality itself that leads to the tendency for intrasex comparisons and for the dif-
ferent terms on which men and women engage in these comparisons. Men tend to com-
pare themselves with other men because women don't count, whereas women tend to com-
pare themselves with other women with an eye to how that affects their relation to
male-defined status. (My thanks to Jean Lave for helping me work out this tangle.)
2. The transcription of these data was done by Alison Edwards, Rebecca Knack, and
Larry Diemer.

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In William Labov (ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 122-142.
Sex and Gender Differences in Variation 137

- - - . (1972b). The linguistic consequences of being a lame. In William Labov (ed.),

Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 255-292.
- - - . (1972c). The social motivation of a sound change. In William Labov (ed.),
Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1-42.
- - - . (1980). The social origins of sound change. In William Labov (ed.), Locating lan-
guage in time and space. New York: Academic. 251-265.
- - - . (1984). The intersection of sex and social factors in the course of language change.
Paper presented at NWAVE, Philadelphia.
Labov, W., Yaeger, M., & Steiner, R. ( 1972). A quantitative study of sound change in progress.
Report on NSF project No. 65-3287.
Laferriere, Martha. (1979). Ethnicity in phonological variation and change. Language
55:603-617.
Macaulay, R. K. S. (1977). Language, social class, and education. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Maltz, Daniel, & Borker, Ruth. (1982). A cultural approach to male-female miscommuni-
cation. In John J. Gumperz (ed.), Language and social identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 195-216.
Milroy, Lesley. ( 1980). Language and social networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Nichols, Patricia C. (1983). Linguistic options and choices for black women in the rural
south. In Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley (eds.), Language, gender
and society. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 54-68.
Rickford, John. (1986). The need for new approaches to class analysis in sociolinguistics.
Language and communication 6:215-221.
Sacks, Karen. (1974). Engels revisited. In M. Rosaldo & L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, culture
and society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 207-222.
Sankoff, David, & Laberge, Suzanne. (1978). The linguistic market and the statistical ex-
planation of variability. In David Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic variation: Models and methods.
New York: Academic. 239-250.
Sattel, Jack W. (1983). Men, inexpressiveness, and power. In Barrie Thorne, Cheris
Kramarae, & Nancy Henley (eds.), Language, gender and society. Rowley, MA: Newbury
House. 119-124.
Thibault, Pierrette. ( 1983 ). Equivalence et grammaticalisation. Ph.D. dissertation,
Universite de Montreal.
Trudgill, Peter. (1972a). Sex, covert prestige, and linguistic change in the urban British
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- - - . (1972b). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Veblen, Thorstein. (1931). The theory of the leisure class. New York: Viking.
Wolfram, W. A. (1969). A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington,
DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Part Three
Genre, Style, Performance
Metternich pointed out that one of the commonest uses of language was for the
concealment of thought.
-J.R. Firth

Only VERY rarely does the spoken word mean what it professes to mean.
-Paul Valery

Most linguists and philosophers have difficulty with "non-serious" uses of lan-
guage, whether these are irony, sarcasm, metaphors, lying, joking, or fantasizing.
This is clearly illustrated in the exchange a few years ago between Jacques Derrida
and John Searle over J. L. Austin's (1975:22) decision to exclude from his analysis
of performatives, language "used not seriously but in many ways parasitic upon its
normal use.'' Derrida teased Searle for his "confidence in the possibility of distin-
guishing 'standard' from 'non-standard; 'serious' from 'non-serious; 'normal'
from 'abnormal; 'citation' from 'non-citation; 'void' from 'non-void; 'literal' from
'metaphoric; 'parasitical' from 'non-parasitical; etc." Derrida's teasing, in part,
consisted of making jokes (often relevant to the points he wishes to make) and
then at the end asking whether he had taken Searle's arguments 'seriously.'
Armchair linguists and philosophers can distinguish very easily and simply be-
tween 'serious' and 'non-serious' or 'literal' and 'metaphoric' because they deal
with examples they (or their colleagues) have invented ('fictive discourse' in
Smith's 1978 terms) and know exactly how these examples are to be interpreted.
Those who deal with language in use find the correspondence between form
and function much less simple or direct. Jose Limon illustrates this by examining
some examples of language that are both 'non-serious' (in the sense that they are
intended to amuse) and 'very serious' (in the sense that the joking plays an im-
portant role in the society). From a few simple exchanges, Limon develops a "nar-
rative of resistance" although the participants themselves provide an alternative
interpretation.
A. L. Becker, in his "rhetorically based linguistics;' aims to get away from "the
world of delicate parsing" and the kind of relations "that grammarians talk about,
often very intimidatingly." For many theoretical linguists language is a system oil
tout se tient, where everything hangs together. If you believe this, then you can
hope to program a computer to deal with language. This is possible only if you

139
140 Genre, Style, Performance

deal with language abstracted from its context, since, as Becker observes, "lan-
guage interaction is not a closed system (i.e., rule-governed)." Becker illustrates
the complexity of understanding language by taking a short Burmese proverb as
a text and showing how the apparently simple message may be more complex
than a simple matching of syntactic form and lexical meaning might imply.
Richard Bauman shows how among coon hunters in Texas "stretching the truth"
and even " [outright] lying" are not only accepted forms of behavior but even taken ·
for granted. Contrary to the Gricean Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975), in which
the assumption is that the participants are telling the truth, Bauman pointed out
that "it is not at all surprising that parties on both sides of a dog trade should enter
the transaction anticipating that the opposite party might lie about a dog and ex-
pect to be lied to in return:' Grice's principle and its maxims have served as a fruit-
ful stimulation for much work in philosophy and theoretical linguistics, but they
are based on an idealization from actual speech behavior.
As part of his teasing, Derrida quoted Searle's justification for idealization in
studying speech acts:
In short, I am going to deal only with a simple and idealized case. This method, one of
constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort of theory construction that goes
on in most sciences, e.g. the construction of economic models, or accounts of the solar
system which treats planets as points. Without abstraction and idealization there is no
systematization. ( 1969:56)

The success of an approach that requires considerable idealization away from

actual language use is obvious in departments of theoretical linguistics, but their
systems have only limited relevance for actual as opposed to idealized language.
To understand how people use language it is necessary to look at the world with a
broader view than the perspective of the scholar's study. The Chapters in Part
Three give a few examples of observing interesting situations.

Suggestions for Further Reading

The starting point for all study oflanguage in relation to culture is the volume edited by D.
G. Mandelbaum, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir: Language, Culture and Personality.
Sapir's writings are full of.insights and acute observations that still provide guidance for
how to look at language in use. Dell Hymes's collection, Language in Culture and Society,
includes many provocative studies on this topic, as do R. Bauman and J. Sherzer's
Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking and J. Gumperz and D. Hymes's Directions in
Sociolinguistics. A fine example of how to carry out such work is K. M. Basso's Western
Apache Language and Culture. A different approach is shown in R. D. Abrahams, The Man-
o[-Words in the West Indies. R. Bauman deals with varieties of verbal art in Verbal Art as
Performance. Several approaches to humor can be found in the volume edited by M. L.
Apte, Language and Humor. The social significance of narratives is shown in B. Johnstone,
Stories, Community, Place. Some of the liveliest work in this area has been by contextually
sensitive folklorists. Two edited volumes, Toward New Perspectives in Folklore (A. Paredes
and R. Bauman, eds.) and Theorizing Folklore (C. Briggs and A. Shuman, eds.), represent a
Genre, Style, Performance 141

wide and stimulating range of such studies. The relevance of Bakhtin's work for linguistic
anthropology is clearly brought out in an article by J. Hill, "The refiguration of the an-
thropology of language:'

References
Abrahams, Roger D. 1983. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the
Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Apte, Mahadev L., ed. 1987. "Language and humor." International Journal of the Sociology
of Language, vol. 65.
Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Basso, Keith H. 1990. Western Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic
Anthropology. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art and Performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Briggs, Charles, and Amy Shuman, eds. 1993. Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives
on the Politics of Culture. Special issue of Western Folklore 52 (2, 3, 4).
Derrida, Jacques. "Limited Inc ab c:' Glyph 2:162-254.
Grice, H.P. 1975. "Logic and conversation." In Peter Cole and Jerrold Morgan, eds. Speech
Acts. New York: Academic Press: 41-58.
Gumperz, John J., and Dell Hymes, eds. 1972. Directions in Sociolinguistics: The
Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
Hill, Jane H. 1986. "The refiguration of the anthropology of language." Cultural
Anthropology 1:89-102.
Hymes, Dell, ed. 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and
Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.
Johnstone, Barbara. 1990. Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Paredes, Americo, and Richard Bauman, eds. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore.
Austin: University of Texas Press. '
Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, David G.
Mandelbaum, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1978. On the Margins of Discourse. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
8
Biography of a Sentence:
A Burmese Proverb
A. L. BECKER

There are three kinds of mistakes: those resulting from lack of memory, from lack of
planning ahead, or from misguided beliefs.
-Burmese proverb

I call this essay "Biography of a Sentence" in order to evoke Wittgenstein's way of

thinking about language as a form of life, a mode of being in the world, and so to
depart from an atomistic picture of language and meaning and to move toward a
contextual one. In using language one shapes old words into new contexts-jarwa
dhosok, the Javanese call it, pushing old language into the present. All language use
is, in this sense, translation to some degree; and translation from one language to
another is only the extreme case. I argue here that translation for the philologist-
one who would guide us across the terra incognita between distant languages-is
not the final goal but only a first step, a necessary first step, in understanding a dis-
tant text; necessary because it opens up for us the exuberancies and deficiencies of
our own interpretations and so helps us see what kinds of self-correction must be
made. And so the goal of this essay is to begin with a Burmese proverb, a simple
sentence, a minimal text, and to move step by step from a translation (provided
by a bilingual Burmese) closer to the original. Each step is a correction of an exu-
berance or a deficiency of meaning as presented to us in the English translation.
In moving from an atomistic mode of interpretation to a more contextual one,
new kinds of questions appear just as old ones lose their force. One asks not how
some phenomenon is built up in a rule-governed way out of minimal bits but
rather in what ways context constrains particular language-real text (i.e., re-
membered or preserved language). There are many ways to answer that question,
depending on how one defines context. One way to see context is as sources of
constraints on text. Linguists and language philosophers could agree on five or six
sources of constraints, although they would group and name them differently, I
suspect. Let me for present purposes identify these six kinds of contextual rela-
tions, none of which seems to me to be reducible to another:

142
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 143

1. structural relations, relations of parts to wholes;

2. generic relations, relations of text to prior text;
3. medial relations, relations of text to medium;
4. interpersonal relations, relations of text to participants in a text-act;
5. referential relations, relations of a text to Nature, the world one believes to lie
beyond language;
6. silential relations, relations of a text to the unsaid and the unsayable.

There is nothing particularly original about these six, and there has been a great
deal of work on each, except perhaps the last one. Together they define context. A
text is the interaction of the constraints they provide.
The terms have one great weakness: they are all too categorial-too "nouny;'
too liberally neutral. As Kenneth Burke might say, their "improvisational" quality
is weak. The life of a text is in the weighting and balancing and counterbalancing
of the terms and figures and in the conceptual dramas they evoke. To transcend
these neutral terms, one can make them active-as a text strategy-and say that a
text has meaning because it is structuring and remembering and sounding and in-
teracting and referring and not doing something else ... all at once. The interac-
tion of these acts is the basic drama of every sentence.
The sentence-simple or complex-is, in any language, the minimal unit in
which all these actions are happening, in which the drama is fully staged. Only
with sentences-and larger units-are there speakers and hearers and times and
worlds; that is, particular speakers, particular hearers, particular times, and par-
ticular worlds. Paul Ricoeur ( 1981) calls sentences the "minimal units of dis-
course;' the "minimal units of exchange:' Jan Mukarovskj ( 1977: 15) wrote of the
sentence as "the component mediating between the language and the theme, the
lowest dynamic (realized in time) semantic unit, a miniature model of the entire
semantic structuring of the discourse:'
Words and phrases are staged only as sentences. Much of our language about
sentences overlaps with our language about drama, an iconicity we share with
many other languages. That is, in both there are actors or agents, goals, undergo-
ers, instruments, accompaniments, times, and settings-all bound into an act or
state, or just plain being, and all shaped to a context in subtle ways. To see the
drama of a sentence requires only a bit of contemplation: stepping back (as a
friend puts it) to take a closer look. To hide that drama with neutral terms-what
Burke (1964) calls "bureaucratizing" knowledge-is to lose the essential liveliness
and excitement of that contemplation. And it is to miss the considerable aesthetic
pleasure one gets in contemplating a text and seeing the drama of terms and fig-
ures unfold, a good deal of it at the level of sentences.
Not all sentences are whole texts in themselves. Most are parts of larger texts.
Yet there are sentences free enough of lingual context to be treated. as texts.
Proverbs, perhaps, which are not really self-sufficient texts but rather small texts
used to evaluate (give value to) new situations. They are recurrent evaluatory
144 A. L. Becker

statements, part of whose job is to sound like proverbs, language in the public do-
main. Proverbs are a mode of sounding, referring, interacting, remembering, and
shaping which are small enough to be discussable in an essay (a ratio of 1 sentence
of text to 320 sentences of commentary, in this case). In larger texts, one is forced
to sample.
Contemplating single sentences or very small texts brings one into the world of
the grammarian, the world of delicate parsing. It thus brings one up against a very
large, wildly ill-defined grammatical terminology: all the names for the categories,
processes, and relations that grammarians talk about, often very intimidatingly.
One can get the feeling that from grammar school to graduate school the prime
use of grammar has been some variety of intimidation.
However, the pleasures of the text (one of the phrases Roland Barthes left us) are
too important not to encourage people to enter as amateurs and to experience the
whole of the journey to a distant text. There is a skill in parsing which a good lin-
guist can be led to display on small persuasion, but it should be only inspiring to
the amateur, not intimidating-like Billie Holiday's singing.
There are two basic ways to think about grammar (as a prelude to the contem-
plation of a small text). One view leads us to think of the field of study as a sys-
tem of rules that somehow map abstract and a priori semantic categories and re-
lations onto phonic substance-or in different terms, map a logical deep structure
onto a surface structure. Language in this structural sense is "rule governed," and
the task of the grammarian is to find the most economical, least "subjective" for-
mulation of the rules. Theory is exclusively formal. In this vjew the computer is a
natural metaphor for the language-processing mind. Grammars-or tiny frag-
ments of unfinished grammars-tend to be written as rules accompanied by ex-
amples, illustrating problems of theory shaping (Geertz 1983: 19).
There is another kind of grammar, based on a different perspective on language,
one involving time and memory; or, in terms of contextual relations, a set of prior
texts that one accumulates throughout one's lifetime, from simple social exchanges
to long, semimemorized recitations. One learns these texts in action, by repetitions
and corrections, starting with the simplest utterances of a baby. One learns to re-
shape these texts to new context, by imitation and by trial and error. One learns to
interact with more and more people, in a greater and greater variety of environ-
ments. The different ways one shapes a prior text to a new environment make up
the grammar of a language. Grammar is context-shaping (Bateson 1979:17) and
context shaping is a skill we acquire over a lifetime. We learn it essentially by con-
tinual internal and external corrections, in response to change and lack of change
in the environment. From the first point of view, constraints common to all lan-
guages tend to be structural (or logical); from the second, pragmatic (or rhetori-
cal). What I call philology might also be called a rhetorically based linguistics.
The ways one shapes a text to new contexts include such operations as substi-
tution of words or other larger or smaller lingual units, rearrangements, repeti-
tion, expansion, inflexion, and embedding. These are all things one can do with a
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 145

word or a sentence or a larger text, all general strategies, which one learns to do
more and more skillfully and which become (potentially) more and more com-
plex. The problem with stating them all as rules is that the constraints on shaping
are not entirely structural; and they are not a closed system but open to context.
We are not so much compositors of sentences from bits as reshapers of prior texts
(the self-evident a prioris oflanguage). The modes of reshaping are in large part
conventional, but also in some unpredictable part innovative and unpredictable-
except for the most formulaic of utterances. Language interaction is not a closed
system (i.e., rule-governed).
Even very formulaic utterances have interesting histories. The strange impera-
tive greeting that has blossomed (along with the three-piece smiling face) in the
currency of noetic exchange over the past few years in American English has been,
"Have a nice day:' The reader is invited to notice how many different shapings of
that formula he or she encounters over the next few days. This morning, in good
New Jersey accent, I got, "Have one, y'hear;' from an exuberant gas station atten-
dant. "I will;' I answered, not knowing what I was saying. In all language, there are
prior norms arid present deviations going on constantly.
Proverbs tend to be slower changing than nonproverbs, since they are public
language and not private language and depend on recognition as proverbs in
order to work. But there are a whole range of things we recognize as proverbs-
not just wise, comfortable ones, but also banal cliches and even original evalua-
tions not yet fully in the public domain. Here are a few:

He who hesitates is lost.

Well, it takes all kinds ....
Sometimes a man just has to stand up for his rights.
We're all in it for the money.
He leaped before he looked.

Here are some not yet in the public domain, perhaps never to be:
Progress: that long steep path which leads to me.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Contextual shaping is only another term for grammar.

Gregory Bateson

Art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop.
Clifford Geertz

Do not be overwhelmed by all that there is to know. It is a myth of the oppressor.

Kenneth Koch

Public evaluatory sentences are of many sorts. One need only look through the
Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs to see the great variety in even so small a sample. But
146 A. L. Becker

the goal here is not to provide a classification scheme for proverbs (as Burke
1964:108 writes in his short essay on proverbs, "The range of possible academic
classifications is endless"-a good and useful candidate for the public domain).
They are sometimes "generic" sentences, in two senses: they are often marked by
indefinite subjects and indefinite tense and thus meant to refer to a large class of
phenomena; but they are also generic in the sense that they are quite overtly
drawn from the past and help to identify a present text as belonging to a genre, a
set of prior texts. They are meant to stand apart. Their power comes from one's
recognition of them as shared public opinion, and one is not supposed to argue
with them in situations that call for politeness. They are part of the credit of soci-
ety on which one lives.
As prevailing opinions, public opinions are uttered differently than private
opinions are. They need no support, since they do not depend on the adherence
of individuals, and are not presented as hypotheses to be proved. They are there,
to be reckoned with, as authoritative as law. We sometimes think of public opin-
ion as a collection of private opinions (polls operate on this fallacy), rather than
as a collection of evaluatory statements, there in the language-like proverbs--on
which we are free to draw (Ortega y Gasset 1957:266). This collection is not iden-
tical for each of us and like much of language is broader in recognition than in
use. The closer we are to people, in a communal sense, the more we share evalua-
tions-and the less we seem willing to tolerate evaluatory differences.
There is a continuum of evaluatory utterances from those, like proverbs,
which we share exactly (i.e., with identical wording) to those which we recognize
as having some family resemblance with our own evaluatory stock sufficient to
be accepted as equivalent or nearly so. For example, "He who hesitates is lost" is
always said in just those words--even when referring to women. Here, context
shaping is minimal, a matter only of one's voice, its qualities, pitches, and
rhythms. By contrast, the cynical observation, "We're all in it for the money" is
less frozen and more likely to be reshaped-softened or strengthened-each time
it is used.
These small texts--proverbs, semiproverbs, and cliches-are a form of speak-
ing the past. But uttering them-even with all the controls over rhythm, pitch,
and voice quality that music can provide-is also to some extent speaking the pre-
sent. They evoke a norm and to some degree, however small, deviate from it.
Utterances with a family resemblance to, for instance, the cliche "We're all in it
for the money" include those utterances that can be seen to have a connection
with it via substitution, rearrangement, repetition, expansion, inflexion, and/or
embedding. As a figure, the cliche sets up points of substitution:

We are all in it for the money.

They were partly in it for the money.
He was in it because of his interest.
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 147

The sentence is a frame for the substitution of words, affixes, phrases, and whole
clauses-all the levels of lingual units.
Besides substitution, context shaping can involve rearrangement and the con-
sequent readjustments, which contribute much of the complexity to syntax
(Giv6n 1979:235ff.):

It's the money that we're all in it for.

Money is what we're all in it for.

Or expansion:

We're all-you me and everyone-in it right now for the money we can get out
of it.

Or repetition:

We're all in it for the money ... for the money.

Or inflexion:

He's in it for the money.

Or the whole can be embedded:

I don't believe that we're all in it for the money.

Our all being in it for the money disturbs me.

(One can reduce these modes of context shaping by considering inflexion a struc-
tural type of substitutl.on and by considering repetition and some embedding as
types of expansion.) Mostly one uses combinations of these strategies to shape
prior text into new contexts-and to recognize someone else's shaping.
The important thing here is not whether one can describe all the shapings that
are possible, singly and in combination, and all the remedial strategies that they
entail, in some formalism, but rather where family resemblance fades in the re-
shaping that keeps lingual strategies alive. Most people-our cousins and aunts-
are not often aware of the extent to which one constantly reshapes old language
into new contexts. The process is rapid, and only if there is a breakdown do we
normally become conscious of it-when something doesn't sound right (under
analysis, as Wittgenstein [1958] put it, language is on holiday).
The difference between looking at grammar as rules which map logical cate-
gories and relations onto a medium and looking at it as ways of reshaping old lan-
guage to new contexts is, primarily, that in the first case one begins with a priori
148 A. L. Becker

or "universal" categories as being common to all languages, while in the second

case what is common are pragmatic or rhetorical situations-common features of
the context-and what is a priori is prior text. To assume a universal logic seems to
be to take very abstract representations of the categories and relations of
Indoeuropean languages as inherent in all languages (see Benveniste 1971). One
learns, .of course, to confront all new experience in one's own language, including
experience of another language. It is not difficult to assume that these categories
and relations are "there" in the phenomena, a priori to language. However, it seems
more conducive to cross-cultural understanding that one not assume an abstract
realm of absolute categories and relations--some kind of extra-lingual logic-as a
ground for all languages, but rather start in language, with actual remembered texts
(however they are preserved). Recall Wittgenstein's (1958:114) caution: "One
thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and
one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it:'
The meaning of a word, then, is not a combination of atomic categories and re-
lations or underlying features or properties, but the past and present contexts it
evokes. Then how do grammars and dictionaries of distant languages work? They
work as abductions: one language in terms of another. A grammar of Burmese in
English is an English version of certain aspects of Burmese-that is, those having
English analogs. A Burmese grammar of English does not yet exist, except as a
translation into Burmese of an English grammar of English; but if it did, it would
be a Burmese interpretation of English in which, for instance, the simplicity of
our numeral classifiers and verb particles might be noted. Grammars and dictio-
naries are as much cultural artifacts as newspapers or shadow plays.
In understanding a distant text, even for the writer of the most formal of gram-
mars, there is an essential first step-a gloss or rough word-for-word translation.
It is always present and is always meant to be invisible, like the invisible man,
dressed in black, in the Japanese Noh drama, who moves props, adjusts costumes,
and generally keeps things tidy on stage. The gloss, rather than the abstract rep-
resentations of categories, features, and relations, is the underlying vehicle for un-
derstanding. The only mode that we have of understanding a distant text is first
to jump to an interpretation, to guess (or have someone guess for us), and then
to sort out the exuberancies and deficiencies of one's guess. One's own language
is the initial model for another language, a metaphor of it (Pike and Pike
1977:69).
A philologist does well to be always self-conscious that his understanding of an-
other language is initially metaphoric and not "pure" meaning. To do otherwise is
to add to the exuberancy of thinking of logical categories as reified "things;' the
further exuberancy of assuming that they are the categories of one's own lan-
guage. It is at this point that grammatical explanation becomes political: when we
assume that there is one grammar for the Greek and the Barbarian-and it is
Greek. To ask, for instance, what the passive is in Burmese is to assume (1) that
"the passive" exists a priori to any language, and (2) that "it" has an English name
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 149

or an English function in shaping context, whatever one calls it. To translate some
Burmese clause as an English passive, however, is both necessary and reasonable.
A methodology for parsing should be a lightly held thing, as one confronts the
distant text with it. When methodology and text conflict, it is the methodology
that should give way first. In this sense, one's discipline is the text. Methodologies
come and go, but the discipline of the text and its language remain. Perhaps a par-
ticular experience can illuminate this point.
On arriving in Burma in 1958, I began to learn Burmese from a very kind and
patient old teacher, U San Htwe. As I had been taught to do, I would ask him
words for things and then write them down. He watched me writing for a while
and then said, "That's not how you write it;' and he wrote the word in Burmese
script. For the word evoked by English "speak;' I wrote /pp/ and he wrote 6@::i. I
insisted it made no difference. He insisted it did and told me I was hurting his lan-
guage. And so I began, somewhat reluctantly, to learn to write Burmese: /p-/ was
a central u, and /-y-/ wrapped around the u to make (Ql and the vowel /6-::i/ fit be-
fore and after it: 6@::i.
This difference in medial representation made a great difference, on at least two
levels. For one thing, I could not segment the Burmese syllable into a linear se-
quence, as I could /py'J/, as one can see clearly by studying the two representations.
But segmentation into linear sequence is a prerequisite for doing linguistics as
most of us have been taught it: normally, sounds string together to make mor-
phemes and words, and words string together to make phrases, and so on. We an-
alyze strings, with analog phenomena relegated to super- or subsegmental status.
To write my kind of grammar I had to violate his writing.
At first it seemed to me a small price to pay, to phonemicize his language. But
over the years-particularly 20 years later, in Java and Bali-I learned how that
kind of written figure (a center and marks above, below, before, and after it; the
figure of the Burmese and Javanese and Balinese syllable) was for many Southeast
Asians a mnemonic frame: everything in the encyclopedic repertoire of terms was
ordered that way: directions (the compass rose), diseases, gods, colors, social roles,
foods-everything (see Zurbuchen 1981:75ff.). It was the natural shape of re-
membered knowledge, a basic icon.
As Zurbuchen (1981) has shown us, this notion of the syllable is the ground
even of the gods: it is evoked at the beginning of every Balinese shadow play. Even
though the shadow play is taught and performed orally, it begins with an invoca-
tion of the written symbol as a source of power.

Just as the boundaries of awareness become perceptible,

There is perfect tranquillity, undisturbed by any threat,
And even the utterances of the gods subside.
It is none other which forms the beginning of my obeisance to the Divine.
Greatly may I be forgiven for my intention to call forth a story.
And where dwells the story?
150 A. L. Becker

There is a god unsupported by the divine mother earth,

Unsheltered by the sky,
Unilluminated by the sun, moon, stars, or constellations.
Yes, Lord, you dwell in the void, and are situated thus:
You reside in a golden jewel,
Regaled on a golden palanquin,
Umbrellaed by a floating lotus.
There approached in audience by all the gods of the cardinal
directio!JS.. .. (1981 :vi)

These last lines, after locating the written symbol outside of time and space, de-
scribe metaphorically the shaping of the written symbol as a focal point for nat-
ural order. Zurbuchen's (1981:vi-vii) translation continues, describing the imple-
ments of writing:

There, there are the young palm leaves, the one lontar,
Which, when taken and split apart, carefully measured are the lengths and
widths.
It is this which is brought to life with hasta, gangga, uwira, tanu.
And what are the things so named?
Hasta means "hand"
Gangga means "water"
Uwira means "writing instrument"
Taru means "ink."
What is that which is called "ink"?
That is the name for
And none other than
The smoke of the oil lamp,
Collected on the bark of the kepuh-tree,
On a base of copper leaf.
It is these things which are gathered together
And given shape on leaf.
"Written symbol" is its name,
Of one substance and different soundings....

The translation, which I have taken the liberty of arranging in lines (mainly to slow
down the reader), goes on slowly to evolve the story from the written symbol.
My point, however, is not to explore this image further, or to retell Mary
Zurbuchen's fascinating stories, but to try to understand why U San Htwe had in-
sisted on my learning Burmese this way. I think it was that the traditional learn-
ing was organized around that shape, that it was a root metaphor (see Lakoff and
Johnson 1980), the stuff that holds learning together-just as our sequential writ-
ing lines up so well with our sequential tense system or our notions of causality
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 151

and history. That is a great deal to ask anyone to give up-the metaphoric power
of his writing system. And I had tried to argue with that wise old man that it did
not matter.
One of the most subtle forces of colonialism, ancient or modern, is the under-
mining of not just the substance but the framework of someone's learning. As
Gregory Bateson put it, in his oft-quoted letter to the other regents of the
University of California, "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning
and you necessarily destroy all quality:' I see now that what I had been suggesting
to my teacher, though neither of us could articulate it, was that we break the pat-
tern which connects the items of his learning. When methodology and language
conflict, it is the methodology which should give way first.
The proverb that serves as an epigraph to this paper comes from a small book
my teacher gave to me just before I left Burma in 1961, after studying with him for
three years and mostly reading Burmese classics, after I had grasped a bit of the
language. I read with a great deal of what Keats called "negative capability": Keats
spoke of Shakespeare as one who was "capable of being in uncertainties, myster-
ies, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (quoted in Dewey
1934:33). I read with half-understanding the children's histories, poems, plays,
chronicles, and jataka tales he brought me, and heard with half-understanding his
commentaries and corrections of me. I taught English to children in the morn-
ing-funny, uninhibited Burmese children-and studied Burmese in the late af-
ternoon, at twilight, at U San Htwe's house. Just before I left, he gave me a small
notebook, a child's copybook with a picture of a mountain on the front, in which
he had copied lists of sets: the two thises, five thats, and fifteen whatevers. I had
asked him how I might continue studying Burmese without him and this book
was his solution and gift. I stared at it for years, and with the help of a Burmese
friend, U Thein Swe, began to understand some of it, much later.
In the book, written in U San Htwe's fine hand, are all classes of things, abstract
as well as concrete, in this world and out of it-a syllabus for study. It begins with
sets of twos and grows, as if paralleling the growing complexity of one's experi-
ence, to larger and larger sets. The initial sets are sometimes obvious, like the two
parents and the two strengths (strength of arm and strength of heart), but are
sometimes more exotic pairs like the two worlds (the zero world-in which
Buddhas, monks, supernatural beings, and so on, do not appear, exist, or flour-
ish-and the nonzero world-in which the above appear, exist, and flourish). The
sets in my book continue to sets of eighteen. (I learned later that other lists go on
to bigger sets and that my teacher may have censored a bit.) To understand the
sets, he said, is to understand the world, both inner and outer, seen and unseen.
They represent, taken together, a taxonomy of the phenomenal and noumenal
universe of at least some traditional Burmese.
Each set is itself a kind of plot from a universal plot book, around which to
build a discourse. For example, a sermon can be built around, say, the four cardi-
nal virtues (love, attention, happiness, detachment), or a political speech around
152 A. L. Becker

those three kinds of mistakes mentioned in the epigraph (resulting from lack of
memory, from lack of planning ahead, or from misguided beliefs). Or a play might
be constructed around some other appropriate set, perhaps the four false hopes
(hoping to get rich by reading treasure maps, hoping to get healthy by reading
medical literature, hoping for wisdom by following a learned man, and hoping for
a girlfriend by dressing up). These sets are assumed a priori to any discourse as im-
personal frames to which nature, both human and nonhuman, properly and ap-
propriately corresponds. A true sermon, a wise foreign policy, or a well-constructed
drama can be rooted in one or more of them. One can contemplate these sets with
continual fascination and increasing insight, as one learns to see things in new
ways. Like a good poem, a new set can defamiliarize one's world.
The proverb used as the epigraph to this paper appears in my copybook as in
Figure 8.1. U San Htwe copied this from a manuscript book that one of his teach-
ers had given to him. Similar books were common in traditional Buddhist monas-
tic education. They were learned first then gradually understood over the years, like
most things in traditional Southeast Asian education. Memory preceded under-
standing, an order practiced by few in our culture other than classical pianists. The
closer one gets to nonliteracy (and a chirographic culture is, in this sense, less lit-
erate than a print culture), the more a student seems to be expected to perform the
past like a classical pianist. Language classes in traditional schools were not so
much the acquiring of a neutral tool as a set of prior texts, serious cultural wisdom.
Neither had writing come to Burma, as it never does anywhere, as a neutral
tool. It had come with content: a religion, a calendar, and a new set of cultural
prior texts in Pali, the language of Buddhism. The new writing was, first of all, ac-
cess to those Pali texts, the real sources of knowledge. Only gradually did the local
language begin to be written in the new writing, at first only for translation. Later,
this translation language-far from the language acts and strategies of everyday
discourse (the vernacular)-began to be used for creating local texts and replac-

"n 0o-rn .S ~: (§~ ~

. v:>§ ./.i ~· ~ ·(jf?.
I()

~ ~ Btv.> ~\..~Gt:..
Figure8.1
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 153

wippal/athq ta ya: thofi: pa:

error law 3 classifier

(hpau' pyafi hma: ywifi: ta' thaw tayq thofi: pa:)

(perforate return error misplace do connective law 3 classifier)

thq nya wippal/athq qhma' q thi hma: hkyifi:

perceive- error sign- know- error doing
mark mark witness
2 sitta wippal/athq qkyafi q thi hma: hkyifi:
mind-thought error plan know- error doing
witness
3 ifiti wippal/athq qmyifi qyu hma: hkyifi:
opinion- error appear- belief error doing
doctrine ance

Figure 8.2

ing individual memory. Very much later, some bold innovator began to write the
vernacular. In a very general way, that is what happened throughout Southeast
Asia under the noetic impact of Sanskritic languages.
And so this set about mistakes is not a proverb in our sense but rather Buddhist
categories indicating natural laws of human nature, stated first in Pali and then in
Burmese. Phrase-by-phrase translation of this sort is also common in Southeast
Asia, and no doubt elsewhere, as a way of performing a translation. It has had pro-
found effect on literary styles and performance techniques, where translating is a
very common speech act (Okell 1965). These traditional styles make most for-
eigners feel that about half the words should be crossed out: we get impatient with
that extra step of glossing so many words.
In order to parse the Burmese passage, we must first transliterate it, or else learn
Burmese writing. Taking the former, faster course means both addition and loss
of meaning: what is lost is the powerful iconicity of the image of the Burmese syl-
lable, the visual gesture and pace of reading it and sounding it, and the aesthetic
possibilities of the shaping and combining of syllables. Using a Burmese type-
writer, even, is like decorating a Christmas tree: the central symbol is struck and
the carriage does not automatically jump ahead but just sits there, while one adds
things above, below, before, and after the central syllable. One focuses on syllables,
not phonemes.
Figure 8.2 gives an interpretation (meant to be read slowly) of the Burmese text
in Roman letters, a transliteration, with rough glosses in English, taken from dic-
tionaries and bilingual Burmese friends.
With this, let us go back to the original English translation (the epigraph of this
paper) and remove from it all the exuberance we can by taking out everything that
has no counterpart in the Burmese (in this passage):
154 A. L. Becker

three kind mistake

error memory error plan error belief

Everything else in the English is there because of the demands of English: exis-
tential frame ("There are .... "), tense, number, of, deictics, prepositions, connec-
tive. Nearly none of the things that give the English passage its cohesion by relat-
ing the parts to each other is left. What remains is that thin, sparse wordscape that
characterizes "literal" translation. It might be argued further that only one of the
English words comes reasonably close to the range of meaning of its Burmese
counterpart: three,((.).
The cohesion of the Burmese passage comes from grammatical phenomena
that we do not have in English or that we have but do not exploit in the way
Burmese does. One deficiency, one of the things missing from the English, is clas-
sification. It occurs twice, once in the top line (pa:) and again in the parenthetical
explanation in the second line. It is used in counting, but it also has several other
grammatical-rhetorical functions in Burmese. It evokes a universe of discourse,
that is, a particular perspective on the word classified (Becker 1975). It marks, by
its special prominence, a discourse topic, and therefore shares some of the func-
tion of the English existential sentence ("There be ... ").The classifier pa: is one
of a paradigm of classifiers that mark the status of beings and some things asso-
ciated with them. There are five categories, which might be conceptualized as a
center and four concentric rings radiating from that center. In the center are
Buddhas, relics, images, and the Buddhist Law. In the next ring, closest to the cen-
ter are the things classified as pa:: deities, saints, monks, royalty, scriptures, and
Pali terms. The word pa: itself is felt to be related to the term for "close" by some
Burmese friends, while others are skeptical about that etymology. In the next orbit
are things associated with the head, metaphorically: people of status, teachers, and
scholars. And next are ordinary humans, followed by an outer realm of animals,
ghosts, dead bodies, depraved people, and children. A classifier is a locus on a con-
ceptual map, not the name of a genus, all members of which have some attribute.
Animate beings are ordered according to their distance from Buddhahood: spiri-
tual progression is a movement from animality to Buddhahood. The three mis-
takes as a set are Buddhist wisdom and so are closest to the center in this concep-
tual map.
Classifiers almost seem to add another level of reality to the world as seen
through Burmese. We are accustomed to quantifiers, like two pounds of some-
thing or three yards of something else; but we do not regularly and obligatorily
classify everyone and everything with the same unconscious thoroughness that,
by contrast, we mark relative times in our tense-aspect system. Classifiers give spe-
cial salience to terms as they are introduced, marking out the topics of a discourse.
What linguists call "zero anaphora" (marking a discourse role as unchanged by not
mentioning it) indicates the domain of a term in a Burmese discourse. My own
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 155

Burmese was always very confusing because I kept overmentioning things, a par-
ticular form of exuberance to which English conditions us.
Most other terms a foreigner usually undermentions. These are the so-called
elaborate expressions (Haas 1964:xvii-xviii; Matisoff 1973:81ff.). Although words
are almost all monosyllabic in Burmese (with the exception of foreign terms like
wippallathq, and the other Pali terms in the text), they are used in pairs. There are
examples in lines 2 through 5:

1. hpau' pyafi "perforate-return" meaning to "fall-away"

(as from a religion)
2. hma: ywifi: "error-misplace" meaning "mistake"
3. a hma' a thi "mark-know" meaning "perceiving and remembering"
(no English term of this scope)
4. a kyafi a thi "intent-know" meaning "planning ahead;' "intending"
5. a myifi a yu "appearance-belief" meaning "belief" in a broad sense.

There are no precise English equivalents for any of these pairs of terms, but via
their Burkean dialectic they help us to imagine what they might mean. Like the
classifiers, they tend to make phrases double-headed. Few foreigners manage this
very well and so speak very thin Burmese, while we find them, as our name for this
phenomenon suggests, elaborate.
The rhythm of good Burmese seems to demand these expressions, and rhythm
is probably the most basic and powerful cohesive force in language. When two
people speak comfortably to each other, they both join in the creation of a
rhythm, marked by stresses, nods, grunts, gestures, and sentence rhythms. On the
basis of this created rhythm they exchange words. If the conversation is not going
well, the discomfort will be manifested in arhythmic responses and repairs, until
they get rolling again. Speaking a language requires skill in those background
rhythms, which are not the same in all languages. Our basic, elusive unease in
speaking to foreigners is in large part inexplicable because it is often in large part
rhythmic (Erickson and Shultz 1982; Scollon 1981). Here, the rhythmic elaborate
expressions mark the parallelism of the three pairs of terms, perhaps also bring-
ing the Burmese terms into balance with the heavier Pali terms.
Slowly, by a process of self-correction after a ventured glossing, the Burmese
passage is emerging: the drama of the classifiers and the elaborate expressions.
This slow emergence is the aesthetic of philology. It emerges in all the dimensions
of meaning: as a structure, as a genre, as an exchange, as a sounding, and as a po-
tential reference to (or evaluation of) an appropriate event.
If we look at the overall syntax of the text, we can clearly identify two strategies.
One is the strategy of the title and its paraphrase, which might be interpreted as:

Xlaw three "close" things

Xtaya: th on: pa:
156 A. L. Becker

\-----
X'ilaw three revered things
(X aw three revered things)

1 Y wippalliithq = Z error-ing
2 Y wippallathq = Z error-ing
3 Y wippalliithq = Z error-ing
Figure8.3

Here the X represents the variable term, the difference between the first and sec-
ond lines. This is a particular classifier strategy, to give it a name based on its final
constituent. By comparing other sets in the little book, 'we might make a more
general formula for classifier strategies, but that would be to move away from un-
derstanding how this strategy is shaped in this context. A strategy is not an ab-
stract pattern but an actual bit of text, used as a point of departure, either across
texts or in a single text. Here, the first line is a frame for the second, in which the
Pali term is paraphrased in Burmese. To give the most generalized formulation of
the strategy is to move too far from the text in separating formal meaning from
the four other kinds of meaning. It is possible to do so, as a long period of struc-
tural analysis has proved, yet it is also a movement away from understanding.
The second strategy is what we might call (after the distinctive sign =) an equa-
tive strategy, and it might be interpreted as: NUMBER Y wippallathq = Z error-
ing. This is the strategy of the final three lines. In this small text, a system has been
established in which certain slots in a frame are varied, others kept unchanged
(other entries in the little book almost all use variants of these strategies). These
repeated strategies give structural coherence to the text and provide a ground for
thematic coherence.
By looking at the relation of the three slots (X, Y, and Z), we find a further pat-
tern. The fillers of X are modifiers of tqya (law). In the first line the filler is the
Pali term (Burmanized) wippallathq, and this term becomes part of the frame of
the second strategy (i.e., the term which Y modifies). In the second line, the para-
phrase, the filler of Xis "hpau' pyafz hma: ywifz: tat thaw" (a modifying clause:
"perforate-return error-misplace doing+ connective term and clause particle"-
a Burmese paraphrase of wippallathq, the Pali origins of which are discussed later
in the paper.) Part of this Burmese paraphrase (the word hma: [error]) is the key
framing term in the second part of the equative strategy (i.e., the term which Z
modifies). The two fillers of X are Pali and Burmese, respectively, while the fillers
ofY and Z are also, respectively, Pali and Burmese. Furthermore, each filler ofY
is structurally parallel, as is each filler of Z. And, one might add, the number three
of the first two lines constrains the number of equative figures in the list. The
structural figure might be represented as in Figure 8.3.
As a structure, the text is very elegant. Each part is tightly bound into a very
'symmetrical overall pattern. At the lower levels of structure in this text are the va-
rieties of relations of modifier terms to modified terms and the internal structure
of the elaborate expressions:
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 157

CJ hma' CJ thi "mark know"

CJ kyafi CJ thi "plan know"
CJ myifi CJ yu "appearance belief"

Here, the particle q. marks a noun derived from a verb (Okell 1969:243). However,
what phonological and semantic constraints there are on the order of these con-
stituents is still unclear.
Probably, it takes a close parsing to make us aware how tightly structured this
figure is. It is a structure used throughout the book U San Htwe gave me, and
hence quite appropriately called a frame for a certain kind of language-a coher-
ence system, a language-game, an episteme.
The kind of knowledge that these frames "contain"-to use our English meta-
phor for the relation of knowledge to language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:92)-or
better, that these "frames" are the formal meaning of-is for the most part origi-
nally in Pali and is being shaped into Burmese in these figures. There are two lin-
gual interfaces here, from English back to Burmese and from Burmese back to Pali.
These can be seen as two sets of prior texts, although the relations are not that sim-
ple, if we consider, for instance, the curious use of the equal sign-the source of
which in Burma may well have been English-or the intrusion of Burmese into the
Pali words-where a Burmese writer's possible confusion over long and short vow-
els in Pali led to the "misspelling" of wippallathq. (only one p in Pali). Or, both these
things may be U San Htwe's own deviations. One of the hardest things to know in
reading a distant text is what is stereotypic and what is innovative.
The term wippallathq. is a Burmese interpretation of Pali vipallasa from Sanskrit
viparyasa. Edward Conze (1957, 1962a, 1962b) translates it as "perverted views:'
The noun viparyasa is from a root as, which means, roughly, "to throw:' The whole
term is used for the "overthrowing" of a wagon, or even, as a Sanskrit pundit told
me, "turning a pancake:' It has been translated as "inversion;' "perverseness;'
"wrong notion;' "error;' "what can be ·upset;' or "missearches"-that is, looking for
permanence in the wrong places. I think it quite appropriate to call them "mistakes
of interpretation" and so underscore their special relevance for philologists. "The
Scriptures;' writes Conze (1957:314 and 1962a:40) "identify the viparyasas with
'unwise attention' (ayoniso manasikaro)-the root of all unwholesome dharmas-
and with ignorance, delusion, and false appearance:' In another place, he writes,
"The viparyasa are sometimes treated as psychological attitudes, sometimes as log-
ical propositions, and sometimes even as an ontological condition" (1962b:39).
When considered as features of the world they distort, the viparyasas are four in
number; but when considered as locations in the mind they are three:

samjna (Pali-Burmese thanya) = "perception"

citta (Pali-Burmese sitta) "thought"
dr~ti (Pali-Burmese diti) "theoretical opinions"
158 A. L. Becker

All of these mistakes of interpretation lead us to habitually act as if things were

different from what they are. Perception (blending in Burmese with what we might
call memory) is perverted when we forget that what we perceive is impermanent,
ultimately unpleasant, and not us (not to be seen ego-fully). And so we meditate
on the rise and fall of the thing, breaking it down into dharmas. Thought (blend-
ing in Burmese with planning) is perverted by our wishes and fears. Both fear and
hope make us overstress the permanence of things, make us close our eyes to suf-
fering and exaggerate the importance of our own existence. Belief is perverted
when we formulate a theory that the world contains permanent objects, with per-
manent properties, or that good outweighs suffering, or that there is a self.
These are all empirical mistakes, summarized in the formula that these views
lead one to seek "the Permanent in the impermanent, Ease in suffering, the Self in
what is not the self:' As Conze (1962a:41) writes,
All this we can see quite clearly in our more lucid moments-though they be rather rare
and infrequent. The techniques of Buddhist meditation aims at increasing their fre-
quency, and innumerable devices have been designed with the one purpose of impress-
ing the actual state of affairs on our all too reluctant minds.

Even yet there remains what Ricoeur has called a "surplus of meaning"-an
open-endedness about what I first saw as a proverb (translated for me by a non-
Buddhist Burmese) but later came to see as a translated bit of Buddhist philoso-
phy. We have sampled each of the contextual sources of meaning-the interper-
sonal uses of public language, the metaphoric power of the medium, the kinds of
references the proverb might be appropriate with, the tight symmetry of its struc-
ture, and the prior (and posterior) Buddhist texts it evokes. We have moved back
from translation toward the original text, and beyond. The text was our discipline
and the unfinished process has been one of self-correction: removing exuberan-
cies of interpretation, filling in deficiencies. The Burmese text eventually overtakes
us, as a Buddhist injunction to philologists.

There are three kinds of perversions of interpretation, three kinds of mistakes of philology:

1. Perversions of perception, including memory = perversions of the past, of prior texts

2. Perversions of thought ... fore-thought, planning, hopes and fears= perversions of
the future
3. Perversions of appearances and beliefs = perversions of theory.

Notes
Acknowledgments. The author is grateful to Madhav Deshpande and Luis Gomez for help
with the Pali terms; to Michael Aung Thwin and U Thein Swe for help with the Burmese;
and to Clifford Geertz and others at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for many
valuable suggestions when a version of this essay was presented there in March 1982. This
paper is dedicated to Saya San Htwe, my teacher in Taunggyi, Burma, 1958-61.
Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb 159

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.
Zurbuchen, Mary S. 1981. The Shadow Theater of Bali: Explorations in Language and Text.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
9
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n
One Hound'll Lie to You":
A Contextual Study
of Expressive Lying
RICHARD BAUMAN

"There are two kinds of tales, one true and the other false;' Socrates proposes to
Adeimantos in the course of exploring the proper place of literature in The
Republic (376e), and the truth value of narrative-one dimension of the relation-
ship of stories to the events they recount-has been a basic typological criterion
in the classification of narrative ever since. Folklorists, for their part, have relied
rather heavily on the truth factor in classifying oral narrative forms. For some, the
basic distinction rests on "the extent to which a narrative is or is not based upon
objectively determinable facts" (Littleton 1965:21), whereas others are more prag-
matic and relativistic, relying on local distinctions made by members of the soci-
eties in which the tales are told between "narratives regarded as fiction" and "nar-
ratives ... regarded as true by the narrator and his audience" (Bascom 1965:4).
Recently, however, there have been increasing expressions of unease about the
empirical basis and reliability of such truth-value criteria. Herbert Halpert, for ex-
ample, reports frequent baffled disagreement between himself and his students in
the application of the truth-fiction distinction to the sorting out of jests and
anecdotes, local legends, tall tales, and personal narratives (1971:51). Robert
Georges, in turn, sees the truth-fiction question as so empirically clouded in ac-
tual cases that "the only meaningful answer would have to be an ambivalent one"
( 1971: 17, emphasis in the original). Arguing from a most revealing transcript of a
storytelling event, Linda Degh and Andrew Vazsonyi take a preliminary step to-
ward formulating an empirical basis for investigating the problematics of the
truth value and believability factors, at least with regard to legends. "Objective
truth and the presence, quality, and quantity of subjective belief are irrelevant;'
they maintain (1976:119). What is important is that legend "takes a stand and calls
for the expression of opinion on the question of truth and belief" (1976:119). As
observed by Jose Lim6n, "In some instances 'belief' may be quite secondary to

160
"Any Man Who Keeps Mo:re'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 161

performance itself" (1983:207). That is, if one may extend the point, considera-
tions of truth and belief will vary and be subject to negotiation within communi-
ties and storytelling situations. This would suggest that if we are interested in the
place of narrative in social life, it is the dynamics of variability and negotiation
that we should investigate; the issue should be transformed from a typological
comparative one to an ethnographic one. Abstract, a priori, and universalistic
truth-value criteria or classificatory systems for oral narrative based on them have
revealed themselves to be no more empirically productive than such a priori etic
schemes have proved to be in other cultural spheres. Still, evidence indicates that
truth and lying may well be of social and cultural concern to members of com-
munities with regard to stories. What is needed are closely focused ethnographic
investigations of how truth and lying operate as locally salient storytelling criteria
within specific institutional and situational contexts in particular societies (e.g.,
Heath 1983:149-89; Rickford 1986). That is what I have attempted here, in an ex-
ploration of storytelling and dog trading in Canton, Texas.
Canton is a small town of approximately 3,000 people, located about sixty miles
east and a little south of Dallas. Its principal claim to fame is that on the Sunday
preceding the first Monday of every month Canton becomes the scene of a large
and very popular trading fair. The average attendance is about 20,000-perhaps
double that on Labor Day. The fair draws traders and dealers from as far away as
New York, California, Oregon, and Minnesota.
First Monday at Canton-for so it is still called, although the action has shifted
to Sunday in accommodation to the modern workweek-fits into a long tradition
of American trade days. These seem to have originated in this country before the
middle of the seventeenth century, in conjunction with the sitting of the county
courts (Craven 1949:167). These courts met as often as once a month in some
convenient spot, corresponding to the shire town of England or New England.
Court day was a holiday, an occasion on which county residents came into town
not only in connection with court functions, but to transact all kinds of business:
to discuss public affairs, hold auctions, trade, and visit on the courthouse green
(Carson 1965:195--6; Fiske 1904:62-6; Verhoeff 1911:7n). County courts usually
met on the first Monday of the month-hence the term "First Monday:' Although
the sitting of the court was the nucleus around which the court days first devel-
oped, the occasion became a social institution in its own right; Sydnor (1948:34)
calls it one of the most important in the antebellum South. As political organiza-
tion changed, however, and county courts developed other schedules, trade days
often disengaged from court sessions to become autonomous occasions; they con-
tinued to be economically and socially important to the people of the regions in
which they were held.
From the beginning, an important commodity in the trading that went on dur-
ing First Mondays was horses and mules. Professional horse and mule traders
were called "jockies"; thus "Jockey Day" and "Hoss Monday" are other names for
the occasion, and "jockey ground" or "jockey yard" designate the area in which the
162 Richard Bauman

trading was conducted (Sartain 1932:253). Numerous local histories and personal
documents testify to the high degree of interest and excitement generated by the
action on the jockey ground during the height of the trade days in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. But, as horses and mules declined in importance
with the mechanization of Southern agriculture, First Monday trade days declined
as well, to the point that very few now remain. Still, some trade days have been in
continuous existence since they began, whereas others have been revived, reincar-
nated as flea markets.
First Monday in Canton, like most others, began in conjunction with a county
court day; Canton is the county seat of Van Zandt County. The event developed
in the years following the Civil War, probably during the early 1870s (Mills
1950:191-2). Like most others, too, this trade day became as much or more an oc-
casion for coming to Canton as for attending to court business. Until 1965, the
trading took place in the courthouse square, but by the mid-sixties the crowds
simply got too big, and separate grounds were set aside. More than 1,000 lots are
available on the trading ground, and more are being added all the time. The en-
tire event is now sponsored by the Canton Chamber of Commerce.
Although an occasional mule or two is still hauled to Canton for trade and a
considerable amount of domestic poultry is sold there as well, where animals are
concerned, coon dogs are the real focus of interest during First Monday. This dog
trading was an early feature of Canton First Monday. No one seems to know pre-
cisely when it began, but my oldest sources, who are past eighty years of age, re-
member it from their earliest visits to Canton. In 1960, a few years before the gen-
eral trading left the courthouse square for separate grounds, the dog trading was
moved to its own site across the highway from the main area, down on the river
bottom. The dog grounds and dog trading are not part of the Chamber of
Commerce operation. The grounds are privately owned, and the dog trading gen-
erally has a very different tone from the flea-market atmosphere across the road.
First, whereas many of the flea-market dealers and public are women, the peo-
ple on the dog grounds are almost exclusively men. Again, the flea market attracts
many urban types as well as townspeople from surrounding towns. On the dog
grounds one sees mostly rural people-farmers, hunters, more blacks, and more
people of lower socioeconomic status generally. The activity on the dog grounds
begins in earnest on Friday night, when people begin to gather, set up tents and
campers, stake out their dogs, drink, play cards, shoot dice, talk dogs, go off into
the surrounding countryside to hunt, and generally have a good time.
At the peak of the trading, there are hundreds of hunting dogs of all kinds on
the dog grounds, although coonhounds are clearly predominant. Some coon-dog
men are as serious as other dog fanciers about breeding, standards, registration,
papers, and the other trappings of"improving the breed:' Most dealing in dogs at
this level involves fancy stud fees, careful records, big money-into the thousands
of dollars for a top dog. Many hound-dog men, however, are far more pragmatic.
They just want good, working hunting dogs, and cannot afford to pay a great deal
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 163

of money for them. These men tend to be less careful about the niceties of breed-
ing, record keeping, and so on; they are satisfied with whichever dogs get together
behind the shed, breeding "old Handy to old Ready:' This is the group of dog
traders that comes to Canton, and as a group they tend not to be highly regarded
by the serious coon-dog breeders or by the townspeople in general. One citizen of
Canton described dog traders to me as people for whom "making a living gets in
the way." Some are professional dog jockies; most are amateurs. Their motivations
for coming to Canton are various and often mixed. Some come to get "using
dogs:' whereas others just like to "move their dogs around" or "change faces:' The
professionals come to make some money, but many traders just want the activity
to pay for itself-that is, to pay for the trip and for the dogs' feed.
The dominant reasons for coming to Canton, though, are to get together with
other hound-dog men to talk about dogs and hunting, and to trade for its own
sake, as recreation. For most traders at Canton, the economic motive is far from
the top of the list; dog trading for them is a form of play, a contest of wits and
words. Some men actually keep one or two dogs around at any given time just to
trade and, not surprisingly, these are usually rather "sorry" dogs, "old trashy dogs
that ain't worth a quarter for nothin'." One trader put it this way:

My experience is, I'll be in Canton in the morning, be there Sunday all day, I've got a
dog trade always. Reason I want to go because a man's gonna meet me there and
demonstrate his dog and I'm gonna take mine. Course the one I'm gonna take ain't
much of a dog.... Now and then I get a good dog, then I get one that ain't worth
bringin' home, but still it's trade that I like to do. (Recorded by Thomas A. Green,
Blooming Grove, Texas, May 31, 1968)

In other words, Canton is "where the action is" (see Goffman 1967). Of course,
no dog trader is averse to making some money, and one of the stated goals of any
swap is to "draw boot"-that is, to get a dog and some cash for your dog. One man
told me that his fellow traders would "trade with you for ten when ten's all they
got in their dog, then they'll make five on your dog:' These are small sums,
though. In most cases, cash profit stands as a token of having played the game
well; it is a sweetener that enhances the encounter. It is also true that many of the
transactions at Canton are straight cash sales, but the dynamic of these transac-
tions is the same in all essentials as trading, and they are considered to be and la-
beled trades.
When I asked what brought him to Canton, one old trader, who has been com-
ing to First Monday for more than seventy years, replied, "Well, I enjoy trading and
enjoy seeing my old friends:' For him, as for most others on the dog grounds, the
essence of First Monday is trading and sociability. I propose in the remainder of
this chapter to explore some of the interrelationships between the two activities.
As a point of departure, let us consider the following two excerpts from dog-
trading encounters at Canton. The first involves two participants: John Moore, a
164 Richard Bauman

black man in his early forties, and Mr. Byers, a white man in his early fifties. John
Moore has the dogs, and Byers has just walked up to look them over.

Byers: He strike his own fox? [That is, can he pick up the fox's trail by himself?]
Moore: He strike his own fox. Strike his own fox. Clean as a pin, strike his own
fox. [Pause] And he'll stand to be hunted, he'll stand to be hunted
[Byers interrupts-unintelligible]. What is that?
Byers: He run with a pack good?
Moore: Oh yes, oh yes. And he'll stand ... he'll stand three nights out a week.
He has did that and took off-ain't seen him waitin' behind that.
[Unintelligible.] He'll stand three nights out a week. I've known that to
happen to him. [Pause]
I try to be fair with a man 'bout a dog. Tell the truth about a dog. Tell
you what he'll do. If there's any fault to him, I wanna tell the man. If I
get a dog from a man, if there's any fault to him, I want him to tell me.
I bought ... we bought some puppies from a man, we asked him,
said, "they been vaccinated?" Said, "now we gonna buy the puppies:'
say, "now if they been vaccinated, we wanta know if they ain't." Say,
"now, what we's gettin' at, if they ain't been vaccinated distemper's all
around:' We wanted 'a vaccinate 'em.
And he swore they was vaccinated and after we bought 'em they
died, took distemper and died. Then he told a friend o' ours, he say he
hate that he didn't tell us that the dogs, the puppies, wasn't vaccinated.
See, and I begged him, "I tell you somethin' man, we gonna buy the
puppies, gonna give you a price for 'em:' I said, "but there's one thing
we just wanta know if they been vaccinated." And then turned right
around ... then turned right around and told the man that they hadn't
been vaccinated. And here I begged him, "I'm beggin' you, gonna buy
the dogs, puppies, at your price:'
Byers: I traded two good coon dogs for two Walker dogs [a breed of
hounds]-
Moore: //Mmmhmm.
Byers: //-supposed to be good fox dogs.
Moore: Mmmhmm.
Byers: Sumbitches wouldn't run a rabbit.
Moore: You see that?
Byers: Boy, I mean they wouldn't run nothin'.
Moore: I tell you for ... what is your name?
Byers: Byers.
Moore: Mr. Byers, this here is John Moore, everybody know me here. I can take
you to some people in here any day-I'm talkin' about some rich, up-
to-date people-I have sold dogs to, and they'll tell you.... I'm talkin'
'bout for hunnerd dollars, some hunnerd dollar dogs, seventy-five dol-
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound 1ll Lie to You" 165

lar dogs, fifty dollar.... I haven't got a dog over there for fifty dollars.
You can't raise one for that, 'cause a sack o' feed down there where we
live cost you four fifty for fifty pounds, what we feed the hounds on, we
feed the hounds on, and then we get scraps from that slaughter pen to
put in. And if I tell you somep'n 'bout a dog I'm not gon' misrepresent
him. Not gonna misrepresent him.
You see that little ol' ugly gyp [bitch] there? She'll git in the
thicket.... We was runnin' the Fourth o' July, I think it was, runnin' a
big gray fox. Across the road runnin' right down 'side this culvert, oh,
'bout like that. [Unintelligible.] You've seen it where, that's what, briar,
you know, you know briar up under there, you know, know what I'm
talkin' 'bout-these ol' ... where ... got them stickers on, 'bout like
that [holds up his finger], 'bout that size, got that runner, big runner to
'em. And just had the place solid.
And we had a fox under there, and got him under there 'bout three
o'clock, and he stayed there till it got daylight, he stayed under there to
daylight. The road on east side o' that place.
And daylight come and them ol' feet comin' out from under round
there drove her all buggy. He just walked in them briars. Place he could
get in, you'd just see him every while just walkin'. You could hear that
gyp now smell that fox. He got him hot, he just walk in them briars.
That little gyp come up in now, and she come up, man, there, like
this fox, far like to the middle o' this pickup, quite that far-come out,
shot out from under there, wasn't long before she come out just
sprawled on her belly.
There she is, right there. There she is right there. [To dog] Yeah,
come over here. (Recorded Canton, Texas, July 31, 1971)

In the second encounter there are three participants, only two of whom are
heard in this excerpt: Homer Townsend and Herman Smith. Townsend's son is in-
terested in Smith's dogs, but his father does the talking.

Townsend: Will them ol' dogs you got catch a rabbit?

Smith: Yeah.
Townsend: Really get up there and catch one?
Smith: Yes sir. I'd buy another one that'll outrun 'em.
Townsend: Well, a man told me a while ago they woµldn't hardly run a rabbit.
Smith: I tell you what I'll do. I'll take the man out here and show him.
That's all I can do.... that's the best way, is to take him out and
show him. I'll buy another 'un that can run with 'em ... uh, keep
'em or sell or buy another 'un that could run with 'em, see ....
Townsend: [Interrupts] He's interested in some dogs, some greyhounds, and,
uh, that man says they wouldn't hardly run a rabbit.
166 Richard Bauman

Smith: [Angrily] I'll show you! That's all I can do. You know me, I don't lie
about these dogs. I tried 'em out, see, I tried them dogs out before I
ever bought 'em, see. And I do the coon dogs thataway. I wouldn't
give a dime for nary a dog I didn't know on this ground until I
hunted him.
I sold one last ... uh ... summer and the man asked me what I'd
take. I said, "I won't even price him till you go huntin'." I said, "I sell
mine in the woods!" And when we went huntin', he treed three
coons. Come out, and he said, "Whatcha want for that dog?" I said
two-fifty. And he went countin' out them twenty-dollar bills.
I got a little ol' gyp out there I've had three years. And she's three
years old-she's been treein' coons ever since she was a year old!
And she's still in my pen! And I got one o' her puppies mated to that
'un yonder ... that's the one over there. Took him out the other day,
just started trainin' him, you know.
That's the reason I got them greyhounds, 'cause I can see 'em, see? I
can't hear a thing outta this ear. I gotta go with somebody and they
got a bunch of trash and.... No, somebody got one to run with 'em,
I'll buy 'em this morning.
Townsend: [Leaving] Well, we'll talk to you a little bit ... after a while.
Smith: [Loudly] I'll take 'em out here and show you! That's the way I am. I
don't lie about these dogs. I ain't ... I don't believe in it.
I bought a dog here 'bout three or four months ago down here
from an ol' man and ended high nigh walkin' him! And he was
tellin' me about that dog, trainin' young dogs and this 'n' that, and I
give him thirty dollars for it, and I give him to that little boy down
there. That hound don't tree. I give him to him. I wouldn't lie to
him, I give it to him! I don't lie about it. I'll buy 'em on the tree or
sell 'em on the tree, I don't care about the money. I don't lie about
these dogs. You hear anything very long and you'll say it's all right,
you know what I mean? (Recorded by Donna West, Canton, Texas,
November 1, 1970)

For our purposes, two features stand out from these excerpts. First, the partic-
ipants clearly devote a considerable amount of interactional attention to the issue
of truthfulness and lying; and, second, one of the devices they resort to in ad-
dressing this issue is telling stories. Anyone who is at all familiar with hound-dog
men, coon hunters, or otherwise, will feel no surprise at hearing they have some
involvement in lying and storytelling. Georg Simmel suggests that "sociological
structures differ profoundly according to the measure of lying which operates in
them" (1950:312), and coon hunting certainly ranks fairly high on this scale.
To an audience familiar with coon hunters, the association between lying and
coon hunting is so well established that it constitutes an expressive resource for
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 167

performance. The humorous monologue of the featured speaker at a Fourth of

July celebration in Pekin, Indiana-an area near the Indiana-Kentucky border
that is full of coon hunters-included the following introduction to a series of
hunting stories:

You know, now, somebody's accused me oflying, and I told somebody one time how bad
it hurt me to lie, and they said, "you must be in awful pain, then, buddy:' But I have had
to lie some just to get by, you understand? I didn't want to lie, I was pushed into it. I done
a lot of coon hunting, and when you go out with a bunch of coon hunters you got to lie
just to stay with 'em.
I can see by looking that there's no coon hunters in this audience today. I'm glad I did,
I didn't want to insult anybody. But when you get out there in the field with a bunch of
coon hunters, and get you a chew of tobacco in your mouth, and the dogs start running,
you better start telling some lies, or you won't be out there long. (Byron Crawford,
recorded Pekin, Indiana, July 4, 1978)

Or, as summed up for me with artful succinctness by a Texas coon hunter, "any
man who keeps more'n one hound'll lie to you."
One type of lying associated with coon hunting, and of long-standing interest
to folklorists, is the tall tale, the traditional tale oflying and exaggeration. Hunting
has always been a privileged domain for tall tales: The Types of the Folktale
(Thompson 1961) established the hunting tale as a special subgroup of tales of
lying (types 1890-1909), and the standard American tall-tale collections are full
of hunting windies (see Baughman 1966: types 1890-1909 and motifs
Xll00-1199, and references therein).
Traditional tall tales are told at Canton, but not often. Since the regulars have
heard them over and over again, they tend largely to save them for newcomers not
yet fully integrated into the coon-hunting fraternity (cf. Toelken 1979:112). The
following tale, widely recorded, was addressed by a veteran hunter to a nineteen-
year-old novice in the group:

This ol' boy, he had him a coon dog. He had him a little coon [hide-] stretcher, looked
like a piece of wire, V-shaped. He'd bring it out of the house, he had that coon dog, and
it'd go out in the woods, kill him a coon, bring it back to the house, and all that boy had
to do was just skin that coon out, put on that stretcher and skin. He was doing that for
about two or three years, and was plum proud of his dog, and everything, and was telling
everybody in town how good that dog was.
One day his mama told him to take the ironing board outside to fix it; there was
something wrong with it. That dog seen that ironing board and that dog hadn't showed
up yet. 1 (Recorded Canton, Texas, June 2, 1973)

Tall tales such as this one play upon the generic expectations of another type of
story which is ubiquitous among hound-dog men: narratives of personal experi-
ence about the special qualities and hunting prowess of particular dogs. The story
168 Richard Bauman

of the dog and the ironing board/hide-stretcher followed closely on the heels of
this one:

A: I run a coon down the creek back down home at Fred's a couple weeks
ago....
B: Yeah?
A: And I couldn't get him out, couldn't get in there to him, so Speck and I got
... I caught Speck to lead him off now, "let's go, Speck:'
Went on down there, struck another coon and treed it. He jumped it out,
and old Speck just whirled and left there, and I didn't know where in hell that
sumbitch went.
First time I heard him opened up back down on the tree. He went back
there and checked the hole, that coon had come out and he treed that
sumbitch down there [laughing].
C:Yeah.
D: Sure did. Dog's smart.
A: That durn coon came outa that hole. He went and treed that coon.
C: Yeah. That's what me and Bud done one night. Treed one down there ....
A: [Interrupting] He was thinkin' about that coon, wasn't he? (Recorded Canton,
Texas, August 1, 1971)

Stories like this one dominate the sociable encounters of coon hunters wherever
they come together, including the dog-trading grounds at Canton. These accounts
stick close to the actual world of coon hunting and to the range of the possible-
though not, in the best of them, to the ordinary. The extraordinary, the "re-
portable" in Labov's terms, is necessary if a personal narrative is to hold the lis-
tener's attention (Labov and Fanshel 1977:105). A dog like old Speck that can
remind itself of a piece of unfinished business and go back to finish it off after
treeing another coon is special, though believable. Why not, then, a dog that will
catch a coon on order, to fit his master's hide-stretcher? The more common story
of personal experience, told straightforwardly as truth, contextualizes the tall tale;
it contributes to the latter's humorous effect by establishing a set of generic ex-
pectations that the tall tale can bend exaggeratedly out of shape. The effect is rec-
iprocal, of course: The obvious exaggeration of the tall tale creates an aura of lying
that colors the "true" stories as well.
When we juxtapose the personal narrative and the tall tale, actually two di-
mensions of"lying" become apparent. First, the unusual but not impossible events
of the former are transformed into the exaggeratedly implausible events of the lat-
ter. Thus tall tales are lies, insofar as what they report as having happened either
did not happen or could not have happened.
There is more, though. The tall tale presented above is told in the third person,
which distances it somewhat from the narrator, and contrasts with the character-
istic use of the first-person voice in the personal narrative. A common feature of
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n _one Hound'll Lie to You" 169

tall-tale style, however, is also the use of the first person (Brunvand 1978:136-7),
either directly ("I had an old coon dog that would go out in the woods....") or as
a link between the narrator and the third-person protagonist ("I knew an old boy,
he had a coon dog ... ").This device occurs in the second traditional tale we will
consider below. When the first-person voice is employed, a second dimension of
"lying'' comes into play. The use of the first person brings the tall tale closer to per-
sonal narrative; it allows the story to masquerade for a while as a "true" personal
narrative, until the realization that what is being reported is impossible shatters
the illusion. In other words, these first-person tall tales are what Goffman calls
"fabrications:' "the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activ-
ity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about
what it is that is going on" (1974:83). What appears to be going on is an account
of actual events; what is really going on is a lie masquerading as such an account-
a double lie. The man who tells such a tale in the third person is a liar; the man
who tells it in the first person is a tricky liar, a con man. Thus two potential di-
mensions of"lying" enter into the expressive ambience of coon hunters: outright
lies and fabrications.
As I have noted, though, traditional tall tales are not very common at Canton.
But even without them, the aura of lying persists around the personal dog stories
because, although recounted as true, they are susceptible to creative exaggeration,
another dimension of "lying:' for at least two major reasons. First, like all natural
sociable interaction, the encounters of coon hunters are at base about the con-
struction and negotiation of personal identity. In them, sociable narratives are a
vehicle for the encoding and presentation of information about oneself in order
to construct a personal and social image (Bauman 1972). In Watson and Potter's
apt formulation, "social interaction gives form to the image of self and the image
of the other; it gives validity and continuity to the identifications which are the
source of an individual's self-esteem" ( 1962:246). The way to establish that you are
a good coon hunter is to show that you have good hounds and are thus knowl-
edgeable about quality dogs-even more so if you have trained them yourself.
Thus, because hunting stories are instruments for identity building, for self-ag-
grandizement (Labov and Waletzky 1967:34), there is a built-in impulse to exag-
gerate the prowess of one's dogs with hyperbole ("When he trees, hell, if you ain't
give out, you're plum gonna get him of starvation before he comes away from
there"), or by selection (omitting mention of the faults of a dog you're bragging
on) as a means of enhancing one's own image (cf. Gilsenan 1976:191). This ten-
dency toward "stretching the truth:' as it is often called, has been widely reported
in men's sociable encounters (see, e.g., Bauman 1972; Bethke 1976: Biebuyck-
Goetz 1977; Cothran 1974; Tallman 1975). It is one more factor that gives hound-
dog men the reputation of being liars.
The other factor that promotes the expressive elaboration of the hound and
hunting story is that, whatever its referential and rhetorical functions, it consti-
tutes a form of verbal art. That is, it is characteristically performed, subject to eval-
170 Richard Bauman

/lying\

[outright] lying stretching the truth

Figure 9.1

uation, both as truth and as art for the skill and effectiveness with which it is told
(Bauman 1977:11). The aesthetic considerations of artistic performance may de-
mand the embellishment or manipulation-if not the sacrifice-of the literal
truth in the interests of greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value,
contrast, or other elements that contribute to excellence in performance in this
subculture. "Stretching the truth;' which chiefly exaggerates and selects, is not ex-
actly the same as the outright lying of the tall tale. Nevertheless, although the two
activities can be terminologically distinguished to point up the contrast between
them, they are usually merged, and the term "lying;' in an unmarked sense, is used
to label both (see Figure 9.1). Fabrication, our third analytically distinguished
type of lying, has no folk label.
For these reasons, then, some expectation oflying attends the telling of these sto-
ries about special dogs and memorable hunts. Realizing this, the tellers frequently
resort to various means of validating their accounts (cf. Ben-Amos 1976:30-2).
These range from verbal formulas like "I guarantee:' to the testimony of witnesses
(as in the above story), to offers to demonstrate the dog in action. One man con-
cluded a lengthy story about the hunting prowess of his hound as follows:
You don't believe it, take and let your dogs run a coon loose, and I'll lead her, anybody
tonight, anybody got their damn good cold-nose dogs, and if she don't run that coon
and tree that coon, it's gonna be somethin' that ain't never happened. She'll run that
sumbitch till by god, she'll tree that sumbitch. (Recorded Canton, Texas, August l, 1971)

But even such emphatic attempts at validation often contain elements that sub-
tly undermine the intended effect. In the statement just quoted, the owner backs
up his previous claim about his dog's ability to follow a cold trail to the tree by
stating that it has never failed to do so. Whereas the dog in question did in fact
have a far higher success rate than most others, both the owner and several of the
onlookers knew of times when it had failed, as any dog must once in a while. So,
despite these attempts at validation, the expectation persists that hound-dog men
will lie when talking about their dogs.
Occasionally, among intimates, someone may make a playful thrust at discred-
iting a story. To cite one example from Canton, a man, spotting an old friend who
was giving an account of a recent hunt to a circle of fellow hunters, called out as
he approached, "What you <loin', lyin' to these people?" This is joking, however.
The interesting and noteworthy thing about the sociable storytelling of hound-
dog men is that, although it is strongly recognized as susceptible to lying, the lying
is overwhelmingly licensed as part of the fundamental ethos of sociability. That is,
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 171

by not challenging the truthfulness of another's stories, one may reasonably ex-
pect to be accorded the same license in presenting one's own image-building nar-
ratives and crafting one's own artful performances. Then too, it is only suscepti-
bility we are talking about; not every personal narrative about dogs and hunting
involves lying, nor is it always clear or consciously recognized as to which do and
which do not. There is merely a persistent sense that every story might. To call an-
other man a liar in this context, then, is to threaten his "face:' with some risk and
no possible advantage to oneself; whereas to give apparent acceptance to his ac-
counts is to store up interactional credit toward the unchallenged acceptance of
one's own tales.
Hunting tall tales and ordinary dog stories do not exhaust the repertoire of sto-
rytelling at Canton. The special character of First Monday for the hunters who at-
tend is that it is an occasion for dog trading; not surprisingly, then, trading itself
constitutes an important conversational resource for those who gather there. Like
the hunting tall tales, some of the trading stories are traditional fictions, part of
the national-even international-treasury of lore about shrewd trades, deceptive
bargains, gullibility, and guile. To underscore his observations about a smart fel-
low trader, a dog jockey from Oklahoma who almost never misses a First Monday
at Canton told the following story:

And they're smart, too. I know an ol' boy, by god, he fell on a damn scheme to make
some money, you know? Got hisself a bunch o' damn dog pills. 'Stead o' them damn ...
he called 'em "smart pills;' you know, and by god, he'd sell them damn things, and an ol'
boy'd come along, and he'd sell 'em a little to 'em, and tell 'em how smart they'd make
'em, you know, an' he'd get a dollar a piece for 'em.
An ol' boy come along, and he sold him one.
He said, "hell, I don't feel any smarter than I did."
He said, "I found sometimes when you're pretty dumb it takes several of' em, by god,
to get you smartened up:'
He bought another one, took it, stood around there a few minutes, and said, "now, I
ain't no smarter than I was:'
"Boy;' he says, "you're something', you're just pretty dumb. You ... you've.got to take
four or five for you:'
Well, he bought another one, took it, so he stood around, and the said, "man, them
things ain't helping me a damn bit:'
He said, "I told you, you was pretty dumb." He said, "by god, you're gonna have to take
another one."
So he bought another one, by god, and he took that son of a bitch and rolled it around
in his damn hand, and he reached up to taste it, and he said, "that tastes just like dog shit:'
He said, "boy, now you smartenin' up:" (Recorded Canton, Texas, June 5, 1977)

Let us examine this story in the light of our discussion thus far. Linked to the
conversation that precedes it, and opened in the first person ("I know an ol' boy
... "),the story appears at first to be a conventional personal narrative of the kind
that is told as true. Ultimately, it is revealed as a humorous fiction. Like the tradi-
172 Richard Bauman

tional tall tale told in the first person, then, this story is both a lie and a fabrica-
tion. Its content, however, endows it with an additional dimension of deception.
The trader here has clearly swindled the dupe by playing on his expectation that
the "smart pills" would make him wiser by virtue of their medicinal powers. That,
after all, is how pills work. The trader, of course, has made no such explicit claim.
He has merely advertised his wares as "smart pills;' and they do in fact make the
dupe smarter-he wises up to the fact that he has been paying a dollar each for
pellets of dog dung.
This story is one of a type of traditional tale in which the shrewd trader, al-
though not actually telling an untruth-and thus not lying in a limited, literal
sense-lies in effect nevertheless, at least in the sense set forth by Charles Morris
(1946:261): "lying is the deliberate use of signs to misinform someone, that is, to
produce in someone the belief that certain signs are true which the producer him-
self believes to be false." In the story above, the trader's ploy is actually a kind of
fabrication, insofar as he induces the dupe to believe that he is taking pills that will
affect him medicinally, whereas in fact such effect as they have is the result of his
realization that this belief is false. The tale thus underscores in expressive form the
semiparadoxical fact that traders can lie by telling the truth. The "smart pills" de-
ception is at least arguably a "benign fabrication;' in Goffman's terms (1974:87),
leading as it does to the enlightenment of the dupe. However, "exploitive fabrica-
tions" (ibid.:103) also abound in this body of folklore and, as we shall see, in ac-
tual trading as well.
My impression, unverified by conclusive data, is that traditional tales about trad-
ing, like the one I have just presented, are less generally familiar to the population of
the dog grounds at Canton than are the traditional tall tales about dogs and hunt-
ing. The latter are appropriate, in a general sense, whenever coon hunters come to-
. gether sociably, whereas the former are more likely to be familiar to those with a reg-
ular involvement in trading, a much smaller group. In the setting of a First Monday,
though, trading tales are highly appropriate, and I have heard more traditional sto-
ries about trading than traditional tall tales about hunting on the dog grounds.
Still more common are personal narratives about trades in which the teller
himself was involved. Some of these, interestingly, are about being taken. Dog
trading is, after all, a contest, and even the canny trader can be bested occasion-
ally, as in the following account:

A: That's that little Trigg [a breed of hound] I's tellin' you about.
B: I bought one o' them one time, Cal, was the funniest thing I got in.
When I swapped for her, and give some money, in Texarkana, old boy
said, "I guarantee her:' Said, "she's one of the finest coon dogs I've ever
had in the woods in my life:'
I carried that dog home, I pitched her out, first thing she hit was a
deer. I think a day or two later, I finally found her. And I mean she
wouldn't run one thing on earth but a deer, not anything.
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 173

So I carried her back to Texarkana and just give her away. Yes sir. And
five minutes after the boy drove off with that dog, a guy drove up and
said, "do you know where I can J'ind a deer dog anywhere for sale?"
C & D: [Laugh]
B: I'll bet he hadn't got two mile outa town, when ...
D: [Interrupting] Outa town dog and all?
B: Yeah. Ain't no tellin' what he'd give for the dog, and she was perfect. I
mean she was a straight deer dog. Wouldn't run nothin' else. But that's
my luck. (Recorded Canton, Texas, August 1, 1971)

In this story, the teller loses out not once, but twice. He is victimized by being
lied to outright by another trader-note the inevitable preoccupation with
lying-and then compounds the problem by giving away the deer dog, worthless
to a coon hunter, moments before he is presented with a golden opportunity to
sell it at a handsome profit. Still, he is philosophical about it; he introduces the
story as the funniest experience he has had with Trigg hounds and chalks up the
whole experience to luck.
Whereas admitting that one has been taken in a trade might seem to expose one
to some risk of losing face, the risk is apparently offset by the reportability and
performance value of a good story. And, after all, it did take an outright lie on the
trader's part to accomplish the deception: Moreover, any trader worth his salt has
plenty of stories about how he bested someone else in a trade by the exercise of
wit, cleverness, or deception. The same man who lost out twice on the deer dog
told the following story, recounting a classic example of the short con, a fabrica-
tion par excellence.
Last time I went over to Canton, I had a dog I called Blackjack. He was just about as sorry
a dog as I ever had owned. He wouldn't do nothin' but eat. Take him huntin' and he lay
out under the pickup.
So I decided I'd take him over to Canton, and I did, and I met a friend of mine over
there, named Ted Haskell, out o' Corsicana. I told Ted, I said, "now, you go up that alley up
yonder and meet me 'bout half-way where they's tradin' dogs yonder, and then we'll in-
troduce ourselves. You ... we'll ... sell this dog, and I'll give you half what I get outa it:'
I met ol' Ted, and he says, "well, ol' Blackjack," he says, "I haven't had a coon race since
I sold him;' he says, "where'd you get him?"
"I got him over to Palestine."
"Well, I declare, I wisht I had him back," he says, "what are you askin' for him?"
I said, "I'll take thirty dollars:'
Well, they began to gather 'round and listen and listen. We kept talkin' 'bout him.
He'd brag on Blackjack. And finally, an ol' boy eased up and called me off and says, "I'll
give twenty dollars for him:'
And I said, "Well, pay me:' Well, he paid me.
Course I told Mr. Haskell mighty glad I'd met him, and he turned and went one way,
and I went the other way, and we met at the pickup and divided the money. I come
home, and he come back to Corsicana.
174 Richard Bauman

So I'm sure that man felt about like I did when I bought him, 'cause he wasn't worth
carryin' a-huntin'. (Recorded by Thomas A. Green, Blooming Grove, Texas, May 31, 1968)

Stories like this one manifest a significant ambivalence about lying and other
swindles, especially about lying-whether outright lying, stretching the truth, or
fabrication-in conducting the trading itself. As I have noted, dog trading is
viewed by the confirmed traders as a game of strategy in which, like many other
games of strategy, deception occupies a central and accepted place. There is a long
tradition in American folklore and popular literature of admiration for the
shrewd trader, from the Yankee peddler to the Southern horse trader, who makes
his way through the world by wit and words, part of "the traditional sympathy
which storytellers have for rascals and crooks" (Benjamin 1969:106; cf. Dorson
1959:47-8; Ferris 1977; Green 1968, 1972). The numerous entries in Baughman's
Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America ( 1966) under
Kl34, Deceptive horse sale (or trade), as well as such literary pieces as the horse
trader in Longstreet's Georgia Scenes or the recent popular collections of horse-
trading tales by Ben Green (1968, 1972; see also Welsch 1981), suggest that
Americans enjoy hearing about shrewd traders and therefore, at some level at
least, accept their crooked dealings (cf. Boatright 1973:146). The interplay be-
tween the trader's verbal skill in trading and his verbal skill as a storyteller is prob-
ably significant here; the two are complementary aspects of his overall image as
quick-witted and shrewd, one who manipulates men and situations-whether
trading encounters or social gatherings-to his own advantage (cf. Benjamin
1969:101). Good traders are not reluctant self-publicists; one Canton regular told
me with obvious pride: "I'll tell you what you can do. You can put me right out
there on that road, barefooted, if it wasn't too hot, and before I get home, I'll have
a pair of shoes, I want to tell you:'
Nevertheless, whereas chess, for example, is unequivocally and only a game, in
which such strategic deception as may occur is completely contained within the
play frame, dog trading is not so unambiguous. Whereas trading is certainly en-
gaged in as play by many of the participants at Canton, the play frame is almost
never overtly acknowledged. The only instances I observed that were openly
marked as play were framed by such obviously inappropriate offers as five dollars
plus a toothless old dog for a proven hound in prime condition. Otherwise, the
public construction placed upon the trading encounter depicts it as a serious busi-
ness transaction, and it is always susceptible to being understood as such by one
or both participants.
Here is the crux of the matter. The traditional American ideal demands, if not
absolute honesty in business transactions, at least the maintenance of the public
fiction that the participants are telling the truth (cf. Simmel 1950:314). Thus lying
does not accord with the public construction of a dog-trading transaction, nor is
it consistent with the actual understanding of those who consider a dog trade
straight business, not a game. The trader who lies about a dog during the conduct
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 175

of a trade may see himself and be seen by some other traders as a master player,
gulling the marks as they deserve, but he may also be despised as a swindler who
cheats honest people. No harm is done by telling stories about shrewd or crooked
trades-indeed, such accounts may be relished for their performance value-but
actually hoodwinking someone is a different matter. It makes the difference be-
tween Goffman's benign and exploitative fabrications (1974:87, 103).
At the same time, therefore, that a trader is telling a well-formed and enter-
taining story in which he beats someone by a classic confidence trick, he may also
be at pains to disavow any dishonesty. The veteran trader who unloaded Blackjack
by trickery and obviously relished telling about it had just a few minutes before
beginning his story made a gesture at resolving the moral dilemma by framing his
trading swindles as the excesses of youth: "Most men my age won't lie about a dog;
but just before you get to my age, they'll lie and tell you any kinda tale just to get
to sell you a dog."
Having explored the relationship between lying and storytelling among the dog
traders at Canton to this point, we can now return to the excerpts from the trad-
ing encounters with which we began our exploration. The strong preoccupation
with lying and storytelling that characterizes both encounters should be relatively
more comprehensible in light of the preceding discussion.
The rich expressive tradition of storytelling associated with hound-dog men
and dog traders-the tales of hunting and trading and the personal narratives
about both activities-as well as the conception of dog trading as a game of strat-
egy in which the goal is often to get rid of a worthless dog at a profit help endow
dog trading at Canton with a considerable aura oflying and deception. These ex-
pressive forms both reflect and sustain the sense that misrepresentation of one
sort or another permeates the institution, and many participants can confirm
from first-hand experience that lying is indeed a factor to be reckoned with. It is
not at all surprising that parties on both sides of a dog trade should enter the
transaction anticipating that the opposite party might lie about a dog and expect
to be lied to in return. At the same time, either man (both parties if a trade is in-
volved, only the seller if it is to be a cash sale) might in fact be ready and willing
to lie to unload a dog. Yet even if one is ready to lie, to acknowledge as much is
impossible; it would violate the public construction that dog trading is an honest
business transaction and would very likely undermine the interactional founda-
tion of the trading relationship itself.
The strategy that emerges from the expectations and conventions of dog trading
is that one should take pains during an actual transaction to dispel the aura oflying
that surrounds it. The most direct means of doing so is by explicit insistence on
one's truthfulness and by disavowal oflying (cf. Bakhtin 1968:162). In the encoun-
ters under examination, both John Moore and Herman Smith employ this means
of establishing their trustworthiness. John Moore volunteers early in the encounter:
"I try to be fair with a man 'bout a dog. Tell the truth about a dog, tell you what he'll
do. If there's any fault to him, I wanna tell the man:' And then, employing the pow-
176 Richard Bauman

erful rhetorical device of identification (Burke 1969:20--3), Moore puts himselfin

Byers's position: "If I get a dog from a man, if there's any fault to him, I want him
to tell me:' A little later, to validate the information he is providing about his dogs,
he insists: "If I tell you somep'n 'bout a dog, I'm not gon' misrepresent him. Not
gonna misrepresent him:' In the second encounter, Herman Smith is rather seri-
ously challenged by Homer Townsend; he reiterates with some vehemence
throughout the encounter, "I don't lie about these dogs!" These are all disclaimers
of outright lying or of stretching the truth by selection or distortion. I have not
recorded or observed any instances in which a participant disavowed pulling off a
fabrication, although it is conceivable that such disavowals might occur.
Another means of establishing one's veracity in a trading encounter is to offer
to let the dogs prove the claims made for them, just as the tellers of dog stories do
in sociable encounters. This is Herman Smith's main trust; he offers repeatedly to
"take 'em out here and show you:' He also resorts to the identificational strategy
of putting himself in the place of the buyer. When he is buying dogs, he tries them
out: "I wouldn't give a dime for nary a dog I didn't know on this ground until I
hunted him:' By trying out the dogs he is offering before having bought them,
Smith has, in effect, already acted on Townsend's behalf, and Townsend is safe in
buying them now.
For our purposes, perhaps the most interesting means by which the dog traders
seek to establish and substantiate their identities as honest men is in telling sto-
ries. If we examine these stories, we see that they are closely related to the sociable
narratives discussed at length earlier in this chapter-specifically, to personal nar-
ratives about the performance of particular dogs and to personal narratives about
trading experiences.
Three narratives appear in the excerpt from the first trading encounter-two
told by John Moore and one very minimal one told by Mr. Byers. Moore clearly
tells his first story, about being victimized in a trade by buying some puppies that
the seller falsely assures him had had their shots, as a rhetorical strategy to convey
his negative attitudes toward a trader who would tell an outright lie about a dog.
By implication, he emphasizes his own trustworthiness in a context wherein trick-
ery and deceit are widespread. Moore's central rhetorical purpose is to distance
himself from dog traders who lie, and his story is obviously and strongly adapted
to that purpose. Much of his narrative is given over to establishing this polariza-
tion (Labov 1979) between the dishonest trader and Moore himself, as customer.
The trader's lie is doubly destructive because it was both unnecessary, since Moore
was going to buy the dogs whether or not they had had their shots, and cruel, since
it resulted in the death of the dogs. The evaluative dimension of the narrative is
heavily elaborated, both through repetition (both the query to the trader about
whether the puppies were vaccinated and the narrative report of those queries are
repeated) and lexical intensifiers (emotion-laden words like "swore:' "hate;'
"begged") (Labov and Waletzky 1967:37-8). The point is that Moore gave the
trader ample and repeated opportunity to tell the truth, but he remained firm in
"Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You" 177

his lie; and everyone suffered as a result, even the liar himself, since the death of
the puppies brought him remorse ("he hate that he didn't tell us ... ").
Byers too has been taken in a trade. He comes back with his account of having
traded once for two dogs that were supposed to be good fox dogs and then dis-
covering that the "sumbitches wouldn't run a rabbit:' This story establishes that he
has already been victimized at least once in a trade and, by implication, that he
does not intend to let it happen again. As he is not the one whose honesty is on
the line, however, having no dog to trade, his story is rather minimal-just long
enough to make his point, without attempting to be strongly persuasive. Still,
there is not a clause in his narrative that lacks a dearly evaluative element.
Moore goes on to reaffirm his bona fides by mentioning his satisfied customers,
including "some rich, up-to-date people." Then, picking up on Byers's apparent
interest in fox dogs, Moore points out a fox dog among his own string, and pro-
ceeds to tell an extended story about her prowess in a recent hunt in order to build
up her credentials-a sales pitch in narrative form. Stories of this kind are espe-
cially motivated during trading transactions because one cannot tell from merely
looking at a dog what its hunting abilities are. Straightforward enumeration of
the dog's qualities could also get the information across, but corroborating nar-
ratives, convincingly told, may add verisimilitude to the seller's claims. Skill in
storytelling may thus enhance the overall rhetorical power of the sales pitch. One
must maintain a delicate balance, however, because stories are also considered ve-
hicles for creative or duplicitous misrepresentation. Hence the usefulness of com-
bining such narratives with additional claims to honesty, as Moore does both di-
rectly and by telling his story about a dishonest dog trader in order to distance
himself from such practices. As the one offering the dogs, Moore has to tell sto-
ries that are persuasive enough to establish both his honesty, as in the first story,
and the dog's quality, persistence, toughness, and so on, as in the second. In so-
ciable interaction, there is no immediate negative consequence if your audience
does not accept the truth of your story; in trading encounters, others must accept
your story sufficiently to be persuaded to act on it (it is hoped by trading for or
buying your dog).
The second excerpt contains two stories, both told by Herman Smith, the man
with the dogs. Townsend has rather seriously challenged him with offering dogs
that won't perform. Smith accordingly counters with a story to demonstrate that,
far from being willing to risk a customer's dissatisfaction or skepticism, he would
actually refuse to conclude a sale until the dog has proven itself in the woods. This
is not just honesty, it's superhonesty. Smith's second story is in the same vein:
Having been taken in by an unscrupulous trader who lied about the treeing abil-
ity of a dog, Smith would not himself stoop to selling the worthless hound, but
gave it away to a little boy. Any man who gives dogs to little boys can't be all bad.
Here is another instance of extreme polarization between the dishonest trader and
the honest man: The unscrupulous trader places profit over honesty, whereas
Smith values honesty over profit ("I don't care about the money. I don't lie about
178 Richard Bauman

these dogs"). Just so there is no question about his own honorable values, he re-
peats the relevant points again and again.
Honesty ... Over Profit
I wouldn't lie to him. I gave him to that little boy down there.
I don't lie about it. I give him to him!
I don't lie about these dogs. I give it to him!

Interestingly, this story compromises one of Smith's earlier claims to

Townsend-that he himself tries out all the dogs he acquires before buying them.
If he had done so in this case, he would not have had a worthless dog fobbed off
on him. But it is more important to tell an emphatic story for its rhetorical effect
than to worry about a minor inconsistency like this. Should Townsend pick up on
it, this inconsistency could undermine Smith's claims to scrupulous honesty.
This second story of Smith's so closely parallels the story of the deer dog, dis-
cussed earlier, that a brief comparison can highlight certain significant differences
generated by the differing contexts in which they occur and their respective func-
tions within these contexts. In both stories the narrator acquires a dog from some-
one who lies to get rid of it and then, discovering that the dog does not perform
as expected, gives it away. The story of the deer dog, told for entertainment in so-
ciable interaction, is connected to the discourse that precedes it solely by the fact
that the dog in question was a Trigg hound, and the previous speaker had pointed
out a Trigg in his own string of dogs. No more is needed for the story to be ap-
propriate in this sociable context. The extra twist at the end of the story, in which
a customer appears for the dog immediately after it has been given away, makes
the tale unusual and endows it with entertainment value. There is credit to be
gained, as a performer, in telling it. The event sequence consists of six principal
episodes, most of which have subepisodes:
1. Trading for the dog in the expectation that it was a coon dog
2. Taking it home
3. Taking it on a disastrous trial hunt, in which it turns out to be a deer dog
4. Having to search for the now apparently worthless dog
5. Returning to Texarkana to give it away
6. Being approached by someone looking for a deer hound exactly like the one
just given away
The evaluative dimension of the story serves to highlight the reportability of the
experience, the humor and irony of the situation.
Herman Smith's story, however, is more strongly motivated and rooted in its
conversational context. Smith's prospective customers are leaving, apparently be-
cause they don't believe his dogs are any good, and he is very concerned to estab-
lish his trustworthiness as a dog trader. The narrative line of the story is minimal:
1. Trading for the dog
"Any Man Who Keeps More•n One Hound'll Lie to You" 179

2. Discovering that it won't perform as promised

3. Giving it away

More important by far is the rhetorical impact. The rhetorical power of the story
resides in the fact that, unlike the unscrupulous trader, Smith spurned the oppor-
tunity to swindle someone else with a worthless dog; instead, he gave it away to
the little boy. This is the point that he emphasizes most strongly in his story. Most
of the work of the narrative, the thrust of its heavy evaluative dimension, aims at
a polarization between the dishonest trader and the honorable narrator. Note,
however, that this story, like those of John Moore and Mr. Byers, does also involve
a trader who is not as honest as Smith presents himself to be, one who lies out-
right about a dog. Thus we come full circle: The very story that is told in the
course of a trading encounter to dispel any suspicion of the trader's dishonesty re-
inforces the aura of lying that surrounds trading in general. Any man who keeps
more'n one hound'll lie to you.
Dog trading at Canton First Monday brings together and merges two impor-
tant figures in American tradition, the hunter and the trader. Both are strongly as-
sociated with storytelling as subjects and performers, and both are major expo-
nents of the widely noted (though not exclusively) American predilection for
expressive lying. Since at least the time when a distinctive body of American folk
humor first emerged during the early years of the American republic, the hunter
and the trader have occupied a privileged place in American folklore. Dog trading
at Canton is a thriving contemporary incarnation of this American folk tradition.
The tall tales and personal narratives of its participants place them in unbroken
continuity with the generations of hunters, traders, and storytellers that have
given American folklore some of its most distinctive characteristics. At the same
time, First Monday dog trading offers a richly textured arena for the ethnographic
investigation of the nuances of expressive lying, the negotiation of truthfulness
and lying as action and evaluation in the conduct of social life.
The narratives that are the instruments of these negotiations do not fall into
clear-cut categories of factual and fictional, truthful and lying, believable and in-
credible, but rather interweave in a complex contextual web that leaves these is-
sues constantly in doubt, ever susceptible to strategic manipulation whenever a
trade is joined.'

Notes
1. Baughman (1966), motifX1215.8 (aa): Master shows dog a skin-stretching board; the
dog brings in a raccoon just the size of the board. Master's mother puts ironing board out-
side one day. The dog never returns.
2. Thompson (1955-8), motif Kl14.3.1: Virtue of oracular pill proved. The dupe takes it.
"It is dog's dung," he says, spitting it out. The trickster says that he is telling the truth and
demands pay.
3. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Bauman (1981).
180 Richard Bauman

.References
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1968. Rabelais and His World, Helene Iswolsky, trans. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Bascom, William. 1965. "The forms of folklore: Prose narratives:' Journal of American
Folklore 78:3-20.
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'10
Came, Camales, and the
Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian
Batos, Disorder, and
Narrative Discourses
JOSE E. LIMON

And when he came to the place where the wild things are
they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Max said, "Be still!"
and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him king of all wild things
''And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
-From the children's book by Maurice Sendak, Where
the Wild Things Are, in which a mischievous little boy,
Max, visits the Wild Things.

At two in the afternoon a periodically unemployed working-class man in

Mexican-American south Texas puts hot chunks of juicy barbecued meat with his
fingers on an equally hot tortilla. The meat or carne has marinated overnight in
beer and lemon juice before being grilled. Antonio, or Tonio, passes the meat-
laden tortilla to one of the other eight mostly working-class men surrounding a
rusty barbecue grill, but as he does so, the hand holding the food brushes against
his own genital area, and he loudly tells the other, "jApafia este taco carnal, 'ta a
toda madre mi carne!'' (Grab this taco, brother, my meat is a mother!). 1 With rau-
cous laughter all around, I accept the full, dripping taco, add some hot sauce and
reach for an ice-downed beer from an also rusty washtub.
Some 50 years ago the Mexican thinker, Samuel Ramos, published his well
known and still culturally authoritative Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico

182
Carne, Ca:rnales, and the Carnivalesque 183

(1962), an interpretive general narrative history of its subject since its indigenous
beginnings. Ramos was trying to explain what he saw as the reduced sense of
Mexican cultural life and its contradictions in his time. As part of his contempo-
rary account, a kind of climax to his narrative, Ramos turns into an anthropolog-
ical, if distanced, observer of everyday Mexican life, particularly male life. For ex-
ample, the Mexican pelado or lower-class man
belongs to a most vile category of social fauna; ... a form of human rubbish.... Life
from every quarter has been hostile to him and his reaction has been black resentment.
He is an explosive being with whom relationship is dangerous, for the slightest friction
causes him to blow up (1962:59).

According to Ramos, the Mexican lower-class man's

explosions are verbal and reiterate his theme of self affirmation in crude and suggestive
language. He has created a dialect of his own, a diction which abounds in ordinary
words, but he gives these words a new meaning. He is an animal whose ferocious pan-
tomimes are designed to terrify others, making them believe that he is stronger than they
and more determined. Such reactions are illusory retaliations against his real position in
life which is a nullity (1962:60).

For Ramos, these verbal pantomimes, these e:Xplosive linguistic reactions are of a
particular kind. This lower-class man's "terminology abounds in sexual allusions
which reveal his phallic obsession; the sexual organ becomes symbolic of mascu-
line force:' The reproductive organs are a symbolic source of "not only one kind
of potency, the sexual, but every kind of human power" as this man "tries to fill
his void with the only suggestive force accessible to him: that of the male animal"
and, continues Ramos, "so it is that his perception becomes abnormal; he imag-
ines that the next man he encounters will be his enemy; he mistrusts all who ap-
proach him" (1962:59-61).
In this paper I discuss what Foucault calls discourses of power as these concern
Mexican-American south Texas where I was raised, my current fieldwork site and
still a place characterized by sharp class and ethnic divisions as it has been since
Zachary Taylor's army first conquered the area in the 1840s during the United
States-Mexico War (Foley 1978; de Leon 1982, 1983; Montejano 1987). You have
already heard two examples of such discourse: one, the expressive, all male humor
of a group of batos (guys, dudes) articulated in and through the ritualistic con-
sumption of barbecued meat in southern Texas, an event called a carne asada; and,
two, Samuel Ramos' narratively embedded commentary on the language and cul-
ture of the Mexican male lower class, a discourse tradition continued by Octavio
Paz in the 1950s and applied directly to the Mexican-Americans of south Texas in
the 1960s by anthropologist Joseph Spielberg (1974).
Mindful of Marcus' recent call upon Marxist ethnographers to also provide
analyses of the culture of the dominant as well as the dominated {1986), I have, in
another paper tried to show how this second set of discourses, this interpretive
184 Jose E. Limon

tradition begun by Samuel Ramos, functions as a discourse of power in a larger

international scope (Limon 1987). At critical moments in Mexican and Mexican-
American history, this interpretive tradition unintentionally helps to ratify domi-
nance through its negative psychologistic interpretation of the Mexican male
lower class and their language. As Ramos' commentary clearly illustrates, this dis-
course casts these classes in the idiom of human rubbish, animality, aggressive-
ness, and abnormality, a view, I might add, considerably shared by those-both
Anglo and Mexican-American-who hold class power in southern Texas.
My chief purpose here, however, is to begin to develop an alternative under-
standing of this lower-class male culture; to develop a third narrative discourse, if
you will, one which I would like to think Foucault might have called an archaeol-
ogy of subjugated knowledges and practices, this in an effort to demonstrate the
power of such knowledges and practices as a discourse of the dominated, dis-
courses often in narrative form. My analysis will draw from recent Marxist per-
spectives on language, on the anthropology of natural symbols but centrally on
Bakhtin's sense of the carnivalesque.
However, even as I go about this central purpose, I want to call attention to
the purpose itself. That is, I want to keep before the reader my own effort to nar-
rativize these subjugated narratives. To be sure, this effort is in a different politi-
cal direction from Ramos and Paz but is nonetheless itself an authoritative narra-
tive, which, as Foucault would remind us, is never wholly free from the influence
of dominating power. This latter issue will become more evident in my conclu-
sion.
In the construction of our own ethnographic narratives, we are inevitably faced
with the problem of rhetorically managing what we are pleased to call "the data."
How much is enough so as to persuade and not bore or overwhelm? And, where
do we place it in the structural development of our own text? What is the proper
relationship between the data and our interpretive analysis, recognizing full well
that the selection and organization of the data have already taken us a long way
toward our understanding of it? With these issues in mind, I continue with my
strategy of juxtaposing narrative discourses from the dominant and dominated,
reminding you once again of my own emerging ethnographic narrative.
Later that afternoon on a hot August Saturday in 1981, another man, an auto
parts salesman, in a ten-year-old pickup drives up to our barbecue session in the
outskirts of McBurg. 2 He brings with him a couple of pounds of tripe that will
eventually be added to the other internal organs and to the fajita, or skirt steak,
now turning golden brown and sizzling in its fat on the barbecue grill. His tripi-
tas-for all the meat parts are expressed in the diminutive-are turned over to
Poncho, house painter, and the latest cook at the grill. Jaime, this new arrival (oth-
erwise known as "el Midnight" because he is quite dark), begins to shake every-
one's hand in greeting saying, "iComo estas?" (How are you doing?) and so on.
Expecting my turn, I put down my beer and dry my hand on my jeans, but Jaime
never makes it past the second man he greets, Simon.
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 185

Simon, otherwise known as "el Mickey Mouse" because of his large ears, has
been a construction laborer most of his adult life, except for the three years he
spent at the state prison when he got caught on the highway to Austin transport-
ing marijuana for the consumption of the students at the university. "jQue pende-
jada!" "jTire un beer can y me par6 el jurado!" (What stupidity! I threw out a beer
can and the cop stopped me!)
Simon takes Jaime's hand as if to shake it but instead yanks it down and holds
it firmly over his own genital area even as he responds to Jaime's "iComo estas?"
with a loud "jPos, chinga ahora me siento a toda madre, gracias!" (Well, fuck, now
I feel just great, thank you!) There is more laughter which only intensifies when
"Midnight" in turn actually grabs and begins to squeeze "el Mickey's" genitals.
With his one free hand, for the other is holding a taco, el Mickey tries to pull on
Jaime's arm unsuccessfully. Finally in an effort to slip out of Jaime's grip, he col-
lapses to the ground cursing and trying to laugh at the same time and loses his
taco in the process. Jaime, however, has gone down on his knees and manages to
maintain his grip even as he keeps saying over and over, "!Dime que me quieres,
cabr6n, dime que me quieres!" (Tell me you love me, godammit, tell me you love
me!) El Mickey finally says "Te quiero, te quiero" but as soon as he is released, he
continues," Te quiero dar en la madre!" (I want to beat the hell out of you) playing
on the double meaning of quiero as "want" and "love:' He takes a few semi-mock
punches at Jaime's torso and receives a few in return, both carefully avoiding the
face. Everyone is still laughing as el Mickey and Midnight, still on their knees, hug
each other to a stop. As they help each other up, Jaime tells Mickey, "Dejando de
chingaderas, anda a traer otro taco y traile uno a tu papa" (All screwing around
aside, go get another taco and bring one for your father), referring, of course, to
himself. Doing or saying chingaderas (fuck ups) is how these men label and gloss
this activity, also sometimes pendejadas and vaciladas (stupidities, play routines).
See Spielberg (1974).
In the 1950s another distinguished Mexican intellectual had this story to tell
about the Mexican lower-class male personality and his language. "It is signifi-
cant;' says Octavio Paz, "that masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain
indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned:' The passive agent is an abject,
degraded being. "This ambiguous conception;' he continues, "is made very clear
in the word games or battles-full of obscene allusions and double meanings-
that are so popular in Mexico City" (1961:39).

Each of the speakers tries to humiliate his adversary with verbal traps and ingenious lin-
guistic combinations, and the loser is the person who cannot think of a comeback, who
has to swallow his opponent's jibes. These jibes are full of aggressive sexual allusions; the
loser is possessed, is violated, by the winner, and the spectators laugh and sneer at him
(1961:39~0).

Octavio Paz continues this commentary translated into English in 1961. "The
Mexican macho;' he says,
186 Jose E. Limon

is a humorist who commits chingaderas, that is, unforeseen acts that produce confusion,
horror, and destruction. He opens the world; in doing so, he rips and tears it, and this
violence provokes a great sini&ter laugh ... the humor of the macho is an act of revenge
(1961:81).
"Whatever may be the origins of these attitudes;' Paz tells us, "the fact is that the
essential attribute of the macho-power almost always reveals itself as a capacity for
wounding, humiliating, annihilating" (1961:82).
It is almost six o'clock in this evening outside of McBurg at what our host
Chema likes to call his rancho, which amounts to less than one-quarter acre of dry,
wholly undeveloped land with only a few mesquites to provide some shade from
the hot south Texas sun. Chema bought the land, called "ranchettes" by local real
estate agents, when he came into a little money from a worker's compensation set-
tlement. He fell from a truck while doing farm labor for extra money. Massaging
his lower back for the still lingering pain, he says "El pinche abogado se quedo con
la mitad" (The fucking lawyer [Mexican-American] kept half). Chema's only real
notion for improving the property is to build an inevitable brick barbecue pit, but
until he can afford it, he will have to haul the portable rusty one on the back of
his pickup out to the rancho.
A few more men have come with more meat and beer and a few have left, play-
fully taunted by the others "Tiene que ir a reportar a la vieja" (He has to go report
to his old lady), knowing that eventually they'll have to go report to their "old
ladies:' The eating, drinking, and the talk are still thick, and conjunto polka music
is playing from a portable radio, although later this will be replaced by guitar play-
ing and singing of, on the one hand, corridos or Mexican ballads with accompa-
nying gritos (cries) and, on the other, American tunes from the 'fifties such as "In
the Still of the Night" by the Five Satins to which everyone will sing a cacophony
of appropriate sho do be do be doos.
One of the men keeps insisting that he has to go; with equal insistence he is told
to have another beer and to make a taco out of the very last of the cherished deli-
cacy, mollejitas (glandular organs), but he is particularly insistent because his kids
need to be picked up at the movies where, we discover, they have been watching
Steven Spielberg's E. T.-The Extra Terrestrial. Octavio is almost ready to leave
when Chema, our host and ranch owner asks him: "Aye, 'Tavo. Sabes coma se dice
'E.T.' en espanol?" (Hey 'Tavo, do you know how to say E.T. in Spanish?) Before
Octavio can even try to reply, a grinning Chema answers his own question cor-
rectly by saying, "Eh Te" but he is also holding his hand over his genitals and ges-
turing twice with it as he pronounces the two syllables. Eh Te does of course mean
E.T. in Spanish, but it is also the way a toddler might pronounce este (this one),
dropping a consonant "s" but meaning this or this one as in este papel (this paper).
In saying Eh Te and with his double gesture, Chema is calling attention, particularly
Octavio's attention, to his penis-this one. But things get better ... or worse, as the
case may be. Chema continues his interrogation of Octavio: "Y, coma se llaman los
dos hermanitos de E.T.?" (and, what are the names of E.T:s two little brothers?).
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 187

Chema demonstrates the answer with another genital double gesture, this time an-
swering his own question with the Spanish Eh Tos, again exploiting the baby play
language pronunciation of estos meaning these, referring, of course, to these two
meaning his own testicles. Everyone, including Octavio, is laughing and all of us
cannot help but look as Chema does his gestures and baby talk, and he isn't
through yet. ''And what;' he asks, "is the name of E.T:s mother?" This time, how-
ever, Octavio who has obviously been conducting his own ethnography of this
speech act, beats Chema to the answer with his hand at his crotch, loudly and tri-
umphantly proclaims the answer, "jMama Eh Te!"; this time, Octavio has exploited
the original este (this one) and he has also exploited the charged ambiguity of
mama in Spanish, which, depending on accent and syntax can mean "mother" or
"suck:' Laughing with the others, Octavio finally makes his way to the movie E.T.
or Eh Te to pick up the kids; Chema is shaking his head and laughing and com-
plaining about all of the meat juice he has managed to rub all over his crotch.
By seven or eight, more people start dispersing, a few latecomers arrive, a fire
has been started, and one of the guitarists sings the "Corrido of Jacinto Trevino"
about a brave south Texas Mexican who shot it out with the Texas Rangers in 1906
in the town of Brownsville just down the river from McBurg (Paredes 1976).
Finally, thinks your ethnographer, I get some real folklore of resistance and not all
of these chingaderas.
For at that moment, some years ago, I am troubled, at least intellectually, by
what I have reexperienced, having gone through such events several times in my
life in south Texas but also in a few cantinas in Monterey, in Los Angeles, in
Mexico City. Are Ramos and Paz right when they speak of sexual anxiety, of
wounding, and humiliation? Are the chingaderas "unforeseen acts that produce
confusion, horror and destruction" amid a "great sinister laugh?" And, at that time
it did not help to have reread a recent anthropological study of such south Texas
male humor specifically in this area near McBurg in which Joseph Spielberg, also
a native south Texan, concludes that this humor "can be characterized as verbal
aggression aimed at another when he is most vulnerable" by his "own lack of dis-
cretion in bodily functions, social circumstances or by revealing his sentiments:'
In the tradition of Ramos and Paz, Spielberg also believes that "the principal
theme of this humor" is "humiliation" (1974:46).
These discourses troubled me then for they did not speak well of these, my peo-
ple, and perhaps, they do not speak well of me, for, frankly, although with some
ambivalent distance, I had a good time that Saturday afternoon and have had a
good time since.
I had indeed gone to racially and structurally dominated southern Texas in 1981
looking for a folklore of resistance, carrying in my head the examples furnished by
Genovese, by Gutman, by E. P. Thompson and George Rude and ultimately by
Gramsci. I found instead a powerful sexual and scatological discourse-part of a
greater Mexican working-class folk tradition, but a tradition I saw as delegitima-
tized by the powerful authoritative intellectual discourses of Ramos and Paz and in
188 Jose E. Limon

a more circumscribed but still effective way, by Spielberg. And I found difficult, and
perhaps still do, its relegitimization because this is at least the implicit burden of
those who approach such materials from a Marxist cultural perspective. Certainly
one alternative is simply to deny the burden and accept Ramos and Paz or perhaps
some species of functionalist argument where these behaviors are seen as adaptive
steam valves. From this perspective as everyone leaves Chema's ranch, they feel well
adjusted to the labors they will face on Monday.
How can one rethink these materials as a narrative of resistance provided by
Marxist social historians, especially when the materials do not nicely lend them-
selves to such a reading as do black spirituals and the crafts of English artisans?
And how can one do this if one has to contend with an extant authoritative inter-
pretive discourse, especially one developed by members of the same general cul-
tural group, such as Spielberg?
In the intervening years I have read new sources, reread old ones, and have been
developing an analysis of such discourses so as to address this question. The task
is made more interestingly difficult by George Marcus, who, in the essay cited ear-
lier, takes Paul Willis to task, and by implication other Marxist ethnographers, for
privileging working-class culture as a seamless discourse of anti-capitalist resis-
tance ( 1986). As I think of Chema, Midnight, Mickey Mouse, Octavio, and others,
I ask, how does one develop a different story about these men without lapsing into
an uncritical romanticism of resistance everywhere; how does one do this without
abandoning the concept of the social whole and one's native and political sympa-
thy with the dominated? And, finally, how does one produce a narrative construc-
tion, one's ethnography, that does not wholly objectify and violate the "feel" of
such events?

Writing with a Difference

We may begin this alternative reformulation by examining the central sexual sym-
bolization that lies at the heart of the speech play and gesture that I have noted.
Tonio's, Jaime's, Samuel's, Octavio's, and Chema's obvious and expressive manip-
ulations of body and speech would certainly seem consistent with Samuel Ramos'
observation that the Mexican lower-class man's

terminology abounds in sexual allusions which reveal his phallic obsession; the sexual
organ becomes symbolic of masculine force. In verbal combat he attributes to his ad-
versary an imaginary femininity, reserving for himself the masculine role. By this strat-
agem he pretends to assert his superiority over his opponents (Ramos 1962:59-60).

For these commentators, aggression and its generative conditions-inadequacy

and inferiority-are directly expressed in this humor through anal references and
the theme of male sexual violation. I would not deny the existence of these values
and meanings, given my earlier argument for the historical production of aggres-
sion, nor that these performances may in part be expressing them. I would, how-
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 189

ever, argue that these might be multivocal symbols possessing several meanings
and not reducible to a single one that fits a preconceived psychoanalytical scheme.
It is too easy to rely on a wild psychoanalysis when dealing with such physical ref-
erences.
Mary Douglas has warned us of the dangers and shortcomings of such simple
psychologistic readings when they concern rituals dealing with the human body
(1978). Some psychologists are fond of treating such rituals not as social acts, but
as the expression of private and personal infantile concerns. "There is;' she believes,
"no possible justification for this shift of interpretation just because the rituals work
upon human flesh ... " ( 1978: 115). Those who make this interpretive reduction

proceed from unchallenged assumptions, which arise from the strong similarity between
certain ritual forms and the behavior of psychopathic individuals. The assumption is
that in some sense primitive cultures correspond to infantile stages in the development
of the human psyche. Consequently such rites are interpreted as if they express the same
preoccupations which fill the mind of psychopaths or infants (1978:115).

Douglas argues for an alternative analytical model for the understanding of the
human body in relation to society-one that is "prepared to see in the body a
symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure
reproduced in small on the human body" (1978:115). A society's definition and
treatment of the body and bodily pollution is, in her estimation, a critical sym-
bolic key for grasping its perceptions of its own structure and of its external rela-
tionships. Such pollution-all forms of matter issuing from the body's orifices as
well as entering through them-may acquire symbolic proportions as do neces-
sarily the orifices themselves. The Coorgs of India, for example, are an isolated
mountain community sharing with other castes a fear of what is "outside and
below" their group. In their ritual behavior they "treat the body as if it were a be-
leaguered town, every ingress and exit guarded for spies and traitors" (1978:123).
I would submit that the mexicano on both sides of the border also has some-
thing to fear. This fear may not be simply an infantile concern with one's palomilla
(gang) and simple sexual dominance. Rather, the themes of anality, pollution, and
bodily penetration may also be symbolic expressions of an essentially political and
economic concern with social domination, not from below, as with the Coorg, but
from above-from the upper levels of the structure of power in both countries.
The marginalized working and unemployed classes where these expressions
abound constitute a body politic symbolically conscious of its socially penetrable
status. What Douglas claims for the Coorgs may be at least partially applicable for
Octavio, Samuel, Chema, and my other friends:
For them the model of the exits and entrances of the human body is a doubly apt sym-
bolic focus of fears for their minority standing in the larger society. Here I am suggest-
ing that when rituals express anxiety about the body's orifices the sociological counter-
part of this anxiety is a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority
group (1978:124).
190 Jose E. Limon

There is certainly some evidence for this view in the often noted tendency of the
Mexican male, particularly the lower-class male, to turn to the expression chin-
gar-meaning sexual violation-to also express social violation, as my friends
often do when speaking particularly of their political/economic relationships: "Me
chingaron en el jale" (I got screwed at work) or during one of the regular political
discussions at the carne asada, "Pos gano Reagan, y ahora si nos van a chingar"
(Well, Reagan won, now we're really going to get screwed) and, finally, "la vida es
una chinga" (life is being constantly screwed), which represents a quite reasonable
perception of social conditions for these men in this part of the world.
Others, the dominant Mexican-American and Anglo upper classes-los chin-
gones (the big screwers )-as these men commonly refer to them, always have the
ability to chingar, and it is entirely to the point that these are also men, and it is
here, I suspect, that we can find a possible reason for the conversion of this po-
tential male social violation into the symbolic idiom of homosexuality. The rou-
tines, I will remind you, are called "chingaderas." When Antonio seemingly threat-
ens me with the meat that has passed by his genitals; when Octavio triumphantly
says "jMama Eh Te!", they may indeed, as all Western men do, be expressing their
latent anxiety about homosexuality. However, I am suggesting, partially following
Mary Douglas' lead, that we need not just stop here.' These men may also be reen-
acting, in the idiom of homosexuality, their sense that the world beyond Chema's
rancho is also full of constant violation by other men-los chingones-and one
must learn to play that too-serious game as well!•
But as I write of play and games, I want to introduce another critical alternative
perspective that speaks to a central flaw in Ramos, Paz, and Spielberg's under-
standing-or lack of it-of this speech play. It is important to recognize that even
as my friends introduce the seemingly aggressive idiom of sexual and social viola-
tion, they do so in a way that reframes that aggressive speech and gesture into play.
Ramos, Paz, and Spielberg extract the sexual symbols in this play and give them
their shallow reductive interpretations. They are not appreciative of these scenes
as dynamic forums that interactionally produce meaning. Their focus always is on
those discrete "aggressive" verbal symbols. As such they are like those anthropol-
ogists who, according to Peacock,

tend to pay too little heed to the dynamics of (cultural) performances, to report from
the. performances only those tidbits of content which lend support to his portrait of the
values and organization of the society in which the performances are found .... This
kind of analysis which fails to grasp the essence of symbolic performances can yield no
full appreciation of social dynamics (1968:256).

This difference in interpretive emphasis is crucial, for their "tidbits of content"

analysis leads these analysts to ignore the way in which the aggressive meaning of
the literal language, such as it is, is transformed into its exact opposite through the
intercession of interactional speech play and art.
Carne, Carnal.es, and the Carnivalesque 191

To begin with, mexicanos frame such scenes as ludic moments through native
markers such as relajando and llevandosale (carrying on, bantering, playing), as in
"nomas estabamos relajando" (we were just playing). We have a clear recognition
of a play world in which open aggression can appear only by mistake. Such a mis-
take can occur when a novice or an unacculturated person fails to "recognize" the
scene, or when he is less than competent in the requisite artistic skills. This latter
consideration is crucial, for whatever latent aggression exists is not only rendered
socially harmless but is turned into a basis for solidarity. The participants do this
by interactionally creating an artistically textured discourse through skillful ma-
nipulations of allusion, metaphor, narration, and prosody.
Through interactionally produced play, the aggression of the world is trans-
formed into mock aggression, mock fighting through artistic creativity which
does not deny the existence of aggression but inverts its negativity. Ultimately this
transformation is of greater social significance. What Bateson notes for nonhu-
man animals is also fundamentally true for these human artistic performers.
These men mean something other than what is denoted by their aggressive lan-
guage. Such language becomes like the "playful nips" which "denote the bite but it
does not denote what would be denoted by the bite" (Bateson 1972:180). Art and
play ultimately create paradox and fiction.

Paradox is doubly present in the signals which are exchanged within the context of the
play, fantasy, threat, etc. Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted
by the bite for which it stands but the bite itself is fictional. Not only do the playing an-
imals not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are communicating about
something which does not exist (1972:182).

Aggression is what would be denoted by an actual bite-it is that something that

is the hidden textual model for the playful nip, but is itself not denoted and there-
fore is negated at the moment of interaction. The playful nips of skillful artistic
language produce a paradoxical effect, namely the interactional production of sol-
idarity, or as Latin Americans everywhere would say, confianza. Anthony Lauria
notes that in Puerto Rico, "to indulge in relajos of any sort in the presence of any-
one is to engage in a relation of confianza-of trust and familiarity with that per-
son" ( 1964:62). As Lauria also notes, the ultimate paradoxical social result of the
expressive scene is not aggression, humiliation, and alienation, but rather respeto.
This is the significance of ending a verbal exchange in mock punches, a hug, and
a laugh. In one of Bateson's metalogues his persona and that of his daughter en-
gage in conversation.

Daughter: Why do animals fight?

Father: Oh, for many reasons, territory, sex, food ...
Daughter: Daddy, you're talking like instinct theory. I thought we agreed not to
do that.
192 Jose E. Limon

Father: All right. But what sort of an answer do you want to the question,
why animals fight?
Daughter: Well, do they deal in opposites?
Father: Oh. Yes. A lot of fighting ends up in some sort of peace-making. And
certainly playful fighting is partly a way of affirming friendship. Or
discovering or re-discovering friendship.
Daughter: I thought so ... (1972:18).

The artistic disclosure of friendship and respect in the palomilla's interaction is

not, in and of itself, ideological. That is, in a social vacuum, one could only con-
strue it as play, friendship, and solidarity pure and simple. But, of course, these ex-
pressive scenes do not emerge in such a vacuum; they appear and are embedded
in a political economy and a hegemonic culture that produces marginalization
and alienation such as prevails among this class of batos in south Texas.'
In these particular socioeconomic circumstances play and its concomitant
friendship become eminently ideological. As an emergent cultural performance,
they represent an oppositional break in the alienating hegemony of the dominant
culture and society.
In a provocative article, Hearn correctly notes that both mainstream and or-
thodox Marxist social science construe play as an ontologically secondary activity
to the instrumental "real" world of politics and economics ( 1976-77). There is in
such a construal a reproduction of capitalist categories of experience, a particu-
larly unfortunate situation for Marxists. Hearn offers a corrective formulation of
play that draws upon the work of two nonorthodox Marxist theoreticians,
Habermas and Marcuse. He notes the former's idea of language as symbolic in-
teraction that "has a transcendental self-reflexive capacity which permits it to give
expression to contradictions between appearance and reality, potentiality and ac-
tuality:' Because it is not totally and automatically bound to reproduce the social
order, "language has the potential for emancipating people from a dependence on
reified cultural controls." As such, people have in their language "the capacity for
reflexivity and transcendence which enables the creation of evaluative standards,
allows the expression of contradictions, and supplies a conception of potentiality,
of'what can be'" (Hearn 1976-77:147). These critical possibilities are greater for
that least commodified and instrumentalized language-the emergent verbal art
of marginalized peoples.
Hearn finds similar properties in Marcuse's concept of play. For Marcuse
human play is the autonomous production of a dramatized, albeit temporal vi-
sion of an alternative social order. In authentic, that is noncommodified play,
there is an emergent promise of"freedom from compulsion, hierarchy, inequality,
and injustice" (1976-77:150). In its very ontology, play is neither secondary to in-
strumentalism nor is it its total denial. Rather it emerges as a critique, a constraint,
and a transcendence of all instrumental activity. Ultimately, play-the free-flow-
ing artistic exchanges of the men at Chema's rancho--has a subversive quality.
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 193

In play while the limitations of the existing reality are exposed, a more satisfying-more
equitable and just-order is celebrated.... To the extent that play affirms.the possibil-
ity of a "better world" it retains the potential for highlighting the negativity of and con-
tributing to the subversion of the prevailing arrangements (Hearn 1976-77:150-151).

Mexicans and their verbal art draw upon the domains of language and play ex-
plored by Habermas and Marcuse to produce a single phenomenon-human
speech play. Through such speech play the participants continually produce a
world of human value-of confianza and respeto. Created in collective equality,
such momentary productions negate the alienating constraints of the historically
given social order that exists for mexicanos and affirm the possibilities of a differ-
ent social order. They momentarily overturn the alienating effects even while they
remind these men of the real aggression in the world, that of los chingones.
Because the dominant discourse of power-that of Ramos, Paz, and Spielberg-
has focused exclusively on the language of such scenes, I too have felt obligated to
pay special attention to language even while recognizing that language is only part
of a cultural contextual scene. Indeed, as I have suggested, it is the failure to recog-
nize this total context of play that flaws this dominant discourse. But in the world
of Chema's rancho, it is necessary to recognize other symbolic elements that also
constitute this play world as a temporary forum of non-alienation.
For example, this play scene is itself framed in another form of play-a kind of
visible joke-namely, the very existence of Chema's rancho, that undeveloped lit-
tle piece of land surrounded on all sides by huge ranches with oil drills; just a few
miles away, for example, lie the beginnings of the King Ranch, parts of which, ac-
cording to Mexican legend, were bought and paid for in Mexican blood. Chema's
rancho is itself a source of constant humor, especially when, after a few beers,
Chema begins to tell the other guys of his big plans for this little place. Inevitably
someone will ask him, where are you going to put the cow? And, how is the bull
going to screw her when you can't get them both on the place at the same time?
The ultimate joke, of course, is the existence of this "ranch" dedicated not to cap-
italist mass agriculture but to friendship and play. While not a necessary condi-
tion, the very existence of this visible joke-this humorous incongruity-is pro-
ductive of more jokes and play. As Mary Douglas says, "if there is no joke in the
social structure, no other joke can appear" (1968:366).
Finally, there is my title-carne, carnales, and the carnivalesque. As the name of
this event-carne asada--dearly indicates, and, as I have suggested throughout,
carne (meat) and its preparation and consumption are of central concern here. If,
as Mary Douglas says, food is a code, then where in society lies the precoded mes-
sage and how does this message speak of hierarchy, inclusions, and exclusions
(1971:61)? What kind of meat is this socially and what, if anything, is its message?
These men are preparing and consuming those parts of a steer-the internal
organs and the faja, or skirt steak, that are clearly undervalued, low prestige meats
in the larger social economy, and, given their economic resources, that is not un-
194 Jose E. Limon

expected. As an old Anglo rancher in the area told me, "We used to call that stuff
'Mexican leavings: "What interests me is the way in which such meat parts, sym-
bolically linked to capitalist cattle ranching, are culturally mediated to convert
them from low-prestige, rather tough and stringy protein into tasty, valued, social
food. The use of the affectionate diminutive to name and linguistically "soften"
this food-fajita, mollejita, tripita-is a case in point here and parallels the phys-
ical softening of the protein in much-valued, secret marinades. (Indeed, it is ru-
mored with awe and disgust that the marinade for Chema's meat-which is con-
sidered the best-has a touch of urine in it, some say from his wife. When I
hesitantly asked Chema about this, he said it was absolutely not true; he would
never ask his wife to do such a thing. After a few seconds, he added, with a grin,
"only a man's piss will do!") In this cultural mediation we get food that is an ever-
present reminder of their class status but which in its preparation symbolically
negates that status; food material that begins with low status and exclusion results
in food prepared in pride, good taste, and social inclusion.
The preparation and consumption of this meat also speaks to class difference
in another way. The food is simply prepared, with the only utensils present being
a sharp knife to cut the meat and the chilis, tomatoes, and onions for the sauce,
and a fork to turn the meat. The sauce is prepared in the bottom parts of beer cans
cut in half, and spoons are fashioned from the metal of the upper half. This prepa-
ration becomes a way for these guys to distinguish themselves from the dominant
Others-los chingones-who use plates, knives, forks, cups, and napkins. They
also eat awful things like potato salad and lettuce with their meat, which is bought
and barbecued for them by their Mexican servants from across the border, who
cross the bridge to work in their large, fashionable homes.
Finally, I am most interested in the way the consumption of food is a kind of in-
teractional parallel to the charged language that paradoxically generates friendship.
Everyone brings their low-prestige meat-a symbol of societal aggression-and
contributes it to a central collective pile; everyone, at some point or another, takes
a turn at shooing flies away, broiling and cutting the meat; and making the sauce.
The tacos are made by everyone in random fashion and, since there are no
plates, they are passed along by hand, sometimes going through two or three sets
of hands. These men at Chema's rancho and many others throughout south Texas
and, I might add, in the Texan outposts of central California, prepare and con-
sume their once low-prestige food collectively and nonhierarchically even as they
playfully assault each other with the charged language of friendship. The felt re-
sult is another discourse of power, a power that does not dominate but liberates
them, if only for brief moments, from the contexts of alienation beyond Chema's
rancho where rac(;! and structure still prevail. In this world, Chema's carne is closely
linked to carnales, a kinship term used among brothers or close male friends.
In the 1960s Chicano college students spoke in too self-conscious and slightly
forced ways of carnalismo. These men never use this term; although, when they
hear it, they can sense what it means. Rather, they freely use the term carnal-a
Carne, Carnal.es, and the Carnivalesque 195

folk term for brother or buddy, which seems to me to be an appropriate native

gloss for their cultural practice. In one too conscious and too keenly ideological
moment, Chinito ("little Chinese man"), a young man with ''Asian" features and
the most educated among them (one year of college) holds up a piece of raw fa-
jita and says "esta carne es pa' mis carnales, esto es el carnalismo" (this meat is for
my brothers, this is brotherhood). Another man, pained slightly by this apparent
intrusion of linear ideology, immediately replies, "Mira cabron:' and going for his
own genitals, says, "esta es la carne que te voy a dar" (Look, goddammit, this is the
meat I'm going to give you). And it is only at this moment, when the others laugh
hesitantly, that we see the possibility and the tones of real aggression. The world
of too-conscious ideology has intruded and must be rejected. One does not speak
ideologically of friendship and community, one practices it in the symbolic action
of meat, body, and language.
To unify these various revisionary perspectives, I want to think of these scenes
as a present-day example of what Bakhtin calls the unofficial culture of the Middle
Ages, the folk culture of Grotesque Realism, of the carnivalesque. The playful, sex-
ual, and scatological language, the concern with minimalist consumption of meat
taken from the internal, stomach-centered parts of the animal, the concern with
the body-all of these involve what Bakhtin called degradation, a principal aspect
of the carnivalesque. But this is not degradation as the imprisoning bourgeois dis-
course of Ramos and Paz would have it.
Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element
that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to
kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also
means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and
the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, con-
ception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not
only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object
does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruc-
tion, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the rone in which concep-
tion and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the
fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving (Bakhtin 1984:21).
However, in adopting this Bakhtinian perspective on unofficial culture, het-
eroglossia, and the carnivalesque, one also has to note its political limitations and
its uneasy relationship to Marxism. In a recent critical review of this issue, Young
seriously and persuasively questions the Marxist status of Bakhtin's thought on
the carnivalesque in culture (Young 1985-86). Taken without critical revision,
Young argues, Bakhtinian "carnival offers a liberal rather than a Marxist politics"
(1985-86:92). That is, Bakhtin has offered a semi-idealist sense of an essentialist-
humanistic oppositional Other expressed in the carnivalesque as a transcendence
of an unspecified general Foucauldian-like domination. Only by specifying the
historical moment and social location of the carnivalesque, as Fredric Jameson
would have us do, only by specifically accounting for its class (and race) antago-
196 Jose E. Limon

nistic character in a specific context, can the carnivalesque be read as an expres-

sion of class contestative discourse in the manner that I have tried to do (Jameson
1981:83-87). For it is specifically against the ruling bourgeois official culture of
contemporary south Texas, including that of both Anglos and Mexican-
Americans, that one must understand my friends. Their discourses of sexuality,
the body, and low-prestige food exactly counterpoint the repression and affecta-
tion of these ruling sectors throughout the region, a dominating culture whose
most visible expression, for example, is the upper-class celebration of George
Washington's Birthday in Laredo, Texas, not far from Chema's rancho.
However, a Marxist perspective on the carnivalesque also obliges us to note that
its ideological and material character is not one of undiluted seamless "opposi-
tion." Two points may be made here. First, the critical carnivalesque of these men
is to some considerable degree predicated on a model of their own dominating
patriarchy and exclusion of women from these scenes. Second, in the long term,
their feasting on beef and beer on an almost daily basis is likely contributing to se-
rious h~alth problems among the working-class male population of this area
(Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs 1979).
"Now stop!" Max said and sent the wild things off to bed
without their supper.
And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to
be where someone loved him best of all.
Then all around from far away across the world he smelled
good things to eat
so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.
But the wild things cried, "Oh please don't go-
we'll eat you up-we love you so!"
And Max said, "No!"
The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed
their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and
showed their terrible claws
but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye (Sendak 1963).

Epilogue: The Centipede Who Played Free Safety

So there you have my narrative, which, though now fleshed out with new theo-
retical references, had already begun to take this form even as I concluded the pe-
riod of fieldwork that had generated it. Successful, I thought, was I in producing
an ethnographic account that could stand as a critical counternarrative to that of
the great Mexican bourgeois thinkers and its localized application by Spielberg.
Successful was I, I thought, in giving narrative critical voice to the dominated
against those who in their discourses of power would reproduce and enhance the
domination in their everyday lives. And, as such, this essay could have ended a
paragraph ago were it not for the centipede-the centipede who played free safety.
Carne, Carnal.es, and the Carnivalesque 197

As I prepared to leave McBurg, los batos decided to have a despedida (a farewell

party) in my honor, naturally a carne asada. This time, however, rather than
Chema's rancho, we decided to gather at a local bar-Tenorio's-where in addi-
tion to partying, it was also decided that I would make a "speech" (their term)
about what I had "learned;' the whole thing in an idiom and ethos of play consis-
tent with the event. We all gathered outside in a kind of patio behind the bar and
with fajita tacos and beer for fuel, I meandered my way through a kind of "folk"
version of my present story. A variety of commentary followed ranging from" Bien
de aquellas" (real good) to "puro pedo" (pure shit) to loud "Hmmm's" to quiet long
pulls on beers. Most of them at least agreed that my rendering was better than
those of Ramos and Paz, which they unambivalently thought of as "puro pedo."
And then the centipede, unexpectedly, made his appearance. Chinito, the local
college dropout who knew something about the esoterica and secret rituals of our
sacred discipline had, from the beginning, been unhappy with my fieldwork en-
terprise. But, he had not actually said so or specified his objections until a little too
much beer plus my leave-taking provided the necessary disinhibition to his re-
pressed critique. Like one of the young antagonistic villagers that James
Fernandez encountered in the Fang village of Gabon, this fellow, with even greater
antagonism, wanted to know "what reason did I have for wanting to know such
things?" (Fernandez 1986:173). As with most antagonistic and therefore rhetori-
cal questions, my questioner came equipped with his own answer, to wit: "You
want to tell them about us!" with a heavy emphasis on "tell" and "them"-which,
of course, was quite true, although I wouldn't have put it quite that way. Rather, I
would have said, or tonally implied, that, yes, I did want to tell them about
Mexican-American critical ideological responses to their domination. We debated
the question, there next to the barbecue pit, and generated just about as much
heat with raised voices, which eventually led to a bit of body posturing-he, for-
ward, me, backward-my most vivid recollection of that instant being, "Oh, shit,
did the summer grant cover health insurance?"
This emerging disorder of a different kind-this intrusion into the somewhat
spontaneous communitas of the carne asada that afternoon--could not be per-
mitted by the rest of the guys, who had a stake not only in the maintenance of the
communitas but in making sure that I, friend/guest/ "professor," wasn't mis-
treated. Yet, to varying degrees, they too had probably wondered "what reason did
I have for wanting to kriow such things?" which, after my best explanations and in
the final analysis, I may not have fully answered to their total satisfaction, a prob-
ably impossible thing. It was at that point, after several of my friends persuaded
my interrogator to calm down, that one of them, "la tuerca" (the screw nut), a car
mechanic, offered the following. He opened with a local introductory marker for
joking narratives:

i Watcha, Limon. Pesca este pedo y pintalo verde! [Lookit, Limon. Catch this "fart" and
paint it green.] These two antropolocos [anthropologists] got a grant, you know. To go to
198 Jose E. Limon

Africa to study the natives. But when they got there, all the batos [dudes] had split for
the mountains. Left a sign in the village. "Gone to the mountains, bros, see you next win-
ter!" "So now what are we going to do, Bruce?" said one of them.
"Well, gee, I don't know, Horace." So they sat around getting bored. Once in awhile
one of them would find some native shit, and they'd get all excited thinking they were
still around. But no, it was old shit. One day, one of them said, "You know, we're not
doing anything. Why don't we organize all of the jungle animals into football teams and
have a game?" So they did. They chose up. A tiger for me. A tiger for you. A hippo for
me. A hippo for you. We each get a gazelle for running backs.
And then they started the game. The giraffe kicked off for one team, and the other
team had its cheetah back to receive. And the game went on. But since both teams had
pretty much the same animals, they were tied by the end of the first quarter. But then
the elephant who was playing linebacker on one team got hurt when somebody stepped
on its trunk. So the other team with its hippo fullback and nobody to stop him up the
middle started getting ahead. jEn chinga carnal! [Fucking them over, bro!]
They went into the third quarter, and the hippo started right up again, but all of a
sudden, he went down with a crash at the line of scrimmage and he had both knees in-
jured. So both coaches and the teams gathered around, one coach worried about his
player and the other one wanted to know who brought the hippo down. "Was it you, tur-
tle?" "No, coach, I couldn't react fast enough!" "How about you, chimp?" "No, coach, I
was up on the goal posts!"
Then they heard a little voice coming from under the hippo, "I got the bastard, I got
the bastard!" They turned the hippo over and there was a little centipede holding tightly
to the hippo's leg. So after they got him off, the coach asked him, "How did you do it,
centipede?" And, the centipede said, "Well, coach, I was playing free safety and when I
saw that the hippo had the ball, I just ran up and met him at the line of scrimmage!"
"But why didn't you do that in the first half?" asked the coach.
"I wasn't playing the first half, coach:'
"Well, where the hell were you?"
"Say man;' said the centipede, "don't fuck with me, I was in the locker room putting
on my goddamn tennis shoes!"
(Much laughter; Chinito and I look sheepish, I think.)

What is this about I asked and continue to ask myself? Two anthropologists,
marked as elite and effeminate by the use and intonation of the personal names,
Bruce and Horace, fail to find their "natives" when they arrive in Africa armed with
their inevitable grant. Given an active presence by the narrator, the natives have
"split" and by virtue of the sign they leave behind, they are also given voice. The
often deactivated subject of anthropology is restored in the same way that it (they)
were restored when I was questioned. So far, perhaps, so good. But why-and this
was the largest piece of the puzzle for me-do our anthropologist/protagonists
then turn immediately to the organization of jungle animals into football teams
and a game? Are the latter so many surrogate "natives"; and is this a satirical com-
ment on the obsessive anthropological quest for order, any order, at all costs? After
all, we can't very well just sit around. Is it this that makes us "antropo-locos" (crazy
anthropologists)?
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 199

But why football? Why not? Isn't it the Balinese cockfight of American culture
where our capacity for highly organized systemic violence is displayed most evi-
dently in the frame of "game" and at a profit? But juxtaposed to anthropology as
its close semantic cousin? Was this what I had been doing, organizing their play
this way? Is this what we all do? Order up what Fernandez calls "the play of tropes
in culture" into ethnographies that organize the polyphony into narrative forms
that are metaphorically related to violence and profit?
Having organized my "natives" for the sake of my own orderly narrative game,
I was ready to take leave of them when the game started breaking down. For I sus-
pect that, perhaps, in the role of one coach, I had gotten ahead of them, run up
the score by having gained much with relatively little in return, save for a book
that would tell "their" story for the benefit of others. Did I, in fact, as I prepared
to leave, require some marked opposition to stop my tough running game?
Which brings us to the centipede. Here the animal symbolism becomes even
shiftier and more multivocalic. Is this the antagonist who brought me down, re-
framed in narrative play and thereby given symbolic license? Why a centipede?
Well, it makes for the punch line, but why a centipede who acts this way, sitting
out the first half, laboriously putting on fifty pairs of tennis shoes so that he can
get in the game? And why does he play free safety?
Let me momentarily avoid my own problem and digress to suggest that the cen-
tipede is a pretty good symbolic rendition not only of my personal antagonist who
disordered my ethnographic narrative game, but of these guys as a group and
probably of Mexican-Americans as they see themselves relative to the sociopolit-
ical game of which anthropology is part.
To fully exploit this particular reading, you have to know your football, includ-
ing the knowledge that the free safety, as his name implies, is a defensive back not
bound to the standard zone defense where a defender protects a particular por-
tion of the backfield. Rather, he is set deep in the backfield and free to roam it,
protecting against deep and short passes but also free to come up and stop a run-
ning play, as our centipede did. You may, perhaps, also need to know that in the
folklore of the National Football League, free safeties, along with split ends, are
thought to be marginal, temperamental, moody guys who love to hit. To this
knowledge, shared by my barbecue friends who are avid watchers of the sport, we
can add the following concerning the centipede, which is found plentifully in
south Texas. It is small and nasty, frequents dark places, and will painfully sting by
clinging ferociously and venomously. Nonetheless, they are lesser creatures cer-
tainly in comparison to tigers, lions, and so on.
And that may be how Mexican-Americans see themselves and are, in fact, seen
in American popular, political, and anthropological discourse. There at the mar-
gins, not fully dangerous or exotic; socially and politically lesser but not enough
to make them a real problem or a real attraction for the imagination. To be sure,
every so often they come up fast and make a hit-Cesar Chavez, Henry
Cisneros-but most of the time there they are at the margins. (Like the coach,
200 Jose E. Llln.6n

Anglo liberals sometimes ask me the political equivalent of"where were you in the
first half?" which is, "why didn't Mexican-Americans turn out to vote in the last
election?" usually for an Anglo liberal candidate. To which, like the centipede, I
sometimes feel like saying, "Say, man, come on. Maybe they're in the locker room
slowly and laboriously putting on the necessarily social, educational, and cultural
equipment to come out and play for themselves:')
But you see, here I am digressing in my own interest, once again, returning to
my safe and politically hip narrative role of explaining how Mexican-Americans
express their cultural opposition to Them including the dominant discourses of
intellectual power. I am neatly avoiding the fragmenting problem for my own
work, namely, what does the centipede have to do with me, with my ethnographic
narration?
The centipede, I propose, is the critical carnivalesque turned in my direction.
Even as I was rewriting their mostly oppositional voices into my own narrative,
thereby rendering it oppositional to those of Ramos and Paz, my friends offered
me pointed instruction on the limits of my rewriting. In their disordering decon-
struction of the ethnographic project, they remind me (us) that however "liberat-
ing" a narrative discourse we propose to write, it is one always intimate with
power, and many of our "informants;' "subjects:' "consultants:' "teachers,"
"friends" know it. That these particular friends permit me to rewrite them is itself
testimony to their understanding that there are better and worse discourses-that
some are, indeed, "puro pedo"-that there are sites of struggle far from Chema's
rancho where such discourses contest for hegemony in other cultural spheres and
where my pale rewriting may be to some purpose.
But it is important to note that their critical reminder itself comes in the form
of the carnivalesque, as if to say that anthropology itself is not and should not be
immune to its disorderly character. Indeed, I want to go a step further and take
this lesson at full formal value for the production of my ethnographic narrative.
Used with imagination, this empowering gift of the carnivalesque can lend not
only ideological content but also an ideology of critical form, as Jameson (1981)
might say, to our ethnographic practice. Along with other critical resources we can
incorporate the carnivalesque into our ethnographic practice, creatively disorder-
ing it so that it also stands as a formal counterhegemonic practice countering the
"normal" and often dominating practice of ethnography. 6 I believe this is what
Fischer is recommending when he argues for an ethnography based formally on
the postmodern practices of ethnic autobiography, practices such as inter-refer-
ence, critical juxtaposition, ironic humor, parody, the return of the repressed, al-
ternative selves, and bifocality which, in my estimation, are synonymous with the
carnivalesque ( 1986). To some degree at least, I have been experimenting with this
formal appropriation of the critical carnivalesque here even as I also write mani-
festly against the ideas of domination. Finally, at the heart of this gift of the car-
nivalesque is a reflexive critical self-awareness of our status as ethno-graphers:
writers of people. For, as my friends and the centipede reminded me, this post-
Carne, Carnal.es, and the Carnivalesque 201

modernity of the carnivalesque must also include the keen sense of critical reflex-
ivity that goes with such discourse, the sense that we must always decenter our
own narrative self-assurance lest it be saturated with dominating power.
Ultimately, as Stephen Tyler reminds us, when ethnography is truly critical, such
a function
derives from the fact that it makes its own contextual grounding part of the question
and not from hawking pictures of alternative ways of life as instruments of utopian re-
form (1986:139).

Notes
Acknowledgments. Portions of this paper were presented as lectures at Stanford University
(1986) and at the annual meetings of the American Ethnological Society in St. Louis
(1988). My special thanks to Renato Rosaldo for the former invitation and to Charles
Briggs for the latter. The research was conducted under the partial auspices of a grant from
the National Research Council and the Ford Foundation sponsored by the Language
Behavior Research Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

1. All formal names and nicknames are fictitious.

2. McBurg is also my general fictional name for the towns-very close to each other-
in South Texas were these men live. It is a composite of two large Anglo-dominated
towns-McAllen and Edinburg. These were established as "American" towns at the turn of
the century as part of the Anglo-American agricultural capitalization and social dominance
of the area. It is in this general area where Madsen (1964) and Rubel (1966) conducted their
fieldwork. For a fine critical account of these two projects and their insensitivity to lan-
guage and humor, see Paredes (1978).
3. I say "partially" for I appropriate only Douglas' fine descriptive insights, not her
Durkheimian interpretive framework. Clearly I am moving in a different left direction;
4. In a footnote, anthropologist Patricia Zavella notes a closely related male-centered
verbal performance among California Mexican-Americans who are nonetheless from South
Texas. I have never heard the expression chingar mentis in South Texas, so it is possibly a
California label for this same kind of verbal performance. I quote Zavella:
In an analysis of chingar mentis behavior (which means to fuck over minds), I concluded that it is
a male form of verbal art similar to "playing the dozens" by young black males. I observed young
Chicano males from South Texas spreading false stories or spontaneously duping someone through
group verbal performance. According to the performers the point of these hilarious deceptions was
just to chingar mentis, but I argue they develop male solidarity and prestige among the participants
(Zavella 1987:25).

5. In a recent article announcing the Vice-Presidential nomination of Senator Lloyd

Bentsen, who is from this area, David Rosenbaum of the New York Times has succinctly
captured this world better than any set of social statistics:
the 67-year-old Senator has deep roots in Texas. He comes from one of the richest and most promi-
nent families in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, where the great wealth of a few families con-
trasts with the poverty of the overwhelmingly Mexican-American citizenry (Rosenbaum 1988).
202 Jose E. Limon

6. In a perceptive insight Young, after Benjamin, notes the way Bakhtin's Rabelais and
His World could be read as itself a carnivalesque text in formal counterhegemonic response
to Stalinist domination (Young 1985-86:78).

References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind. pp.
177-193. New York: Random House.
de Leon, Arnoldo. 1982. The Tejano Community, 1836-1900. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
- - - . 1983. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas,
1821-1900. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1968. The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception.
Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3:361-376.
- - - . 1971. Deciphering a Meal. In Myth, Symbol, and Culture. Clifford Geertz, ed. pp.
61-81. New York: W.W. Norton.
- - - . 1978[1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 1986. Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory. In Writing
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James Clifford and George E. Marcus,
eds., pp. 194-233. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foley, Douglas. 1978. From Peones to Politicos: Ethnic Relations in a South Texas Town.
Austin: University of Texas, Center for Mexican American Studies.
Hearn, Francis. 1976-77. Toward a Critical Theory of Play. Telos 30:145-160.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lauria, Anthony, Jr. 1964. Respeto, Relajo, and Interpersonal Relations in Puerto Rico.
Anthropological Quarterly 3:53-67.
Limon, Jose E. 1987. Mexican Speech Play: History and the Psychological Discourses of
Power. Texas Papers on Latin America. No. 87-06. Austin: University of Texas Institute
of Latin American Studies.
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. 1979. The Health of Mexican Americans in
South Texas. Policy Research Project No. 32. University of Texas at Austin.
Madsen, William. 1964. The Mexican-Americans of South Texas. New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston.
Marcus, George E. 1986. Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World
System. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James Clifford and
George E. Marcus, eds. pp. 165-193. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Montejano, David. 1987. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Paredes, Americo. 1976. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
- - - . 1978. On Ethnographic Fieldwork among Minority Groups: A Folklorist's
Perspective. In New Directions in Chicano Scholarship. Recardo Romo and Raymund
Paredes, eds. pp. 1-32. La Jolla: Chicano Studies Center, University of California at San
Diego.
Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque 203

Paz, Octavio. 1961[1951]. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. New
York: Grove Press.
Peacock, James. 1968. Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian
Proletarian Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ramos, Samuel. 1962[1934]. Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Rosenbaum, David E. 1988. A Candidate Who is More Like Bush: Lloyd Millard Bentsen,
Jr. New York Times, July 13, p. 1.
Rubel, Arthur. 1966. Across the Tracks: Mexican Americans in a South Texas Town. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Sendak, Maurice. 1963. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper and Row.
Spielberg, Joseph. 1974. Humor in a Mexican-American Palomilla: Some Historical, Social,
and Psychological Implications. Revista Chicano-Requena 2:41-50.
Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to
Occult Document. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. James
Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds. pp. 122-140. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Young, Robert. 1985-86. Back to Bakhtin. Cultural Critique 1:71-92.
Zavella, Patricia. 1987. Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the
Santa Clara Valley. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
 Part Four
Language as
Social Practice
Language lets us choose.
-Norbert Dittmar 1988:xi

What the norms do, then, is to give all speakers a grammar of consequences.
Speakers are free to make any choices, but how their choices will be interpreted is
not free.
-Carol Myers Scotton 1988:155

Daniel Jones, in his book on the phoneme, defined a language as "the speech of
one individual pronouncing in a definite and consistent style" (1962:9). Such a
rigorous definition is admirably honest in making clear the basis on which his
study is founded. It is, however, not a very helpful definition for those who are in-
terested in how language is used in a particular community. With the exception of
Chomsky's "ideal speech-community:' variation in language is endemic every-
where. The existence of alternatives implies choice, and choice is generally mean-
. ingful. Whether the choice is between two distinct languages or within a single
language, the choice between two alternatives can be significant. The chapters in
Part Four illustrate the kinds of social and political consequences that may result
from such choices.
Donald Brenneis's study of Fiji Indian gossip focuses on interactions among the
content of gossip, the events within which it is conducted, and the stylistic features
that make the intense coperformance characteristic of this genre possible.
Understanding the "politics" of gossip in Bhatgaon requires a multidimensional
approach: It furthers overt political ends through its scurrilous commentary
about absent others, but it also implicitly weaves together and strengthens social
relationships among the participants themselves. Brenneis's study also draws
upon a relatively detailed transcript of particular gossip sessions; such features as
overlap between speakers and the rhythmic pacing of individual turns are critical
in how gossip works in Bhatgaon.
Fred Myers describes a situation among the Pintupi in Australia's Northern ter-
ritory, where the use of language is influenced by the need to maintain the "relat-
edness" that gives the group its cohesion. The Pintupi are reluctant to use Ian-

205
206 Language as Social Practice

guage confrontationally in situations that are potentially divisive. This makes it

difficult to arrive at decisions in meetings where there are opposing interests:
"Maintaining respect . . . dictates the removal of individual assertiveness from
public speech." The function of the meeting is more to reaffirm membership in
the group than to achieve a result. Myers is "concerned with the way forms of
speaking come to acquire meaning for participants."
Michael Silverstein shows how in the United States, Standard English is a com-
modity that has become "the object of a brisk commerce in goods-and-services"
in which experts and advertisers encourage speakers to acquire it "for a price:' The
notion of a standard language has been frequently discussed. (e.g., Bartsch 1987,
Joseph 1987, Macaulay 1973, Milroy and Milroy 1985), but Silverstein emphasizes
the role of Standard English as "a cultural emblem" rather than as a medium of
communication. He also links the symbolic value of Standard English to the
"English only" movement as conforming to the -ideology that the standard lan-
guage is "the essential medium of corporate survival and personal success."
Judith Irvine deals even more explicitly with the notion of value, looking at the
"communicative economy'' (Hymes 1974) of a Wolof community in Senegal, West
Africa. Irvine describes two speech styles, "noble speech:' associated with higher
castes, and "griot speech," used by low-ranking groups. These are not separate lan-
guages (although French and Arabic are also used in the community) but each style
has an appropriate function. In the case of praise-songs offered by griots to pa-
trons, the rewards are openly material. In this sense, the use of language is, as Irvine
suggests, "part of a political economy, not just a vehicle for thinking about one."
Jane Hill shows how in the Malinche Volcano region of central Mexico the
Mexicano language (Nahuatl), despite its limited value in the mainstream Spanish-
speaking community, is "the language of intimacy, solidarity, mutual respect, and
identity as a campesino:' However, the higher status of Spanish is recognized by the
frequent use of Spanish loan words when speaking in a "power code" register of
Mexicano. At the same time, even those who assert their identity by using
Mexicano do not control the language in its traditional form. The symbolic value
of Mexicano does not guarantee its survival as a full-functioning language.
Each of these Chapters deals with the role that language plays in a particular so-
ciety. These are the topics that traditionally crop up in courses on language and
culture. But the purpose of studying these cases carefully is not simply to see them
as alien ways of behavior. As G. K. Chesterton observed: "The whole object of
travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own coun-
try as a foreign land:' By looking at the significance of language in other cultures
we may come closer to understanding our own.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Other examples of politically significant uses of language can be found in the collections of
D. L. Brenneis and F. R. Myers, eds., Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific;
Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies, edited by K. A. Watson-Gegeo and G.
Language as Social Practice 207

M. White; and Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, edited by J. H. Hill and J. T.
Irvine. Different forms of face-saving are examined in P. Brown and S. Levinson, Politeness:
Some Universals in Language Usage. The classic works on interaction are those by E.
Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Frame Analysis, and Forms of Talk.
Ethnographic studies of particular language situations are provided by K. H. Basso, Western
Apache Language and Culture; W. F. Hanks, Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space
Among the Maya; G. Urban, A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South
American Myths and Rituals; and J. Siegel, Language Contact in a Plantation Environment:
A Sociolinguistic History of Fiji. M. Moerman provides a rare example of combining an
ethnographic and conversation analytic approach in Talking Culture: Ethnography and
Conversation Analysis. W. Chafe and J. Nicholls, eds., Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of
Epistemology gives examples of different ways of expressing stance in a variety of languages.
The debate over "English only" is set out clearly in the collection of materials edited by J.
Crawford, Language Loyalties, and discussed by him in Hold Your Tongue.

References
Bartsch, Renate. 1987. Norms of Language: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. London:
Longman.
Basso, Keith H. 1990. Western Apache Language and Culture. Tucson, AZ: University of
Arizona Press.
Brenneis, Donald L., and Fred R. Myers, eds. 1984. Dangerous Words: Language and Politics
in the Pacific. New York: New York University Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols, eds. 1986. Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of
Epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Crawford, James. 1992. Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of "English Only''.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Crawford, James, ed. 1992. Language Loyalties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dittmar, Norbert. 1988. "Foreword to the series 'Sociolinguistics and language contact:" In
Norbert Dittmar and Peter Schlobinski, eds. The Sociolinguistics of Urban Vernaculars:
Case Studies and Their Evaluation. Berlin: de Gruyter: ix-xii.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday.
- - - . 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper.
- - - . 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hanks, William F. 1990. Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space Among the Maya.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hill, Jane H., and Judith T. Irvine, eds. 1993. Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Jones, Daniel. 1962. The Phoneme: Its Nature and Use (2nd edition). Cambridge, MA:
Heffer.
Joseph, John Earl. 1987. Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard
Languages. London: Frances Pinter.
208 Language as Social Practice

Macaulay, Ronald. 1973. "Double Standards:' American Anthropologist 75:1324-1337.

Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1985. Authority in Language: Investigating Language
Prescription and Standardisation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Moerman, Michael. 1988. Talking Culture: Ethnography and Conversation Analysis.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Scotton, Carol Myers. 1988. "Code switching as indexical of social negotiations:' In Monica
Heller, ed., Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter: 151-186.
Siegel, Jeff. 1987. Language Contact in a Plantation Environment: A Sociolinguistic History of
Fiji. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Urban, Greg. 1991. A Discourse-Centered Approach to Culture: Native South American Myths
and Rituals. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Watson-Gegeo, Karen A., and Geoffrey M. White, eds. 1990. Disentangling: Conflict
Discourse in Pacific Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
11
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon:
Style and Substance in Fiji
Indian Conversation
DONALD BRENNEIS

The central question in the anthropological study of gossip has long been, What
is gossip about? Gluckman ( 1963:308), for example, suggests that gossip and scan-
dal "maintain the unity, morals and values of social groups .... they enable these
groups to control the competing cliques and aspiring individuals of which all
groups are composed:' For Gluckman the content of gossip-the message it con-
veys-is primarily concerned with the implicit, sometimes negative articulation
of group values. Paine (1967:282), by contrast, argues that "gossip, whatever else
it may be in a functional sense, is also a cultural device used by an individual to
further his own interests"; gossip contains information about others, shaped
strategically to suit the speaker's ends (see also Cox 1970; Szwed 1966). From both
perspectives the proper objects of study are the texts and topics of gossip; dis-
agreement lies in how these materials and their implications are to be evaluated.
In this paper I argue that as important as the question of what gossip is about
may be, our anthropological preoccupation with it has prevented us from looking
at gossip itself in any great detail. To some extent this reflects a broader cultural
notion that language is primarily a descriptive tool, a way of making propositional
statements about the world (see Myers and Brenneis 1984 for a more detailed dis-
cussion). Our interpretations have concentrated on what gossip says about people
and values and have largely ignored how it is said. In so doing we have neglected
the nonreferential features and implications of gossip as an activity. A few an-
thropologists, notably Edmonson (1966), Gossen (1974), and Abrahams (1970),
have drawn attention to the stylistic character of gossip itself, analyzing it in terms
of community ideas of verbal art, license, and decorum; others such as M.
Goodwin (1980, 1982) focus on its interactional character and ways by which lan-
guage use generates social relationships. When Edmonson, Gossen, and Abrahams
consider the content of gossip, it is essentially as a way of getting at style; the
rhetorical effects of what gossip is about are neglected. Goodwin, by contrast, con-
siders prosodic, syntactic, and interactional features in some detail; her analysis

209
210 Donald Brenneis

centers on relationships between particular syntactic forms; especially embedding

(Goodwin 1980:689), and the presentation of information. In this she uses stylis-
tic features as a way of understanding the organization of content and the estab-
lishment of a recurring interactional frame ("he-said-she-said") that ramifies
throughout social relationships. I seek to broaden still further our understandings
of gossip by reference to larger sociopolitical features of community life in which
gossip clearly plays an important role.
This paper examines a variety of verbal interaction, herein glossed as "gossip;'
in a Fiji Indian rural village. This type of talk, labeled in village Hindi by the Fijian
loan word talanoa,' is one way of speaking within the larger domain of batcit
("conversation" or "discussion"). Talanoa is not a clearly demarcated genre in it-
self. Certain stylistic, semantic, and contextual features are associated with it, but
they are evident to some extent in other kinds of conversation as well; villagers
speak of talanoa in degrees. Talanoa is not the only way in which information
about absent others is conveyed in Bhatgaon, but that it is talk about absent oth-
ers is central to its definition. As the private, essentially illicit discussion and eval-
uation of others, talanoa is regarded by many villagers as fakutiya bat ("worthless
doings") 2 This negative evaluation extends to the language of talanoa as well, as it
draws on the forms and vocabulary of local, rustic Fiji Hindi rather than on those
of the Standard Fiji Hindi used for public occasions. Despite these negative fea-
tures, villagers clearly delight in talanoa and relish both the scandals themselves
and the highly stylized ways in which they are discussed.

Approaching Tulanoa
In my consideration of talanoa I am guided by four premises. First, talanoa can-
not be treated in isolation but must be seen as part of the expressive and commu-
nicative repertoire of a community; its character and implications are tied to
those of other ways of speaking. Second, gossip is both about something and
something in itself. It works in both referential and nonreferential ways at the
same time (see Silverstein 1976), and a consideration of gossip should not be lim-
ited to one or the other. Third, gossip necessarily involves two kinds of social re-
lationships-those between the gossipers and their subject and those between the
gossipers themselves. The functions of gossip in the two relationships are quite
different, as are the ways in which those functions are accomplished. Finally, the
stylistic features of talanoa in Bhatgaon are both striking and substantial. They
not only mark talanoa but have a great deal to do with its effectiveness. The for-
mal features of talanoa operate in different and quite specific ways vis-a-vis both
the kinds of relationships mentioned above and the larger social context.

Bhatgaon: A Fiji Indian Community

Bhatgaon is a rural village of 690 Hindi-speaking Fiji Indians located on the
northern side of Vanua Levu, the second largest island in the Dominion of Fiji.
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 211

The villagers are the descendants of north Indians who came to Fiji between 1879
and 1919 as indentured plantation workers. Bhatgaon was established in the early
1900s and now (July 1980) includes 91 households. There has been little migra-
tion to or from the village for the past 20 years, and there is a wide age-span
among the villagers. Most families lease rice land from the Government of Fiji; al-
though they may work as seasonal cane cutters or in other outside jobs, most men
consider themselves rice farmers. Rice and dry-season vegetables are raised pri-
marily for family use, although surplus produce may be sold to middlemen.
Leaseholds are generally small, and rice farming does not offer Bhatgaon villagers
the same opportunities for wealth available in sugarcane-raising areas. Since 1974
a number of village men have been able to spend four months in New Zealand
doing agricultural work under Fiji government auspices.
Both men and women are politically active in the community, but they take
part in very different ways and in different settings. Men are the performers in
such public political events as religious speechmaking and insult singing
(Brenneis 1978; Brenneis and Padarath 1975). Women may speak in mediation
sessions as witnesses, but these important political events are organized and run
by men. Political participation by women generally occurs in less public settings,
as does much male politicking through talanoa.
Among males an overt egalitarian ideology prevails. Although ancestral caste
appears to influence marriage choice to some extent (Brenneis 1974:25), it has few
daily consequences in Bhatgaon. As one villager said, Gaon me sab barabba hei ("In
the village all are equal"). This public ideology is manifest in such practices as sit-
ting together on the floor during religious events and equal opportunity to speak.
The roots of this egalitarian outlook lie in the conditions of immigration and in-
denture, central among them the difficulty of maintaining subcaste identity and
purity and the disappearance of the hierarchical division of labor which helped
sustain the caste system in north India (Mayer 1972; Brown 1981; Brenneis 1979).
Egalitarian values are reinforced by the relative similarity in wealth throughout
Bhatgaon. Such egalitarianism, however, is problematic in several important re-
spects. First, not every villager is a potential equal. Sex is a crucial dimension; men
do not consider women their equals. Age is also consequential. Adolescent boys
(naujawan) are accorded less respect than older, married men (admi). As there are
no formal criteria or ceremonies to mark the transition from naujawan to admi-
to social adulthood-disagreements about how one should be treated are common
and often lead to serious conflict between males of different ages.
A second problematic aspect of Bhatgaon egalitarianism is the delicate balance
between people who should be equals. One of the hallmarks of such an egalitar-
ian community is that individual autonomy is highly prized. Equals are those who
mutually respect each other's freedom of action. Attempting too overtly to influ-
ence the opinions or actions of another is a violation of this equality. Further, in-
dividual reputation is central to one's actual social position. A man's reputation is
subject to constant renegotiation through his own words and deeds and through
212 Donald Brenneis

those of others. Villagers are quite sensitive to perceived attempts by others to

lower their reputations; the fear of reprisal by the subject of a gossip session has
an important constraining effect upon the form of those sessions. Reputation
management is a constant concern in disputes, for conflict often arises from ap-
parent insult, and the remedy lies in the public rebalancing of one's reputation
with that of one's opponent.
A number of men are recognized as bada admi ("Big Men") because of their
past participation in village affairs, religious leadership, education, or other per-
sonal accomplishment. They also gain respect through the successful manage-
ment of the disputes of others. Their status is always under stress, however, as ob-
trusive attempts to assert authority or to intervene in the problems of others abuse
the autonomy of other men. Successful Big Men do not exercise their informal
power ostentatiously. Continued effectiveness as a respected advisor depends on
an overt reluctance to assume leadership. Even when requested to intervene in a
dispute, Big Men are often unwilling; they fear both being identified with one
party's interests and being considered overeager to display power. The willing ex-
ercise of authority leads to its decline.
Although there is a police station 5 km away, there are no formal social control
agencies in Bhatgaon itself. The village has a representative on the district advi-
sory council, but he is not empowered to regulate affairs within Bhatgaon. With
the decline of caste as an organizational feature of Fiji Indian life, such bodies as
caste councils are no longer available for conflict management. Conflict in
Bhatgaon remains largely dyadic, the concern of the contending parties alone; yet,
as long as the disputes are dyadic, the chances of a settlement are slim. The face-
.to-face negotiation of a serious dispute is usually impossible, as open accusation
or criticism of another is taken as a grievous insult. The offended party might well
express his displeasure through nonverbal, nonconfrontational violence-for ex-
ample, cutting down his opponent's banana trees. While such vandalism would
not be praised, other villagers would interpret it as the natural result of direct con-
frontation or insult and would not intervene. Only a kara admi ("hard man'')
would risk such revenge through direct discussion; most villagers resort to more
indirect strategies.
It is difficult to enlist third parties in the management of a conflict, but such tri-
adic participation is crucial. The recruitment of others, not as partisans but as in-
termediaries and mediators, is a central goal of disputants. Compelling the inter-
est and involvement of disinterested parties is therefore a major end in dispute
discourse. Not surprisingly. avoidance remains the most common means of man-
aging conflict.
Central to an understanding of discourse in Bhatgaon is a consideration of the
sociology of knowledge in the community. As in any society, both what people
talk about and how they talk about it are to some extent informed by what they
know, what they expect others to know, and what they and others should know.
However, just as local organization and social values were transformed during im-
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 213

migration, indenture, and postplantation life, expectations concerning the social

distribution of knowledge were also dramatically altered from those characteris-
tic of north Indian villages.
The radical leveling of Indian immigrant society in Fiji had obvious implica-
tions for the allocation of knowledge in Bhatgaon. While in north India the dif-
ferential distribution of knowledge had both reflected and sustained a system of
ranked but interdependent caste groups, in Fiji the groups were at best ill defined;
the division of labor in part responsible for the division of knowledge no longer
existed. Secular knowledge became, in effect, open to all.
In Bhatgaon, at least, there was a corresponding democratization of sacred
knowledge as well. The reformist arya samaj sect has as a central tenet the notion
of sikca ("instruction"). Members are expected to educate both themselves and
others in religious practice and understanding. The stated purpose of most types
of public communication, from hymns to religious speeches, is mental and spiri-
tual improvement (Brenneis 1978, 1983). Although reform Hindus are a minority
in Bhatgaon, their stress on instruction has had a considerable effect on orthodox
villagers.
The generally egalitarian nature of social life in Bhatgaon has a counterpart in
the relatively equal opportunity of all villagers to pursue knowledge, both sacred
and secular. .The sacred has become shared knowledge, no longer, in most cases,
the property of a particular group. It is important to note, however, that where
egalitarian ideals are stressed, continuing symbols of one's membership in a com-
munity of peers are necessary. One must not only feel membership but be able to
display it publicly. Apparent exclusion from the community is taken very seri-
ously, and knowledge continues to define one's social identity.
A crucial way of demonstrating one's membership is through sharing in what
is "common knowledge" in the community-what "everyone" knows. Sacred and
technical knowledge can be included in this, but it is relatively unchanging. The
real action lies in the dynamics of everyday life; familiarity with local events and
personalities is necessary. No one, however, knows everything, and some villagers
are considerably better acquainted with particular incidents than are others. This
differential participation in common knowledge lies at the root of talanoa in
Bhatgaon.
The general features of male speaking in Bhatgaon derive in large part from the
community's character as an acephalous, egalitarian one in which individuals are
concerned both with their own reputations and freedom of action and with main-
taining those of others, particularly of men with whom they are on good terms.
One's enemies present a more complex situation. Their reputations are tempting
targets, but too overt or successful an attack might lead to immediate revenge or
preclude future reconciliation, as the insult would be too grievous to remedy.
These broad features of life in Bhatgaon underlie a speech economy the salient
feature of which is indirection.3 One rarely says exactly what one means. Instead,
in a variety of public and private performance genres, speakers must resort to
214 Donald Brenneis

metaphor, irony, double entendre, and other subtle devices to signal that they
mean more than they have said. Such indirection is clearly a strategy for critical
junctures, for situations in which overt criticism or comment would be improvi-
dent or improper. Public occasions recurrently pose the same dilemma: one must
both act politically and avoid the appearance of such action. The perils of direct
confrontation and of direct leadership in the village have fostered oblique,
metaphoric, and highly allusive speech. Understanding political discourse in
Bhatgaon therefore requires both the interpretation of texts in themselves and the
unraveling of well-veiled intentions.
In such genres as parbacan ("religious speeches") oblique reference is particu-
larly marked. Parbacan are oratorical performances with ostensibly sacred content
given at weekly religious services. Their contents are not ambiguous in them-
selves; it is easy for the Hindi-speaking outsider familiar with Hinduism to follow
an analysis of, for example, the fidelity of Sita, the wife of the epic hero Ram. The
relationship between such a text and its intended function, however, remains quite
opaque. The audience knows that some speakers have no hidden agenda while
others are using parbacan for political ends.4 Such indirection both precludes re-
venge and pricks the curiosity of others, who feel they should understand what is
really going on. A successful parbacan compels the interest and involvement of
potential third parties.
Even in those events where relatively direct reference is necessary, such as pan-
chayats ("mediation sessions"), procedural rules severely limit what can be dis-
cussed. Panchayat testimony focuses on specific incidents rather than ranging
freely over the history of disputants' past relations (cf. Gibbs 1967; Nader 1969;
Cohn 1967); further, it is elicited through quite direct and topically restricted
questions. No decisions are reached in such mediation sessions. A coherent pub-
lic account of disputed events is produced through testimony; participants and
audience are left to draw their own conclusions about the implications of the ac-
count. Again, the effects of a concern for individual reputation and autonomy are
evident (Brenneis 1980).
A second important feature of men's talk in Bhatgaon is that the culturally as-
cribed purpose of most genres of public, generally accessible performance is sikca
("instruction"). Whatever intentions individual speakers might have, their texts
must focus on such topics as moral and spiritual improvement; their apparent
motives must be didactic. Such genres as parbacan work politically by joining sa-
cred teaching with covert secular interests. The political implications of mediation
sessions are more overt. They provide authoritative and licit public explana-
tions-though not evaluations-of particular incidents; villagers can refer to
these authoritative accounts in later discussions without fear of revenge.
Mediation sessions "teach" not so much through their content as through the
manner in which they are conducted-that is, in a neutral spirit and with proper
respect for individual sensibilities.
 Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 215

Private conversation (batcit), whether talanoa or not, is not limited by this con-
cern for instruction. Its topics may range from national politics to the weather, the
selection of a topic depending on the participants and their shared interests, not
on generic requirements. Most batcit is neutrally evaluated: conversation does not
offer the same scope for instruction as speechmaking, but it is rarely inherently
bad. One of the important features of talanoa is that it is clearly considered faku-
tiya ("worthless"). That talanoa is seen as worthless or wasteful reflects the vil-
lagers' evaluation of its content: nothing of value can be gained from such con-
versations. One can, nonetheless, learn a great deal from such talk, especially given
its potential dangers.
Talk is evaluated not solely in terms of topic. Artfulness, fluency, and wit are
highly prized along dimensions specific to each genre. Speechmakers, for exam-
ple, should display a good knowledge of standard Fiji Hindi, a large Sanskritic vo-
. cabulary, and a knack for apposite parables. While talanoa is considered worthless
in itself, men who excel in it are much appreciated. In distinction to other kinds
of batcit, talanoa is clearly a variety of verbal performance-it "involves on the
part of the performer an assumption of responsibility to an audience for the way
in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content"
(Bauman 1977:11; see also Hymes 1975). As shall be evident below, it is a some-
what singular kind of performance-focusing on stigmatized subjects, using a
low-prestige variety of Hindi. Nonetheless, it is an important type of verbal .art in
the village.
Genres of verbal activity in Bhatgaon are linked together not only in terms of
the expressive repertoire of the village but in an inferential web as well. Given the
indirect character of public communication, a crucial question is how one learns
the background information in terms of which these oblique references can be in-
terpreted. My own initial sense was that parbacan made sense because of what the
audience had learned or would learn through gossip, that talanoa would carry the
real communicative burden behind the scenes. However, a more detailed consid-
eration of talanoa has shown the process to be considerably more complex. How
one learns what is going on in the village remains very problematic.

'llilanoa as Tuxt
Most talanoa sessions take place in the early evening when the day's work is com-
pleted and village men sit with a few friends or kinsmen and drink yaqona, a bev-
erage made from the roots of the Piper methysticum tree and frequently referred
to as "grog." Yaqona drinking has long been a ceremonial focus in Fijian life; Fiji
Indian grog drinking is considerably less ritualized. The drink has relatively few
physiological effects and does not so much intoxicate as prov.ide a focus for re-
laxed and amiable conviviality. Grog is most frequently drunk inside the belo, a
thatched sitting house found on most village homesteads. Drinking may go on for
several hours, after which the men eat dinner and retire for the night.
216 Donald Brenneis

While women from the household might sit in the belo doorway and occasion-
ally join in conversation, grog drinking and talanoa are chiefly male activities. This
is not to say that women do not gossip, but their gossip occurs in different settings
and is not labeled talanoa. Only fairly close friends who may be kin as well par-
ticipate in talanoa sessions. The men drop by to drink and chat; rarely is a formal
invitation extended. Occasionally, someone comes with a particular purpose in
mind, but more frequently sociability is the goal. The gossiping group is in most
cases small, rarely exceeding four men; should an additional man join the group,
especially one who is not an intimate, the topic will most likely change. At a grog
party most of the talk is batcit ("general conversation"). From time to time speak-
ers will move to topics and styles associated with talanoa and then return to less-
marked discussion.
The linguistic code used in talanoa is frequently referred to as jangli bat ("jun-
gle talk"), a local variety of Fiji Hindi. Jangli bat is usually contrasted with shudh
Hindi ("sweet Hindi"), a dialect considerably closer to Hindi as spoken in India:
Shudh Hindi is the language of religious oratory and public events; it is the "ver-
nacular" used for early instruction in elementary school. Jangli bat is associated
with home, farm, and informal conversation. The two varieties are not clearcut al-
ternatives, however, but represent two ends of a continuum. The language of ta-
lanoa is considered to be the most jangli variety available, at the same time a
source of shame and of rural pride.
The generic boundaries of talanoa are somewhat fuzzy and include both topi-
cal and stylistic elements. Talanoa must be about the less-than-worthy doings of
absent others. In addition, a complex of stylistic features are linked with talanoa,
though they need not all be present for a conversation to be so classified. The texts
in the appendix of this paper represent a moderately marked piece of talanoa and
a considerably more striking one. Villagers use such terms as "light" or "deep" to
describe how extreme a particular conversation is; the second transcript is of a
very heavy conversation.
"Talanoa at Dharm Dutt's", while only a moderate example of talanoa, displays
many of the characteristics of talanoa-differences between it and "Talanoa at
Sham Narayan's" are primarily a matter of degree. The two speakers in the first
transcript are an elderly man (R) and his deceased younger brother's son (DD), a
close neighbor and a good friend. DD also participates in the conversation at
Sham Narayan's house. The others involved are HN and SN, brothers, sons of
DD's mother's sister, and very close friends of DD. I was also present at both ses-
sions, making the tape recordings which the transcripts in part represent.
The incident discussed at Dharm Dutt's house was a dispute about the amount
of money that villagers recently returned from seasonal work in New Zealand
should pay to the village road fund. Before leaving for New Zealand the men had
signed a promissory letter agreeing to give the village F$150 each for sponsorship
in the labor program. They did not make as much money as expected in New
Zealand, and most were reluctant to pay the full amount. Lal Dutt, the village rep-
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 217

resentative on the district advisory council and the instigator of the promissory
letter, refused to accept less than the promised amount. By the time DD and R
were discussing the issue, a number of attempts at resolving the disagreement had
been made, several catalyzed by Praya Ram, an older village man who is often con-
sidered to be a bada admi ("Big Man"). The first part of the transcript is a narra-
tive of several stages in the dispute, while the latter portion includes more evalu-
atory comments and suggestions for how the disagreement should be handled.
In the second transcript, HN, DD, and SN are discussing the remarkable events
of the night before at Praya Ram's house, where he lives with his wife and his mar-
ried son Vajra Deo and his wife and their children. The entire family had been
threshing and bagging rice for storage on the previous day, in the course of which
they got Praya Ram's blanket dirty. That evening a number of family members
drank locally produced rice whiskey, getting quite drunk in the process; Praya
Ram was not home and did not drink with them. Upon his return, however, he
found the house full of intoxicated people and his sleeping blanket still dirty from
the threshing. A series of altercations followed, during which Vajra Deo fled the
house with a rope, seriously threatening to hang himself. Praya Ram chased him
and some of the quickly gathered spectators with a knife. By the time a number of
neighbors had reached the house, everything was again quiet. The next day Praya
Ram called the police to come and interview his family. They came to the village,
talked with a few people, and left. Almost all of the second transcript consists of a
narrative of these events.
The most striking feature of these transcripts is how difficult it would be to re-
construct the underlying events on the basis of the talanoa texts themselves. To
some extent contextual cues help in making sense of what is said, but generally
participants in talanoa sessions must come to them with some understanding of
what is being discussed. Talanoa is in part referential-it is about something-but
it is a very opaque kind of referentiality.
One major feature contributing to this opacity is the lack of any orientation in
talanoa narratives (Labov and Waletzky 1967; Kernan and Sabsay 1982). One is
never told why a story is being told, and the links between the account and pre-
ceding discourse are never made clear. Instead, the talanoa performer leaps right in
medias res, frequently identifying his character obliquely, if at all. This feature con-
trasts markedly with most accounts of gossip in other communities, where the
identification of those being talked about is considered an essential, initial part of
any gossiped story (see, e.g., Haviland 1977:51; M. Goodwin 1982). While the usual
absence of orientation and identification suggests that talanoa does not meet the
generic standards for well-formed narratives generally found in the literature, it is
clear that these features are not necessary from the villagers' point of view. 5
A particularly marked feature of talanoa discourse is the remarkable frequency
with which the word bole (literally, the third-person singular present form of the
verb "to speak") appears.6 Further, bole rarely appears with a subject, a generally
unacceptable occurrence in even jangli Hindi. Bole ki ("says that") frequently oc-
218 Donald Brenneis

curs with a subject as a quotative frame in Awadhi, the Indian variety of Hindi
from which Fiji Hindi is most directly descended (R. Miranda 1982:personal com-
munication), but the particular form and frequency of bole in talanoa appears to
be a peculiarly Fiji Indian phenomenon. The confusions possible in this use of bole
are further compounded by the fact that it sometimes is used to mean something
_much like the English "I hear" or "They say:' and at other times is used to quote
unidentified speakers. In either situation the use of bole has the effect of distancing
the speaker from the subject about which he is speaking; it is not one's own account
but something which has been heard (see also M. Goodwin 1980; Volosinov 1971 ).
In the first transcript bole almost always occurs in contexts where reported
speech might be occurring. For example, DD says (1.8): tab Praya Ram bole ham-
log dusre aidia lagai bole dusre skim lagai aise nahi thik hei. The second bole has
Praya Ram as subject; its text (Dusre skim ... nahi thik hei) works both syntacti-
cally and semantically as a quote. In the second transcript, the deeper talanoa, a
solely quotative interpretation of bole is difficult to sustain. In HN's speech (2.9),
for example, there is no obvious subject. Further, while any single "quoted" phrase
following bole might reasonably be taken as reported speech, it is highly unlikely
that the entire string of phrases is intended as quotation.
Bole is not the only verb to lack a subject. Especially in the second transcript ac-
tions frequently appear without apparent actors. Subject deletion is not a feature
of ordinary jangli bat, and such passages as HN's first long turn (2.7) are syntac-
tically quite confusing. The confusion is heightened by a fairly free variation in
verb form between the simple past tense (injangli Hindi the third-person singu-
lar form ends in -is, as in kaderis, or "chased") and what strictly is the impolite im-
perative form (-ao or -io endings, as in lagao, or "fasten"), which is characteristic
of the plantation-pidginized Hindi spoken between laborers and European su-
pervisors. From their linguistic context it is clear that verbs with the latter endings
should be understood as past tense.
Although it is not evident in the transcripts, rapid and rhythmic delivery is
characteristic of talanoa. Bole plays an important role in this, as it divides the dis-
course into syntactic and rhythmic chunks. It frequently is stressed and length-
ened vis-a-vis the rest of the text, and these stress patterns give a pulsing feel to
the talanoa as a whole. Talanoa displays a number of other prosodic features as
well. Assonance and alliteration are quite marked, and exaggerated intonation
contours and volume variation frequently occur. The repetition or near repetition
of words and phrases are common, as are plays with word order. Reduplication
(garmi-garmi, "hot" or "angry"; 1.20) and partial reduplication (polis-ulis, "po-
lice"; 2.3) are common injangli Hindi but particularly marked in talanoa.
All of these features have a great deal to do with a larger structural feature of ta-
lanoa. Talanoa rarely has a single performer. While one man may do most of the
talking, usually at least one other will participate in the performance. One's audi-
tors are not limited to grunts of encouragement but are expected to contribute to
the construction of a narrative. Overlaps between speakers are fairly frequent in
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 219

talanoa in contrast to ordinary village discourse. Such overlaps lead not to con-
versational repair but to continuity between two speakers; they contribute to the
coproduction of talanoa narratives.'
The stylistic features described above are instrumental in the coordination of
the speakers' performances. Bole's rhythmic and segmenting effects are particu-
larly important as they mark potential entry points for the other speaker. An ex-
ample of this is in the second transcript, where HN joins in (Ha. Bole ... ) while
DD says "Kahe bole . .. "(2.16, 2.15). Such junctures allow for a continuing flow
of talk from speaker to speaker.
Most transitions between talanoa speakers do not involve overlap but are linked
through some stylistic feature. Direct repetition of the preceding speaker's words
is fairly common, as are word order plays between speakers (see, e.g., 2.4-2.7).
Speakers also frequently maintain the tempo and meter set by their predecessors.
Although there may be two or more performers. talanoa is one performance,
united in subject and style.
The degree to which there is such coperformance appears to be one of the di-
mensions along which heavy and light talanoa are distinguished. The first tran-
script is close to a one-man show; R's participation is, with a few exceptions, lim-
ited to supportive murmurs and questions intended to further D's account. All of
the stylistic features of talanoa are present but to a moderate extent. In the second
transcript HN initiates the talanoa in the midst of a more general conversation,
but DD quickly joins in as a coauthor. Features present in the first example are ex-
aggerated in the second.
There are no other genres of adult male discourse which display the stylistic
and organizational features of talanoa, nor are there any in which joint perfor-
mance occurs. Talanoa, however, is remarkably similar to children's arguments in
the village (Lein and Brenneis 1978). Children's arguments are characterized by
exaggerated prosodic features, self- and other-repetition of both texts and stylis-
tic strategies, the use of shared rhythmic framework, and considerable coordi-
nated overlap between speakers. The texts of arguments are considerably more di-
rect than those of talanoa, and the bole construction is not used. Apart from
particular similarities, talanoa and such arguments share a remarkable sense of
verbal playfulness. The manipulation of forms and the simultaneously competi-
tive and cooperative construction of a joint performance provide pleasure for par-
ticipants and audience alike. Adults do not argue like children do; in rare mo-
ments of direct confrontation between disputants playfulness is never evident.
What I suggest here is that communicative styles learned in one type of context in
childhood become part of one's repertoire; in later life these styles can be adapted
to new settings and uses.•

'Hdanoa as Activity
Gossip necessarily involves the gossipers in two simultaneous social relationships:
with each other and with the subjects of their talk. In this concluding section I ex-
220 Donald Brenneis

plore the relationships between the formal features of talanoa and these two so-
cial dimensions. In so doing I also suggest the very important nonreferential func-
tions which talanoa appears to serve.
Perhaps the central concern of gossipers about their subjects is that their com-
ments do not lead to irreparable damage; one gossips as frequently about friends
as enemies. One way of trying to prevent such difficulties is to limit gossiping to
trustworthy auditors. Even with care, however, information leaks are possible. The
relative opacity of talanoa texts and the systems of indirect reference sustained
through the bole construction help to make speakers less than fully culpable for
their commentary. It is not fortuitous that the use of bole developed in the rela-
tively amorphous social world of Fiji Indian villages: it provides an effective way
of distancing speakers from their speech, of allowing them denial as defense. Such
responsibility as speakers have is shared with their co-authors; joint performance
helps to shield gossipers from anger and possible revenge.
If the effects of talanoa style in relations with subjects are largely preventive, the
same stylistic features have a quite different role in regard to the gossipers them-
selves. First, the same indirection that helps to prevent revenge from others also
leaves open the options of one's listeners. The possibility of multiple interpreta-
tion helps to maintain the autonomy of participants: they are not forced to accept
a straightforward and unambiguous account. Second, the stylistic and organiza-
tional features of talanoa allow-indeed, almost compel-a kind of conversa-
tional duet. Rhythm, repetition, syntactic play, and the bole-defined chunking of
discourse not only invite coparticipation but enable a remarkable degree of styl-
istic convergence on the part of the speakers. As Gumperz (1982) has recently ar-
gued, divergences in conversational style can lead to the definition and mainte-
nance of social differentiation. Convergence can have the opposite effect,
emphasizing the shared qualities and social identities of the speakers.
It is clear that talanoa is about something; it concerns village events, people, and
standards for evaluation. Information is transmitted, even if individuals must
know a great deal already to make sense of what they hear. Gossiping is also an
event in itself, one in which relationships of solidarity and artful complicity are
each time reproduced anew.

Appendix
The following talanoa transcripts are intended for general readers rather than Indianists;
diacritical markings have been omitted. Numbers in parentheses indicate the length of
pauses in seconds; brackets indicate overlaps.

Transcript 1: Talanoa at Dharm Dutt's, 7 July 1980

1.1 R: HOYGAYA FAISALA?

Completed decision?
Has a decision been reached?
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 221

1.2 DD: NAHI NAHI KUCH NAHI.

No no at all no.
Not in the least.
(1)
1.3 R: KAL RAHA KI KAHIA RAHA?
Yesterday was or when was?
Was it yesterday or some other time?
(1)
1.4 DD: KAL TO PRAYA RAM SENICER TO BATAYA RAHA NE? HAMLOG
Yesterday so Praya Ram Saturday so said had no? We
Praya Ram said Saturday yesterday, didn't he? Our ...
KE.. (l) .. TUMHE BATAYA RAHA BATAYA RAHA MORDAYA ME.
of.(1) .. You said had said had cemetery in.
You said he said it would be in the cemetery.
1.5 R: HA, HA, HA.
Yes, yes, yes.
1.6 DD: HARDGAYA BOLE.
Changed says.
Says it was changed.
(4)
1.7 R: HARDGAYA?
Changed?
1.8 DD: TA BOLE HARDGAYA....
So says changed. ...
So says it was changed....
TAB PRAYA RAM BOLE HAMLOG DUSRE AID IA LAGAI BOLE DUSRE
So Praya Ram says we another idea propose says another
So Praya Ram says we'll propose another idea, says we'll propose
SKIM LAGAI AISE NAHI THIK HEI.
scheme propose this not good is.
another scheme; this one is no good.
1.9 R: HA.
Yes.
1.10 DD: BOLE BATAI DENA TUMHE NAHI AI NAHI HAMLOG HARDAI DEGA.
Says tell give you not come not we change will give.
Says to tell you not to come, that we will make a change.
1.ll R: 00.
Oh.
1.12 DD: TAB KAL HAM JANNO MAI.TAI- ... U STIRING KAMITI
Then yesterday I think Multi- ... that steering committee
Then, I think it was yesterday, the Multi-racial, no, the
MITING RAHA U RAJ KUBER KE GHAR PAR RAT ME.
meeting was that Raj Kuber of house at night in.
steering committee meeting was that night at Raj Kuber's.
222 Donald Brenneis

1.13 R: 00.
Oh.

1.14 DD: BOLE PATA NAHi KIYA NISCAY KARO. KO! BOLE
Says knowledge not which decision make. Someone says
Says he has no idea which decision was made. Someone said

BYASDEDIS.
Byas gave.

1.15 R: UM HUNH. KITNA?

Um hunh. How much?

1.16 DD: EK SAU PACAS.

One hundred and fifty.

1.17 R: PURA?
All?

1.18 DD: HA.

Yes.

1.19 R: KAMTI DETE TABO THIK RAHA.

Less give then fine was.
If he'd given less, it would have been fine.
1.20 DD: HA. TAB PHIR RAJ DHAN KE LADKA AI RAHA HAM JANNO KAPHI
Yes. Then again Raj Dhan of son come had I know plenty
Yes. Then again I've heard that Raj Dhan's son came and gave
GARMI-GARMI KARIS USE.
hot-hot did to him.
him a hot time about it.
1.21 R: HA.
Yes.
1.22 DD: BOLE TUM KAH! DEDIU?
Says you why given?
Says why had you given?
1.23 R: HA.
Yes.
1.24 DD: KAHi DEDIU BOLE HAM BATAYA RAHA NAHI DENE ....
EK DEDIS TO DEKH
Why given says I said had not give .... One gave so look
Why did you give? I said not to give ... One has given, now
PARI SAB KE LAGBAG ... (4) .. TO HARi PRATAP KALAYA
RAHA TO BOLE
must all similar.. (4) .. So Hari Pratap gone had so says
all must do so .. (4) .. So Hari Pratap went over there and says
RAJ DHAN WALLA TO NAHi DE MANGE.
Rai Dhan folks so not give want.
that Raj Dhan's family did not want to give.
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 223

1.25 R: HA.
Yes.

1.26 DD: BOLE KAMTI DIEGA. HAM BOLA KI JO GAYA RAHIN INKE
Says less will give. I said that who gone had he
Says I'll give less. I said that whoever had gone must.

CHAHIYE MITING BATORKE JANTA SE BATAU KI HAMLOGIN

must meeting called people from tell that we
having called a meeting, tell people that we

GAYA RAHA JARUR LEKIN PAISE UTNE NAHi MILA.

gone had certainly but money that much not available.
certainly went, but we did not make as much money as we hoped.

HAMLOG NAHi SAKIT HEI ETNA DIU EK SAU DE

We not able are that much give one hundred give
We cannot give that much. Some can give one

SAKIT HAI YA PACASSI DE SAKIT HOI NA? ... DUI CAR ADMI
able are or eighty-five give able are no? . .. Two four men
hundred, some eighty-five, okay? A few men

PAGALA HEI SAB PURA NAHi PAGALE HEI. HAM JANNO KOI TO
crazy are all totally not mad are. I know some so
are crazy but not everyone's that way. I know several who

BATAYA TO THIK HEI.

said so fine is.
said it would be fine.

1.27 R: NAHi KAMTI ME TO RAJI HOI JATE.

Not less in so agreement be goes.
If it's not less, people will be in agreement.
1.28 DD: HA.
Yes.

1.29 R: PACASSI DOLAR NE BHAIYE?

Eighty-five dollars no brother?
Eighty-five dollars would be all right, brother?

1.30 DD: HA. KUCH DE DETE NAHi?

Yes. Whoever bit give gives no?
Yes. Whoever gives a bit is giving, no?
1.31 R: SACHE BAT.
True words.

1.32 DD: PATA NAHi KAISE MAMALA HEI. ABHI KUCH PATA NAHi
Knowledge not what sort fight is. Now some idea not
I don't know what the trouble's all about. Now I don't know
LAGA KA FAISALA BAYE KAL. NOTIS TO MILA HEI
take if decision was yesterday. Notice so available is
if a decision was made yesterday. There's been notice, so
224 Donald Brenneis

INKE JALDI PAISE BHAR DIU JALDI SE JALDI.

to them quick money pay give quick from quick.
they should pay the money quite quickly.

1.33 R: SACHE BAT .. (2) .. LEKIN APAS ME BATWAI KE AUR KAMTI HOI
True words .. (2) .. But own on tell of other less is
True enough .. (2) .. But one told the other less than he was

SAKATA RAHA. KAMTI KAREK TO BOLET RAHA.

able was. Less having done so said had.
able. He did less than he said he had.

1.34 DD: HA. ULOG DUNO PAGALE HEIN. LAL DUTT TO GAON KE PAGALA
Yes. They two crazy are. Lal Dutt so village of crazy
Yes. Those two are madmen. Lal Dutt is the craziest one

HAI YE HEI USKE KOI TANG NAHI HEI KAISE KAREK CHAHIYE.
is is his at all idea not is how done must.
in the village and has no idea at all how things should be done.

AUR U JON HEI ULOG PAGALE HEI. LAL DUTT ULTA BAT
And he who is they crazy are. Lal Dutt backwards talk
And those other folks are mad! Lal Dutt has been talking
BATAWE TO ULOGIN KE CHAHIYE MITING BAI.AU. YA KOI KAMITI
spoke so they of must meeting call. Some committee
nonsense, so they must call a meeting. Some committee.
SANATAN DHARM KAMITI YA STIRING KAMITI UNKA BOLA! LIYE.
Sanatan Dharm committee or steering committee them call take.
whether the Sanatani or steering committee, call them.
TA KOI KAMITI BATAI DE KI AISE AISE BAT
Then some committee tell give that this way this way affair
Then they can tell some committee what the nature of the

HEI. YA RASTE KAMITI RUPAN PRADHAN HEI UNKE BAI.AU

is. Or road committee Rupan chair is him call
problem is. Or call the road committee-Rupan is the chair-

KI HAMLOG DE MANGE HEI JARUR AISE AISE

that we give want are certainly this way this way.
say we certainly want to give, that Lal Dutt made us
LAL DUTT SAIN KARAI RAHA AUR BATAYA RAHA KI TUMLOGIN
Lal Dutt sign cause had and said had that you
sign things this way, that he made us sign saying

SAIN KAR DIU JITNA DE DENA. TO SAKIT RAHA KUCH

sign make give how much give give. So can was somewhat
how much we would give. So it could be somewhat

SUDHAR HO NAHL I.EKIN ULOGIN KUCH NAHi KARE. IDHARSE

simple is not. But they at all not did. From here
simple, no? But they did nothing at all. Just running
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 225

UDHAR DORE HE JUTE-PHUTE. KOi ACHA TANG SE KAM NE

there run is lying, at all good idea from work not
around wildly, lying, doing nothing profitable.
KARE NAHi. TAB E TO ETNA GARBARI .. (1) .. RUPAN NE BATATE
did not. Then e so so much trouble .. (1) .. Rupan ne said
thoughtless. And from that so much grief.... Rupan could say.
Kl DEKHO AlSE AlSE BAT HEI HAMLOG MANGIT HEI
that look this way this way issue is we want are
look, this is how things are-we want to give
PAISE DEGA LEKlN PAlSA MANGE PURA BADA RASTA ME
money will give but money want all big road on
money but want to make sure it is all used for the main
LAGESAB.
placed all.
village road.

1.35 R: HA.
Yes.

1.36 DD: YA NAHI DETE WE ME DETE BOLTE SAB Kl HAMLOG PACAS PACAS.
Or not give it in give said all that we fifty fifty
Or if not giving as much as they agreed, at least to say
DEGA.
will give.
they'd give fifty dollars.
1.37 R: UM-HMH.
Um-hmh.
1.38 DD: TODA ADMI KE KAM ME AWA AUR HAMLOG JADA UNNATI
Few men of work in come and we great improvement
Help has come from only a few men's work; we haven't made
NAHI KAR PAWA. UTNA PAlSA KAMAI NAHI PAWA
not make able. That much money raise not able
a great improvement. We haven't raised much money.
KALI CHE SAT AT SAU. LAWA OMAN SE DUI SAU
only six seven eight hundred. Take it from two hundred
only six to eight hundred. Take two hundred dollars from
DOI.AR RASTAM DEDE TO HAMAR BHAKl KA. TAB KOi
dollar road give so our remaining of. Then some
that, give it to the road; we'll keep the rest. Then there'd
FAISAi.A HOI I.EKIN ILOGIN PATA NAHI KAlSE ULTA-PHULTA
decision is but they idea not how upside-down
be some decision, but they don't know what they're doing.
GARBARIYANI HEI IDHARSE UDHAR KARE HEI.
mixed-up is from here there do are.
just getting everything mixed-up.
226 Donald Brenneis

1.39 R: UM-HUNH .. (3) .. KHUSI UWGINKE .. (1) .. TANG SE BAT

Um-hunh .. (3) .. pleasure theirs .. (1) .. sense from issue
Um-hunh .. (3) .. It's their choice .. (1) .. It would be nice
KARTE TO THIK RAHE.
make so fine would be.
to make some sense out of all of this.
1.40 DD: ETNA MAMALA NAHI HOTI. .. .
This much trouble not have been. .. .
There need not have been all this trouble....

Transcript 2: Talanoa at Sham Narayan's, 3July1980

2.1 HN: TAU BAT .. (3) .. EE VAJRA DEO KAL CHATAK

So that issue .. (3) .. Ee Vajra Deo yesterday occasion
What about that? ... Ee Vajra Deo really made a great
KARDIYA RAHA.
created had.
stir yesterday.
2.2 DD: HAM SUNA UPAR SABERE WAHA TAK GAYARAHA.
I heard there in the morning there to went had.
I heard this morning they had gone as far as that place.
2.3 HN: AJ POLIS-ULIS
Today police
Today the police
AIN .... FASI LAGAI RAHA. BOLE DUNU PIET RAHIN.
came. ... Noose fastened had. Says both drinking were.
came.... He'd tied a noose. Says both were drinking.
BOLE PIET RAHIN ISE TODA JADA RAT HOGAYA RAHL
Says drinking were so a bit late night become had.
Says they were drinking. and so it became late at night.
2.4 DD: NAU BAJE LAGBAG HOINA?
Nine o clock approximately is no?
About nine o'clock. wasn't it?
2.5 HN: NAU BAJE LAGBAG.
Nine o'clock approximately.
About nine o'clock.
2.6 DD: DUNU KAT PIN.
Both totally drunk.
2.7 HN: BOLE DUNU PIN KAT BOLE BAS DONO LARAIN BOLE
Says both drunk fully says enough both fought says
Says both were quite drunk; says they fought with each other;
PRAYA RAM BOLE BHAG JAO KADERIS BOLE GAYE RASI LEKE
Praya Ram says away go chased says went rope taking
says Praya Ram says scram and chased them; they went taking
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 227

CHADKE JAMUN PED PE FASI LAGAO CHOTU BOLE SAB GHARAWE

went jamun tree on noose fastened. Chotu says all house in
a rope and tied a noose on the jamun tree. Chotu says all were
CHOTKANA JAI BOLE BAPA LOTIO JAB CHOTKANA
little fellow go says father returned when little fellow
at home, and the little guy says father is back; the little
GAI BOLE LEKE CHURI RAPETIS CHOTKANA TO BHAGA GHAR
went says taking knife chased little fellow so fled house
guy left; says he took a knife and chased the little guy so
E. CHOTKANA RAPETIS TO BHAGA CHAR E.
from. Little fellow chased so fled house from.
he fled the house. He chased the little guy so he fled.
U DARWAWAT RAHA. BAS SAB RONA PITNA BOLE EK
He terrified was. Enough all crying drinking says one
He was terrified. So everyone was crying, drinking. Says
TAR.AF SE CHILA! ROWAI KALI YAHA BIKARI GHAR LE ROYE
side from shout cry only there Bikari house at crying
from that side there was nothing but crying and shouting;
SUNAI.
was heard.
they heard it as far away as Bikari's.
2.8 DD: LONDE BOLE TIS JANNE HAMLOG GAWA.
Children says thirty people we went.
The children said more than thirty people went there.
2.9 HN: HA BAHUT BOLE TIS JANNE KOI GAYE TIS RAHA BOLE
Yes many says thirty people who went thirty were says
Yes, many people, says, says thirty, says thirty or
TIS BATIS JANNE KE BOLAT RAHA GAYE BOLE.
thirty thirty-two people of said had went says.
thirty-two people. he said, went there. says.
2.10 SN: BOLE GAYE HUAN KUCH PONC GAYEN KUCH DEVIDINLOG
Says gone had some arrived went some Devidin's folks
Says some had arrived as far as Devidin's house.
KE GHAR LE. KUCH NARA TALAK GAYE BIKARI KE GHAR KE
of house to. Some ditch to went Bikari of house of
Some got as far as the ditch, some only as
KOI DUI LADKE GAYE RAHA TALAK KALI. KUCH FIR LOTAIN.
some two boys gone had to only. Some again returned.
far as Bikari's house. Some went back home.
2.11 DD: BOLE HUWA JATJAT BATI KALAS BHUT GAYE. BOLE SAB
Says there going lanterns finished off went. Says all
Says that as they were going there the lights went out.
228 Donald Brenneis

SOYGAYA KALAS. PONCAT PONCAT.

gone to sleep finished. Arriving arriving.
Says all had gone to sleep. Just as they were arriving.
2.12 HN: HA. BOLE EKDUM GHAR ME SAKIT BOLE
Yes. Says immediately house at arrived says
Yes. Says that just as soon as they got to the house, says
VAJRA DEO NIKALGAYA. [BOLE PRAYA RAM POLIS ME GAYA RAHA
Vajra Deo. came out. Says Praya Ram police to gone had
Vajra Deo came out. Says Praya Ram had gone to the police
2.13 DD: BOLE POLIS. . . . HA, TO... .
says police. . . . Yes, then... .
2.14 HN: AYA RAHIN DIN ME BOLE ADMILOG SOCIN BOLE PRAYA RAM
Come had day in says men thought says Praya Ram
The police came today. Says people thought, says Praya Ram
NAHI RAHIT TO AUR JANNELOG SOCE RAHIN BOLE KI KAHE
not was so and people thought had says that told
wasn't there, and people thought, says, that he'd
ETNA GAON KE NI ETNA DOR KE GAYE RAHIN JANTA.
such village of in such run of gone had know.
never heard of sucq running around in a village.
2.15 DD: KON KON MAMALA RAHA? KAHEBOLE....
What what trouble was? Told says... .
What was it all about? I've heard... .
2.16 HN: HA. BOLE ILOG KE BOLE U KAR
Yes. Says they of says he done
Yes. Says of them, says he did
DIN ILOG DOR KI GAYIN TO DEKHIN PRAYA RAM APNE GAYA.
had they run of went so saw Praya Ram self went.
something. They fled running so he saw Praya Ram himself go.
2.17 DD: PRAYA RAM BATIS .... BOLE... .
Praya Ram said.... says... .
[
2.18 HN: BIKARI BOLET RAHA.
Bikari said had.
Bikari had said.

2.19 DD: BOLE BAHUT GUSSAN BOLAT RAHA TUMLOG CELLE JAO BOLE.
Says very angry said had you(pl) leave go says.
Says he said, very angrily, for them to leave at once.
BOLE FIR ROHIT RAHA PRAYA RAM BOLE KA KARI.... U
says again cried had Praya Ram says what doing. ... He
Says they cried again; Praya Ram says what are you doing?
BATAWAT RAHA BESWA GAYA RAHA BOLE LATCHMI UDHAR SE AWE
said had Beswa gone had says Latchmi there from came
He said Beswa had gone; says Latchmi had not come from
Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon 229

NAHi.
not.
over there.
2.20 HN: HA.
Yes.
2.21 DD: BOLE CELLE JAO NAHi TO CHURi-URI MAR DI BOLE EKDUM
Says leave go not then knife hit give says totally
Says leave at once or I'll hit you with my knife. Says
PAGALEN HEI NAHi?
crazy are not?
they're totally mad, aren't they?
2.22 HN: HA.
Yes.
2.23 DD: BOLE HAMWG NAHi MANA AUR AGHE GAWA TO PRAYA RAM
Says we not believe and forward went so Praya Ram
Says we didn't believe him and went on. So Praya Ram
NIKALA BOLE KAMAR KE PICE JAGARA BAYE. KAMARWALA
came out says blanket of after fight was. Blanket about
emerged, says the fight was about a blanket. The whole
BATRAHA.
issue was.
thing was over a blanket.
2.24 HN: HAMWG KE VISCAY KUCH NAHi MALUM. KALI I BAT BOLE
We of topic at all no idea. Only this issue says
We had no idea about that topic. All we knew was that
KI DHARU PIN ETNA... .
that whiskey drunk this much. .. .
they had drunk so much whiskey... .
2.25 DD: EE U DHAN RAKHAIN NAHi?
Ee they rice put away not?
Ee, they were storing threshed rice, right?
2.26 HN: HA.
Yes.
2.27 DD: KAMAR MAILAI GAYA RAHA HAM JANNO
Blanket dirtied gone had I know.
They got the blanket dirty in the process. I know.
2.28 HN: HA.
Yes.
2.29 DD: VAJRA DEO BATAYA RAHA DHOHI DENA KUN CIS KAR DENA
Vajra Deo said had wash give some thing do give
Vajra Deo had told them to wash it or do something with
PATEL KE RAHA. TO DHOHE NAHi TO ADHEK TAIM BAYE TO
Patel of was. So washed not so covering-up time was so
it. It was the boss's. So it wasn't washed and when it was
230 Donald Brenneis

HAM JANNO BAS.... BOLE KAHi NAHi DHOHIN TO CELLA

I know enough. ... Says why not washed so proceeded
time to go to bed that was all.... Says why didn't you wash
BAT.
issue.
it, and things got started.
2.30 HN: HAI, HAI, KOi VISCAY WAHi TO....
Yes, yes, some topic that so. .. .
Yes, yes, something like that... .
2.31 DD: EKDUM SARA BAT. LAD PADE BOLE DHARU PIS.
Totally shameful issue. To carry on says whiskey drunk.
What a shameful affair! To carry on like that while drunk!

Notes
Acknowledgments. Research in Bhatgaon was sponsored by Harvard University, N.l.M.H.,
the Haynes Foundation, N.E.H., and Pitzer College. I would like to thank Wynne Furth,
Fred Myers, Bette Clark, Ronald Macaulay, Elinor Ochs, Sandro Duranti, and Emanuel
Schegloff for their comments and suggestions concerning the transcripts discussed in the
paper. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Department of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley, and in the session on "Ethnographic Approaches to
Verbal Interaction Across Social and Cultural Contexts" at the 81st Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association. I would like to thank participants in these events
for their guidance. Michael Silverstein, Judith Irvine, Andrew Arno, Roger Abrahams, Dell
Hymes, Norman E. Whitten, Jr., and the anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist
also provided very helpful criticism and encouragement.

1. Talanoa is one of the relatively few loan words taken into Fiji Hindi from Fijian. In
Fijian it means general conversation rather than gossip per se. Its use in Fiji Hindi carries
some connotation of idle chatter, sustaining the Fiji Indian stereotype of Fijians as given to
pointless socializing. That it is a loan word suggests, as I explore in detail later, that this
form of discourse is a development in Fiji rather than an importation from India.
2. Fakutiya is a particularly rich term in Fiji Hindi; it implies silliness, worthlessness,
sloth, immorality, and eristic behavior generally.
3. Bhatgaon villagers themselves make a clear distinction between kara ("hard") or sita
("straight") talk and shudh ("sweet") talk which is parallel to my distinction between direct
and indirect discourse; only on certain infrequent occasions would the usual village man
speak "straight."
"Indirection'' as communicative style has yet to be defined in such a way that the con-
trolled crosscultural study of it can be carried out. Various strategies of indirection, how-
ever, are strikingly associated with egalitarian social relations (see, e.g., Atkinson 1984;
Rosaldo 1973; Strathern 1975; McKellin 1984; Myers and Brenneis 1984). Specific motives
for indirection remain quite variable. In the Pacific communities discussed in the articles
cited above, for example, indirection serves to preclude further conflict, while in the well-
known Black American speech strategy called "signifying" the intent may be "bringing
about future confrontation through indirection" (M. Goodwin 1982:800; see also Mitchell-
Kernan 1972).
Grog and Gossip in Bbatgaon 231

4. Speakers with political motives frequently cue their listeners to the possibility of sec-
ond meanings through the use of a range of keying devices, notable among them the "coy
reference;' the use of relative clauses with indefinite antecedents (discussed in detail in
Brenneis 1978).
5. Other genres in the village, for example katha ("sacred narratives") and dristant (reli-
gious exempla), come much closer to meeting the Labov and Waletzky (1967) criteria.
Talanoa differs not only from scholarly definitions of narrative but from other folk genres
within the village as well.
6. I am indebted to Ronald Macaulay for suggesting that given this salient characteristic,
talanoa be referred to as "shooting the bole:'
7. Conversational analysts such as Schegloff (1982) and C. Goodwin (1981) argue con-
vincingly that ordinary talk is a shared achievement, one in which participants attend con-
stantly to a range of formal ordering and cueing devices. Their argument arises from a pro-
grammatic position that conversation is a coordinated exchange between individual
speakers; from that point of view conversation is best seen as joint accomplishment. While
talanoa can be characterized in terms of such conversational organization, any focus on the
individual speaker would obscure one of its central features, that it is an instance of coper-
formance, rather than a merely cooperative one. Talanoa is an emergent performance, not
a formulaic one. Burns (1980) and Watson-Gegeo and Boggs (1977) discuss somewhat
similar examples of the coperformance of narratives.
8. This observation draws in part on Ochs's (1979) suggestion that linguistic forms char-
acteristic of speech during childhood remain in the repertoire of adults and are used in cer-
tain situations. Ochs is concerned primarily with morphosyntactic forms, while I focus on
discourse structure.

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12
Reflections on a Meeting:
Structure, Language, and the
Polity in a Small-Scale Society
FRED R. MYERS
Observation shows us, first, that every polis (or state) is a species of association,
and, secondly, that all associations are instituted for the purpose of attaining some
good-for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in
their view, a good. We may therefore hold that all associations aim at some good;
and we may also hold that the particular association which is the most sovereign of
all, and includes all the rest, will pursue this aim most, and thus be directed to the
most sovereign of all goods. This most sovereign and inclusive association is the
polis, as it is called, or the political association
-(Aristotle 1967:1252a)

In May 1981, a critical meeting took place at Papunya, an Aboriginal community

in Australia's Northern Territory. The participants included members of the
Aboriginal Village Council of Papunya and Pintupi Aborigines from the sur-
rounding outstation communities. These groups had disputed the use of a truck
that had been granted by the government to the outstations but funded legally
through the administrative mechanism of the Papunya Council (incorporated as
Lyappa Congress). Miffed by Papunya control of resources vital to their auton-
omy, the Pintupi, among themselves, had discussed intensively their desire to have
their funding separated from Papunya administration.
As the meeting to voice their problems began, with the requested attendance of
senior representatives of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Alice Springs, a
Papunya councillor asserted that there was no problem: "We're all one country,
one Council-eh?" This was precisely the disputed issue, of course, since the
Pintupi were at that moment attempting to establish themselves as a separate, au-
tonomous body. Yet, as if bound by the unspoken code of face-to-face encounter,
one of the previously outspoken Pintupi rose and enthusiastically seconded this
assertion. "Yes, one country, really:'
After watching a month's preparation for this meeting and conscious of the
message the DAA would conveniently take about Pintupi wishes to establish their

234
Reflections on a Meeting 235

own communities further west, for a moment I actually considered speaking up

myself. But I held my breath when another Pintupi assented, "One council:' My
heart pounded and Uooked around; it appeared the meeting would end without
any open airing of their grievances, although only an hour had passed since the
Pintupi had explained their wish for autonomy to these same DAA representa-
tives. With relief I heard, finally, one unusually persistent man assert undiplomat-
ically, "No. We want separate money, separate banking:'
After years of association with the Pintupi, I recognized that he had violated
common meeting practice. And I understood how, ironically, the Pintupi ability
to sustain their political autonomy and identity depends on adopting forms of so-
ciality somewhat alien to them.
Ethnocentric Europeans once characterized tribal societies as "group-oriented;'
but a later generation of researchers has been rather impressed with the value
placed on autonomy (cf. Briggs 1970; Lee 1979; Myers 1979; Rosaldo 1980). To be
sure, this is never a simple matter. For the Pintupi, personal autonomy lies in the
capacity to choose which social relations to sustain. Such relations are, it would
seem, fragile-the cost of freedom. On the other hand, personal autonomy de-
pends paradoxically on sustaining relations-shared identity-with others.
Herein lies the problem of the polity, and the internal contradiction of many so-
cieties. 1 The subjective dimension of this political problem was acutely grasped by
R6heim (1945) in his interpretation of central Australian Aboriginal cultures.
What he discusses in Freudian terms as the loss of a loved object and the desire to
complete oneself through incorporating it reflects the dilemma my Pintupi infor-
mants faced in gaining autonomy through relations to others.
This paper is a consideration of the significance of this dilemma, using as illus-
tration the speech events (Hymes 1972) known as "meetings" among Pintupi-
speaking Aborigines of Australia's Western Desert. While the lives of these for-
merly foraging people have changed dramatically in the past 30 years of contact
with Euro-Australian society, a particular Pintupi conception of the polity con-
tinues to inform the organizational work of speech at meetings. Attending to the
form and significance of this linguistic activity in Pintupi life illuminates some
vital features of their political culture. Viewing speech as a form of action not only
reveals the polity as a problematic achievement, but as a construction of quite spe-
cific form. At the same time, we are able to comprehend how language as a social
artifact can be vital to sustaining political structure in this small-scale society.
In analyzing the relationship between speech and sociopolitical context, then,
my emphasis is on the structural necessity of sustaining that context. I will show
that ( 1) meetings constitute the Pintupi polity as an organized framework within
which certain principles (rules or precedents) are held applicable and binding,
and that (2) the principle or value (Aristotle's "most sovereign of all goods") that
defines this jurisdiction is "relatedness"-a concept I define in reference to their
notion of"kin" (walytja). In other words, the Pintupi polity has an emergent char-
acter, marked by enormous flexibility yet apparent to the observer and partici-
236 Fred R. Myers

pants as it is constituted through activities of speaking. In such actions, the rela-

tionship of Pintupi political culture to subjective feeling and a sense of shared
identity is manifest.
This relationship between feeling and polity is not accidental. Such a temporary
polity as the Pintupi maintain, as with many small-scale societies, is constituted
by "feeling" in the sense that people residing together consider themselves to share
identity. Where individuals can easily opt out of particular collectivities, a flexi-
bility permitted by traditional Pintupi band organization (Myers 1982), accep-
tance of membership represents a participant's sentimental orientation.
That social and cultural analysis of linguistic acts might illuminate the active if
not obvious concerns of participants in political relations should not be surpris-
ing. Not only do our informants consider speech to be important, but recent
ethnographic studies indicate that speaking has structural significance in many
small-scale societies (Bloch 1975; Irvine 1979; Myers and Brenneis 1984; Paine
1981; Rosaldo 1973, 1980; Sansom 1980). In maintaining that certain forms of
speaking should be seen as definite forms of social action, I do not claim a single
universal significance for language or for any feature, as Bloch {1975) did for "for-
mality:' Rather, I hope to suggest how the significance2 of different formal features
of speech is defined by their relationship to the larger system of social relations in
which they take place.

The Polity
The question of how we might understand the political organization of small-
scale societies when, as is commonly the case, there are no obvious institutional
forms (kingships, chiefdoms, village councils, and so on), is well known to an-
thropologists. Nearly 50 years ago (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Evans-Pritchard and
Fortes 1940) the problem of acephaly was met by pointing to the way other insti-
tutions (kin groups, feuding, and so on) carry out "political function." Yet such
studies have rarely considered how the maintenance of a political arena itself-of
a polity, so to speak-might be the substance of political activity.
In Aboriginal Australia especially, the substance or value of the polity has been
obscured too often by an emphasis on geographically based local groups (cf.
Strehlow 1970:128-129). What I might characterize as the "building block
view"-no centralization of authority for a tribe but smaller geographical groups
centralized around a leader-ignores the concrete relations among those who are
temporarily coresiding, on which the daily enactment of the polity rests. In
Pintupi society, at least, the polity is not a permanent, concrete grouping organi-
zationally, nor is it the reflex of authority.
My attention to the relationship between speech and this sort of temporary
polity is based in part on observations of the limitation on the authority of col-
lective decision making in Pintupi meetings. Despite urging by white authorities
to do so, talk at Pintupi meetings does not press on toward a topic, relentlessly to
Reftections on a Meeting 237

solve a problem. At first this puzzled me as much as it frustrated well-intentioned

advisors interested in Pintupi self-determination. Gradually, I came to understand
the nature of talk at meetings differently. For Pintupi, the meeting must first sus-
tain the very occasion of its performance. This is so because there is no preexist-
ing, assured organizational framework of political action within which people
live, yet they are in need of each other. Thus, the force of their speaking is con-
cerned mainly to sustain relations among the participants under a rubric of being
related to each other-but always maintaining the identity as autonomous equals
that is so marked a feature in Pintupi life more generally. My argument is that
speech at meetings mediates between two dialectically related values that are cen-
tral to any political identity for Pintupi: relatedness and autonomy. The social
form oflanguage-minimally including speaker, hearer, messages, and the capac-
ity to be coordinated and shared-facilitates the process of mediation through
which the polity is continually renegotiated.
While the meetings are partly an artifact of the postcontact situation, I believe
that they nonetheless make clear a more general condition. As in many small-scale
societies, the Pintupi polity is a difficult and precarious achievement, not simply
to be taken for granted. For them, the nature of this sort of polity imposes con-
straints on meetings as speech events. The organizational work of speaking as a
form of social action, I will argue, is rooted in the precontact system of local or-
ganization that placed little emphasis on maintaining any residential community
through time.

Ethnographic Context
In asking what is accomplished in Pintupi meetings, my analysis concerns the re-
lationship between a form of speaking and the larger social context. The Pintupi
discussed here are Western Desert Aboriginal people, hunter-gatherers who came
to live in the area of Papunya, a settlement of some 600 Aboriginal people situated
150 miles west of Alice Springs, Northern Territory.' Many Pintupi reside in small
satellite communities called "outstations:' which surround Papunya at distances
of anywhere from 3 to 100 miles and depend on the larger settlement for most of
their goods and services. The residents of the area represent groups of differing
cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds, but government administrative
convenience and economy in the early contact period led to their settlement in a
single community. For many, contact began in the 1920s and 1930s, and from that
time the autonomous foraging way of life in small mobile bands became increas-
ingly abbreviated as people moved to missions and settlements. The Pintupi con-
tinued an independent way of life in their western homelands until the late 1950s
and early 1960s, when they joined the others in sedentary life in the large, perma-
nent settlement of Papunya. Here, much to the chagrin of those who administered
to Aboriginal welfare and envisioned the long-term goal of assimilation, the
Pintupi maintained a certain distinctiveness. But the frequent, regular pattern of
238 Fred R. Myers

movement-aggregation and dispersion-in relation to the seasonal and local

distribution of resources ended.
Life in contemporary Pintupi communities depends largely on regular social
service payments to the unemployed, widows, and pensioners and some limited
employment by the administration of the communities. While as much as 40 per-
cent of the meat consumed in outstation communities may be procured by hunt-
ing and foraging, cash is necessary for staple supplies of flour, tea, sugar, and to-
bacco, as well as for clothing and the gasoline needed for the vehicles now used in
foraging and visiting expeditions, and other desired items. As in the traditional
subsistence economy where sharing resources among coresidents of a band was
morally obligatory, those without direct access to cash are provided with food,
clothing, and the like through kinship ties to fellow residents.
In all contemporary communities in this desert area, the basic facilities of water
bores and tanks, most of the transport vehicles that assure basic supplies, housing,
health care, and other community facilities are provided and maintained through
a variety of government grants. Given that few Pintupi desire to return to a com-
plete foraging lifestyle, the existence of particular remote outstation communities
is largely determined by governmental agreement to provide services. These are
applied for, granted to, and administered by an institution that had no precedent
in precontact Pintupi life: the Village Council.
Initially administered by government representatives, after 1973 control of
Papunya passed into the hands of an elected Aboriginal Village Council that was
itself created by earlier government policies in the 1960s. In addition to repre-
senting local Aboriginal communities to the branches of the Australian govern-
ment, Village Councils were envisioned-by white Australians in any case-as the
authoritative and legislative representative of those communities. Such bodies
were expected to help preserve order and regulate community life, to decide on
how to deploy community resources, and to decide on employment.
The organizational situation in which Pintupi find themselves is not entirely
strange to them. Shared identity-through kinship ties, affinality, and cere-
mony-continues to represent the basis of their access to valued and necessary re-
sources. Thus, they have adapted to settlement conditions in ways familiar to
them, only lacking the geographical flexibility that underlies an individual's free-
dom to move away from difficult circumstances. In meetings, settlement people
work to sustain and reproduce the shared identity that culturally underwrites
their continued association.
Contemporary Pintupi political life must be defined at least partly by their in-
clusion in the Australian welfare state and the fact of European political hege-
mony. As a result, the Pintupi live now in larger and more permanent aggregations
than anything they had known before. The frequency (at least weekly) and size ( 10
to 20 participants) of gatherings as well as the relative social distance among par-
ticipants would not have been matched in foraging conditions, when residential
groups rarely exceeded 30-50 persons. Additionally, the meeting is to some extent
Reflections on a Meeting 239

the creation of Australian government policies that sought to establish responsi-

ble, self-governing Aboriginal community structures with which they could deal.
Encouraged by government support of self-determination, however, the limited
autonomy of the movement to remote outstations has allowed the reemergence of
local Aboriginal conceptions of political order. The fragile polities are the forms
of sociopolitical organization that are reasserting themselves in the contemporary
situation. Regardless of external form, meetings are a clear expression of Pintupi
values and understandings of the polity, which are often at odds with those being
imposed from outside.
The few occasions of meetings that occurred around the preparation of cere-
monial events-the very antithesis of European matters-were similar to patterns
I describe below. While the English term "meeting" is the marked form, it is not
insignificant that Pintupi currently refer to all collective gatherings using both the
loan word and the Pintupi unmarked form, wangkinpa, which means generally
"speaking." Indeed, the Pintupi sense of the difference between ''Aboriginal" and
"whitefellow" styles of speaking allows me to suggest that public speech events
have always borne a significant relationship to the negotiation and renegotiation
of the polity in Pintupi terms. Thus, the lack of political force of meetings in con-
temporary contexts does not only reflect the futility of collective Aboriginal polit-
ical action in the face of Euro-Australian control of critical resources. While this
may be the case, such a view dismisses the critical weight that Pintupi place on
balancing autonomy and relatedness in all forms of collective identification.

The Phenomenology of Relatedness

In the Pintupi view, the category of"meeting" includes any significant group dis-
cussion with an agenda or a common concern. Gatherings to discuss plans for ini-
tiation or other ritual matters, inquests relating to death, and the like are all de-
scribed as meetings. Many of the meetings I observed took place in the context of
the Village Councils. That meetings of this sort are largely male activities may have
resulted in an impression of male dominance, but such a view reflects the very dif-
ficulty at hand: it simply assumes that the deliberations of such bodies have au-
thority over women (cf. Bell and Ditton 1980). That they have authority at all is
problematic. Indeed, little attention has actually been given to what these meet-
ings accomplish or to the substance of"politics:'•
To understand the significance of meetings-the work they do-we must begin
to place them within the social relations of their use. The tension between "relat-
edness" and "differentiation" (as expressed in conflict and violence) defines the
central dilemma for Pintupi life and is the field in which meetings are to be un-
derstood. This dialectic is not mystifying. The terms are my own labels for a struc-
tural opposition rooted in Pintupi concepts. Elsewhere, I have explicated the im-
portance of what I here call "relatedness" (Myers 1979, 1986) in terms of the way
Pintupi ideas of shared identity, compassion for others, grief, and so on, are for-
240 Fred R. Myers

mulated around the concept walytja. That this term can be translated in some
contexts as "kin" or "relative" and in others as the possessive "one's own" or the re-
flexive ''oneself" shows its general application to the problems of relational iden-
tity. What is clear is that sustaining the impression of relatedness to coresidents
constitutes a real and basic quality of Pintupi social life. So great is the emphasis
on open sociality that it comes to dominate the ability of any group to define it-
self as a bounded entity.'
However, "differentiation"-its opposite-is also a fact of life, in the form of
conflict and violence (pika, fight or argument), as well as the willingness to stand
up against threat. Pintupi descriptions of the past as "like army all the time" and
their fear of attack by revenge parties under cover of night are indications of this
potential. Conflict and intimidation are regular occurrences in Pintupi commu-
nities as individuals try to influence each other. Despite the value on shared iden-
tity, fighting prowess is highly valued and both men and women are proud of their
abilities. But these are not warrior people. Fighting is not so much an attempt at
dominance as an assertion of autonomy. In this sense, conflict and relatedness de-
fine each other structurally as values: it is the possibility of conflict or differentia-
tion that gives relatedness its special value. Ultimately, they are two different tra-
jectories of autonomy. Thus, fighting and threat are commonly understood as
responses to the rejection of relatedness.
The Pintupi meeting is one transformation of this dialectic between relatedness
and differentiation. It is necessary to understand, however, that in Pintupi social
life relatedness is the ontologically primary value, and that differentiation is expe-
rienced as a breach. Much Pintupi public speaking is constitutive of this funda-
mental image of society. For example, Pintupi avoid the appearance of egotism,
self-assertion, or private willfulness (all considered shameful) and accept identity
with others as part of the self.6 This identity is represented subjectively by the cul-
tural formulation of emotions such as "shame" (kunta), "compassion" (ngaltu),
and "homesickness" (watjilpa) that tie the self to others (Myers 1979). The Pintupi
emphasis on relatedness itself, as opposed to kinds of relationships, is fore-
grounded by the unimportance of distinctions in the kinship system. For the
Pintupi, the fact of being a "relative" (walytja) is more important than what par-
ticular kin status one has. Since all relatives must "help" (a loan word from
English) each other, there is no simple way to establish priorities.
Furthermore, a wide extension of relatedness is an important component of
Pintupi life, illustrated in an extended classificatory kinship system, subsections
and in numerous named, ceremonially constituted relationships. A tendency to
assimilate categorically distant but well-known kin to categories reflecting close
(that is, "one countryman") relations also exhibits Pintupi willingness to extend
the substance of relatedness. As a person grows older, the field of relatives in-
creases in breadth and complexity. From them come the valuables of Pintupi life,
including food, spouses, rights in ceremony, protection, and so one. One's rela-
tives are likely to be found in all geographical directions and, though each is re-
Reflections on a Meeting 241

lated to ego, they may not be related to each other. This quality of the social field
is a source of strain. One cannot ignore ties with some neighbors to concentrate
on just a few relations, because those neglected may prove necessary in the long
term. Yet, choosing among them to allocate one's attention is, at times, difficult to
avoid.
Being a relative requires regularly demonstrating the relationship. Creating and
maintaining relatedness necessitates interaction, reciprocity, and exchange, yet
this is not always possible. A man who kills a kangaroo must decide which people
will receive a share. Frequent neglect is regarded as a rejection of relatedness-of
kinship-and leads those who fail to get a share to complain about "not being
loved:'1 Those who give nothing are "hard" (purli, stone), that is, without feeling.
The problem of managing relatedness is apparent in the lives of older men who
talk about how to delay ceremonial obligations to one set of people while satisfy-
ing another. While men of prominence are skillful in managing complex relations
over time, one cannot ever satisfy all expectations. Conflict, division, or differen-
tiation are inevitable, although people work to reduce the instability, to suppress
distinctiveness, by making choices less insulting (or less obvious) to others. This
often occurs in discussions of landownership when speakers typically include
those present with them at the time as "co-owners."
Finally, the traditional system of local organization did not offer much struc-
tural basis to sustain divisions in any enduring fashion. The larger regional sys-
tem-by which I mean the relationships that exist between different localities of
the total area-was and is still built out of egocentric or dyadic links among indi-
viduals. Pintupi local organization was characterized by a flexibility of movement,
maximizing access to resources in the desert through a system of multiple claims
by individuals to association with several different landholding groups (Myers
1982, 1986). Local groups-both landowning groups and residential ones-are
crystallized out of dyadic categories of relatedness that have been established
among a territorially broad range of people. The system of openness and flexibil-
ity continues to operate, although in changed circumstances, in modern settle-
ments where Pintupi still draw on wide-ranging ties to sustain residential alterna-
tives. Aggregations, or collective formations, are outcomes of ongoing social
processes. Conditions of life in the Western Desert, then and now, give value to
shared identity as a means for obtaining other people's labor, support, and tem-
porary resources. People need each other's help, and the most extraordinary fact
is how the rubric of relatedness is usually restored after conflict. It is important to
realize that this Western Desert focus on extensive dyadic relatedness among in-
dividuals in a region differs from forms of territorial organization found else-
where in Aboriginal Australia that identify individuals first with a discrete group
and integrate these into a larger system. For the Pintupi, an individual's social
identity is not subsumed by any particular aggregation.
It is well known that rituals such as male initiation prescriptively bring together
people of geographically separated social areas. One of the principal consequences
242 Fred R. Myers

of such events has been the reproduction of relatedness as a component of the re-
gional system, but this is not just any sort of relationship. That these cere-
monies--dearly the most important in Western Desert life-are organized on the
principle of alternate generation moieties is critical in my view. These genera-
tional categories transcend local group affiliation, giving such segments no place
in the regional structure. Thus, participation on the basis of a social identity for-
mulated through generational moieties emphasizes what might be called overall
relatedness. In emphasizing this principle as basic, Pintupi social structure differs
from that of other regional organizations in Australia, a point to which I will re-
turn below.•

The Problem of Meetings

The ceremonial forms discussed broadly above address the perennial dilemmas of
differentiation posed for many foraging people by life in dispersed, localized
groups. Meetings, however, tend to deal more with idiosyncratic threats to relat-
edness among those whose lives impinge on each other; such threats have become
especially frequent in postcontact life.
The subjective, moral dimensions of relatedness are a notable element of
speech in meetings. Initially, this appears to administrators and anthropologists
only as a problem, a limitation on the legislative effectiveness of meetings. As re-
ported for other small-scale societies as well (Bell and Ditton 1980; Brenneis 1984;
Frake 1963; Lederman 1984; Meggitt 1962; Rosaldo 1973; Weiner 1976), Pintupi
meetings rarely resulted in decisions or plans for concerted action.• However, the
outcome ceases to be a "problem" when these events are placed in broader per-
spective. Rather, three issues seem fundamental regarding the relationship of these
events to the rest of Pintupi social life. First, to whom are its actions relevant?
Second, in what way are they relevant? Third, do its actions (decisions, delibera-
tions) have a status hierarchically superior to other forms of social action (that is,
as rule to application)?
The establishment of Aboriginal councils by government policy envisaged a
model of authority that related this assembly to a community in terms of repre-
sentation, in Euro-Australian terms. These assemblies were expected to act for the
community in representing Aboriginal opinion to whites and in making policy
and regulations binding on members. Pintupi perceptions differed. No matter
how much respect members of the Council might enjoy as individuals, their de-
cisions were usually seen as without authority when they attempted to impose
new regulations on community residents. One man's objection to the creation of
a no-liquor rule by the Council particularly illuminates the issue: "It's only their
idea:' he insisted; "They [the Councillors] are just men like me." Viewed as en-
croachments on the autonomy of others, such attempts are treated as egoistic, co-
ercive, and self-willed by Pintupi; one should be ashamed. When the Council did
seek to impose sanctions, claims on their sympathy on grounds of relatedness in-
Reflections on a Meeting 243

evitably caused them to relent. Thus, a decision to banish two irresponsible youths
from a settlement in 1974 was rescinded when the young men asked to be trusted,
to be given another chance, and drew attention to their status as relatives.
The frequency with which such events occurred raised questions for me about
the social construction of "law" itself, of rules to which action must conform.
Where egalitarian relations prevail, how is legitimacy-authoritative social con-
sensus-to be established for new rules?

The Dreaming and the Meeting

In fabricating authority, the problem the Pintupi face more generally is how to re-
move the constructions of men from their identification with subjectivity, per-
sonal will, interest, and responsibility (Munn 1970; Myers 1979, 1980a, 1980b).
For example, the normative foundation of Pintu pi life has been traditionally guar-
anteed through a mythological construction known as The Dreaming: those crit-
ical events external to human action-retold in myth, song, and ritual-that cre-
ated the present-day world of landscape, natural species, and social institutions.
This cosmogony presented certain social practices and principles as ontologically
basic to cosmic order (cf. Stanner 1956). They were not human creations and
therefore represented no encroachment by an equal other on one's autonomy.
Further, they were incumbent on everyone.
By rendering the concept, alternatively, as "The Law;' Pintupi direct attention to
the moral imperative bound in these structures: as things were done in The
Dreaming, so they should be done in the present. To objectify contemporary
human decisions into guiding principles requires representing them as religious
revelation, not just consensus among a group of men. While this kind of objecti-
fication may constitute authority, there are limitations to what such a polity can
do (cf. Meggitt 1962:253). However, the point is that the Pintupi polity is con-
cerned as much with preserving autonomy (with reference to authority outside
the self) as it is with legislating.
It is revealing, therefore, that the process embodied by the Pintupi strategy in
meetings so clearly resembles the moral movement of The Dreaming. A speaker
presents his own position as representing that of an external, authoritative source.
Hence, a man who was reluctant about a proposed move to a new settlement re-
ferred to the opposition that had been expressed by officers of the Department of
Aboriginal Affairs, and thus did not deny relatedness by committing himself
against the sense of a gathering. Similarly, it was common for Pintupi Council
members to present their decisions as ideas coming from the white Australian(s)
employed as Community Advisor(s) and thus to abjure responsibility for them.
Though Advisors served at the Council's behest and were without authority,
Council members used them as convenient representatives for an authority that
stood outside the Pintupi social world.'° These forms of political maneuvering
take place in a contemporary context. However, the use of an authority external
244 Fred R. Myers

to the self in order to deny subjectivity, personal will, and responsibility is an in-
digenous practice applied to new circumstances. While meetings are obviously a
different domain from The Dreaming, as cultural constructions they accomplish
similar goals.

Speech Style
The political strategy of Pintupi meetings is demonstrated and informed by a
dose analysis of the salient style of speech. Several features are particularly no-
ticeable in speeches at meetings: ( 1) opening with oratorical self-deprecations,
such as "I'm going to tell you a little story, nothing really"; (2) depersonalization
of an account, as in presenting one's own position as coming from outside; (3) in-
directness in discussing the substance of conflict; and (4) noncontradiction of
others. These are more than idiomatic because to violate these canons is thought
to "set up" fights.
Participation in these speech events is marked by a concern with "shame" and
with those sentiments constitutive of relatedness. Commonly, "shame" (kunta) is
understood as a consequence of being exposed in a failure to recognize one's re-
latedness and thus malleability to others; such action lacks the "compassion"
(ngaltu) expected of relatives who share identity. Not only are direct refusal and
open contradiction of another shameful, but so also are other forms of self-im-
portance, willfulness, and lack of control. Maintaining respect (that is, avoiding
kunta), on the other hand, dictates the stylistic removal of individual assertiveness
from public speech. The same effacement is often developed further by a deper-
sonalizing obliqueness and indirectness of discourse, so that the substance of con-
flict is disguised. 11 Even when two successive speeches in a meeting are directly op-
posing, therefore, the speakers usually do not refer to each other.
Although speech in meetings follows more explicit turn-taking rules than in or-
dinary conversation, interruption is still frequent, as it is in most forms of Pintupi
talk (Liberman 1981:114). Liberman describes the turn-taking procedures, of ser-
ial turns instead of"you-me" pairs addressed to each other, as contributing to the
"anonymization" of the product. Understood as joint production rather than as-
sertive interruption, such procedures lead to an outcome that is not associated with
anyone in particular. Pintupi men contrasted their usual meeting practice with the
special organization of a meeting that they described as "whitefellow way:' The lat-
ter style implies a single speaker at a time and "listening without talking:' 12
The characteristic Pintupi orientation of presenting the events of this world as
conforming to an already objectivized, external authority or "law" (as with The
Dreaming) is reflected here in meeting speech. The organization of discourse has
the effect of creating a sense of a meeting as a set of discrete bits from which
speakers' egotism, will, and responsibility are detached. It is as if the outcome-
the consensus no one opposes--is "found" rather than created, and the group re-
flexively derives from it. No one's autonomy is diminished. An awareness of this
Reftections on a Meeting 245

reflexive property of meetings and of"consensus" in constituting a polity as much

as in formulating a policy is very much part of Pintupi culture. 13
Within these constraints, meetings are delicate achievements, consisting of
movements between "centralization" and "peripheralization:' Meetings tend to
move back and forth between a predominance of unfocused side conversations
and the achievement of a central focus (Irvine 1979). A meeting attempts to con-
struct a central focus-one of topic and/or personnel. When it breaks down, the
event is characterized by a lot of side-talking. It becomes conversation. Certain
talented speakers are successful and gain prestige from bringing meetings to
fruition, sustaining a focus within a framework of "anonymization:'
The substance of Pintupi strategies is clarified in the way meetings, typically,
appeared to end in assent. A speaker catches the drift of the main sentiments and
phrases them for the whole group present. Strangely, however, while this "phras-
ing" of the sentiment seems to be a climax or turning point in the event, nothing
may come of it. What, then, does it accomplish?

Meetings and the Problem of Relatedness

Examples of this kind of performance-in addition to that in the introduction-
clarify the question of what is accomplished. Together, they suggest that the meet-
ing does not stand for but is the polity for Western Desert Aborigines. Therefore,
meetings designed for the airing of conflict are, by definition, unlikely to achieve
that end, since they conflict with the Pintupi notion of polity as relatedness.
The encounters between the Pintupi and the Papunya Council are instructive.
The Pintupi lived mostly on outstations around Papunya, but still on land that be-
longed to the traditional Aboriginal residents of Papunya, who controlled the
Council. Although the outstations were granted their own money by the govern-
ment, it was administered through the Papunya Council, and they had disagreed
with the latter about who could be hired by the outstations. The Pintupi spoke
among themselves of their desire to separate from Papunya. When joint discus-
sions took place between the Pintupi and people from Papunya-even under the
rubric of disagreement-Papunya spokesmen emphasized how they help their
relatives in the outstations. This sort of help or exchange, in the Pintupi view,
makes people "one countrymen" (ngurra kutjungurrara) or "from one camp"-
the primary category of relatedness. Thus, Papunya people implied, they should
be all one Council.
An emphasis on the unity of Papunya and the outstations was characteristic of
joint meetings. Usually, as such a meeting progressed, Pintupi men who had once
spoken privately for separation and autonomy stood and assented to the view that
they were all "from one country, one Council;' and therefore did not desire a split
(as my introductory example illustrates). To do otherwise would be to deny the
shared identity and mutuality of being related, and these are the only bases on
which coresidence and continued association (or meeting) could take place. In
246 Fred R. Myers

other words, a significant constraint on any meeting that takes place is the asser-
tion of relatedness or identity that underlies social interaction. The recognition of
this frame is what makes meetings "collaborations for the production of conge-
niality" (as Liberman [1981] called them). The emphasis is on producing or sus-
taining a sense of shared identity, or of having "one word" (Sansom 1980). When
consensus in actuality cannot be reached, it is not disagreement that is publicly
announced. Those who are capable of bridging dissension in difficult situations,
usually men of real oratorical skills, are highly valued and sought out.
As the central domain in which consensus can occur, the very process of the
meeting is the polity and defines it, however momentarily. Because it exists only
as long as people view themselves as related, the polity is not a structure, an out-
side referent that is simply to be taken for granted and not an enduring accom-
plishment. Severe opposition and debate would deny the very basis on which res-
olution could take place at all. Recognizing this, the Pintupi would rather not have
a meeting until some of the opposition has diminished. To do otherwise is an in-
vitation to violence, what they call "setting up" a fight.
Having a meeting is itself a social achievement. It is a recognition of some com-
mon level of sociality, and because that fact dominates it, the appearance of dis-
agreement is uncomfortable, a contradiction. In this sort of egalitarian structure,
the actors must work to sustain the context of"relatedness" that underlies the pos-
sibility of continued interaction. Debate and confrontations that threaten the con-
text are suppressed.
This is not simply my reading of it, but that of participants as well. For exam-
ple, amid a controversy during an initiation in Papunya, a white Australian who
worked for the outstations had attempted to set up a separate meeting for outsta-
tion people to decide about using their truck independently from Papunya influ-
ence. Unable, in that context as guests, to enact distinctiveness, the outstation peo-
ple had ignored him. When members of the Papunya Council spoke against him,
he was upset that no one openly defended him. Afterwards, however, several
Pintupi eiplained that there was nothing to worry about because the Papunya
people could not fire him: it was "only talk:' Pintupi silence was not assent to crit-
icism or willingness to dismiss him; rather, their silence sustained the continued
association with fapunya that was still necessary and desirable. Agreement recog-
nizes one's relatedness to those present but does not compromise autonomy out-
side the context.
The following example illustrates how important the appearance of agreement
is to participants. In addition to showing how a speaker's position varies with the
context in which he acts, it demonstrates the way in which individual speakers
focus the event. (This case followed on the strain in relations between the Pintupi
and other Aboriginal groups in Papunya and was, despite appearances, a step to-
ward moving back west to their own country in the Kintore Range.) Upon decid-
ing they were going to move to a new, autonomous outstation, the Pintupi re-
quested help from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. At the resulting meeting
Reftections on a Meeting 247

to discuss their plans, the DAA representatives told the Pintupi men not to hope
for much financial support from the government and stressed the difficulties of a
move. Most of the men had already been talking of moving, yet as the meeting
progressed, one of those previously most vocal about the need for a move stood
to tell the meeting that they did not want to move west. "We have to stay here." His
remarks were clearly addressed to the source of power at the meeting, the white
"bosses:' and he was phrasing what he took to be the inevitable conclusion of the
meeting. Just five minutes later, he spoke to me in a fashion that indicated he still
planned to move. Nonetheless, he had undoubtedly enjoyed his moment in the
limelight.
For the Pintupi, relatedness is not constituted by the meetings alone. In this
sense they may differ from some other "egalitarian societies:' Among the Ilongot
(Rosaldo 1973, 1980), for example, speaking is all that sustains the overarching
rubric of a polity that might be described as the context of interaction (Myers and
Brenneis 1984). For the Pintupi not everything is negotiable. Not only does The
Dreaming as moral imperative provide an objectified, inescapable context for
some actions, but also on the basis of the classificatory kinship system, we should
regard relatedness as ontologically preexisting; threats to its continuation are
overcome through meetings. As indicated by the substance and increasing fre-
quency of meetings, it appears that their significance may be intensified with the
problems brought in by contact with Euro-Australian society.

Participation and Its Consequences

The meetings do not seem to result in a plan of action that is binding on those
who are not present. Rather, the events play a significant role in sustaining relat-
edness as the context in which a limited polity can exist. If the force of speaking
often seems more concerned with sustaining the occasion itself, then taking part
in this production is of some consequence.
Who can perform is a vital element in the significance of these events.
Demonstrating the right to be heard seems very close to what participants in
meetings perceive as important. They often seem less concerned with a particular
outcome than they are with taking part in its production. Such demonstrations
are the real protection of their status. Common features of speech at meetings-
the repetition of what has already been said and the concern to be the one who
phrases shared sentiments-make sense in this light. Not surprisingly for a soci-
ety with egalitarian tendencies, there is little power to coerce others. People are
more concerned with the recognition of their autonomy as the right to be con-
sulted and the expectation of being heard. As with drama, understanding what
meetings do depends as much on recognizing who is on stage and who is off as it
does on following the lines themselves.
Almost all the meetings that occurred within sight of the main camp were dom-
inated by men. 14 Not only women, but also young men rarely spoke in public and
248 Fred R. Myers

little attention was paid to those who tried. Fearing "shame;' they were reluctant to
put themselves forward. Indeed, their performance was inhibited not only because
the young were much less adept at the stylistic flourish characteristic of the best
speaking done by their elders, 15 but also because they were less certain that they
knew enough about the ritual life to speak about matters that might impinge there.
Obviously, the systems of age and gender differentiation work together here.
One important result of the restriction on who can speak is in symbolic action:
it produces, in every event, a tangible representation of the social order as con-
sisting of those who speak and those who listen. This image identifies initiated
older men with knowledge and sociality.
While men do not make decisions binding on women, participation in meet-
ings does affect sexual politics because of the value meetings have for everyone.
The management of relations among men has consequences for Pintupi social life
that derive from men's critical position in the tension between relatedness and dif-
ferentiation. In the Western Desert, male-centered initiatory ritual is the idiom of
most of the regional activity through which the broadest relatedness is consti-
tuted.16 Generally, adult men have a greater number of relationships established
through ceremony with other individuals from afar than women have.''. They are
also more concerned in daily life with the sustaining of "distant" relations. The
problem of how to allocate "value" (in terms of sacred objects and ceremony) is
especially significant for older men and precariously managed. That the serious
violence and threats that follow on differentiation (or mismanaged choice) are ul-
timately men's business is clear when danger is afoot. When a group is under
threat of violence-or when a woman feels threatened-people congregate and
travel with male kin for protection. 1•
This is the context that gives value to the activity of meetings. In these meet-
ings, adult men produce determinations sensitive to the parties present, sustain-
ing a rubric of relatedness that maintains they are members of a single group, or
(as they say) "from one camp:' Because of what these relations entail for everyone,
social value accrues to those who perform in this context, according prominence
to those who may speak without giving them a power to coerce. The meeting is
political not as a form of coercion as much as for the part it plays in reproducing
the structures that make domination possible-the differentiation of older and
younger men and the existence of men as a corporate body.

Negotiation and the Polity

The limitation of the jurisdiction of a meeting and the precariousness of its
achievement in terms of decision and regulation are obvious. At best, consensus is
the account of those present; it must be sensitive and responsive to the entrance of
new persons into the social field. However, the widespread quality of relatedness
and the mutuality of rights make it difficult within any aggregation to consult all
those who have an interest and a claim in a formulation. How is it possible to es-
tablish a determination that does not unalterably differentiate some people?
Reflections on a Meeting 249

Indeed, their emphasis on sustaining the sense of relatedness has consequences

for all Pintupi social activity. A sense of looseness, negotiatedness, or temporari-
ness was what was prominent in Pintupi social action. 1• Rules and norms-so
amply and prominently present not only in Meggitt's (1962) description of the
neighboring Warlpiri but also in my own brief visits among them-were rarely
stated by Pintupi. Although norms obviously exist for Pintupi, the problem is pre-
cisely in what sense they do. In the mundane course of fieldwork, I quite fre-
quently had the opportunity to experience the characteristic Pintupi consultation
with those whose interests or rights might be affected by a decision. Once, for ex-
ample, my "father;' N., planned to sing some songs for me to tape and analyze. He
assured me emphatically that it was all right to do so. "Women can hear them;' he
said. Then he turned to an older man and asked him, "Is it okay?"
The issue of recording the songs depended on whether they were secret and
who owned them, but these matters do not seem to have an accepted interpreta-
tion even among the Pintupi themselves (although, because of my involvement,
this case is not unambiguous on that score). N., a man of ritual standing who
knows the Law, was not merely asking for permission or information from an
elder. Rather, in making public his intention and displaying awareness of another
man's rights, he recognized that what is appropriate or acceptable to people may
change (cf. Williams 1985).
The need to consult those whose interests are at stake is a major constraint on
Pintupi action and explains why many forms of activity follow such an extreme
path of negotiation. One could never be certain who might extend' a claim to be
included. Pintupi typically avoid the unnecessary differentiation of others as un-
related or, as they say, "nothing to do" (mungutja). The recognition that one's
rights are rarely exclusive of those of other people makes consultation an essential
part of life. This is especially true when one needs, equally, the recognition of oth-
ers to sustain claims of one's own. Further, the threat of violence by one whose
claim might otherwise be regarded as weak-as with a marriage bestowal-could
lead to acceptance.
The concerns of relatedness and consultation place a substantial limitation on
the Pintupi polity. This is particularly true in regard to achieving an authoritative
consensus, as one can grasp in discussions concerning land and ritual. If decisions
are taken without those who have a right to be consulted, violence or sorcery are
possible. The issue of relatedness informs the strategy of participants in recent
meetings to establish legal ownership of Aboriginal land or to plan distribution of
royalties from its use. Men may absent themselves from discussions about land in
order to avoid the pressure for consensus and to show who really is "boss." Others
hesitate to talk without them. Conversely, some use the value on congeniality by
coming to meetings drunk and, without shame, pushing their own position while
sober parties are reluctant to contradict (J. Stead, personal communication).
The maintenance of relatedness over such a broad field has its effect on the
Pintupi polity. As compared with the clan.-organized Yulngu (the "Murngin") of
250 Fred R. Myers

northeast Arnhem Land who have well-organized moots (Williams 1973), the
Pintupi polity has no clearly defined social center in which authority resides. It is
never quite certain who should be included in considering a problem, who be-
lieves he or she has a right to be consulted. An important Western Desert custom
reported by informants may illustrate the problem of jurisdiction: when a person
is accused of serious sacrilege, a "firestick" (tjangi) is sent from group to group to
inform men of the region about the "trouble" and to gain legitimacy from the rel-
evant polity for the sanctions appropriate as Law. What is significant is the dif-
fuseness of the authoritative body, the breadth of those considered to have a right
to be consulted.
Even for the Pintupi, though, everything is not always and forever up for grabs
in that there are some objectified norms around which negotiation occurs. Much
of Pintupi social life-in ritual transmission to the young-is directed toward the
social reproduction of these hierarchical orderings that counteract negotiability.
Punishment of one who transgresses a major Dreaming law is not open to con-
sideration; claims of relatedness with the victim and compassion are counter-
vailed by an external authority that commands greater moral claim. It is more
common, perhaps, for the stable center of unquestioned principles to be sustained
indirectly, entailed by negotiation. Because the achievement of consensus in meet-
ings is, I have argued, a search for objectified forms, the consensus reproduces
these previously objectified forms as effective and viable (cf. Giddens 1979:71).
For Pintupi, relatedness is egocentric and unsubordinated to group member-
ship; its network quality makes it essentially dyadic in form. The polity, a tempo-
rary jurisdiction among those who regard themselves as related and subordinated
to a binding set of principles, is not predicated on membership in groups, has no
offices and no enduring structure. That it is based on the creation and mainte-
nance of dyadic relations gives a special quality of intimacy, fragility, and subjec-
tive responsibility to interaction among autonomous equals. For the Pintupi, es-
pecially, the polity is one of "feeling;' in that the jurisdiction of relatedness-of
shared identity-must constantly be renegotiated among those who participate.
Hence, the principle held sovereign within this jurisdiction is relatedness. That
any action must conform to this value reproduces it but limits, at the same time,
its enduring accomplishments.

The Cultural Subject and the Polity: The General Case

Far from being distinctively Pintupi, the value on relatedness is reported in many
descriptions of Aboriginal social life (and elsewhere in the world). What differs is
the field to which this value may apply and the way in which it can be employed
by participants, that is, the way this value is situated in a larger structure. In the
Western Desert there is an enormous value placed on relatedness in terms of a
whole region, not structured as the integration oflower level units. Indeed, so im-
portant is overall relatedness that the local units at the lower levels of the system
Re:llections on a Meeting 251

are not clearly bounded. Whereas other Aboriginal groups have more definitively
formed and bounded social units, Pintupi stress the relation of all to all: they "are
all family:' Without a basis on which one can legitimately refuse or exclude an-
other, the questions of who are and who are not "relatives" (walytja) are always
problematic and never taken for granted. Thus, avoidance of overt differentiations
and an attempt to sustain the rubric of overall relatedness are essential to deter-
minations such as meetings. These sociological conditions seem to underlie the
stylistic features and the general awareness of negotiation that we have seen to
characterize speech in such circumstances.
One must not lose sight of the specific qualities of the Pintupi case. That other
small-scale polities are less fragile is highly revealing. It would be absurd to sug-
gest that the problem of relatedness and autonomy is equally the political focus in
all these societies. The possibility of autonomy, for instance, would seem to be
limited by the relations of production in which an individual is located. But these
are not only the subjective entailments of certain material forms of organization
in a vulgar sense; it is the total structure of social relations that gives differing
value to relatedness and autonomy. Thus, the relative flamboyance and more
clearly delineated structures of leadership in Arnhem Land on the tropical north
coast are the consequences of a system of social reproduction that does not em-
phasize the sustaining of overall relatedness as the Pintupi do. In Arnhem Land
relatedness is, so to speak, structurally circumscribed. That the fragility and inti-
macy of a system built out of dyadic ties is not even general throughout
Aboriginal Australia has important implications for ascribing subtle differences in
cultural emphasis to structural variation in foraging societies.
This has further consequences. Despite anthropological platitudes about
Aboriginal people "philosophizing" about kinship, I found the Pintupi relatively
disinclined to reflect on their social system as an abstracted object, in contrast to
the Warlpiri. Instead, Pintupi comments and reluctance emphasized the negotiated
quality of social life and their sense of it as always under construction. They focus
on what individuals do and the experiences to which their concepts are relevant.
However, the concern to maintain relatedness by considering the claims of oth-
ers need not be as central for other Aboriginal societies as it is for the Pintupi. And
where individuals are aggregated into enduring groups first and through these
into a larger system, there are predictable subjective consequences. Such is mani-
festly the case for the polity among the well-known Yulngu of northeast Arnhem
Land (see Warner 1937; Shapiro 1969; Morphy 1977; van der Leeden 1975;
Williams 1973). Here the region is integrated, politically and ecologically, through
alliances between structured patrilineal clans ordered into a system of named pat-
rimoieties. Such groups have an objective status of a given reality beyond the
choice of participants: they are objectifications. The dependence of the structures
of alliance on arranged marriage leads to a concern with temporal continuity,
with the reproduction of these relationships through time, as evidenced in elabo-
rate mortuary ceremonies, clan differentiation, and inherited leadership. Thus,
252 Fred R. Myers

meetings and determinations are often held within the jurisdiction of the clan
alone (Williams 1985). Within these meetings, the maintenance of "one word"
among participants is important, but the boundaries of participation are clearly
drawn (the clan) and particular individuals who represent the group appear to
control the event. Who is and is not included within this jurisdiction is far less ne-
gotiable: a determination need not satisfy outsiders. One's relationship to others
outside the clan is mediated by membership in it. In Arnhem Land, then, a wider,
regional system exists, but this system of relatedness is achieved through a rather
different means of reintegrating accepted distinctions. At one level of the polity, at
least, a secure objectified base exists. Participants seek to reproduce this basis for
action; the strategy is different from recreating it anew.
In contrast, the Pintupi system is predicated on the denial of repeated and de-
fined particular political relationships, in favor of overall, diffuse regional inte-
gration. Consequently, in the Western Desert social attention to temporal conti-
nuity in terms of mortuary, clan structure, or even the reproduction of alliances,
is insubstantial. The social concern with an individual's marriage, so vital to al-
liances in the north, is far less pronounced in Pintupi life.
What is critical, then, is the level of social organization on which a value (like
relatedness) or an event (a meeting) appears. The fact that overall relatedness is the
structure that is reproduced through time among the Pintupi, rather than the
structuring of difference and alliance as it is in Arnhem Land, is responsible for
very different emphases on the part human beings can play in creating, altering,
or affecting the things of this world. Because relatedness is not constrained within
a higher level of structure in Pintupi society, it has no limits of application. Thus,
negotiation is never fully concluded and decisive choices rarely made. Only The
Dreaming remains as a control, a structure beyond individuals and binding them
to itself, but it is, correspondingly, felt more intensely as an imperative here than
anywhere else. It is not accidental that Western Desert people are known through-
out Australia for their conservatism and the strength of their adherence to the
Law. In Arnhem Land, on the other hand, individuals appear more constrained by
membership in a group and political alliances of the past, but are freer in the in-
vention of song, dance, and innovation. Individuals build names for themselves,
amass a wealth in bestowals, and constitute alliances that last for generations. This
difference is, of course, precisely the consequence foretold in Simmel's ( 1950) dis-
cussion of dyadic relationships in contrast to those submerged in groups: because
of their fragility, the freedom to choose the relationship decreases the freedom to
act. That these variations exist and seem to be systematic argues that we must at-
tend to kinds of structural differences in the polity of small-scale societies that we
have not conceptualized well heretofore.

Conclusion
In analyzing the organizational work of speech at Pintupi meetings, I have tried
to place speaking as a form of action within a larger theory of social value. This is,
Reflections on a Meeting 253

then, something of a structural sociolinguistics, concerned with the way forms of

speaking come to acquire meaning for participants. In the Pintupi case, the meet-
ing is dominated by the requirements of immediacy. I have argued that talk at
Pintupi meetings is concerned mainly to sustain relations among the participants
under a rubric of being related to each other but also as autonomous equals.
Without an overarching and preexisting organizational framework of political ac-
tion, such talk must continually define its own context. In a sense, it constitutes its
own referent. Recognizing the value and meaning of this form of social action is
simply to recognize that the structural content of any activity must be understood
in terms of its relationship to the total system of relations. Thus, without placing
action within a larger totality, we cannot foretell what it is that participants are
treating concretely in their activity, linguistic or otherwise.
In linking event and structure, the analysis has more general theoretical impli-
cations. The conditions of the Pintupi meeting are embedded in a larger political
economy that shares some features with other tribal societies, particularly the
segmentary quality in which there is no genuine jurisdiction between segments.
Yet the structural differences between the Pintupi regional system and others have
important consequences, giving special importance to the meeting and, ironi-
cally, limiting its capacity for legislative accomplishment. In some of these soci-
eties (cf. Strehlow 1970, Williams 1973 ), if there is no overarching authority at the
societal level, it clearly exists at a lower segmental level and has been identified
with concrete groupings. What is informative about the Pintupi case is that the
organization of society at the higher level (region) affects the relations of the
polity existing at lower (infrastructural) levels and is mediated by speech. Here,
where access to resources in a region is organized primarily through extensive
dyadic ties, the very relations among those of a locality are affected, made flexible
but more problematic. Without other levels of structure that can be relied upon,
the Pintupi polity, more than most, is what I characterize as a polity of "feeling,"
and the meeting is a vehicle of communion, not so much representing a social
grouping as constituting it. I would suggest that the organizational work I ascribe
to Pintupi meetings has correlates among other small-scale societies, but that the
level of social integration sustained by this kind of linguistic action might differ
in those cases.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, by drawing our attention to the special
problem of constituting and sustaining a political arena, the analysis of these
meetings provides us with a basis for comparison. This case foregrounds what
other societies have achieved in creating a polity and how they have done so: the
particular structures have their own dynamics and their own limitations. It is not
only important that we continue to build our comparative models of political
process before they "disappear:' however. In seeing the persistence of indigenous
forms in contact, I hope to have shown how anthropological knowledge can help
ameliorate some dilemmas in the struggle for self-determination faced by the
people with whom we work.
254 Fred R. Myers

Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank the following people for their useful comments and
criticism of earlier drafts of this paper: Jane Atkinson, T. 0. Beidelman, Don Brenneis, Bette
Clark, Faye Ginsburg, Annette Weiner, and anonymous reviewers. They are not responsible
for difficulties that remain in the analysis here. Finally, my most profound gratitude goes to
the many Pintupi who have treated me with kindness, love, and patience. An earlier version
of the paper was given as part of the symposium "Papers presented in Honor of Mervyn
Meggitt: Ethnography and Theory;' held at the 1982 Meetings of the American
Anthropological Association. Research with the Pintupi-at Yayayi, Northern Territory
(1973-75), at Yayayi and Yinyilingki (1979), and at New Bore and Papunya, Northern
Territory (1980-81)-was supported by NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant
No. GS 37122, NIMH Fellowship No. 3FOIMH57275--01, and research grants from the
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. The ethnographic present is 1981.

1. I use the word "polity" in this paper to distinguish my object of consideration both from
the Homo politicus of political process as formulated in Swartz, Turner, and Tuden ( 1967) and
from the easily identifiable formal political institutions. By leaning toward this less positivist
construct, I hope to avoid as well the notion that small-scale societies are prepolitical.
2. I conceive the term "significance" to include the notion of"value;' thereby avoiding a
division between meaning and action that would contradict the basic thrust of my analy-
sis. Part of an act's meaning or significance is the value it acquires.
3. See Myers 1976, 1986.
4. A similar concern has developed in the work of Sansom (1980), Williams (1973,
1985), and Liberman (1981).
5. For readers unfamiliar with Aboriginal ethnography, the sort of relatedness I describe
below is specific to the Western Desert and takes on different forms in other Aboriginal so-
cieties. I discuss these differences at the end of the paper.
6. This is why I have emphasized "identity" in my writing and appears to be corrobo-
rated by Liberman (1981).
7. I quote here an English usage from one dispute. There are important similarities here
with the !Kung San (Lee 1979; Marshall 1961) and the Trobriand Islands (Weiner 1976).
8. That moiety organization could be analyzed as the transformation, on a higher level,
of basic principles of the structure was suggested by reading Turner (1979).
9. In central Australia, Bell and Ditton argue that contemporary male councils have a
"wider ranging jurisdiction than any body [traditionally] enjoys in Aboriginal society" and
that a "council of male elders did not constitute the only decision-making mechanism in
Aboriginal society and probably did not exist in any formal sense in the past" (1980:13).
These comments suggest the limits on the jurisdiction of any such gathering.
10. Reay (1970) presents interesting parallels in the use of outsiders at Borroloola.
11. For a discussion of "indirection" in speech as a general strategy for coordination
around a common goal, see Myers and Brenneis (1984:14-16).
12. Rosaldo (1973, 1980) discusses a similar contrast, in "traditional" and
"Christianized" speech styles, for the Ilongot.
13. Attempting to come to terms with the process by which a group's "word" defines it
as a social unit, Sansom (1980) calls its result a "determination:' Williams (1985) calls it a
"standing account."
Reflections on a Meeting 255

14. In the past (1973-81), Pintupi women tended to regard meetings as "men's busi-
ness;' and rarely spoke even when they did attend. At Kintore in 1982, however, a few
women were Council members and women spoke at meetings on subjects that were ofCon-
cern to them (Bette Clark, personal communication). Still, men continue to run the meet-
ings. The place of these events as part of contemporary sexual politics involves two issues.
One concerns a shift in the balance of power between the sexes in contemporary life: where
Councils control resources, men's meetings may intrude on women's autonomy more than
they once did. The second issue concerns the differing integrative scope of men's and
women's activities in the Western Desert.
15. These include in-law avoidance registers and ceremonial euphemisms.
16. This is not to deny power to Pintupi women or to deny their own experience of au-
tonomy. Women's "business" is their own and it is valuable. Nor is it simply to associate
women with "kinship" as against "society" or "politics." Recent accounts show that women's
ritual is addressed to varieties of social disharmony, thereby securing the social system at
certain levels of relationship (Bell 1980; Hamilton 1984). It is necessary, however, to see the
activities of males and females within a total system, acting at different levels or dialecti-
cally to limit each other.
17. These are characterized by restraint in behavior, including the use of special speech
registers.
18. These patterns continue to be important. Women tend to associate their activity with
the "single women's camp" consisting of their close kin. Men, on the other hand, are likely
to congregate in larger groups that transcend this differentiation and in which the forms of
speech stress the "relatedness" of all present.
19. See Sansom (1980) for a similar description of Aboriginal fringe camps in Darwin.
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69-85. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
256 Fred R. Myers

Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In Directions in
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Irvine, Judith. 1979. Formality and Informality in Communicative Events. American
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Lederman, Rena. 1984. Who Speaks Here? Formality and the Politics of Gender in Mendi,
Highland Papua New Guinea. In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in the Pacific.
D. Brenneis and F. Myers, eds. pp. 85-107. New York: New York University Press.
Lee, Richard B. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. New
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!Kung Bushmen. Africa 31:231-249.
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- - - . 1979. Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order Among
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Reflections on a Meeting 257

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13
When Tulk Isn't Cheap:
Language and
Political Economy
JUDITH T. IRVINE

Perhaps one of the most durable legacies of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics
is its radical separation of the denotational sign (qua sign) from the material world.
This conception of the sign has endured not just because of the effectiveness of
Saussure's own formulation, but probably also because it was consonant with ideas
already having a long history in the Western intellectual tradition-most particu-
larly, the separation of mind from body. 1 It was also consonant with emerging views
in American anthropology and linguistics at the time. The Boasian concern for the
independence of linguistic form from race and culture (given the technological
emphasis common in conceptions of culture in the early years of this century) sim-
ilarly led many scholars to promote the autonomy of linguistics as a discipline and
to turn their attention away from the political and economic conditions of speech.
Although the Boasians and their descendants included major figures and schools
who focused on relationships between language and culture, they did so largely by
defining culture in terms of knowledge and ideas. The obverse side of this tradition
is represented by those anthropologists and other scholars who, in studying a ma-
terial and political economy, ignored or played down the study of language, and
sometimes even saw themselves as aligned against the "idealists" or "culturalists"
who drew on linguistic models and verbal data.
Recent years, however, have seen some uneasiness with this dichotomy, and
some attempts at rapprochement. Within linguistics, the consideration oflanguage
use and context has reached out to the material and historical conditions of lin-
guistic performance. Thus, for example, linguists like William Labov portray
speech as varying according to speakers' socioeconomic class and other affiliations
relating to economic and political interest. The implication is that the class conno-
tations of variants influence the direction of change in the linguistic system. From
a more sociological point of view, we see in some quarters a new or renewed con-
cern with ideology, including its linguistic articulation, in the control of material
production and distribution (for example, Rossi-Landi 1983). Still, in these views,

258
When 'Ill1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 259

however much the world of ideas and the world of goods may influence each other,
language remains firmly locked in the former-the world of ideas. Linguistic signs
stand for aspects of the marketplace; they influence it but are not of it.
Language has more roles to play in a political economy than these. And, prob-
lematic though the term "political economy" may be in some respects,2 it may
offer clues as to what those roles are. To recognize that the study of economy must
include institutions, practices, and values, as well as goods-and that the values
and interests governing much of its operation necessarily involve political
processes and relations, not just the autonomous flow of markets-is to begin to
move beyond the dichotomy that excludes linguistic phenomena from the eco-
nomic realm. The allocation of resources, the coordination of production, and the
distribution of goods and services, seen (as they must be) in political perspective,
involve linguistic forms and verbal practices in many ways-as this paper will
demonstrate.
The other side of the problem, and the one more central to my discussion, lies
in our conception of language. In linguistic anthropology a fruitful approach
began with the work of the anthropologically oriented sociolinguists Hymes and
Gumperz, with their attention to speaking as a socially and culturally constructed
activity. This school's significance for the problem of language's relationship with
political economy might not be obvious from a cursory glance at some of its early
texts, since the early years of the "ethnography of speaking" sometimes tended to
focus on cognitive questions (for example, the concept of communicative compe-
tence) and to emphasize ideas about speaking as part of a larger, cultural system
of ideas, rather more than the verbal acts themselves. But while these initial em-
phases were not inconsistent with the relegation of linguistics to an "idealist"
camp, the shift toward a concern with speaking as a social activity opened the way
to a more productive conception of relations among language, culture, and soci-
ety-and, from there, the way beyond the materialist/idealist dichotomy. 3
The present paper builds upon that base. It also draws upon recent conceptions
of a semiotics inspired as much by Peirce as by Saussure (see Mertz and Parmentier
1985; Silverstein 1980, 1984), for we need to conceive oflinguistic phenomena, and
the functions of the linguistic sign, more broadly than in the usual structuralist
rea4ings of Saussure if we are to move beyond the materialist/idealist conundrum.
As I have suggested above, we also need conceptions of economy and of value that
are comprehensive enough to include linguistic resources and verbal activities.
Toward that end, in this paper I consider a case where linguistic objects and per-
formances are exchanged for cash and goods-a case where language's involve-
ment in an economy is perhaps most direct. This is a type of economic function of
linguistic phenomena that, I believe, deserves an attention it has not had. It is, how-
ever, only one type of relationship between language and economy, and to be prop-
erly understood it needs to be compared with others.
Part I of this paper, therefore, lays that groundwork: it summarizes and com-
pares some views of the relations between linguistic phenomena and economy
260 Judith T. Irvine

(best thought of as political economy). I shall lay out a range of possibilities as to

what those relations can be. Part II will explore a more specific topic: a compara-
tive economy of compliments. Ethnographic illustrations in the paper derive
largely from my own fieldwork in West Africa (Senegal). As Part II emphasizes,
among other things the Senegalese case presents compliments that are paid for in
cash-an example of linguistic phenomena as objects of economic exchange.
A major purpose of these discussions is to show that the roles language and
speech can play in a political economy are not mutually exclusive. Even though
some of these "roles" correspond to views already articulated in the linguistic and
sociological literature, views that are sometimes seen as competing, what they ac-
tually represent are coexisting functions of language. Rather than rival theories or
separate sets of ethnographic cases, they concern different dimensions oflanguage
use. Because of language's semiotic complexity (its multiple levels of patterning,
and the multifunctional nature of the linguistic sign), there are multiple possibil-
ities for its relationship with a material world. All the types oflinkage between lin-
guistic phenomena and political economy mentioned in Part I could be found co-
existing in the same community-even in the same verbal performances, as we
shall see in Part II.
In outlining language's many relationships with the material world, my object
is not to claim it for a "materialist" camp, or to attack the materialist/idealist di-
chotomy merely by inverting it. Indeed, I argue that cultural systems of ideas are
crucial to an understanding of language's full range of roles in a political econ-
omy. Language is a complex social fact that can be looked at from many angles,
including the economic. It is only by appreciating language's complexity that we
can transcend the conundrum.

I. 'fypes of Linkage Between Linguistic Phenomena

and Political Economy
The linkages compared here can be distinguished in several ways: according to
what sign-function they emphasize (denotational reference, indexicality, and so
on); according to what kind of linguistic and social diversity they encompass; and
according to how they connect language with the social division of labor-as its
instrument, as its index, or as part of its substance. That is, does linguistic diver-
sity impede social cooperation? Does the variety of verbal behaviors merely index
social groups, divisions, or roles formed on mainly nonverbal bases, or is the va -
riety of verbal performance a precondition for (and thus a defining characteristic
of) the social division of labor itself-as the practices constituting a social role, or
as the objects of economic activity?
As I suggested earlier, the notion that signs may have an economic and politi-
cal dimension is hardly new. Nor are most of the extant statements on the subject
inherently faulty. They are, however, incomplete. Some reduce language to only
one of its functions, for example referential propositionality. • Some describe an
When Th1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 261

indexical relationship but give little account of it. And most omit a consideration
of linguistic phenomena as possible objects of exchange-exchanged against what
we consider to be material objects, not only against other linguistic signs.

Propositionality: Signs Denote Objects and Adivities in the Material World

The first kind of relation between language and economy is the most familiar one:
linguistic signs denote objects, the natural world, and economic skills and activi-
ties. They label persons and groups; and they refer to, and make predications
about, the forces of production and the coordination of efforts. Because signs
refer to the external world, a society's productive efforts can be organized and a
division of labor becomes possible.
In discussing this referential function of language and its communicative im-
plications, however, many writers both in linguistics and in the social sciences
have done more than merely elaborate on these statements. Instead, some have as-
sumed that referential communication is the only function of language, and that
language must be uniform in order for referential communication to work. They
assume, therefore, that a social division of labor depends on linguistic homo-
geneity, or at least is facilitated by it. Bloomfield wrote, for example:

In the ideal case, within a group of people who speak to each other, each person has at
his disposal the strength and skill of every person in the group. The more these persons
differ as to special skills, the wider a range of power does each one person control. Only
one person needs to be a good climber, since he can get fruit for all the rest; only one
needs to be a good fisherman, since he can supply the others with fish. The division of
labor, and, with it, the whole working of human society, is due to language (1933:24, ital-
ics in the original).'

Notice that this discussion of the "ideal" case envisions a diversity of skills in the
socioeconomic realm but not in the linguistic: "Obviously the value of language
[for social cooperation) depends upon people's using it in the same way"
(1933:29). Homogeneity in linguistic usage is assumed necessary to ensure refer-
ential communication. Utterances refer to economic skills, to their realization in
acts and events, and to their coordination. Thus Bloomfield's conception of lan-
guage's role in a social division of labor rests entirely on the referential function.
It would be unjust to Bloomfield to suggest that he never acknowledged the ex-
istence of diversity in linguistic skills or performances within a speech commu-
nity. Indeed, he paid more attention to this than did many other scholars of his
day and later (see Hymes 1967). But the rubrics under which he considered di-
versity-as material to eliminate from his science of language, or as relevant only
to historical processes such as "intimate borrowing"-are inimical to any serious
sociolinguistic view. For the most part he saw linguistic diversity as incidental to
social and regional boundaries, or as contingent upon them. The product of"lines
of weakness" in communication, diversity (for him) interferes with shared refer-
262 Judith T. Irvine

ence, and thus with economic cooperation or any other aspect of community. The
"literary genius" (Bloomfield 1933:46) is the only figure he mentions whose social
position is actually constituted by special linguistic skills.6
This picture of linguistic homogeneity as basic to communication and hence to
social coordination is a familiar one-as are some of the critiques of it-and I do
not want to dwell on it at length. 7 Only two further remarks are worth making
here. First: although some aspects of the picture have been condemned, it has not
been thrown out altogether. Sociolinguists like Hymes and Gumperz have at-
tacked Bloomfield's (and Chomsky's) portrayal of the homogeneous speech com-
munity, and they replace it with a notion of the organization of linguistic diver-
sity; but they do not wholly abandon the view that sociitl coordination is
facilitated if the parties to it share some common code. Instead, Gumperz and
Hymes shift the emphasis to interpretation, as what is shared, rather than perfor-
mance. In this way referential accuracy can be preserved under multilingual (or
multi-varietal) conditions, although denotational reference is not the only func-
tion of language sociolinguists envisage.
Second: much investigation remains to be done on just how language facilitates
coordination of a social division of labor. For example, within the linguistic sys-
tem the study of directives (requests and commands) is especially relevant, be-
cause it concerns the verbal management of the flow of goods and services in an
economy. The few studies we have of directives in social and cultural context sug-
gest that, in conspicuously task-oriented situations, speech coordinating the tasks
is often reduced and simple compared to speech of other kinds, or speech in other
settings. 8 (The reduction and "simplicity" of linguistic form in pidgins and trade
languages originating in labor or market settings might be relevant also.) Another,
more sociological aspect of linguistic involvement in coordinating a division of
labor concerns how people participate in organizational discussions. For instance,
a single spokesperson may represent_ a group and carry out the communicative
tasks necessary for its coordination with other groups. 9 In short, coordinating a
material division of labor does not universally require a very complex system of
signs held in common among all coordinated parties.
However, to the extent that a code is held in common, or at least that a seman-
tic system is, it may also facilitate cooperation-or at least co-optation-in an in-
direct way: by incorporating an ideology that supports a particular socioeco-
nomic system. The lexicon labeling social groups and economic activities, and
perhaps also a system of metaphoric constructions and semantically generative
principles, would presumably be the main places in the referential structure to
look for this.

Indexicality: Signs Index Social Groups, Categories,

and Situations Entering into the Relations of Production
I turn now to the second type of relation between signs and political economy-
to a view that has become familiar to us under the rubric of sociolinguistics: a
When 'Tu1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 263

view of the speech community as an organization of linguistic diversity, having a

repertoire of ways of speaking that are indexically associated with social groups,
roles, or activities. 10 In other words, there is a diversity on the linguistic plane that
indexes a social diversity. Studies of correlations of this sort, especially as social di-
alectology, have become commonplace. Less common is any attempt to explain
the correlation-why a particular linguistic variety should mark a particular so-
cial group, except for reasons of external historical contingency, such as the de-
mographic one of migration of ethnic groups speaking different languages.
Indeed, most of these studies either state or imply that the social diversity is
formed independently from its linguistic marking: for example, Labov's use of an
already-existing sociological survey of the Lower East Side that provided a 10-
point index of socioeconomic class, based mainly on occupation and income.
Among all these cases and their correlations, what kinds of distinctions might
be useful? One possibility has been to distinguish dialects from registers-that is,
to distinguish codes associated with persons and groups from codes associated
with situations. This classification makes a convenient starting point, but it be-
comes complicated when-as is so frequently the case-a variety historically as-
sociated with one social group is adopted by another to mark a social situation.
Similarly, Labov's studies of speech styles and socioeconomic class have shown
how the type of linguistic variation that signals class also signals differences
in style (thus, situation), in one and the same sociolinguistic process (Labov
1972). 11
Another approach has been to characterize "types of linguistic communities;'
distinguished according to degrees of internal differentiation. In an early paper by
this title ("Types of Linguistic Communities;' 1962) Gumperz proposed that lan-
guage distance among codes in a repertoire is correlated with degrees of social
complexity-social differentiation internal to the community-in an evolution-
ary scheme ranging from bands through "larger tribal groups" to modern urban-
industrial societies (1971(1962]:105). Gumperz (private communication) no
longer subscribes to this scheme and its evolutionary implications. He had sug-
gested it at a time when (as he noted, pp. 104-105) "reliable cross-cultural infor-
mation on speech behavior [was] almost nonexistent:' Counterexamples now
abound: compare the studies of urban social dialectology in the United States and
Britain, where "language distance" between social classes consists largely in pho-
netic detail, with cases such as the Vaupes region in the northwest Amazon, a
small-scale egalitarian social system where mutually unintelligible languages are
associated with descent-group-like units in a network of marriage alliances.
Although I too discard this particular evolutionary hypothesis, a valuable as-
pect of the 1962 paper was its attempt to draw some explanatory link between the
form of the social division of labor and the nature of its linguistic indices-in
contrast to correlational studies that assume the relationship is entirely arbitrary,
or entirely external to the linguistic system. With this problem in view I think it is
still useful to look at the topology of linguistic differentiation and social differen-
264 Judith T. Irvine

tiation, and to pay attention to the kind of linguistic phenomena involved. For
"language distance" let us substitute some other properties of codes: their dis-
creteness and their autonomy from other codes in a communicative system. In
other words, the question is how functionally independent of one another they
are, regardless of their genetic relationship and structural comparability. This
might allow us to compare several kinds of sociolinguistic systems: ( 1) systems
where the socially indexing linguistic alternants form a set of discrete usages, ver-
sus systems where they are gradient (for example, multilingualism versus differ-
ences in vowel height). This contrast concerns the alternants' linguistic form. 12 (2)
Systems where the socially indexing alternate varieties are limited to a narrow se-
mantic range, or a set of topically specific items (as with some kinds of respect vo-
cabularies), versus varieties that can apply over a wide referential range (such as
dialects differing mainly in phonetics). This contrast concerns the extent to which
the socially indexing variety is simultaneously involved with the referential func-
tion. (3) Systems where the relevant codes are autonomous (at least potentially),
in the sense that they can be independently described or characterized, versus sys-
tems where some codes can only be defined relative to other codes (for example,
by the addition of a surface-level rule, as with Pig Latin and many other play lan-
guages, and also the gender-linked codes of some American Indian languages).
Where these alternants index social groups and roles, I would suggest that their
contrasts might have some connection with a cultural ideology of role relations-
such as, whether the roles they mark are thought of as essentially autonomous, de-
fined independently of one another, or as dependent and complementary;
whether a role is thought to be part of a person's basic identity, thus applying to
all situations and governing what other roles he/she may take on; and whether, in
principle, the roles (or groups) are exclusive and sharply bounded, as opposed to
allowing degrees of participation, or mobility and shifting among them (see
Goodenough 1965; Nadel 1957).
A good example of the kinds of cases we might look at in this light would be
"antilanguages" (Halliday 1976): argots spoken by groups (or in roles) culturally
defined as opposing, or inverting, prevailing norms-such as thieves, prisoners,
and revolutionaries. As Halliday points out, the linguistic phenomena character-
izing these codes cannot be accounted for simply by the need for secrecy or for
group boundary markers, although those needs are present. Instead, the codes'
origin in counter-societies is reflected in many aspects of their linguistic form, for
instance in their elaboration of lexicon and metaphor relevant to their special ac-
tivities and their attitudes toward the normative society, and in their frequent use
of formal inversions and reversals, such as metathesis. Also significant is their con-
spicuous avoidance and violation of forms recognized as "standard" (consider, for
example, Reisman's [1974] description of"contrapuntal" speaking in Antigua as a
counter to conventions of orderly turn-taking associated with the social forms of
white colonial society and its heirs; see also Kochman 1972). These anti-languages
are clearly not autonomous codes, then, although the normative codes on which
When 'Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 265

they depend may be. The anti-language is not, and has never been, anyone's na-
tive tongue, nor are all its formal characteristics simply arbitrary. Both function-
ally and formally it is derived from the normative code, just as its speakers define
their social role in opposition to the normative society.
The language (and culture) of gender, in different societies, might be another
suitable set of cases, some perhaps even showing the characteristics of "antilan-
guages" (in cases where sex roles are culturally conceived of as antagonistic). The
question is whether the forms of speaking associated with males and females re-
flect, in some way, cultural conceptions of their social identities, in relation to each
other and in relation to other kinds of statuses an individual may hold."
My point is that indexical correlations between realms of linguistic differentia-
tion and social differentiation are not wholly arbitrary. They bear some relation-
ship to a cultural system of ideas about social relationships, including ideas about
the history of persons and groups. I do not mean that linguistic variation is sim-
ply a diagram of some aspect of social differentiation-as correlational studies
often in effect suggest-but that there is a dialectic relationship mediated by a cul-
ture of language (and of society).
As a more detailed example, an ethnographic case from West Africa illustrates
these suggestions about code discreteness and autonomy. 1• Among rural Wolof of
Senegal, there is a series of ranked, endogamous occupational groups, called
"castes" in the ethnographic literature on the region. As I have described (Irvine
1975, 1978b, 1982), caste differences are culturally associated with differences in
speech style. A style connected with high rank (waxu geer, 15 "noble speech") con-
trasts with a style connected with low rank (waxu gewel, "griot speech;' so named
after the bardic caste which in some respects is said to epitomize low-ranking
groups). Linguistically, the phenomena that most conspicuously distinguish the
two speech styles are gradient in form and/or application: prosodic differences,
such as pitch, loudness, and speed of talk; and the proportional use of emphatic
particles and parallel and/or repetitive constructions. The prosodic phenomena in
particular can only be defined relative to one another. There is no pitch frequency
that absolutely marks a voice as high-ranking or low-ranking, only relatively low
or high pitch. The two speech styles are complementary, mirror-images diverging
from a neutral middle ground to the extent that a social situation defines differ-
ences in social rank as relevant.
Contrast this complementarity in Wolof speech styles, then, with the speech of
another "caste" group, the Lawbe (Woodworkers). A semi-nomadic population
said to have migrated into Wolof territory from a Pulaar-speaking region to the
north, the Lawbe are bilingual: they speak Wolof during their temporary visits in
Wolof villages (during which they are hired by villagers to cut down trees and
carve wooden utensils from them), but they speak Pulaar in their encounters with
Pulaar-speakers (the similarly semi-nomadic cattle-herding Peul and the seden-
tary Tukulor). Wolof villagers claim that the Lawbe also speak Pulaar among
themselves, and that their command of that language shows they are "not Wolof:'
266 Judith T. Irvine

Given the dearth of published studies of the Lawbe (and I have not closely ob-
served them myself), it is not clear what they speak among themselves-whether
what the Wolof claim about them is true or, if true, whether it holds for all Lawbe
groups or only some of them. What does seem to be clear, however, is that Wolof
villagers assign the Lawbe a different ethnic origin and a separate history, to match
their control of a separate language, Pulaar. These same Wolof villagers also de-
scribe the Wolof system of caste occupations, its associated symbolism, and so on,
as if it were complete without Woodworkers-that is, as if Woodworkers were
simply a late, tacked-on addition to an already autonomous, self-sufficient social
system. In contrast, they describe nobles and griots as complementary ranks such
that neither could exist without the other. Without nobles, or without griots, there
would be no Wolof caste system at all.
Now, it is probably true that the Lawbe, or at least some Lawbe, are descendants
of migrants from a historically separate system to the north, and that their lin-
guistic behavior, as compared with Wolof nobles and griots, is the result·of his-
torical facts. But this cannot be the whole story, because historical documents at-
test that there used also to be Wolof Woodworkers, called by a different name
(seen), and taking their place on lists ofWolof caste occupations. 16 So I would sug-
gest that Wolof villagers' ideas about the history of Woodworkers and their place
in an overall set of caste roles have at least partly shifted to match their linguistic
behavior and their residential marginality, in a broader cultural scene that ideo-
logically links language differences with historical autonomy (and with regional
boundaries rather than caste boundaries).
In this case, we see two kinds of code/role relationships: the speech styles of no-
bles and griots, nonautonomous styles that can only be defined relative to one an-
other, like their speakers' social roles; and the separate language, Pulaar, whose
speakers are culturally assumed to have an autonomous history matching their
autonomous code. 17 There is an iconic link here between the kind of linguistic dif-
ferentiation and the kind of social relationship it marks, at least in the cultural ide-
ology.
Two other languages present on the Wolof sociolinguistic scene-Arabic and
French-can also be considered in the same light. These languages are of interest
because they are relevant to the connections between a rural Wolof village and the
national and international systems that impinge upon it, and also because we can
see these connections mediated, again, by the ideology of language just described.
For Wolof villagers, Arabic is the language of Islam, the dominant religion among
Wolof for many centuries. Although villagers are well aware that Arabic is also the
language of the modern Arab nations, including neighboring Mauritania, for the
majority of the community the religious connotations predominate and a form of
classical Arabic is the only variety of that language they know. 1• Indeed, many vil-
lagers, of various castes and age groups, know some Arabic; 1• in contrast, far fewer
people know (or admit that they know) French, the language of colonialism, de-
spite the long-established presence of French-speaking schools, radio, and so on.
When 'Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 267

The level of acquisition of French, especially before the 1970s, has been low com-
pared with its availability in terms of exposure and opportunities for systematic
instruction.
From the linguist's point of view, of course, Arabic and French are equally un-
related to any form of Wolof; the three are historically, and denotationally, au-
tonomous. But some Wolof villagers have not always seen them that way. In 1970
I was told that Arabic "is really Wolof underneath, at heart.... Only the pronun-
ciation is different." French, on the other hand, was said to be quite alien, even
formed in a different part of the body. Thus the local ideology of language was
tending to assimilate Arabic into the repertoire of"Wolof" linguistic varieties be-
cause of its functional integration into social life, while French remained (in that
view) a "foreign" language belonging properly only to non-Wolof, and not readily
acquirable by true Wolof ethnics, except perhaps for persons of low rank. 20
Since local ideology linked the nature of linguistic differentiation (between
Arabic, Wolof, and French) with the nature of the social relationships and activi-
ties it indexed, ideas about language were likely to shift if there were some major
change in the social situation. It is not surprising, then, that the advent of
Senegalese independence, by altering some aspects of the political and economic
connection with France, eventually affected villagers' ideas about French, now the
official language of the Senegalese state. 21 While no one has told me that French
"is really Wolof:' by 1984 it was apparent that many people who used to consider
French unlearnable and unspeakable had changed their minds.
Note, however, that the linguistic ideology whose modifications are described
here is no simple reflex of the change of government or even of a shift in eco-
nomic opportunities. The attitudes toward language in general (and French and
Arabic in particular) found in this rural Wolof locality differ from those in some
other areas of Senegal, where (for example) French sometimes penetrated earlier,
even though instructional opportunities were fewer and economic opportunities
no greater. What we see here is a particular rationalization of a particular local ex-
perience, a rationalization informed by a framework of other ideas about lan-
guage and about the kinds of people who speak in certain ways.
It should be clear, therefore, why this discussion of indexical values of linguis-
tic phenomena, and the topology of linkages between codes and social relation-
ships, does not propose a direct analogy between linguistic and social differentia-
tion that would claim to predict the one from the other. To attempt such
prediction would be to ignore the role of linguistic ideology-the cultural (or
subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together
with their loading of moral and political interests-which is a crucial mediating
factor. And I should also emphasize that the cultural system (including the lin-
guistic ideology) is a mediating factor, not necessarily a causative one. In some
cases it may merely rationalize a set of sociolinguistic differences, rather than
shape them. The usual assumption that some historical contingency of a nonlin-
guistic sort, such as migration, has brought about a present-day sociolinguistic
268 Judith T. Irvine

scene may often be true enough; but it is not all we need to consider. The cultural
reformulation of that scene (its persons, groups, and codes) according to some ra-
tionalizing criterion is also relevant, perhaps sometimes inventing as much his-
tory as it reflects. 22

Incorporation: Linguistic Phenomena Are Included in

the Economy as Practices and as Commodities
One of the reasons correlational sociolinguistic studies fall short of revealing the
full involvement of linguistic phenomena in political economy concerns the fact
that forms of speaking are not always merely an index of some independently gen-
erated social differentiation but may indeed effect social differentiation. The divi-
sion of linguistic labor is not just an analogy with the division of labor in society,
or even a homology (as some have said; see Rossi-Landi 1983), but, in some ways,
part and parcel of it. That is, while linguistic phenomena may denote the forces of
production, and they may index the relations of production, they may also be
among those forces, and they may be objects of economic activity. I turn now to
that "communicative economy:' to borrow a term used by Hymes (1974:4, 26) to
describe the organization of a society's system of communicative (not just lin-
guistic) institutions, vehicles, and contexts. In this view, verbal skills and perfor-
mances are among the resources and activities forming a socioeconomic system;
and the relevant knowledge, talents, and use-rights are not evenly, randomly, or
fortuitously distributed in a community (see Bourdieu 1977, 1982; Hymes 1971,
1973). The fact of uneven distribution isitself economically relevant.

Verbal Skills as Economic Resources

(and as Practices Constituting a Social Role)
One way in which linguistic goods enter the marketplace is simply as a conse-
quence of indexical correlations like those noted above. This process is discussed
at length by Bourdieu (1977, 1982), who sees it as a process of"conversion" be-
tween a "linguistic marketplace" and a material one. In a class-based society, he
points out, where social classes and class-linked activities correlate with linguistic
variation, the linguistic varieties acquire differential value that translates into eco-
nomic value. Access to high position and prestigious social circles may require, or
seem to require, the ability to speak or write in a prestigious language, variety, or
style, whose acquisition becomes the focus of economic activity. 23 People who fail
to acquire the high variety, such as a national standard, at their mother's knee
must pay for instruction later on, whether through tutoring, how-to books (more
often how-not-to), newspaper columns about "proper speaking:' or state subven-
tion through the school system.
Bourdieu's discussion focuses on the European industrial nations, especially
France, and on the acquisition of standard language among other indices of mem-
bership in the bourgeoisie. Much of the argument applies elsewhere too, however,
even in pre- or less-industrialized settings. Any case of diglossia, or a case where
When 'Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 269

there are linguistic forms that (for at least some of the population) cah only be ac-
quired through special education, will be somewhat parallel. In all these cases
code acquisition-actually, second-code acquisition-is surrounded by economic
activity because of the perceived value, and distributional scarcity, of the linguis-
tic variety to be acquired.
Now, while Bourdieu's view of the "linguistic marketplace" is clearly useful to
our inquiry, it is not without complications. For example, it tends to reduce lan-
guage to presuppositional indexicality and to derive language's role in political
economy entirely therefrom. Little room is left for any statement made in one of
the available varieties to make a difference to the political and economic situa-
tion-to be anything other than a symptom of it. 24 As Woolard ( 1985) points out,
moreover, Bourdieu's statements on the value of class-linked varieties in the lin-
guistic market, and his emphasis on the institutional domination of a language,
are oversimplified. Questions remain as to whether the linguistic market is ever
fully integrated, and whether the population that does not control a dominant va-
riety regards its domination as legitimate (1985:740-741).
These questions about integration and legitimacy are especially relevant to
Third World situations and the link between local sociolinguistic systems and the
languages of national and international relations. 25 Senegal's "linguistic market;'
for example, is far from integrated. The political dominance of French was long
acknowledged in Wolof communities without being considered legitimate, while,
in contrast, members of other ethnic groups often favored French as the alterna-
tive to Wolof domination. Within the particular Wolof village described here,
changes in the legitimacy of French have already been mentioned; but even
though French is no longer resisted as much as before, differences in the legiti-
macy of French and Arabic show up in the economics of their acquisition.
Economic activity surrounding acquisition of Arabic takes place at the grass-roots
level, where villagers pay for their children's (and sometimes their own) instruc-
tion, while economic activity directed toward the acquisition of French-domi-
nant but far less legitimate, in the local view-takes place at the level of the state. 26
Despite complications, however, it is evident that linguistic skills can be eco-
nomic resources, and even if some skills are merely status markers their acquisi-
tion may be the focus of economic activity. Still, as regards how linguistic phe-
nomena can be economic resources, grammatical competence in a high-valued
code is not the only aspect of language to look at. We must also consider skills in
the appropriate use of language and in the management of discourse-skills that
fall outside "grammatical competence" as usually defined, and that do not depend
on the differentiation of a set of codes. Many social roles and statuses are at least
partly defined in terms of discourse management: teacher, lawyer, or psychiatrist,
for example. Even where verbal skills are not crucial to the performance of some
particular social role they may be crucial to gaining access to it; see studies of gate-
keeping interviews by Gumperz and his associates (Gumperz 1982; see also
Erickson and Shultz 1979).
270 Judith T. Irvine

Among rural Wolof, skills in discourse management are essential to the role of
the griot (bard), whose traditional profession involves special rhetorical and con-
versational duties such as persuasive speechmaking on a patron's behalf, making
entertaining conversation, transmitting messages to the public, and performing the
various genres of praise-singing. Not everyone who might be born with the ap-
propriate raw talent can become a professional bard-for that one must be born
into the griot caste. But within that category, the most talented and skillful griots
earn high rewards and are sought after by would-be patrons, such as village-level
political leaders (or those who seek leadership positions). High-ranking political
leaders do not engage in these griot-linked forms of discourse themselves; to do so
would be incompatible with their "nobility'' and qualifications for office. But their
ability to recruit and pay a skillful, reputable griot to speak on their behalf is es-
sential, both to hold high position and to gain access to it in the first place.
Note that political systems in other African societies (and societies elsewhere in
the world too, for that matter) commonly include spokesperson roles, such as the
Ashanti "linguist" who speaks on behalf of the king. In contemporary states pub-
lic relations personnel, press secretaries, and professionals in the communications
industry are statuses somewhat resembling these traditional spokesperson sta-
tuses and in Senegal, at least, have often drawn their personnel from among the
bardic castes. 27
This point-that some social roles are constituted by discourse management-
has been made often by Hymes and others, and I shall not belabor it, even though
it is important to our understanding of political processes and access to political
positions. I shall just emphasize that its implications reach beyond the cognitive
(questions of communicative competence), to include how we conceive of econ-
omy. Thus, one must consider the place of verbal skills and rights in a system of
transactions that includes both material and nonmaterial goods, services, and val-
ues. It is perhaps not a question of looking at a "communicative" economy, there-
fore, or at some sort oflinkage between a sociolinguistic system and an (indepen-
dently conceived) economic system, but, instead, just at an economy, from which
the verbal must not be excluded.
Indeed, linguistic elements and utterances may themselves be goods and ser-
vices, exchangeable against other goods and services, including material goods
and cash. The next sections shift to this focus.

Authentications: Signs Accompany Commodities and Give Them Value

In a 1975 paper, "The Meaning of Meaning;' Hilary Putnam presents what he calls
a "division of linguistic labor." The discussion turns in several ways on the refer-
ence of terms for natural kinds, such as elm and gold. Putnam writes:

We could hardly use such words as "elm" and "aluminum" if no one possessed a way of
recognizing elm trees and aluminum metal; but not everyone to whom the [linguistic]
distinction is important has to be able to make the distinction [between the things or
When Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 271

substances] .... Gold is important for many reasons: it is a precious metal, it is a mon-
etary metal, it has symbolic value (it is important to most people that the "gold" wed-
ding ring they wear really consist of gold and not just look gold), etc. ... Everyone to
whom gold is important for any reason has to acquire the word "gold"; but he does not
have to acquire the method of recognizing if something is or is not gold. He can rely on a
special subclass of speakers. [These are people who have the job of] telling whether or not
something is really gold [1975:227-228; italics in the original].

In other words, these people are experts whose knowledge (for example, knowl-
edge of some test for telling whether a metal is really gold), while not itself lin-
guistic, nevertheless renders their usage of the term gold authoritative. The eco-
nomic and symbolic value of gold for the wider community depends on this. Any
gold object circulating in the community must be accompanied by some con-
vincing testimonial to its being authentically gold, if it is to command its full
value. The testimonial may be oral or written (for example, when the state stamps
its insignia on a gold coin).
Most often, we are probably relying not just on a single testimonial statement, but
on a chain ofauthentication, a historical sequence by which the expert's attestation-
and the label (expression) that conventionally goes along with it-is relayed to other
people.'" For example, I claim that the necklace I wear is made of gold because I ac-
quired it from a trustworthy person who said it was, and who in turn acquired it
from a "reliable" dealer, who in turn acquired it from a reliable source, and so on
back to a point at which some expert actually did make the tests that enabled him
or her to declare this metal to be gold. Thus my valued commodity (the necklace) is
accompanied, not just by one special kind of statement (the authoritative testimo-
nial), but by two: the authoritative and the derivatively authoritative (reportive-all
the statements after the expert's, in the chain of authentication).
This kind of process applies not just to gold, but to any exchangeable item in-
vested with social value, where only an "expert" can tell if it "really" is what it pur-
ports to be. Such items include not only material objects, but also verbal items like
magic spells or other texts. Just what is invested with what sort of value, and which
persons get into the position to speak authoritatively about the value, must vary
from one society to another. What this process suggests, however, is that perhaps
any system of prestations and counter-prestations-that is, an economy (in a
broad sense)-will necessarily include authoritative statements as part of the ex-
change system. When I pay for the gold necklace, I am paying not only for the
necklace itself but also for the chain of authoritative statements that accompanies
it. And if I take it to be appraised, I am paying for the statement alone.

Utterances as Commodities Exchangeable for Material Goods

The above discussion of testimonials focused on statements accompanying an ob-
ject of exchange, statements necessary if the object is to have its full exchange-
value. I turn now to cases where a verbal statement is the object of exchange.
272 Judith T. Irvine

Although the appraisal of a piece of jewelry meets this criterion in a way, it only
does so because it is part of a longer series of transactions whose object is the jew-
elry, not the statement. What we consider now are verbal "goods" and practices
having value in their own right. Thus, a view of economy that can incorporate ver-
bal practices and products will be useful for understanding systems where lin-
guistic texts can become alienable property, and systems where some forms of
speaking are institutionalized and receive financial reward.
What the verbal goods and services are, and where they enter an overall econ-
omy, will vary from one sociocultural system to another. Presumably, any aspect
of a speech act might, separately or in combination with other aspects, be the
source of its economic value in a particular system. In any given case we might
ask: What aspects of the verbal performance bear the value? Who holds rights in
them? Who benefits? Who pays-and in what coin?
For example, magic spells may be as much the property of a community (as
with some Trobriand magic [Malinowski 1978 (1935)]) or lineage (as with some
Wolof spells) as gardening land is. According to Malinowski (1978 [1935):64),
however, although the community "owns" the major form of gardening magic
and has the right to benefit from its application, only one person, the towosi, has
the right and the ability to perform community gardening spells, though he may
delegate the office to a junior relative. All members of the community who expect
to benefit from the performance must contribute payments for it-just as they
pay for other kinds of specialist services, material or otherwise. 29
In its capacity as community property, Trobriand gardening magic is appar-
ently inalienable; but verbal properties may be alienable too. Silverstein (n.d. a)
describes proper names in Northwest Coast societies as "investment property"
and "heirloom antiques:' alienable during the lifetime of a bearer. People used to
try to accumulate as many names as possible and to control their bestowal (on
themselves or on others). Sometimes the bearer of a name would vacate it, be-
stowing it on some junior relative. Acquiring a new name involved a ceremony in
which an audience assembled and called the new bearer by it-receiving, in ex-
change, large quantities of material valuables. As Silverstein writes: "The wealth
thus constitutes a back-prestation in response to the audience's having come and
called the new bearer by that name, this act effectively validating the claim to it as
being at a certain ranked ordinality with respect to their names (n.d.a).
Consider, too, the case of"the sick who do not speak" (Sansom 1982). Among
Aboriginal Australians of Darwin fringe camps, a person who has undergone a
major episode of illness may not verbally recount the story of the illness.'0 The
right to tell the "sickness story" is given over, instead, to the persons who "helped
him through"-in partial recompense for the debt arising from their care. The
story, Sansom argues, is a bit of property exchanged against caregiving, in a com -
munity that places little store in material investments.
Although Darwin camp members treat the telling of"sickness stories" as a priv-
ilege, in other societies some kinds of talk may be treated as a burden one pays
When 'Th1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 273

someone else to undertake. The high-ranking Wolof noble pays a griot to make a
public announcement for him, because loud public speaking is something he
would be "ashamed" and "unskillful" at doing.' 1 On many public occasions the
noble whispers briefly in the griot's ear, and it is then the griot who volubly and
elaborately performs the speech for the audience. In this case, then, the act of pub-
lic utterance is a service for which the griot is paid in cash.
These examples could be multiplied. It seems preferable, however, to explore
one case in greater depth. Accordingly, the following section offers a more ex-
tended example of this kind of relation between language and economy. It con-
cerns a particular type of verbal goods-statements of praise and compliment-
and the verbal services of the flatterer, among village Wolof as compared with
contemporary middle-class Americans. But while one of my purposes is to exam-
ine some verbal objects of exchange, the material I present also reflects other link-
ages between language and political economy, especially the indexical relation dis-
cussed earlier. Thus the example illustrates the fact that language is always
multifunctional-and its relation to economy is, therefore, manifold.

II. The Multifunctionality of Linguistic Signs:

A Wolof Example
Recently there appeared a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, entitled "Flattery
getting someone somewhere" (M. Stevens, 28 July 1986). "You're looking great,
Frank!" says a man in business suit and necktie to another, perhaps older, man
with glasses and bow tie. "Thanks, Chuck! Here's five dollars!" Bow Tie replies,
handing over the cash. The joke depends, of course, on the notion that the ex-
change of compliments for cash should not be done so directly and overtly. We all
know that Chuck may indeed flatter Frank with a view to getting a raise, or some
other eventual reward; but it is quite improper in American society to recognize
the exchange formally, with an immediate payment. A compliment should be ac-
knowledged only with a return compliment, or a minimization, or some other
verbal "goods." If it is to be taken as "sincere," it is specifically excluded from the
realm of material payments.
Some cultural systems do not segregate the economy of compliments from the
economy of material transactions and profits, however. It is doubtful, for exam-
ple, that the cartoon would seem funny to many Senegalese.32 With a few suitable
adjustments for local scene, the transfer it depicts is quite ordinary. There is, in
fact, a category of persons-the griots-specializing in flattery of certain kinds,
among other verbal arts. The income they gain from these activities is immediate
and considerable, often amounting to full-time employment for those whose
skills include the fancier genres of eulogy.
Let us return to a consideration of the social system in which these transfer, and
institutionalized acts of eulogy, occur. As I mentioned earlier, the Wolof (and, in-
deed, most other Senegalese peoples from the Gambia River north) traditionally
274 Judith T. Irvine

had a complex system of social stratification usually called a "caste" system.

Though undermined by government policies and other factors the caste system
retains considerable importance on the rural scene, and even on the urban scene
too, according to some observers (see, for example, Silla 1966). Thus Wolof soci-
ety is a hierarchical one in which hierarchy is an explicitly acknowledged value. It
is also personalistic, a patronage system where person and position are closely
identified. Compliments to the person are directly relevant, therefore, to the con-
struction of high position, political and otherwise.
The lower ranks of rural Wolof society engage in various kinds of activities-
agricultural labor, smithing, weaving, and so on-whose product, delivered to
their patron, enhances his or her position and role as redistributor. 33 The higher
ranks, as patrons, compete among themselves for political position and influence.
Access to such positions is supposed to be based on genealogical rank and moral
qualifications as well as on one's ability to attra~t and maintain a large clientship;
but ideologically these criteria are almost indistinguishable from one another, for
one's moral character, personality, reputation, and ancestry are all considered to
be linked.
Verbal activities fit into this local system of production in several ways, most
notably as one of the kinds of productive activities low-ranking persons provide
for the higher-ranking. Thus verbal praise enhances the reputation and attrac-
tiveness of a would-be patron. It is comparable to physical enhancement, such as
hairdressing, and requires a similar reward. (Actually, eulogizing and hairdressing
are often done by the same people, or at least by members of the same social cat-
egory, the griots.) Moreover, the griots' performances supposedly-that is, in the
ideology of the system-contribute more directly to the system of production and
distribution as well, because their liveliness and excitement arouse the addressees
to carry out their own allotted role more energetically and enthusiastically. That
is, praise directed to a patron stimulates him/her to (re-)distribute largesse more
generously, while other kinds of performances, such as the drumming and singing
directed to a work party laboring on a patron's behalf, rouse laborers to work
more vigorously. Physical aspects of the performance are relevant to how this
works, or so informants suggest: the forceful gush of humanly shaped, vibrating
air (breath) stimulates the energy of the recipient, just as the air blown from a bel-
lows arouses a fire.
The propositional contents of compliments and praise are of course dependent
on a cultural system and the kinds of attributes locally invested with social value.
Among rural Wolof, personal beauty is in some respects subordinated to "beauty
of birth" (rafet-juddu), the subject matter of much ofWolof praise, especially of its
most institutionalized form, praise-singing (as the Wolof term way is often trans-
lated; praise-oratory might be a better term). I shall examine this oratorical form
in more detail in what follows. But note that in doing so I am not departing so far
from Chuck and Frank's conversational compliment as it might appear. Wolof con-
versational compliments are often formulaic praise-utterances derived from, or al-
When 'Tu1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 275

luding to, the extended forms of praise-oratory. Thanks for a gift, for example, al-
ways includes praise and very frequently draws upon these formulaic expressions,
or other allusions to praise-oratory. A difference between full-fledged praise-ora-
tory and its conversational vestiges is that the former are performed only by griots,
while the latter may be produced by anyone. But the griots' praise-singing is, for
Wolof, a cultural model or prototype for praise-utterance in general.
Indeed, except for compliments between lovers, only this type of compliment is
proper. 34 Otherwise, anything departing too far from the model is suspect, sug-
gesting an indecent envy or exposing the addressee to the attentions of witches.
"Departing too far" means a compliment focusing only on physical appearance or
possessions, and uttered by someone of same or higher rank than the addressee.
(Neither condition alone would be problematic. Lower-ranking people, like a
griot speaking to a noble, may freely comment on appearance and possessions;
while a high-ranking person may comment on ancestors and generous deeds.)
Returning, then, to the contents of praise: the content of a griot's praise-song
normally focuses on the praiseworthy ancestry of the addressee-the ancestry that
qualifies him or her for high rank and has contributed to the character and the
physical being he or she is. Although the performance includes comments explic-
itly eulogizing particular ancestors (their generosity, strength, rectitude, beauty,
great deeds) and the addressee, much of it consists in naming the ancestors and
connecting them to kings or village founders or other heroic figures. Merely setting
forth the names would be eulogy in itself, a display of the addressee's verbal family
heirlooms, as it were. That the most elaborate displays of genealogical eulogy are
performed at life-crisis events and family celebrations is only appropriate, there-
fore, as are outbursts of eulogistic performance at local-level political gatherings.
Praise is not limited to those occasions, however, and in fact the shorter forms of
eulogy and compliment need no special scheduling to occur.
Since I have described some aspects of praise-singing elsewhere (Irvine 1978a),
I shall focus here on just a few relevant matters: some characteristics of praise-
singing as a kind of sign. For some of these the Peircean trichotomy of icon, index,
and symbol is useful, because it allows us to see praise-singing as a complex semi-
otic gesture uniting all three types. As icon, praise-singing formally illustrates the
roles of laborer and redistributor: the singer is both verbally and physically active,
declaiming the praise long and loud, and with energetic, dramatic gestures.
Meanwhile the recipient (the high-ranking patron) is silent and motionless, per-
haps even hidden from view behind a curtain (depending on the occasion). His/her
sole appropriate movement is to hand over the cash that pays for the performance.
These iconic, formal considerations shape several aspects of the linguistic reg-
ister in which praise-oratory is performed-"griot speech" (waxu gewel), as op-
posed to "noble speech'' (waxu geer). As I described earlier (and see Irvine 1975),
"griot speech" is loud, high-pitched, rapid, verbose, florid, and emphatic, with as-
sorted phonological, morphological, and syntactic devices linked to those charac-
teristics. It is the appropriate style for all expressions of praise and/or thanks, by
276 Judith T. Irvine

anyone (griot or not), and for other verbal expressions of rank lower than one's
addressee; 35 but, as its name implies, it is conventionally associated with griots, as
the professional eulogizers who carry the style to an extreme. Thus the speech
style of praise is an. index of the speaker's (relatively low) rank and social identity.
In a larger sense it also indexes the traditional system of ranks and sources of au-
thority, as compared with other sources such as the French-speaking colonial
regime and the national state.
Another indexical function, too, links the praise-song's eulogistic and ge-
nealogical content to its addressee, at whom the griot dramatically points. That is,
the praise-song indexes the praisee (addressee) because it is pointedly directed at
him/her. This addressee is also the praise-song's principal referent, however. The
praisee is named, and this name, together with the genealogical statements ex-
panding upon and providing background to it, are part of the performance's sym-
bolic dimension. Here it is important that the griot display the patron's genealogy
coherently and convincingly, mentioning only persons of good reputation, and
linking the patron to famous heroes and to the ancestors of other notables, per-
haps even higher-ranking. Should the griot fail to do this-that is, should he state
the relationships incoherently, or reveal skeletons (family relationships) the pa-
tron would prefer to keep in the closet, or spend so much time on other lineages
that he fails to display the patron's own genealogy adequately-the performance
will no longer qualify as truly complimentary. Of course, griots may fail in these
ways conspicuously and on purpose, if they are unsatisfied with the payment they
have been offered.
This mention of payment brings me to the economic value of praise-singing,
an aspect of it for which Peirce's trichotomy is no longer particularly illuminat-
ing. It is not illuminating because Peirce focuses on the relations between the sign
and what it stands for-not on what it may be exchanged for. 36 But the praise-
song costs, and this aspect of it is crucial. It is one of the unavoidable, large ex-
penses a Wolof notable must incur on his way to attaining political position and
maintaining any claim to rank; and, moreover, it is a sign of his ability to pay.
During a performance a griot may even display the money he receives, so that all
may see and admire the person being praised as a potential patron for their own
services. In an important sense, then, the exchange-value of the sign is an under-
stood part of it.
Let us consider what that value rests upon. Wolof praise-songs are a form of
property, in that exclusive rights are asserted over them. The rights are of two
kinds: rights over the genealogical and historical content of the praise-song (it is
the patron's genealogy, and in principle at least the griot must obtain permission
before performing it for any other addressee); and rights over the performance of
it. (Rights to perform the long, formal versions of praise-singing accrue only to
griots of particular families, although griots may transfer these rights to other gri-
ots. In no circumstances may the patron perform "his" [or "her"] own song.)
When Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 277

The value of the performance depends in part on the gloriousness of the con-
tent-how praiseworthy the family history really has been, and how important
the family has been in political and religious hierarchies-but it depends much
more on the skill and reputation of the performing griot. Though even the clum-
siest griot receives something for praising a patron, knowledgeable and skillful
griots are much in demand and their performances highly paid. This is especially
the case when, for example, two nobles from the same lineage are competing for
a lineage title and, in the process, for the services of the most famous griots who
know their lineage history. And those famous performers, in tum, are careful to
keep the supply of trained performers down, in order to keep the price up (as one
young griot complained to me).
Thus the complexities of the overall market in which praise-song performances
are situated affect their exchange-value (in cash or goods), and are the reason one
may indeed, I think, speak of exchange-value here rather than just use-value.
Linguistic phenomena are not all limitlessly and publicly available, like fruits on
the trees of some linguistic Eden. Some of them are products of a social and soci-
olinguistic division of labor, and as such they may be exchanged against other
products in the economy.
Under what circumstances do utterances or linguistic forms become products
exchangeable against other kinds of goods? Perhaps, as material in this paper sug-
gests, when the sign (or some aspect of it) is a scarce good, invested with value-
either because knowledge of the relevant linguistic form is unequally distributed,
or because performance of it cannot be universally undertaken. That is, perfor-
mance might be an exclusive right, or it might require time and effort, or other
costs to the producer-including, for example, as in the Wolof case, an implica-
tion of lower rank (a cost explicitly recognized as requiring remuneration, and
carrying the right to receive largesse).
In these pages I have only scratched the surface of a comparative economy of
compliments and praise, and how they do or do not link up with other forms of
transaction in a given society. Moreover, these are certainly not the only kinds of
utterances worth looking at as objects of exchange. My purpose, however, was to
suggest that the project is worth undertaking-that utterances, and indeed vari-
ous aspects of linguistic form and its production, can be viewed as prestations,
and thus as part of a political economy, not just a vehicle for thinking about one.

Conclusion
I began by mentioning Saussure and suggesting-as, indeed, it has become fash-
ionable to do-that I would take some post-Saussurean, post-structuralist posi-
tion, in regard to his segregation of the sign from the material world. Actually, part
of this position is not so very novel. Anthropology has a long tradition of looking
at the material objects exchanged in a cultural system partly in terms of their sign
278 Judith T. Irvine

value. A good example would be Evans-Pritchard's discussion of cattle among the

Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1956). In some circumstances the sign-value of the
Nuer ox can be so predominant, and its material substance so irrelevant, that you
can substitute a cucumber for it. What I argue for here is, in a way, a parallel treat-
ment of the verbal sign. Ultimately, the goal-which I do not pretend to have
reached, though I hope to have moved in its direction-must be a more compre-
hensive conception of"value;' so that the various kinds of sign-values and mate-
rial values can be seen in their complex integration.
Thus, linguistic forms have relevance for the social scientist not only as part of
a world of ideas, but also as part of a world of objects, economic transactions, and
political interests. The verbal sign, I have argued, relates to a political economy in
many ways: by denoting it; by indexing parts of it; by depicting it (in Peircean
terms, the iconic function, illustrated here for Wolof praise-singing); and by tak-
ing part in it as an object of exchange. These multiple functions may all co-occur,
because they merely reflect the multifunctionality of language in general.
Saussure's segregation of sign-value from the world of material values is linked
to his focus on only one oflanguage's functions-its role as vehicle for referential
communication. To acknowledge that language has many functions, and therefore
that signs relate to the material world in many ways, including as objects of ex-
change, is important to understanding language's role in a political economy. An
opposition between "idealists" and "materialists" that assigns the study of lan-
guage only to the former is-as social theorists increasingly recognize, on other
grounds-a false dichotomy.

Notes
Acknowledgments. Earlier versions of portions of this paper were presented at the annual
meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1984 and 1986, as no. 7 in the
Working Papers of the Center for Psychosocial Studies (Chicago, IL), at the University of
Massachusetts/Boston, and at Brandeis University. For helpful comments I am grateful to
the audiences at these meetings; to the anonymous reviewers for American Ethnologist; and
to Annette Weiner, Michael Silverstein, Bill Hanks, and Paul Friedrich. Financial support
for fieldwork in Senegal was provided by the National Institutes of Health, the National
Science Foundation, and Brandeis University; I am also grateful for institutional support
from the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire and the Centre de Linguistique Applique
de Dakar, and for the help and cooperation of Senegalese officials, consultants, and hosts.

1. See discussions in, for example, Coward and Ellis 1977 and Derrida 1972.
2. Unlike political scientists, apparently, many anthropologists make a close connection
between the term "political economy" and debates over a Wallerstein-derived world-system
approach, on which this paper takes no particular stand. One of the issues in the debate,
however, is the degree of importance to be assigned to local social relations and their "cul-
ture" (I put the word in quotation marks since some writers contest its applicability). To
the extent that anthropological views of culture have been bound up with language, then,
When 'Tu1k Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 279

this paper contributes to the debate by considering the way we think about relations be-
tween linguistic phenomena and the forces of production.
3. See Hymes 1961and1973.
4. Those that reduce language to presuppositional indexicality are equally problematic.
This criticism, differently worded, has been leveled at the writings of Bourdieu (see
Thompson 1984).
5. Underlying this conception of language's role in social cooperation was Bloomfield's
enthusiasm for behaviorist psychology. See his 1931 obituary of the psychologist A. P.
Weiss, which draws a more explicit connection between language, its speakers' nervous sys-
tems, and cooperation among members of a speech community (1970:237-238).
6. But see his discussion, in the last chapter of Language, of the roles of traditional gram-
marians, schoolteachers, and ·administrators as supported by the conventions of linguistic
standardization.
7. For a useful historical summary, see Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968.
8. As regards the form of directives, this difference in settings is sometimes confused
with matters of politeness or rank, I believe. For studies of directives in social and cultural
context, see for example, Ervin-Tripp 1976 and Irvine 1980.
9. See, for example, Barth 1972 on the political integration of Pathan-speaking social
segments into a Baluchi system. Despite the language difference, Barth argues, Pathan seg-
ments are easily attached to the Baluchi political hierarchy because a single bilingual
spokesman suffices for the communicative needs of the political relationship and its eco-
nomic arrangements. There is no need for the ordinary Pathan-speaker to convey personal
opinions or discuss individual contributions, as (Barth suggests) might be required in a
more egalitarian political system, such as is found among other Pathans.
10. "Index" is used here in the Peircean sense of that sign-function in which the sign rep-
resents its object by contiguity (as smoke is a sign of fire), rather than by resemblance (as
with a picture of a fire) or by rules and conventions (as with the word "fire").
11. Although Labov's conception of "style" differs from that of other scholars, the gen-
eral point-that variation marking groups and variation marking situations appear to be
closely linked wherever we have the information to investigate the relationship--still holds,
I believe. See Irvine 1985.
12. A similar contrast, however, might concern categorical versus variable application of
a rule.
13. For a recent discussion of the language and culture of gender see Silverstein 1985.
For an extended ethnographic example see Abu-Lughod 1986.
14. Fieldwork was carried out in Senegal in 1970-71, 1975, and (briefly) in 1977 and
1984.
15. The transcription ofWolof expressions is based on the phonemic system developed
by the Centre de Linguistique Applique de Dakar and officially adopted by the Republic of
Senegal in 1971. The system is phonetically fairly transparent: /waxu geer/ = [waxu geer];
/gewel/ = [gewel]; and so on.
16. The relation between seen and lawbe is complex. Yoro Dyao (Rousseau 1929, from a
turn-of-the-century manuscript) briefly describes both groups; see also Kobes 1875.
Abdoulaye Diop (1981) considers them to have been subcastes, but argues that the seen
were eventually absorbed into a different low-caste category, not into the lawbe.
17. That is to say, Pulaar is a language distinct from any form of Wolof, whose existence
and form owe nothing to Wolof as far as we know (though the two languages are geneti-
280 Judith T. Irvine

cally related), and which has both formal and functional completeness within the main
communities of its speakers, the Tukulor and Fula. For Lawbe, it is historically and deno-
tationally autonomous, but has an indexical value within the Wolof system.
18. Note that the village from which my description is mainly drawn is far from the
Mauritanian border. In Wolof villages further north, or among Wolof-speakers in
Mauritania itself, native speakers of Arabic would be much more conspicuous, and the re-
lationship with them would, no doubt, alter the ways their language is thought of by the
local Wolof population.
19. Villagers' competence in Arabic is almost entirely passive. They may recite formulaic
prayers, and those who know Arabic best read texts and listen to religious speeches on the
radio; but they compose nothing.
20. The views ofWolof city-dwellers might well have been quite different from this, even
at the time. Wolof villagers acknowledged that French was more widely used in town, but
they also claimed that city-dwellers were likely to be people of dubious ethnic, caste, and
moral background.
21. Senegal gained its independence from France in 1960. Ties with France remained
close, however, and a sizable French population stayed on-including, locally, a commu-
nity of French technical personnel. For some time after independence, therefore, many vil-
lagers apparently still thought of French in colonial frameworks-whence the statements I
heard in 1970. In subsequent years the French population in Senegal dropped sharply, es-
pecially in rural areas outside the tourist zone.
22. See also Silverstein's (n.d.b) discussion of comments on British regional dialects by
the Queen's English Society.
23. Silverstein (n.d.b) calls this "commoditization."
24. Again, see Thompson's (1984) critique.
25. For a Mexican example involving the autonomy of Mexicano-speaking peasant com-
munities, see Hill 1985.
26. The acquisition of varieties of Wolof itself should not be left out of the economic
picture, although this part of the linguistic "market" operates in a different way (further ev-
idence, presumably, of the lack of integration of the Senegalese "linguistic market").
27. See Silla 1966.
28. See Putnam (1975:246) on the transmission of reference, and Kripke 1972 on the
transmission of proper names, from performative nomination or "baptism" through sub-
sequent, warranted referential usage.
29. See also Weiner 1984.
30. The former patient does, however, bear a nonverbal sign of the illness, such as a tic,
a scar, or a recurrent cough (Sansom 1982:183).
31. See Irvine 1975, and Part II below. These attitudes are part of a larger sociolinguis-
tic ideology connecting griots (and the lower ranks in general) with noisy activity and the
high ranks with quiet, sometimes inert, solidity.
32. Except insofar as it might seem funny to see Americans or Europeans behaving like
griots and their patrons.
33. Though I refer principally to "traditional" activities, and have not space to consider
the complexities introduced by contract labor and "modern" trades, patronage and values
generated through personalistic networks are important there also.
34. Actually, another proper type of compliment focuses on the addressee's religious
goodness and piety. In practice, however, these compliments seem usually to merge with
the praise-singing type, "goodness" being evidenced by birth and generosity.
When Tulk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy 281

35. This is something of an oversimplification. In some circumstances a speaker draws

on only some features of the register, not others.
36. Some scholars consider that what the sign may be exchanged for, and what it stands
for, are the same: hence Saussure's analogy between money and language, and the connec-
tion drawn between valeur and signification. I believe the equation is problematic, however,
particularly as regards the analogy with money. Because money is a system that is maxi-
mally structured by exchange-value and minimally by use-value, it makes a tempting anal-
ogy for language if one conceives of linguistic signs as those that are maximally structured
by denotational sign-value in a system and minimally by any other kind of function. But
these forms of "value" may still be distinguished. Moreover, the analogy between money
and language may make it difficult to conceive of any other relation between them.

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14
Monoglot "Standard" in
America: Standardization
and Metaphors of
Linguistic Hegemony
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

The evidence of societal plurilingualism is everywhere about us, on urban public

transportation, in classrooms, wherever service-sector personnel are encountered,
and on lettuce farms and across vast tracts set aside as reservations. Yet, since we
live in a nation-state perpetually trying to constitute of itself an officially unified
society with a uniform public Culture, one of the strongest lines of demarcation
of that public Culture is linguistic, in the form of advocacy of or opposition to
something that, in keeping with terminologized usage, I shall call The Standard. It
is obvious that advocacy of The Standard has, in certain contexts, posed problems
for those for whom the linguistic realm should be but a special case of their more
widely-held, or generalized, longings for an ideal pluralism, or egalitarianism, or
even free-market consumerist smorgasbordism as a construction of the American
sociopolitical telos. And it should also be obvious that, once debate is focused on
linguistic issues in terms of The Standard versus whatever purportedly polar op-
posites, then the fact that the situation is conceptualized in terms of The Standard
indicates what we might term its hegemonic domination over the field of contro-
versy, no matter what position is taken with respect to it.
Indeed, we might say that we live in a society with a culture of monoglot stan-
dardization underlying the constitution of our linguistic community and affect-
ing the structure of our various and overlapping speech communities. I want to
explore some of the dimensions of this culture of monoglot Standard, and to
show how the essentially sociopolitical problems for societal plurilingualism pre-
sent themselves in its terms. In this, the work is part of the linguistic anthropol-
ogy of modern American society.
I have been using several terms in technical senses; these need definition, or at
least characterization. Anthropologists speak of a culture (with a small c) as a way
of orienting themselves to a structure of symbolically-enactable values implicit in

284
Monoglot "Standard" in America 285

the organization and interpretability (significance) of social action, that is, of in-
terpersonally consequential behavior and thought. Hence, a culture of monoglot
standardization (or Standard) can be demonstrated by showing the ways that this
ideal underlies people's understanding of linguistic usage in their community,
how it lies behind, or is presupposed by, the way people understand sociolinguis-
tic behavior to be an enactment of a collective order (social or "natural" or divine
or whatever). Societies have cultures, and societies are, in this sense, gradiently co-
hesive as groups of people.
One aspect of society-hood is being a speech community: sharing a set of
norms or regularities for interaction by means of language(s). It was in this sense
that Benjamin Lee Whorf ([1941] 1956:138) coined the term "Standard Average
European" for that set of regularities in linguistic usage, particularly "fashions of
speaking" about things, that were common in gradiently characterizable degree
across all of Western Europe and many parts of Central and Eastern Europe as
well. A speech community need not have only one "language;' then, in the normal
understanding of this term.
By contrast, a linguistic community, such as the kind we refer to a culture of
standardization, is a group of people who, in their implicit sense of the regulari-
ties oflinguistic usage, are united in adherence to the idea that there exists a func-
tionally differentiated norm for using their "language" denotationally (to repre-
sent or describe things), the inclusive range of which the best language users are
believed to have mastered in the appropriate way. There may be no actual histor-
ical individual who, in fact, does; that is not the point. It is allegiance to the con-
cept of such a functionally differentiated denotational norm of usage, said to de-
fine the "best" speakers of language L, that marks membership in a specific
linguistic community for language L, and a sense of continuity with others in it.
Note that speakers of Arabic belong to a single linguistic community-with prop-
erties somewhat the inverse of Whorl's European case-by virtue of equivalent
local functional differentiation (in conditions we call 'diglossia' [Ferguson 1959;
1968]) of all the dialectal forms of Arabic from Koranic and Classical Arabic,
which are usable by the "best" speakers of Arabic in appropriate situations as the
denotational code par excellence, the mode of correct or truthful communications
about what is apprehensible in God's universe. Yet, of course, there are many dif-
ferent speech communities-especially of the dialectal sort-in which Arabic lin-
guistic community members take part. And, it should be recalled, both types of
community, speech community and linguistic community, are gradient notions,
the characteristics of which interact in specific ways in different sociohistorical
conditions.
Standardization, then, is a phenomenon in a linguistic community in which in-
stitutional maintenance of certain valued linguistic practices-in theory, fixed-
acquires an explicitly-recognized hegemony over the definition of the commu-
nity's norm. People defer-on grounds varied as a function of their positions in
the community, to be sure-to the authority of such institutions-to articulate the
286 Michael Silverstein

community's norm. Hence, "best" users of the language, that is, at least, those who
would be "best:' strive to achieve this Standard linguistic practice, the control of
which as part of the functionally differentiated norm becomes an index of "best
speakerhood:' As Leonard Bloomfield (whose centenary we celebrate this year) in
effect noted in 1927, the Saussurean or Durkheimian linguistic norm is a univer-
sal condition for linguistic communities, while the existence of Standards is very
much a function of having hegemonic institutions, such as those that control
writing/printing and reading as channels of exemplary communication with lan-
guage, the operation of which in a society establishes and maintains the Standard.
So much so, Bloomfield pointed out, that people who speak Standardized lan-
guages (note: not, necessarily, people who speak Standard) often cannot even con-
ceive of there being a linguistic norm in our technical sense-and hence, for them,
a "language" as opposed to a "dialect" or "patois" or whatever-for languages lack-
ing the institutionalized paraphernalia of Standardization, such as enforcement of
a conventionalized writing system, or explicit communication (e.g., through
schools) of a tradition of normative grammar. Even though such languages may
be highly and transparently articulated into a set of context-specific registers, be-
speaking subtle regularities of usage, may manifest all the communicative proper-
ties of one's own language, and may be sociohistorically specific to a cultural tra-
dition identifiable in all other ways, still, to many speakers of standardized
languages, non-standardized ones do not quite seem to be "real" languages, which,
ironically enough, are for them thought to come in "naturally" standardized con-
ditions of"objectively" distinct systems of norms.
There is, obviously, an enormous complexity to the functional diversity of lan-
guage in the several American speech communities. The linguistic community of
American monoglot Standard English can thus be situated in several dimensions
of contrast simultaneously. For example, with respect to what Gumperz
(1968:383) has called the "dialectal" (including sociolectal) variability of English
linguistic usages comprehended in the partition into speech communities,
Standard is endowed with claims to superiority as a "superposed" register for use
in those contexts of interaction that count in society. In this sense, Standard is, as
it were, the absence of"dialect:' and its superiority as such is seen to emerge from
its positively-specifiable attributes. With respect to the existence of plurilingual-
ism in the nation-state, Standard English is differentiated from mere norm-gov-
erned languages (frequently not recognized as languages, as I noted above), from
non-written norm-governed languages (even worse), and from languages the
local forms of which are defined in relation to heterochthonous norms (even
Standards), e.g., New World Spanish or French seen in relation to Castillian or
Parisian insofar as understood to be Spanish or French, respectively. In this sense,
Standard English becomes the unifying emblem of nation-statehood insofar as
linguistic community is swept up into participation in its cultural expression.
In all these respects, the culture of Standard is aggressively hegemonic, domi-
nating all these linguistic situations with an understanding of other linguistic us-
Monoglot "Standanl" in America 287

ages as locatable only in terms of Standard. There is thus always an interested ide-
ology that rationalizes these sociolinguistic situations with a metaphoric model
for interpretation, in which a variant of the cultural drama of standardization acts
itself out. It is not the particular side of any issue that concerns us here, so much
as the characteristics common to and implicit in the structuring of various argu-
ments about such issues. Let us look at a couple of examples.
We find, for example, the pro-Standard free-market economistic variant artic-
ulated by Milton and Rose Friedman in their book, Free to Choose (1980:25):

No one decided what words should be admitted into the language, what the rules of
grammar should be, which words should be adjectives, which nouns.

How did language develop? In much the same way as an economic order develops
through the market-out of the voluntary interaction of individuals, in this case seek-
ing to trade ideas or information or gossip rather than goods and services with one an-
other. One or another meaning was attributed to a word, or words were added as the
need arose. Grammatical usages developed and were later codified into rules. Two par-
ties who want to communicate with one another both benefit from coming to a com-
mon agreement about the words they use. As a wider and wider circle of people find it
advantageous to communicate with one another, a common usage spreads and is codi-
fied in dictionaries. At no point is there any coercion, any central planner who has power
to command, though in more recent times government school systems have played an
important role in standardizing usage.
If we concern ourselves not with either the factuality or coherence of the points
made in this text, but with what it tells us about the view of language from within
the American culture of standardization, three general properties emerge in the
specifics, all relevant to my discussion further on.
First, the argument about the historical emergence of codification or standard-
ization as a social process is displaced to the plane of the functional utility of lan-
guage as a means of representation or instrument of denotation. How Standard
becomes the mode of optimal denotation is the central issue of the exercise of ex-
planation. Note, by the way, that other than the classificatory terms alluding to
(normative) grammar, namely noun and adjective, the entire discussion of lan-
guage-as-denotational-instrumentality is cast in terms of words and word mean-
ings, in other words the very folk view of language as a grammarless collection of
nomenclature-word-as-forms standing-for things-as-content-that Saussure
(1916:97, 158) and Boas (1911:67-73) long ago set in perspective as folk rational-
izations. In fact, generalizing from their insights, the modern, semiotic study of
the functional grounding of language and its structures, predicts that folk views
about the functions of language will characteristically center on the functional ca-
pacity of words and expressions as the salient, formulable interest of native speak-
ers in their language (see Silverstein 1979, 1981, 1985a for discussion and refer-
ences), one of those functions particularly emphasized in our folk linguistic
tradition being denotation.
288 Michael Silverstein

Second, note that in this argument the social processes of communication are
naturalized in two specific ways, and hence doubly anchored by reduction to a
non- or prelinguistic realm of things: individual practical rationality seeking some
kind of optimal contractarian "fit" individuals can negotiate freely among them-
selves for the coding relationship between linguistic words and the extralinguistic
"reality" they represent, but do not affect. The history of standardization is, in this
view, the process of contractarian search for "a common agreement" about the de-
notational value of words, the right fit naturally being acceded to by "a wider and
wider circle of people" purely for (presumably economically important) conve-
nience. This process of cumulative individual "rational choice" to participate in
the "wider and wider circle of people" (namely, aggregate of individuals) using
words with particular denotational values, seems to have no basis in structures of
authority or "linguistic division oflabor" (Putnam 1975), nor social consequences
other than whatever flows indirectly from the ease of informational coding pos-
tulated to underlie and to motivate the process. These two forms of naturaliza-
tion, then, anchor the processes of standardization in something outside of the so-
cial organization of language use itself, namely in psychological properties and
propensities of the individual users, and in properties and things to be denoted
that are independently in the world "out there." Standardization, with its accom-
panying codification, is really the long-term consequence of the first set of factors
"solving" the functional problem presented to language as a system of denotation
by the second set of factors.'
Third, this argument, having naturalized, as it were, the processes of standard-
ization, presents the rise of social phenomena with "power to command" over lan-
guage, such as "government school systems" (and, we might argue, dictionaries
that are part of the institutional paraphernalia), as merely the natural, or rational,
endpoint in concrete institutional form, of the otherwise timeless forces of deno-
tational optimization. So institutions of standardization are created as merely the
endpoints of the natural, evolutionary working of the "invisible hand;' the better
to effectuate what is already going on in more informal, non-institutional terms.
Institutions in this sense are also "natural" phenomena in that they respond to
needs already and independently present in the processes they affect/effect, but
presumably help the individuals caught up in such process the better and perhaps
more efficiently to realize the telos to which they are in any case already tend'ing.
The rhetoric of naturalization has thus moved to the justification of undeniably
social institutions as aids to the realization of every individual's natural linguistic
project.
Compare now a discussion that starts from opposite predispositions to value
the effects of monoglot standardization, and which is couched in a different
metaphorical framework for naturalization. The physicist Freeman Dyson
(1979:223-24) puts his model and its rationale biologically, where the lesson of
the evolution of species gives the proof of the functionality of his position valu-
ing the greatest diversity of dialect and language:
Monoglot "Standard" in America 289

In biology, a done is the opposite of a dade. A dade is a group of populations sharing a

common origin but exhibiting genetic diversity so wide that they are barred from inter-
breeding. A done is a single population in which all individuals are genetically identical.
Clades are the stuff of which great leaps forward in evolution are made. Clones are evo-
lutionary dead ends, slow to adapt and slow to evolve. Clades can occur only in organ-
isms that reproduce sexually. Clones in nature are typically asexual.
All this, too, has its analog in the domain of linguistics. A linguistic done is a
monoglot culture, a population with a single language sheltered from alien words and
·alien thoughts. Its linguistic inheritance, propagated asexually from generation to gen-
eration, tends to become gradually impoverished. The process of impoverishment is
easy to see in the declining vocabulary of the great writers of English from Shakespeare
to Dickens, not to speak of Faulkner and Hemingway. As the centuries go by, words be-
come fewer and masterpieces of literatm;e become rarer. Linguistic rejuvenation requires
the analog of sexual reproduction, the mixture of languages and cross-fertilization of
vocabularies. The great flowering of English culture followed the sexual union of French
with Anglo-Saxon in Norman England. The dade of Romance languages did not spring
from Latin alone but from the cross-fertilization of Latin with the languages of the local
barbarian tribes as the empire disintegrated. In human culture as in biology, a done is a
dead end, a dade is a promise of immortality.
Are we to be a dade or a done? This is perhaps the central problem in humanity's fu-
ture. In other words, how are we to make our social institutions flexible enough to pre-
serve our precious biological and cultural diversity? There are some encouraging signs
that our society is growing more flexible than it used to be. Many styles of behavior are
now allowed which thirty or forty years ago were forbidden. In many countries where
minority languages were once suppressed, they are now tolerated or even encouraged.
Thirty-five years after my visit to Llandudno, I stayed at the house of a friend in Cardiff,
the capital city of the English conquerors in Wales, and I was happy to see that the chil-
dren of my Bengali-speaking host were learning Welsh in the Cardiff city schools. Since
they were already fluent in English, Bengali and Arabic, they took Welsh in stride, with-
out difficulty. These children were displaying in a spectacular fashion the gift of cultural
and linguistic plasticity with which nature has endowed our species. So long as we con-
tinue to raise such children, we shall be in no danger of becoming a done.

As can be seen, cultural flowering follows upon linguistic health, measured in

terms of vocabulary, the folk denotational units of language. The unhealthy,
"clone" -like state of a language is, for Dyson, reflected in the purported vocabu-
lary-size of various writers, presumably at the apex of language use in their re-
spective linguistic communities, and hence an index of the potential of the lan-
guage in which they write. And the processes of recommended linguistic "clade"
formation seem to rest on some kind of intermixture, of"cross-fertilization" be-
tween languages, or more particularly between the speech, in each case, of a na-
tion/race of "Culture" and one that, in the English and more generally Western
European folklore, is considered more on the order of "local barbarian tribes:'
such as "Anglo-Saxon" vis-a-vis French, Celts vis-a-vis Romans, Welsh vis-a-vis
English, etc. Notions of hybrid robustness in such linguistic husbandry seem to be
underlying. Hence, again here, social institutions are to foster that robust state of
290 Michael Silverstein

speech by being made "flexible enough to preserve our precious biological and
cultural diversity," as for example teaching the local language-here, Welsh in
Cardiff-alongside the official and standardized one. (What goes for distinct lan-
guages goes, of course, for local dialect vs. Standard language even more.)
It is easily seen that in each of three respects, both the Friedmans' and Dyson's
accounts of monoglot language standardization have certain recurrent general
themes, despite the differences of their metaphoric models of language standard-
ization or its opposite. They both displace the problem onto the functional plane
of word denotation, seeing this as the problem of language par excellence. They
both "naturalize;' as I have termed it, the processes of standardization or diversi-
fication as ones that play themselves out with reference to aggregates of individu-
als, the advantages or disadvantages to whom of the one or the other course of
events-wider circles of people with whom one can communicate, enhanced abil-
ity to produce literary masterpieces, linguistic/cultural vigor, etc.-are at issue.
Through such naturalization, extralinguistic properties or attitudes of individuals
can be read in and from their participation in standardization/diversification
processes. Hence, third, both these approaches rationalize the existence or opera-
tion of social institutions promoting, authorizing, or enforcing standardiza-
tion/diversification as potentially enhancing, perfecting, or enabling the individ-
ual to achieve personal consonance with the "natural" tendencies advocated.
It is noteworthy as a confirmation of the cultural nature of views of standard-
ization/diversification that some set of variants of one or more of these themes,
similarly internally coherent (or at least mutually reinforcing), appears again and
again in the hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, advertisements for
Standard-related services and products, letters to the editor, advice columns, etc.,
that I have been collecting and examining for the last several years. 2 The sheer
number of these items alone, particularly in the major source for systematic col-
lection, The Chicago Tribune, during the period in question demonstrates that the
culture of standardization is a dominant mode in which the society is articulating
itself to itself.
More particularly, we can discern in the corpus a very focused and socially lo-
catable construal of Standard English in relation to all other possible forms of
speech. It is what I would term the commoditization of Standard English and, in
relation to it, of alternative forms of speech-language use, in short swept up into
the brisk commerce of personal socio-economic identity. In any cultural ideology
of language, to be sure, it is expectable that language use become an objectified
focus of rationalization, an explicit object of the actors' subjectivities and their in-
tersubjective understandings communicable as social thought. But more than
this, we discover an objectualization, as I have called it (Silverstein 1984), of lan-
guage and its use, in which language acquires a "thinginess" such that the proper-
ties language takes on are continuous with those of other objects in the culture.
Hence, linguistic forms and their deployability-in-context can take on the charac-
teristics of sometimes alienable, sometimes inalienable possessions and their per-
Monoglot "Standard" in America 291

sonally-controlled display or even bestowal. Such objectualized language becomes

an important adjunct to all other forms of indexicals of identity, and indeed be-
comes metricized-turned into a gradient measurable-in relation to them, an
indexable as well as indexical in a culture that literalized the enactment of the
metaphor of personal values. As a commodity, Standard English in particular can
be made the object of a brisk commerce in goods-and-services for which experts
make themselves available (authorities or connoisseurs in the humanistic social
fields, therapists/doctors or technicians in the scientific ones, etc.) and advertisers
become focal personnel of personal decision-making to acquire the desired com-
modity for a price. Witness to all this, reporters have become bearers of the glad
tidings of availability to the concerned market, secondarily repeating the advertis-
ing messages as a surrogate "educated public" through which news of the com-
modity's availability is being spread.
What I am suggesting is that the traditional" questione della lingua" that we have
always had in the United States is being transformed by a culture of language use,
in particular of Standard English usage, that is changing both as to the kinds of
social communication its enactment makes possible, and as to the locus of con-
cern and enactment, the locus, as it were, of the cultural "action:' From the mate-
rial examined, it appears that the commoditized sense of Standard and the anxi-
eties revealed in practical discourse about it have moved rather decidedly into the
institutional setting of corporate business-where commoditization is indeed the
mode of construing culture. It is the setting in which plying one's product or pro-
fession has become sometimes indistinguishable from displaying one's personal
value. Briefly put, it is the world of yuppiedom. 3
In this, as in any institutional sphere, culture manifests itself through enactable
figures, inscribing tropes of "praxis;' or pragmatic tropes, in the very commu-
nicative modalities of social action. Possession-of-Standard vs. lack-of-Standard,
it seems, is being made culturally enactable through tropes of personal value or
worth, where lack-of-Standard is gradiently negative with respect to gradiently
positive possession-of-Standard. As we shall see below, though there are many
specific commercial and non-commercial variants on this theme, they all turn
possession-of-Standard into a realizable asset that can be achieved so as to in-
crease overall personal value in one or another recognizable symbolic paradigm.
Lack-of-Standard, by contrast, is a lack only against a background assumption
that Standard is "natural" if not neutral in some sense (recall here the Friedmans'
Just-So story). And indeed, this naturalization of the commodity that people are
able to acquire becomes a key leitmotif underlying specific advocacies of
Standard.4
How does this process manifest itself? Let us examine the materials with a focus
on the three aspects of cultural construction of language as a problem I have in-
troduced above. Let us see thereby that general forces of culture are at work here
in a specific sociohistorical setting of institutions that are increasingly formative
of contemporary American life.
292 Michael Silverstein

First, let us take the issue of referential displacement. If language basically

names things "out there:' it becomes important to name them correctly, that is,
not too few distinctions, not too many, but to get it, like Goldilocks, ju...st right.
Standard English, it turns out, does just that, or at least does so better than any-
thing else available as a variant. As the playwright Ossie Davis put it on Ted
Koppel's Nightline on September 3, 1986,
it's absolutely essential that there is a distinction between one thing and another, and
those distinctions can only be expressed in a language that is capable of discerning the
difference between one thing and another. . . . [I] f we lose the value of the words we use,
then we can't clearly describe what it is we want to describe. . . . [T] ruth is absolutely es-
sential to the practice of [life], and if we lose truth, we lose our sense of direc-
tion.... Language is the road map of experience, and if we tell ourselves lies and let our-
selves be misguided we can go off the edge and never come back.

Adds George Will:

Confusion creeps into language on tiny little cat feet like the fog, and before long you're
in a fog .... [T]he issue here really is truth, our capacity to accurately describe [-uh
oh, Mr. Will, a split infinitive confounding Truth!-] real states of the world.... It's re-
ally the slovenliness, the small incremental carelessness that bothers me most.

One might as well be listening to post-Baconian Puritan preachers talking

about the road to salvation, for truthfulness, a form of referential cleanliness, is in-
deed next to Godliness. Hence the moral indignation, indeed outrage, that vari-
ous writers can work themselves up to venting about non-Standard linguistic
practices. And on the other hand, we must, as modern, rational people, defend
that language that gives us access to the unvarnished, non-euphemistic, "scien-
tific-objective:' as it were, Truth. The values of technology, how science manifests
itself in the corporate world of commoditization, are indeed on the same side as
those of religious fervor, just as they were in seventeenth century England. 5
It is Standard as Logos: numerous columnists and other occasional writers,
with zero actual expertise, devote great numbers of column inches to talking of
the "obfuscations" of truthful reality evidenced in social dialects, chic or trendy
usages, and so forth. In one way or another, every report on what become from
this point of view variants of "good, dear, Standard English" is presented in com-
patible language, in which non-Standards of the 'dialect' [= geographical dialect]
or ethnic [e.g., Black] English variety are denotationally impoverished with re-
spect to the more "truth-full" Standard, and technical jargon, such as lawyers'
English, or economists', pr other scientists' English are hyper-rich-nitpicking, if
you will-with respect' to Standard.
Thus, note that every popular presentation of regional accents, especially
phonological variation, portrays the defects of the accent, with respect to
Standard, as the cause of"confusion" and lack of"darity:' Indeed, "clarity" of ex-
pression is foremost among the rationalizable attributes of Standard, as our
Monoglot "Standard" in America 293

quoted disquisition on Truth demonstrated, and threats to that clarity come in

ethnic-, regional-, gender-, and class-based deviations from it. The New York
Times, for example (W. K. Stevens, NYT 21/VII/85, p.14), notes that
Mr. Labov tells of a New York family that was sharply criticized by the neighborhood
children for giving their son a girl's name. The name was Ian, which is how the children
all pronounced Ann.

Again, note the theory underlying the charming reports that abound in the
press where a particular phonological "accent" is the topic (and generally the
cause of someone's making a bundle by writing a joke-book on it). Generally, the
theme is the charm of the humor in confusion, as demonstrated by the puns in-
duced between the "accented" pronunciation and how the written form of a word
would be read off in Standard spelling pronunciation:

"Ah speck yore paved with me." [I expect you're peeved with me.]
"He made a heir at second base." [He made a(n) error at second base.]
"Yew main to tell me yew paid four dollars for that quart of pint:'
[You mean to tell me you paid $4 for that quart of paint?]
(quoted from "Larnin' the lingo fer trip to Taxes;' by K. Biffle, Chicago Tribune,
18/Vl/85, sec.5, pp. 1,5)

Such devices underscore the fact that for the population in the culture of
Standardization, accented, positively-marked deviations have something of the
quality of malapropisms, which are, of course, embarrassing even if charming
gaffes in self-presentation as someone able to speak seriously and clearly.
But this serious and (lexically) clear speech can go too far, as in what is termed
"Econspeak" in one report ("The only patter that matters in Washington;' Bill
Neikirk, Chicago Tribune, 7/XI/85), or lawyers' language ("It's perfectly clear:
lawyers obfuscate;' H. Witt, Chicago Tribune, 9/X/84, sec.2, p.9). Like a linguistic
Frankenstein-monster, technical terminology and patterns of (lexical) expression
are seen to have gone wild, outwitting or at least hampering humans who use
them. Language, in this sense, can outwit its users; verbally splitting hairs with too
much technical terminology can render us the unwilling but helpless sorcerer's
apprentices awash in misguided thought. 6 At the same time, there is a sinister side
to the purposeful use of bejargoned language, governmentese and other forms of
obfuscation, "cover-up" language, which is reported as a crime against truth, and
thus a crime against what we might term the "Standard reality" of rational per-
sons-in-the-street.' Professionals, thus, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, are being
subjected to courses and tutorials that show them how to write and speak with
"cleaner, simpler, more vivid" language-like stripping away encrusted and non-
functional muck, one supposes, as we see always in toothpaste, mouthwash, sham-
poo, and other such advertisements, or perhaps a form of linguistic Bauhaus
modernism to renovate the mansions of the mind. Such language will be closer,
of course, to one's ideas of generalized Standard, which surely, the argument goes,
294 Michael Silverstein

suffices to get across even the most complex concepts, if, that is, they are clean, and
clear, and honestly to be communicated.
This valorization of the "just right" denotational Standard by having the "just
right;' accentless pronunciation and "just right" lexical expression by no means
occurs in a culturally-construed social vacuum. Indeed, an elaborate conscious-
ness of the nature of variability-around-the-Standard informs the material I have
examined and the social processes of definition and differentiation of types oflin-
guistic variants. In the particular social sector for which the greatest commoditi-
zation of Standard seems to have taken place, the urban paraprofessionals and
rapidly-upwardly-mobile professionals, a "story;' as it were, has to be fashioned
about the commodity as an item of social transactions, giving it values that emerge
in native social theory from objectifications of the pragmatics of linguistic usage
of Standard and variant forms of language. This is what we would term a folk
meta-pragmatics, an aspect of the constant, ongoing semiotics of language use: as
for any form of social behavior that operates through pragmatic codes, it is the
means of the participants' coming-to-grips with the problem of construing the ef-
fectiveness and meaningfulness of the events in which they (and here, we) take
part. For language as a pragmatic (indexical) code in SAE linguistic communities,
as I have elsewhere argued (Silverstein 1979, 1985a, 198Sb), the folk meta-prag-
matics generally consists of two kinds of semiotic movements: folk-extensional-
ization of indexical (pragmatically enacted) distinctions through the code of de-
notation, and folk-intensionalization of the distinctions among the deflected-or
denotationally recoded-duplex sign-complexes (leading to what Barthes
(1967:41-42) calls "refunctionalization" for objects of utility in general) that re-
motivates the indexical code as a schema of representation of (naturally) iconic
value. The use of now denotationally-linked indexicals becomes emblematic of
one's relation to the commodity and its sphere of values.
The first semiotic movement is the apprehension of some usage-marked differ-
entiation of situation through forms and categories of a denotational code. In this
way, the denotational code is seen to "extend;' i.e., point directly to, the particular
situational differentiation in question; the use-marking thus differentiates some-
thing that is construable as independently "out there" in the situation (were it not;
we could not extend it denotationally, could we now?). The second semiotic
movement is finding some motivation in the relationship of use-marking sign to
its correlatively indexed situational differentiation by seeing an analogous prop-
erty or set of properties, predicable of both, that shows why the one stands for the
other. As is readily apparent, both of these movements are "naturalizing" in just
the sense we introduced earlier; the one understands the situational differentia-
tions to have existed independent of the use-marking that seems to enact it, while
the other finds that the use-marking is "natural" for the particular situational dif-
ferentiation as so apprehended because there is some common property, or at
least likeness, about the use-marking and the situational differentiation. These
semiotic movements of interpretation and construal, moreover, operate in both
Monoglot "Standanl" in America 295

directions, in the ongoing processes of production and comprehension of our

own and of others' social behavior.
The use in context of what are apprehended as forms of Standard English ver-
sus any variant forms of English, or of Standard English versus another language
can thus become such a pragmatic code, in folk terms at least initially the "how"
rather than the "what" of saying something.• But immediately one wishes to
"place" use of Standard vis-a-vis such alternative uses, one comes across other so-
cial facts of variation that comprise the situational differentiations enacted by the
usage of one kind of form over another, facts of social identity of speakers and
hearers in situations of use of language, facts of differential influence or power
correlative with such social differentiation in society, and facts about participants'
commitment to ideals that construe such societal differences as good or bad (holy
or evil, etc.). And, as such a pragmatic code of the "how" of interacting socially,
use of Standard (vs. alternatives) is subject to the semiotic processes of folk-ex-
tensionalization and folk-intensionalization that seem to be inherent in its appre-
hension by its users. By such processes, social differentiations can be displaced
onto linguistic differences in usage-specifically seen as differentiations around
the denotational linguistic norm of Standard English-and these latter can be
perceived as a guide to and natural basis for the social differentiation that they
index.
Now given that the indexed social differentiations involving standardization re-
volve around social stratification and hierarchy of one sort or another, and given
that in our fiercely egalitarian and individualistic mode of apprehending the var-
ious codes of social stratification we tend to construe such indexables as coordi-
nated clusters of positive properties, nonsociologically-valorized symbolic attrib-
utes, of individual people-given these in our cultural construal of linguistic
usage, the situating of Standard in our culture of standardization becomes under-
standable. Valorized as an instrument of maximally clear denotational communi-
cation, and indexically associated with those to whom its use has made accessible
highly-valued characteristics, Standard English becomes a gradiently possessible
commodity, access to which should be the "natural;' "rational" choice of every
consumer equal-under-the-law (God's and the country's), and lack of which can
be seen in this symbolic paradigm as a deficit, much like vitamin deficiency (in the
natural, physiological variant), or lack of a good wardrobe or proper facial make-
up or freshened body odors for personal attractiveness (in the self-expression
variant), or an affliction of poor background hindering one's ability to blend into
the corporate background (in the Cultural, etiquette-like variant). I believe that
this is a key distinction between the culture of Standard, as we have it most highly
manifest in the noted social sector in America (and elsewhere, like Great Britain,
to a lesser extent), and other kinds of cultural dimensions of linguistic stratifica-
tion (e.g., diglossia; caste/estate ranked-dialects; socially identifiable registers,
asymmetrically distributed and accessible; etc.). The naturalization of Standard at
present is such, that its possession becomes a measure of (good old American)
296 Michael Silverstein

freedom, freedom to achieve professionally, personally, and, as expressed by a

number of speech consultants, psychologically. Freeing people from unwanted
and unsightly ("unsoundly"?) accents, bad expressions, etc. frees their true inner
selves, their "real" selves, as it were: Be all that you can be; join the army of
. Standard-bearers! It's both natural and patriotic. Standard is our manifest destiny.
We can observe how these processes operate to re-valorize and transform a di-
alectal difference into a superposed symbolic= (emblematic) differentiation. They
operate according to the logic of metaphorical or analogical (iconic) schemata
that give the contextual parameters of code use (here, who uses the dialectal vari-
ant in what contexts to whom about what) an essential connection to the forms
of the code, seen denotationally, in a schema or model of explaining (etiologically
or causally) why such-and-such type of person uses such-and-such type of lan-
guage in said act of code use. Observe how the Queen's English Society valorizes
RP ('Received Pronunciation') with respect to geographical dialect variants, thus
in effect drawing all these recognized geographical dialects together in a culturally
superposed schema of variation with respect to the RP norms, the non-availability
of all the elements of which to any person or group in the overall schema of dif-
ferentiation becoming their deficit with respect to the Standard that has a rational
basis in some identifiable characteristic:

Yorkshire miners: "defiantly talk among themselves in the local dialect" [defiant
provincialism];
Welsh: "sound liltingly conciliatory";
Ulster Irish: "sound blustery" [cf. 'Windy City'?];
West Country people: "purr" [less than sophisticated; kitten-like];
Bristolians: "mysteriously add an 'l' to various words" [superfluousness of irra-
tional];
East Anglians: "wheedle" [ungentlemanly; tricky];
Cockneys: "sound cheeky;' "thick" [impertinent and stupid];
Liverpudlians: "just think of the Beatles" [!] .
(source: [AP] M. Eliason, Chicago Tribune, 9/V/85, sec.l, p.25)

What we have here is nothing less than a schema of negatives in characterolog-

ical terms, serving ultimately as a model for grounding and explaining dialect
speech as a function of something about these people as individuals, by compar-
ison to the unspoken positive virtues of those who speak the (neutral) Queen's
English.
The very same phenomenon is found in the United States, where, however,
there is some variability in the sources as to how a complete schema is to be re-
constructed out of the observations that symbolically ground social and geo-
graphical localizations. So, we are told in the New York Times (W.K. Stevens,
21/VII/85, p. 14), perpetuating the East Coast variant of the myth of a "General
American English" (the mythical embodiment of Standard9 ), that
Monoglot "Standard" in America 297

what Mr. Labov calls 'television network' or 'Standard' American English ... is com-
monly spoken in the West by white members of all social classes.

Yet, sources from the Far Western state of California, and from the Midwest,
clearly recognize that social class, urban vs. rural identity, etc. differentiate
Standard speakers from others in those regions, and that they speak a geographi-
cally locatable variant with respect to Standard. Of course, many people in the
eastern part of the United States attribute this "generalized" American to the
Midwest or the Far West, particularly California, no doubt in an emblematic map
of where the "true" America can be found to be embodied in these United States.
Thus, why, in our sources, does the phonetic accent of New Yorkers "grate;' and
that of the Southerner bespeak mental slowness? Note here, too, the totemistic
transfer of the social emblem cast in essentially individualistic characterological-
personality terms onto language as what we might term a folk-etiological theory.
Again, many women construe differences in Standard-possession somewhat
differently from men, though the general asymmetry in the direction of

women : men :: less-Standard : more-Standard

holds for people in the culture of Standard, thus explaining for them why, as is
quoted in my data, "Women often lack punch in their speech ... sound[ing]
apologetic or unsure" (D. Solis, ''A good accent is not accent to some people;' Wall
Street Journal, 22NII/86, p. 1). The "apologetic" or "unsure" self-presentation of
women is located in relatively less Standardized usage, which mediates their fe-
maleness! 10
The situation of Standard English with respect to other languages also takes on
the character of a linguistic totemism, here projecting the values of nationality as
seen by speakers onto the linguistic expression of them. A Chicago Tribune edito-
rial writer seeks to

examine why English words are so widely used in French[.]

Clearly, one reason is that English is so flexible. It is a kind of linguistic putty; it can
be squeezed into any shape required and used to fill in all kinds of gaps in other lan-
guages. One cannot do that with French because it is too-well, French.
One reason why English is so adaptable is that it is so nonexclusive; speakers of
English have always been ready to borrow useful words from any language.

Note how those values of self-perception of Americans vs. the French that were al-
ready established in the mythology of Benjamin Franklin in Paris-ingenious-
ness, ingenuousness, practicality, etc.-are projected onto the difference between
the English and French languages. The adaptable welcoming, and, indeed, "nat-
ural" egalitarianism of American self-image vs. its opposite (observe the strong
connotation of pretense and artificiality about French/the French) become over-
298 Michael Silverstein

all attributes of the respective languages as instruments of denotation. And given

how this ethno-ethnology engages with linguistic ideology as it construes another
highly-regarded standard language, it is easy to see the route for various some-
times vitriolic attacks on the various non-English languages the existence of
which in communities in the United States obtrudes into the consciousness of op-
ed piece and letter writers in our newspapers through political issues like funding
for bilingual education, balloting, etc. The same kind of construal of Standard vs.
non-Standard English gets applied, mutatis mutandis, in the wider field of English
vs. other forms oflinguistic self-presentation."
There is, then, a construal of Standard English with a neutral, emblematic value
centered in the unity and identity of the nation-state, that does not easily distin-
guish between the dialects/sociolects-around-the-Standard and any other-lan-
guages-around-the-Standard in its analysis and advocacy. Indeed, the processes of
such emblematization, as I have argued a form of Barthian "refunctionalization"
of denotational value, are common to social forms in all societies, and hence, in
particular, to languages everywhere; that they do not make the analytic distinc-
tions we do from our linguistic perspective is to be expected. What seems to be
distinctive of the current cultural scene, however, is the emergence, at the very epi-
center of Angst about Standard, of new mechanisms that, in "dealing with" the in-
tensely experienced Standard-deficit, have the semiotic effect of commoditization,
shaping the terms in which English per se is valorized as well. How vivid is the
metaphor of language as our very "currency" of communication:

In economic theory, bad money drives out the good. In linguistic theory as well, bad lan-
guage is clearly capable of driving out good language. (Bill Neikirk, "Econspeak;'
Chicago Tribune 7/Xl/85, sec. 5, p. 2)

Hence, we would suppose, the necessity for certain controls or stimulated market-
correctives to deal with this debasable medium (one wonders what the linguistic
monetarist would do!).
There has been emerging, then, a new kind of hegemony over Standard, closely
tied to the world of American business, where its primary target audience is
found, and whose language, as it were, it speaks. The authoritative discourse about
Standard in relation to alternative variations comes in the form of numbers of
new companies marketing products and services in recognizable cultural idioms:
not just (old-fashioned) books, but up-to-the-minute cassette courses on gram-
mar, vocabulary, oral diction, etc. for self-help to achieve personal transformation
before the Standard; private and group "therapy" or "courses" in eliminating or
masking (perhaps to become a verbal Charles Atlas?) what are considered non-
Standard phonological and other patterns, combining aspects of psychotherapy,
self-help groups for sharing afflictions (Accents Anonymous?), and extra-credit
courses in practical or applied science (or even acting); consultancies on matters
linguistic, as a mode of rationalized corporate efficiency in personnel manage-
Monoglot "Standard" in America 299

ment and image, for which linguistic standardization is a matter of interpersonal

quali-control. Once-upon-a-time "elocution" teachers (drawing upon an idiom of
connoisseurship in personal arts) have been fashioned into the personnel of com-
panies of "helping professionals;' (cf. private, outpatient medicine in "health
maintenance organizations [HMOs]"). For an upscale fee, of course, such au-
thoritative professionals will eradicate the deficiencies people may have in spoken
and written Standard, emphasizing what we might call "corporate Standard;' that
is, Standard as the essential medium of corporate survival and personal success.
Their names, such as Grammar Group, Creative Speech Interests, Inc., Speech
Dynamics, bespeak the world they are attempting to dominate. These are wizards
of the accent and of the vocabulary, of punctuation, intonation, and hypercorrect
grammar, ministering like social workers or even physicians to "patients;' as many
characterize those "afflicted" with poor, i.e., non-Standard or non-English, lin-
guistic habits. (Speech pathologists, indeed!)
There is a market. From the fraction of"Dear Abby'' and "Miss Manners" space
devoted to matters of grammar, usage, pronunciation, etc. in my collection of
data, it is clear that there is much concern with such issues. And if, unlike the var-
ious newspaper pundits, actual experts on linguistics take positions about these
matters that bespeak a so-called "permissive" stance12-leading directly, many be-
lieve, to such things as bilingual programs and worse!-<:orporate America,
America, Inc., does not, nor do its entry-level but upwardly mobile white collars,
nor especially the cheerleaders for those values of which, in this context, Standard
becomes the emblematic focus. And if corporate America has decided that the
public schools, with all their permissiveness, are not supplying it with the kind of
linguistic product it needs/wants, it is certainly not going to put up with the situ-
ation, nor are entrepreneurial corporate folk going to resist filling the bill. So there
is money to be made by selling the commodity in question, in the paradigm of re-
mediation, a demand for which can be generated and maintained by using the en-
gines of that very Satan the ayatollahs of Standard most despise and complain
about as the ruination of the purity of Standard-advertising!13
Such is the emerging hegemony over commoditized Standard English in
America, spurred on by the chorus of William Satires, Edwin Newmans, John
Simons, and so forth in the public media.
And if that is the case for the way monoglot Standard is situated with respect to
other forms of what are termed "English" within the linguistic community, think
of how this particular social formation deals with the facts of plurilingualism
within the political borders of the United States at the present time. It must spell
itself out in legal/political terms, seeking to motivate assertion or reassertion of
Standard English by means of equating deficit-for-Standard (through, e.g., non-
English mother tongue, and non-Standard version of that, to boot!) with block-
age of access to the kinds of ideologically demanded "equality''-of protections,
opportunities, etc.-that the courts have been (some would say, have notoriously
been) trying to assert for some period of time. Hence, the arguments have to be
300 Michael Silverstein

mounted as functional ones, ones of enablement of particular non-Standard

English-speaking groups, or enablement of the entire polity (and hence, the legit-
imate interest of the state to intervene against unbridled freedom) by espousing
or denouncing state-supported/encouraged/restrictively enforced/franchised
unilingualism (in Standard English or some other norm/standard) or plurilin-
gualism.
It is clear that English-only amendments speak to this issue at state (currently)
and potentially national levels of political organization. With reference to the pop-
ulations at the economic fringes of American society, being slowly mobilized into
it, these remind one of the kind of edicts about language characterized by R.F.
Inglehart and M. Woodward ( 1967) in their classic study of "Language Conflicts
and Political Community." As they point out, when such measures are taken by a
dominant group in power during the phase of transition to mobility of the dom-
inated in the system of stratification, political conflict seems to be the regularity.
Yet the rationalization by which, as Katherine Woolard discovered in her study of
the California referendum, people of seemingly liberal consciousness and good-
will voted overwhelmingly for the establishment of English as the official state
language, can be nicely encapsulated from the ideology we have already seen,
namely that access-to-[Standard] English is 'direct access-free of community-in-
ternal political bosses, etc.-to the "truths" that elections, in the fairyland of
American civics ideologies, are said to be about. English gives each individual the
equality under the law, somehow.
Note further that bilingual education programs, rationalized when they were
passed as something to speed or at least increase the efficiency of mainstreaming
of minority groups, have both a group-internal and an official interpretability. On
Indian reservations where I have discussed the issue, it is a matter of giving the
fruits of Standardization, and its paraphernalia, to the local language. To a certain
extent, we can see this reading in much of the bilingualism literature written by
minority linguistic community members. That is, the success of the program in
officialdom's terms would be the failure of the program in group-internal terms.
But note that the arguments in the larger and dominant community pro and con
cannot really face up to the group-internal reasons for having such education in
the first place. Instead, the argument between the pros (who are accused by
Secretary Bennett and his assistants of being exactly that, pros, and hence eco-
nomically-do we smell a whiff of corruption on the scholarly breath?-not dis-
interested and so disingenuous in their opinions/conclusions) and the cons may,
indeed, I would say, must be read in terms of culture of Standard: can the virtues
attribut~d to the educated person-the speaker of, or aspirant to, English
Standard, be gotten through study by means of some other system of communi-
cation? What are the ultimate consequences of having/not having access to the
paraphernalia of Standardization-in this case, the educational establishment-
for the group(s) in questions? Are we exercising the state's legitimate interests in
one or another form of resolution, or are we thereby preserving equality of op-
Monoglot "Standard" in America 301

portunity in the laissez-faire sense? Since monoglot Standard is a cultural emblem

in our society, it is not a linguistic problem as such that we are dealing with.
Hence, note the folly of my colleagues in the LSA, who ask the membership to
vote on (the metaphor is wonderful!) the following resolution:

RESOLUTION
Whereas several states have recently passed measures making English their "official
state language;' and
Whereas the "English-only" movement has begun to campaign for the passage of sim-
ilar measures in other states and has declared its intention to attach an official language
amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and
Whereas such measures have the effect of preventing the legislature and state agencies
and officials from providing services or information in languages other than English,
Be it therefore resolved that the Society make known its opposition to such "English-
only" measures, on the grounds that they are based on misconceptions about the role of
a common language in establishing political unity, and that they are inconsistent with
basic American ideals of linguistic tolerance. As scholars with a professional interest in
language, we affirm that:
The English language in America is not threatened. All evidence suggests that re-
cent immigrants are overwhelmingly aware of the social and economic advantages of
becoming proficient in English, and require no additional compulsion to learn the
language.
American unity has never rested primarily on unity of language, but rather on
common political and social ideals.
History shows that attempts to impose a common language by force of law usually
create divisiveness and disunity.
It is to the economic and cultural advantage of the nation as a whole that its citi-
zens should be proficient in more than one language, and to this end we should en-
courage both foreign language study for native English speakers and programs that
enable speakers with other linguistic backgrounds to maintain proficiency in those
language along with English.

Such wide-eyed innocence-perhaps coming from the referentialist/structural-

ist dogma-about what is really at stake for the groups concerned with language
in relation to a culture of monoglot Standardization embarrasses me and makes
me realize that perhaps my high-school math teacher was right when he said that
language is too important to be left to the linguists.

Acknowledgments and History

A text of shorter compass was read as "Standardization and metaphors of linguistic
hegemony" in the session "Language and Political Economy, I" at the annual meeting of the
American Anthropological Association held in Philadelphia, 6 December 1986. I thank Hy
Van Luong and James Collins for the invitation to participate, and the discussants of the
session, John Comaroff and Jane Hill, for their oral comments. Written comments by James
Collins, Paul Friedrich, Thomas Kochman, and Elizabeth Mertz have been very useful to
302 Michael Silverstein

keep in mind in the process of revision. A longer version, somewhat reoriented, was given
as "Monoglot 'Standard' in America" at an interdisciplinary symposium, "The politics of
language in multilingual societies" at the University of Maryland (Baltimore County)
sponsored by the department of Modern Languages and Linguistics on 8 May 1987. For the
opportunity to present that version, and for making my visit to the UMBC campus very
pleasant, I thank Judith Morganroth Schneider of that department. Discussion with Brian
Weinstein and Frank Anshen, two other participants in that symposium, has been espe-
cially helpful in further revision. For some of the technical terminology, readers may wish
to consult various articles in Semiotic Mediation, ed. Elizabeth Mertz & Richard Parmentier
(Orlando, Fla.: Academic, 1985).

Notes
1. As such, the reconstruction of this process in economistic terms is of the genus of
what I would term, after Boas ( [ 1887) 1940:643) "evolutionary'' thinking on this temporally
bounded sequence of events, rather than "historical" thinking. Evolutionary thinking sees
such processes as the natural outcome of the spatio-temporally located interaction of uni-
versally-applicable functional laws affecting phenomena and thus explaining such phe-
nomena as an expectable instance of what is predictable on reductively explanatory
grounds. Historical thinking sees such processes as having a non-reducible structure im-
manent in the processes themselves, the dimension of contingent causality in which cru-
cially involving factors specific to instances of moments of the overall processes. Viewed
this way, even modern biological "evolutionary'' theory is "historical" thinking, according
to its most articulate inside philosopher (Gould 1986). And, increasingly, the microphysics
of quantum cosmogony seems to be heading in the direction of true historical thinking.
2. Except for days when I am out of town, I have been systematically scanning the
Tribune daily, clipping articles about language, articles that contain a significant focus on
linguistic or related issues, advice-personal and etiquette-couched-including "Dear
Abby" and "!"vfiss Manners" and, more recently, "Ask Ann Landers;' letters to the editor, op-
ed pieces, cartoons, etc. Relying further on exposure to a wide variety of the popular press,
I have clipped anything of similar nature that I have come across, e.g., American Express
brochures, local "learning center" commercial "course" descriptions in self-improvement
(the 20th century Yuppie equivalent of the 19th century workingman's athenaeum/insti-
tute/extension school), magazine articles in general circulation press, etc. All of my exam~
·ples are excerpted from this collection, which I use regularly in teaching undergraduate lan-
guage in culture and society courses at The University of Chicago in order to bring the
message, as it were, back home.
3. As James Collins (p.c.) has pointed out to me, it is probably no coincidence that the
locus of this development of our culture of standardization is in the social sector of people
whose dependence on educational credentials and similar paraphernalia of personal, up-
wardly mobile accomplishment would appear to be most central to social identity in the
socioeconomic stratification, or of heightened pointedness in those institutional settings in
which they live. This is very much reminiscent of the heightened "linguistic insecurity" of
the lower middle class as calibrated in Labov's (1966; 1972) early 1960s data; presumably,
similar segments of the population, articulated more on a national scale, are being mobi-
lized into the ranks of yuppiedom.
Monoglot "Standatd" in America 303

4. In fact, this naturalization of Standard, already the hegemonic form of language in the
United States, realizes the discourse of its own hegemony, just as we might expect; for then
"natural" Standard continually validates power of groups and institutions that "naturally"
have-and, ideologically, ought to have-control of the hegemonic discourse in such a cul-
ture of standardization. The discourse of advocacy is probably not unrelated to the coeval
quest on the part of the target audience for "naturalness" in achieving the wholesome, good
consumerism in life that has historically emerged from 1960s counter-cultural whole-
grainism, now that corporate interests have gotten hold of such a set of themes. Language
falls into step as just one more area where buying (into) the hegemonic line's product be-
comes nature's way. Interestingly, the anti-monoglot advocacies, such as those in favor of
plurilingual educational policies, etc., frequently naturalize their arguments also (cf.
Freeman Dyson as quoted above) in a form of cultural-linguistic conservationism-preser-
vation of every linguistic snail darter in the face of "big" culture's dominant homogeniza-
tion-that is as unnatural on the face of it as any inference can be, from the lessons of bi-
ological evolution about extinction of species.
5. See Silverstein 1985b:247-48 for a discussion of this point, with references, in the con-
text of a discussion of Friends' Plain Speech.
6. See Labov's article (1969) on "The Logic of Non-Standard English" for a counter
against this kind of"cognitive deficit" argument with respect to Black non-Standard. Thus,
as is important to my point about the "just right" quality of Standard, note that both de-
grees of deviation from Standard-purported lack-of-conceptual-differentiation, as well as
hyper-"intellectualization;' i.e., hyperterminologization (Havranek 1964:6-9) and hyper-
syntacticization-are seen to victimize people who use them. It should be noted that to an-
swer this kind of argument purely at the level of demonstrating denotational adequacy ei-
ther misconstrues the sociocultural basis for the argtiment (see Kochman 1974) and
unwittingly takes it at face value, or pointedly tries to take it as "scientific" in spirit, but then
straight-facedly buys into its premises in the folk view of language as purely denotational
instrument.
7. Recall here the notion that there is such a Standard-bearing person-in-the-street as
one of the defining allegiances of members of a linguistic community with a culture of
standardization. This naturalization.of Standard reality has taken many forms: such popu-
lar misinterpretations ofWhorf's (1956) writings as Stuart Chase's (and note that he wrote
a foreword to the collection), such dark visions as George Orwell's, such movements as
Count Korzybski's General Semantics movement, and such self-styled religions as
Scientology (nee Dianetics) are all oriented to linguistic and hence cognitive therapeutic,
bespeaking a construal of language as a clothing for clear thinking about an obvious real-
ity that governmentally and technologically controlled denotational forms can transform
for ill or for good. (Note the etymologically original sense of ideologie, by the way, invented
by Destutt de Tracy as a product of the Enlightenment.)
8. This is a rather common folk conceptualization of the notion of style, it should be
noted, and it is probably no accident that in the culture of commoditization of Standard
the term lifestyle recurs in many sources. When erstwhile fashion is turned into lifestyle we
can understand the rather pointed commoditization of the "how" of self-presentation as a
'self conscious fashioning (pun intended) of a style as an individual's prerogative.
9. The idea that Standard is embodied in actual speakers of some particular dialect may
well be grounded in and facilitated by a process attending to language in the following way.
Where speakers who perceive themselves to be deficient with respect to Standard in partic-
304 Michael Silverstein

ular forms perceive/conceptualize either (a) the absence of those "deficiencies" in some
other dialect, or (b) their correspondence in some positively valorized form in some locat-
able dialect, whether cumulatively (arithmetically) or by structural salience (with some dif-
ferential weightings), this may be taken to "be" Standard. The location of or construal of
which dialect as such an embodiment, however, is clearly not a linguistic process tout court;
our data show that it is a matter of just the sort of emblematic construal of social differen-
tiation described in the body of our discussion.
10. See Silverstein 1985b:234-41. Note the formulation of P. Smith (1979:113), who ob-
serves that there is a distinction that appears to be involved here between Standard usage
and perception of such usage as prestigious:
much of the foregoing data has been summarized by the comment that women regularly employ
the use of more socially prestigious speech than men (Labov 1970; Trudgill 1975). Sociolinguists
usually use the term prestige in one of two ways, to mean either (i) the value of a way of speaking
for upward social mobility (Weinreich 1963), or (ii) the avoidance of stigmatized speech variables.
It may be that the use of standard speech accomplishes both of these conditions at once, but this
begs the crucial question of how the standard, defined on linguistic grounds, acquires its evaluative
connotations. It certainly poses problems for the traditional sociolinguistic view that speech sim-
ply reflects underlying social reality, for women, despite their more standard speech, do not enjoy
a prestigious position in society compared to men. In short, prestige cannot be used interchange-
ably with standard in sociolinguistics, for the linguistic varieties that are socially advantageous (or
sigmatized) for one group, may not be for another. That is, the evaluative connotations of speech
Carl!10t be assessed independently of the people that use them.

We might see this disparity as a reflection of the semiotic processes of extensionalization

+ intensionalization = (rationalized) emblematization, expressed in individual charactero-
logical/self-presentational terms. Though reflecting a perception of status asymmetries in
institutional contexts between women and men, the very language of women as compared
with that of men is isolated as a locus of why femaleness enacted in identifiable linguistic
terms entails lower status, less power, etc., where male speech is taken to be an embodiment
of Standard.
11. There is a nonprofit membership organization called "U.S. English," of which former
Senator S.I. Hayakawa is Honorary Chairman, whose literature claims that "Its purpose is
to restore the English-only ballot, and to limit bilingual education to a transitional role" by
such means as a U.S. Constitutional amendment "designating English the official language
of the United States;' though of course, in the absence of case and administrative law re-
lating to «official" language, which would develop only over a lengthy period of adjudica-
tion, the effective connection between the two things is not in fact obvious. Some of the
connotative political penumbra of the movement's prose, however, is revealed in the spe-
cific phrases used, such as "foreign languages in competition with our own;' "the special in-
terest groups pressing for language separatism:' etc. Note further that the proposed amend-
ment (actually introduced in the Senate by Hayakawa in 1981, and apparently in the
current 1987 House session by Representative Robert Fairchild [D., Arkansas], whose state
has declared English to be the "official language" of the state) says, simply, "The English lan-
guage shall be the official language of the United States:' thus introducing the presumably
interpretable (now vacuous) concept of "official language" vis-a-vis other languages, but
silently assuming, one imagines, that Standard represents English. What, for example,
would be the fate of government-sponsored programs in the "bilingual" mode for regional,
class, and ethnic dialect speakers under this amendment? Since the Chairman of this orga-
Monoglot "Standanl" in America 305

nization is, as Hayakawa reassures the addressees of his direct-mail solicitation, "Dr. John
Tanton, a practicing physician and well-known leader of many civic causes;' we would not
necessarily expect sociolinguistic expertise to frame its concerns. (Note the image of the
doctor, the "practicing physician," at the helm of this monoglot juggernaut, by the way,
much like one of the strong and recurrent images in terms of which Standard is authorita-
tively commoditized for its market.)
12. Grounded professionally in Boasian cross-cultural comparatism, and self-con-
sciously and pointedly limiting its structural study to what we would call the central refer-
ential-and-predicational form of grammar (from phonology through sentence-structure),
technical linguistics in America in the recent period has preached the doctrines of equiva-
lence and effability: that all language structures are complete and sufficient as referential-
and-predicational instrumentalities, and that anything expressible in one language can be
expressed in any other, only the formal organization (including the structural complexity
and specificity) and the respective means of expression differing (e.g., a word in one lan-
guage may be translatable only by a grammatically complex phrase in another). But the
public, including otherwise educated scientists and scholars, have taken such technical be-
liefs, when articulated about, for example, Standard vs. non-Standard dialects (in the tech-
nical sense, again) none of which has a claim to superiority from the strictly referential-and-
predicational doctrine of completeness plus effability to be, from its culturally valorized
understanding of Standard vs. "dialect;' at least non-advocacy of Standard, and at most ad-
vocacy of "anything goes:' But the naivete of American linguistics as a real-life interest
group that has tried simply to constitute itself discursively as "scientific" expertise accord-
ing to its internal understanding of the subject matter, rather than according to the culture
that valorizes scientific expertise on subject matters that are defined by the sociosemiotic
processes of interested human action and power, all the while attempting to speak to/influ-
ence society's interest in the latter, have been, in effect, its undoing and revalorization as it-
self an expectedly "liberal" (if not libertine!) interest group, looking out for its own inter-
ests in linguistic diversity in the same way that social workers are said to be a poverty or
welfare lobby hell-bent on preserving their field of operation as a vital economic interest.
See "Battle on Bilingual Education;' from AP, in Chicago Tribune 19/III/87, sec. IA, p. 33;
cf. Kochman 1974 and n. 6 supra. Any inclusive semiotic analysis oflanguage and its struc-
ture would avoid this.
13. An analysis of the mode of presentation of the commoditized Standard in relation
to other forms of speech is to be completed. A sampling of materials is available from the
author on request.

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Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, April 20-21, 1979, ed. P. Clyne et al. pp.
193-247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
- - - . 1981. The Limits of Awareness. Working Papers in Sociolinguistics, no. 84. Austin:
Southwest Educational Research Laboratory.
- - - . 1984. The 'Value' of Objectual Language. Paper presented at symposium, "The
Division of Labor in Language and Society;' American Anthropological Association
Annual meeting, Denver, Colorado.
- - - . 1985a. The Functional Stratification of Language and Ontogenesis. In Culture,
Communication, and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, ed. J. Wertsch, pp. 205-35. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
- - - . 1985b. Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure,
Usage, and Ideology. In Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives,
ed. E. Mertz and R.J. Parmentier, pp. 219-59. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press.
Smith, Philip M. 1979. Sex Markers in Speech. In Social Markers in Speech, ed. K.R. Scherer
and H. Giles, pp. 109-46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956 [1941]. The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to
Language. In Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writing of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed.
J.B. Carroll, pp. 134-59. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
15
The Grammar
of Consciousness
and the Consciousness
of Grammar
JANEH.HILL

Sociolinguistics should be a tool for the exploration of the role of human linguis-
tic capacities in the dynamic of the world system. However, while both the politi-
cal economic study of the world system and the structuralist study of language
have made important advances in recent years, there has seemed to be little pos-
sibility of uniting them. In the present paper I propose one avenue toward such a
union, using tools for the investigation of the practice of speaking developed by
Mikhail Bakhtin and V.I. Voloshinov.' Their work suggests the shape of a theory
of the linguistic foundations of consciousness, that lens that, in Marxist political
economic thought, focuses the material and symbolic historical dynamic within
the acting subject. I will illustrate this possibility through a brief study of the
Mexicano (Nahuatl or Aztec are other names for this language) usage found in
peasant communities in the Malinche Volcano region of Tlaxcala and Puebla in
central Mexico.
The Malinche Volcano is a Mexicano-speaking (or, more properly, a bilingual)
island in a Spanish sea. The maintenance of the Mexicano language there among
people who have been in intimate contact with Spanish speakers for nearly 500
years would seem to be a textbook example of the symbolic dimension of peasant
conservatism. However, as I hope to show in this paper, we find, in fact, that
Mexicano usage on the Malinche is not single-mindedly conservative. Instead, its
speakers have drawn upon the resources of Spanish in complex ways. Their usage
today constitutes an ongoing negotiation with the symbolic power of Spanish; the
form of their practice in this negotiation is closely related to the structural posi-
tion of individuals in the material sector.
In terms of human geography, the Malinche Volcano region has been identified
by Nutini and Isaac (1974) as an area of sloped-terrace rainfall maize agriculture
which is surrounded by irrigated cash-crop agriculture in the Valley of Puebla-

307
308 Jane H. Hill

Tlaxcala. Members of the Malinche towns (which range in population from a few
hundred people to as many as 20,000) hold their lands privately; communal land,
whether held by the towns or held under the Mexican government's ejido or col-
lective farm system, constitutes only a small proportion of the area under cultiva-
tion. Lastra and Horcasitas ( 1979) in their linguistic survey of the state of Tlaxcala
have confirmed that the Malinche region can also be defined by a uniquely high
proportion of Mexicano speakers. The people of the Malinche constitute them-
selves as a region; this self-definition is symbolically warranted in myths like that
of the Pillo, who brought water to the towns and, with the help of the ants, en-
tered the earth and turned into a powerful being who was able to defeat the evil
"government of Puebla'' (the largest city of the region). At his death, the Pillo or-
dered that his body should be divided into pieces, and each piece wrapped in its
own shroud and buried in a principal town of the Malinche:

1. ... ic San Pablo del Monte, La Resurrecci6n, ic San Luis Teolocholco,

In San Pablo del Monte, La Resurreccion, in San Luis Teolocholco,
ic Huamantla, nochi in nonqueh pueblohtin que in tocazqueh in inacayo
in Huamantla, in all of those towns that they would bury his flesh
cada in ipedazo de inacayo ye mortaja.
each piece of his flesh already in its shroud.

The work of struggle against the "city"-the Spanish-speaking world with its
market economy-begun in mythic times by the Pillo continued. Throughout the
19th century the Malinche was the locus of ongoing peasant banditry, which was
shaped during the early years of the Mexican Revolution into an effective guerrilla
force. This force was not, however, fortunate in its alliance with other peasant
groups. Its most important leader, General Domingo Arenas, was assassinated by
elements of the Zapatista army (to this day Malinche people believe that the mur-
der took place on Emiliano Zapata's order, and they remember his army as a band
of vicious thieves).
The people of the Malinche region define themselves as cultivators-
campesinos. It is important to note at the outset, however, that a substantial pro-
portion of the adult male population of the region is involved in regular wage
labor, largely in small independent factories. While there is a good deal of contro-
versy in the political economic literature about the structural position of popula-
tions like that of the Malinche, my own view is that the facts are best handled
within the framework developed by the Mexican anthropologist Arturo Warman,
who treats a similar population in the state of Morelos as a "peasantry" (Warman
1980) which has maintained relative autonomy from the capitalist sector. Warman
argues that such populations live within a separate "peasant mode of production:'
and have bargained, albeit on increasingly unfavorable terms, with the capitalist
sector (and particularly with the state) to retain their autonomy. They return to
the capitalist sector that sine qua non of peasant status, a fund of rent, which in-
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 309

dudes a complex sum of low wages in the capitalist sector, wages largely expended
within that sector, and also includes support within the communities of a labor
force upon which that sector can draw. This support includes not only the provi-
sion of subsistence, but also provision to the capitalist sector of physical access to
the labor force, including education (schools are built by cooperative labor),
transportation (roads are also built cooperatively, and bus systems are local pri-
vate enterprises), and the provision (also through cooperative work) of the
plumbing and electrical systems that make it possible for women to run house-
holds with little help from men, and that bring in the acculturating forces of na-
tional and regional mass media. Warman believes that this contribution of the
peasant mode of production to the development of the Mexican capitalist sector
is a fundamental one; Mexican industrialization, he argues, is "made of corn"
(Warman 1980:176).
One result of the very unfavorable balance of negotiating power between the
peasant sector and the national capitalist sector has been an extraordinarily com-
plex involution of social and economic systems within the peasant communities.
These systems are characterized by emphasis on maize, a semi-sacred subsistence
crop, the cultivation of which is so uneconomic in modern Mexico that it has been
largely abandoned by other sectors. Economic exchange within the community is
dominated by systems of reciprocity and redistribution; recent studies, such as
that of Olivera on Tlaxcalancingo (1967), show that three-fifths of community in-
come goes into this "ritual" sector. This sector includes the system of compadrazgo,
or ritual kinship, which, along with blood kinship, structures reciprocity and is ex-
traordinarily elaborated in the Malinche region (Nutini and Bell 1980; Nutini
1984). Redistributive exchange is structured through the system of mayordomias,
graded ranks of stewardships of holy images. Both compadrazgo and mayordomia
are seen within the towns as "sacred" duties, but they can be easily seen to have an
economic function. It is certainly not, however, one that yields a net profit to the
participants, and in the Malinche region a man usually ends his ritual career, as
Eric Wolf put it, "old and poor." But this ritual sector, in spite of the fact that it
drains resources from the towns into the capitalist sector through ritually required
expenditure, is fundamental in structuring access to subsistence resources of the
communities.
In order to sustain the involuted system of maize cultivation and ritually regu-
lated exchange, Warman has shown that the peasant sector must borrow tools
from the capitalist sector. Warman was particularly interested in use by peasants
of commercial credit, which in Mexico is available through state banks for invest-
ment in cash-crop cultivation. In Morelos, peasants use the profits from such cap-
italized cash cropping to prop up the money-losing maize cultivation system. On
the Malinche, probably the most important material borrowing from the capital-
ist sector is that of wages. Rothstein (1974) has shown that in the Malinche town
of San Cosme Mazatecochco, most surplus from wages is turned to the buttress-
ing of a man's position as a cultivator-toward investment in land, in fertilizers,
310 Jane H. Hill

in herbicides, and in cash-crop ventures, the profits of which can be turned to-
ward continuing maize cultivation.
In the symbolic sector, the principal instrument that the peasant sector has ap-
propriated and turned toward the maintenance of its involuted autonomy is the
Spanish language. Mexicano and Spanish have been given sharply differentiated
symbolic significance. Spanish is the language of money and the market, of the city,
of evil personages in myths, and of social distance. To speak Spanish to a fellow
townsman can be an aggressive denial of intimacy; the use of Spanish to outsiders
to the region, regardless of their ethnicity, registers social distance in that context
as well. Spanish is also the language of obscenity and of "nonsensical" drunken
speech. But, in line with Brown and Gilman's (1960) proposal that expressions of
social distance will also be expressions of power, Spanish elements have been re-
functionalized within the Mexicano language as markers of the "power code;' the
register of Mexicano through which important men mark their identity, and
through which even men who are not principales (men of high rank in the ritual
hierarchy) mark their discourses as profound and authoritative. (I use the term
"men" on purpose; women hardly use the hispanicized Mexicano power code.)
In contrast to the symbolic position of the Spanish language and elements bor-
rowed from it into Mexicano, which mark power and distance, Mexicano is par
excellence the language of intimacy, solidarity, mutual respect, and identity as a
campesino. Mexicano is required at major community rituals such as the sealing
of the vows between new compadres, or the blessing of newlyweds. Obscene "in-
verted greetings" in Mexicano are used by young men to test the ethnicity of
strangers encountered on the roads; the return of the correct Mexicano comeback
is a password allowing entree into the town. Mexicano is the language of eating
and drinking together, and even when guests at a party are speaking Spanish, they
will often call loudly for more food and drink, or offer toasts, in Mexicano. The
discourses of cultivation are considered particularly characteristic of Mexicano,
and are often used by informants to illustrate the essential nature of the language.
The reader can immediately see that this functional balance between Spanish
and Mexicano is potentially fraught with contradictions. A speaker manifesting
hispanicization in the "power code" is always vulnerable to being seen as express-
ing social distance and "outsiderness" to his town, or as expressing the arrogance
and lack of respect thought to be characteristic of Spanish speakers. Within
Mexicano usage, Spanish, essential to expressing the status of men and the seri-
ousness of their discourses, can be seen also as a source of pollution from the cap-
italist sector. Even in the speech of cultivators who are fully committed to the
community and its complex organizations, one can observe a struggle against this
ambivalence of Spanish forms. In the usage of factory workers, who are perhaps
of all inhabitants of the Malinche those who are most exposed to the structural
contradictions of the regional situation, one can see the escalation of this ongoing
struggle into a ferocious purism that threatens the yalidity of the Mexicano power
code; indeed, purism is precisely turned to the struggle for power between factory
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 311

workers, who are beginning to show signs of becoming a classical evolue sector,
and the principales, who adhere to what is thought to be the "traditional" way of
life of the towns, with cultivation and selfless community service the way to a re-
spected old age. Bartra {1978) has suggested that in the negotiation for peasant
autonomy the balance has now tipped in favor of the capitalist sector, which has
refunctionalized the community support of factory workers from a fund of rent
into a wage supplement, such that these workers must be considered not a peas-
antry, but a rural proletariat that does not control a means of production. On the
symbolic side, we might suggest that the Spanish-speaking capitalist sector has
succeeded in refunctionalizing Mexicano purism, latent in Mexicano communi-
ties for hundreds of years (cf. Karttunen and Lockhart 1976), into a weapon
through which the symbolic bulwark of peasant autonomy, the Mexicano lan-
guage, can be attacked. The attack may succeed, for the lexical resources to satisfy
purist demands for a legitimo mexicano-a pure Mexicano, without Spanish in-
fluence-no longer exist, and are precisely most lacking among the most purist
group, young and middle-aged factory workers, who spend much of their lives in
a Spanish-speaking environment. 2
The concept of "consciousness" in Marxist thought would seem to provide an
analytical locus at which the material and the symbolic sides of human adaptation
could be linked. However, the classical work on consciousness, such as that of
Lukacs {1968), gives little attention to what people actually say and do and often
even denigrates such attention as "empiricism:' The form of conciousness is de-
rived on a priori theoretical grounds, and the ideal "vanguard leaders" of the pro-
letariat function as "practitioners" much as Chomsky's "ideal native speakers"
function as the bearers of linguistic competence-they are theoretical abstrac-
tions, far from the behavior of real human beings. The program for the study of
language suggested by Bakhtin and Voloshinov, which, particularly in the work of
Voloshinov, is grounded in a Marxist structural analysis of human interaction, of-
fers the possibility of an alternative-a rigorously empirical investigation of the
"practice" of language, which will be a window on consciousness, whether peas-
ant, bourgeois, or proletarian. This program admits the systemic aspects of lan-
guage, as well as the study of usage.
For Bakhtin and Voloshinov, the central structural element of a new kind of
language study (which their translators usually call "translinguistics" (cf. Todorov
1981; Bakhtin 1980 [1935]) is the "voice:' and the theoretical possibilities for the
juxtaposition of "voices" is the central problem of translinguistic study. A single
utterance can combine a variety of voices in an intertextual polyphony or dia-
logue, in which both ideology and the language system function as constraints on
combination. It is important to emphasize that the study of the language system
remains fundamental to translinguistics. The language system of linguistics is the
context-free, relatively permanent, "centripetal" side of language, the domain of
"monologue:' which can exploit the language system in order to constrain the
possibilities for discourse. This monologic voice is somewhat similar to the "ideal
312 Jane H. Hill

native speaker;' the locus of competence, but it is an active voice, using the sys-
temic side of language as a resource for the practice of dominance. Added to this
"linguistics" is the central translinguistic domain, the context-bound, shifting, re-
sponsive, intertextual, "centrifugal" production of meaning in language, which is
found prototypically in the negotiations of a dialogue on equal terms, and not in
monologic dominance. In dialogue as well, both conflicting ideologies and the
systemic constraints of grammar are resources for the combination of voices.
In Bakhtin's analyses, the systemic unit is the context-bound utterance of the
voice, the "word:' In his study of the poetics of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin classifies this
"word" into three major types. The first, the direct word, is "aimed directly at its
object;' and constitutes a claim of "semantic authority'' by the speaker over that
object (Bakhtin 1973 [1929]:164). A speaker whose usage is dominated by the di-
rect word, a word to which he attributes only referential and propositional value,
constructs a monologue that is ideologically consistent within itself and permits
no challenge. This "direct word" of translinguistics is perhaps closest to the
"word" of linguistics. The structuralist claim that language systems "admit of no
positive terms" (as Saussure put it), but contain units that gain their meaning or
positivity exclusively by their structural relations within the system, is a linguistic
account of the ideological consistency of the monologue.
The second type of translinguistic word is the objectivized word. Instead of
treating an object directly, the objectivized word makes an object of the word of
another voice, through typifying it or through assigning it to a particular "charac-
ter;' according to a scheme proposed by an author. Most instances of represented
and reported speech that have the function of "sketching character" are assigned
by Bakhtin to the category of objectivized words. They are still a part of mono-
logue, not of dialogue, since to objectify or typify another's word requires a dom-
inant authorial voice, which makes these objects and types serve its own ideology.
The third type of translinguistic word is the "double-voiced" word. This is ori-
ented toward another person's word, but without objectification or typification,
just as in egalitarian dialogue speakers engage each other's voices. Bakhtin divides
the double-voiced word into three subtypes. The first two are "passive:' These in-
clude stories where the author speaks through the voice of some character; such
speech often becomes an example of the monologic direct word. The second "pas-
sive" subtype includes parody and irony, which also tend to become part of an ide-
ologically controlling, monologic voice, if the words that are parodied are allowed
no independence or resistance against the author.
The last subtype is the "active" word. Here, the word of the other "exerts influ-
ence from within" (Bakhtin 1973 [1929]:164). Examples of this type include gen-
uinely dialogic relationships between voices, in "hidden dialogue" and in polemic,
in which words exhibit what Bakhtin calls a "sidelong glance" at the words of oth-
ers. Here, the word of the other can resist and interrupt the authorial voice, and
their relationship can be a struggle for dominance, with the embedded voice hav-
ing a good chance at victory.
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 313

While Bakhtin and Voloshinov took as their principal research site the study of
reported speech in the novel, Bakhtin notes specifically that multilingual commu-
nities would be appropriate sites for translinguistic investigation.

Dialogical relationships are possible among linguistic styles, social dialects, etc., if those
phenomena are perceived as semantic positions, as a sort of linguistic Weltanschauung,
i.e., if they are perceived outside the realm of linguistic investigation (Bakhtin 1973
[1929):152).

Bakhtin himself treated this research possibility only briefly, as in his discussion
of the influence of the heteroglossic 16th-century marketplace on the poetic tech-
nique of Rabelais (Bakhtin 1968(1940]), or in his brief discussion of the moment
of choice faced by Russian peasants between the multiple languages (each repre-
senting an ideological stance) in their environment, mentioned in "Discourse of
the Novel" (Bakhtin 1980(1935]). But it seems clear that the perception among
speakers that a symbolic code is also a "position" must be shaped by the material
forces of power; what can be done with this perception will then be shaped by the
systemic forces of ideology and of grammatical practice.
Let us begin our analysis of the practice of speaking in Malinche Mexicano,
using Bakhtin's system, with a passage uttered at the beginning of a traditional
story by a 40-year-old cultivator from San Miguel Canoa. The speaker is already
beginning his rise in the religious hierarchy of his town, and has had an impor-
tant mayordomia that took enormous amounts of time and money. Don Otilio
cultivates just over a hectare of land, and supplements this subsistence base with
wage work as a construction worker in the city of Puebla during the agricultural
off seasons. He cultivates only maize, and sells maize about twice a year to raise a
bit of cash, in spite of the loss sustained thereby. The passage cited in example 2
below is the beginning of the story of the Pillo and is filled with symbols of mili-
tant peasant autonomy. Yet, because it is a serious story, it is appropriate for Don
Otilio to load its introduction with Spanish loan words, even though, in general,
traditional stories of this type display a low frequency of Spanish loans (about half
that seen in "power code" registers). Spanish loans are underlined.

2. Nicmolhuitiz ce cuento de in nee antepasado ocmihtahuiliayah in

I will tell a story of that ancestor (that) they used to tell
tocohcoltzitzlhuan neca tiempo i5movivirhuiliaya lpan Matintzln ce,
our grandfathers (about) that time when there lived on the Malinche A,
ce persona lti5ca i5cnombrarohqueh Pillo.
a person his name they named him Pillo.

In this example the Mexicano morphological and syntactic system is intact and
dominates the Spanish loans. While loan nouns can receive Mexicano inflectional
and derivational affixation, here, since there is no occasion for use of possessives,
diminutives, and the like on the loan nouns they appear without any affixes, but
314 Jane H. Hill

with Mexicano determiners and demonstratives such as ce (one) and nec(a)

(that). Spanish loan nouns never receive Mexicano absolutive suffixes (most
Mexicano nouns include, in the nonpossessed form, a root and an "absolutive suf-
fix" -tl, -tli, or -li, for example, tempiimi-tl [wall-absolutive], toch-tli [rabbit-abso-
lutive]). This is a loan-incorporation strategy that is quite common in the lan-
guages of the world, which Markey (1983) has called "marking reversal.'' The
"marked" loan nouns are rendered "unmarked" by being assigned to a "marked"
noun class, the small class of nouns in Mexicano, such as chichi (dog), which do
not appear with absolutive suffixes. The verbs vivir (to live) and nombrar (to
name) are here fully incorporated into Mexicano, being affixed with theme for-
matives and person and aspect markers precisely as if they were Mexicano words.
Complex sentence elements, such as neca tiempo omovivirhuiliaya (that time
[when] there used to live), are formed by adjunction rather than exhibiting the
Spanish complementation and relativization markers such as que, which appear
in some Malinche usage (as in example 6 below). The use of Spanish loans of this
type occurs even in the speech of Mexicano "monolinguals" (more properly "in-
cipient bilinguals;' [cf. Diebold 1961]); the speaker in example 2 speaks Spanish
haltingly, with a good deal of interference from Mexicano, as will be illustrated
below in example 7.
In Bakhtin's terms, the Spanish loan words in the passage above are examples
of the "direct word.'' They have two values, a referential one and a "semantic po-
sition," that of representing seriousness and power, which is wholly determined
within the Mexicano system; the same words would certainly not be particularly
potent within a Spanish discourse. That is, they are fully dominated by a
"Mexicano" voice, and turned to its purpose. However, we can see in other pas-
sages uttered by this same speaker moments in which the latent ambivalence of
such usage is brought to the surface, and the Mexicano voice is forced to address
directly the problem of its dominance. This can be seen in the passage in example
3. Here, the speaker is a little drunk, and he has been reflecting on his poverty and
the "sacrifices" of life as a cultivator,. particularly the problem of coping with the
steep slopes of the volcano Malinche. At the urging of an interviewer, he turns to
a discussion of the female spirit of the mountain:

3. Mihtahulia in neca Malintzin, cmopialia in neca arete. huan

it is said of that Malinche that she has those earrings, and
neca, neca, neca collares. In tehhuan tquiliah, 'icolalex in
those, those, those necklaces. As for us we say, 'her necklaces the
Malintzin.' Quin-, quinmopialia, cualtzin, mopetlanaltia, in neca
Malinche. Them-, she has them, beautiful, she shines, that
Malintzin. Cualtzin quinmopialihticah, in neca icolalexhuan, huan
Malinche. Beautiful she is having them, those her necklaces, and
neca ipipilolhuan cualtzin.
those her earrings beautiful.
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 315

Here, at the beginning of the passage we see a wholly characteristic use of

Spanish loans, arete (earring[s]) and collares (necklaces). The variation in plural-
ization of inanimate nouns is typically Mexicano, and the use of the Spanish suffix
-es on collares illustrates one of the rare instances of a borrowed affix; -s, -es have
been added to the Mexicano repertoire of plural suffixes for use on Spanish loan
nouns. However, the speaker suddenly changes his approach to these words, not-
ing that tehhuan (we) would say a different form-'icolalex (her necklaces )-which
exhibits a Mexicano possessive marker and phonological nativization of the loan
word, including the plural marker [ikolales]. In line 4, he further nativizes the form
by adding the Mexicano plural suffix for possessives, -huan. In line 5, arete is re-
placed by a fully Mexicano form, root and all, 'ip'ipilolhuan (her earrings). These na-
tivized forms are clearly not simply referential "direct words:' Instead, they estab-
lish a Mexicano "semantic position:' In Bakhtin's system, they are double-voiced
words of the "active" type, uttered by the Mexicano voice with what Bakhtin called
a "side-long glance" at their Spanish alternatives. This passage is not simply a de-
scription of the beautiful and seductive Malinche, but a translinguistic battlefield,
upon which two ways of speaking struggle for dominance. Bakhtin comments on
this capacity for words to shift their position in mid-speaking:

the interrelationships ... in a concrete living context have a dynamic, not a static char-
acter: the interrelationships of voices within the word can change drastically, a single-di-
rected word can transform itself into a hetero-directed one, the inner dialogization can
be intensified or weakened, a passive type can become activated, etc. (Bakhtin
1973[1929]:165).

A second kind of evidence, in addition to the kind of backtracking and refram-

ing seen in example 3, of the representation of the practices of peasant con-
sciousness in speaking can be found in hesitations, stammering, and other failures
of fluency, and in violation of systemic constraints on code-switching proposed by
Gumperz (1982). An example of this type can be seen in example 4. Here, an el-
derly cultivator, a full principal of his town of San Lorenzo Almecatla on the edge
of the Malinche region, discusses how his son was attracted into a shady business
deal, which was in conflict with his community responsibilities and which even-
tually led to his murder.
4. Huan iiquiniitzqueh de . .. ser tesorero iminahuac, neh acmo iiniccahuaya
and when they called him ... to be treasurer with them, I no longer gave permission
porque lo mismo iiyec presidente.
because that same person was (municipal) president.
(He was invited to be treasurer of the local community bus lines, a sure route to gain-
ing wealth through embezzlement.)

In this passage, we see a code switch, between the verb oquinotzqueh (they
called him) and its complement, de ser tesorero (to be treasurer), violating
316 Jane H. Hill

Gumperz's Verb-Verb Complement Constraint (1982:88), which states that code

switching will not take place between the two. In general in Malinche usage, this
constraint makes an excellent test for assigning a Spanish complement phrase to
the category of fully incorporated "borrowing." However, we know that Malinche
speakers always emphatically reject Spanish infinitives such as ser as "not
Mexicano"; this kind of form is particularly accessible to sanction as "mixing:' In
Bakhtin's terms, we can analyze this example as a struggle (and note the hesitation
represented by the ellipses) between a "voice" of corrupt local politicians, speak-
ing in the Spanish of civil government and profit-making commerce, and the
Mexicano, peasant, communitarian voice of the narrator. Here, the "Spanish"
voice is powerful enough to break through systemic constraints on its appearance,
and we see Spanish ser instead of Mexicano yez (to be).
If cultivators such as Don Otilio in example 3 and Don Gabriel in example 4
face a struggle with the ambivalent place of the Spanish they have turned to the
purposes of Mexicano, we might imagine that the struggle would become par-
ticularly acute in the usage of factory workers. Factory workers face a number of
problems in the successful presentation of a "Mexicano" identity that will war-
rant their access to community resources. These resources, distributed through
the community ritual sector, are a vital backstop to factory-worker participation
in a particularly oppressive and insecure wage labor market, which often denies
them legally mandated benefits and minimum wages, and in which they experi-
ence frequent layoffs. During layoffs (and even when employed) they are hard-
pressed for basic subsistence, and they maintain themselves and their families
through the loans that circulate among compadres, and the redistribution of
high-quality food that takes place in the system of feasting organized through the
mayordomias. But the identity of factory workers is ambivalent. They can often
devote little time to cultivation, relegating these tasks largely to women, children,
and the elderly in their families. They find it almost impossible to participate
fully in the mayordomia system. Since they spend most of their time out of town,
they have less opportunity than do cultivators to keep their political fences
mended within the town. While the towns value endogamy, factory workers often
meet and marry the sisters and daughters of workmates who come from other
towns; these women often do not even speak Mexicano (although they usually
try very'hard to learn it). Such wealth as they have, which comes through wages,
is wealth acquired in a "universalistic" sector; the wealth of a cultivator, acquired
on his lands (even though lands are privately held, the towns consider the lands
"their own" and fiercely defend against acquisition of land by outsiders), is "par-
ticularistic"-his access to land and water is possible because he is a mexicano, a
campesino, a puebleiio (member of the town). The increasing permeability of the
towns, because of improved transportation and the penetration of mass media,
is a matter of great concern; members of the towns are often quite hostile to out-
siders (a hostility that culminated in the murder of three students from Puebla
by men of San Miguel Canoa in 1968). 3 Thus, factory workers, in contrast to cul-
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 317

tivators, face special problems in authenticating their identity as "member of the

town:'
The ability to use the Mexicano language is an important badge of such an iden-
tity, and here as well factory workers face special problems. Education, particularly
for boys, is held to be very important in the towns, and parents often speak in
Spanish to children during the school years in order to help them succeed. This
means that in late adolescence and early adulthood, many young men are relearn-
ing Mexicano as a "first-and-a-half" language. However, a young man who goes to
work in a factory spends an enormous amount of time outside the town arena
where he might consolidate his Mexicano competence, in an environment-the
workplace-where Indian identity is often fiercely stigmatized. Mexicano is used in
the workplace only for teasing and joking at the expense of the butt, who is tem-
porarily assigned the identity of a cuaxepoh (stupid Indian, literally "grease-head;'
perhaps related to American English greaser, "Mexican"). Thus, workers experience
intense pressure toward the local vernacular Spanish norm and are not exposed to
as many counterpressures from Mexicano as are cultivators. The two groups ex-
hibit different patterns of bilingualism. Cultivators are likely to exhibit Mexicano
interference in Spanish, while workers exhibit the opposite pattern. In example 5
we see this in the speech of a 30-year-old factory worker:

5. Amo nicpia pleito. siempre niviviroa en paz ica in notahtzin huan

Not I have lawsuits, always live in peace with my father and
nonantzin huan ica nos-, nopilhuan.
my mother and with my-, my children.

Here, the frequency of Spanish borrowings is not particularly unusual.

However, a Spanish systemic voice dominates. For instance, this speaker does not
exhibit contrastive vowel length, as in Mexicano, but has simply a pattern of stress
alternation borrowed from Spanish. We also see lexical and morphological pene-
tration. The form ica (usually lea [with]) is the Mexicano instrumental, not the
form for marking accompaniment, which is inahuac. In the last word, we can see
the Spanish agreement pattern appear as the speaker adds -s, the Spanish plural,
to the Mexicano possessive prefix no- (my), in order to make it agree with pilhuan
(children); he immediately corrects this slip.
Assimilation to Spanish in the usage of young factory workers is also apparent
in the syntax of complex sentences, illustrated in example 6 in the usage of a 26-
year-old factory worker from the same town as that of the speaker in the previous
example.

6. Pues neh niquimati de que Malintzin cah-como se dice vivo?-yoltoc!

Well I I know that Malinche is-how does one say alive?-alive!
Yoltoc, huan cerro non, cah sagrado segun no imaginaci6n, verdad, de que
alive, and mountain that, is, sacred according to my imagination, right, that
318 Jane H. Hill

personas que yahueh ompa quinequi mohuetziz di ipan de que ipan tepetl
people who go there she wants him to fall from on it who on the mountain
yahui, zan yenon.
goes, just that.

Here, again, we notice the absence of vowel-length contrast, and the obvious
problem with lexical resources faced by such speakers. In addition the speaker
uses the Spanish que to form embedded, rather than adjoined, complement and
relative clauses. Que embeds the complement of the expression of propositional
attitude, segi:tn no imaginaci6n (according to my imagination [understanding, be-
lief]). Que also forms the relative clauses, personas que yahueh (people who go),
and que ipan tepetl yahui (who go on the mountain). This speaker is also having
difficulty keeping verb number agreement straight, changing from plural yahueh
(go) to singular mohuetziz (will fall) and singular yahui (goes).A hispanicized use
of Mexicano cah (to be in a place) also occurs: here, it is calqued (loan-translated)
on Spanish esta, which can be used for "is in a place:' but can also be used to link
nouns and predicate adjectives. In Mexicano, we would find in Malintzin, yoltoc
or yoltoc in Malintzin (the Malinche is alive), without cah. Note also that the
speaker in example 6 has failed to use the Mexicano adjunctor in before the noun
Malintzin in the first line, as Mexicano would require. This is almost certainly due
to the pressure of stigmatization of the use of in in Mexicano-ized Spanish.
The pattern in example 6, of interference from Spanish into Mexicano syntax,
can be contrasted with the opposite pattern, seen in example 7, a Spanish utter-
ance by Don Otilio, the cultivator of examples 1, 2, and 3.

7. Como ejemplo ahorita yo, yo es mi tio este senor, ya para mis hijos
For example now I, I is my uncle this man, now for my children
ya se ve ihcon ce su abuelito.
now is seen thus one their grandfather.

Here, we find Mexicano lexical interference in ihcon (thus) and ce (one). We see
interference from Mexicano possessive morphology in the expression ce su
abuelito (one their grandfather), calqued on Mexicano ce incohcoltzin (or ce
imiabuelito) [one their grandfather]). Perhaps most interesting, however, is the
calqued relative clause yo es mi tio este senor (this man who is my uncle), a loan
translation from Mexicano neh notio nin senor, with the addition of the Spanish
copula es to adjoin neh and notio.
These examples show the intrusion of Spanish ways of speaking into the
Mexicano usage of young wage laborers. While both cultivators and factory work-
ers exhibit Spanish loan words, the Mexicano voice of most cultivators, while
struggling with the ambivalence of Spanish loans, has at least the syntactic and
morphological tools to dominate the loan words and turn them to its own pur-
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 319

poses. In the usage of most factory workers, however, particularly the young, the
Spanish voice has clearly moved into a more dominant position, occasionally pen-
etrating even the morphological system of Mexicano. A highly hispanicized and
calqued Mexicano is an inadequate filter for the pressure toward relexification and
language shift that young factory workers face.
Members of the community, including factory workers themselves, see the
Spanish in the Mexicano speech of such young men as "refunctionalized:' Instead of
serving as an elegant metonym of authority and prestige, it is seen as a symptom of
pollution from the Spanish-speaking world. That is, this Spanish is seen as
"Spanish;' and a threat to Mexicano identity. In the face of this problem, factory
workers often become ferociously purist, particularly as they reach middle age and
come into competition with men who in their adult careers have taken the cultiva-
tor-ritual participation route to the control of community resources. While all
Malinche speakers are capable of purism (as seen in example 3), I have encountered
the fully developed purist repertoire only among middle-aged factory workers, who
subject other speakers to vocabulary tests, challenge their usage as "mixed" in con-
versation, focus very self-consciously on selected syntactic phenomena such as
noun-number agreement, and argue that no Mexicano usage which now occurs in
the communities has any validity, because it is not legitimo mexicano. Many factory
workers have developed their purism as a weapon to be deployed in a struggle for
power; they challenge as "mixed" the hispanicized usage even of prestigious princi-
pales. Such challenges are often successful, even when the grammar of the challenger
is of the type seen in examples 5 and 6 or 8 below, because people are, in general,
self-conscious about lexical items, but are not attuned to (or at least do not have an
appropriate set of discourses for commenting upon) grammatical structures.4
Space does not allow illustration of all of the different kinds of purist discourse,
so I illustrate only one type, the challenge of "mixed" usage, as shown in example
8. The challenger is a 60-year-old factory worker, who has lived most of his life in
Mexico City, visiting his home town only on weekends. Now retired in the town,
he has invested capital saved from wages in political contributions which have
brought him the CONASUPO (the national farm-product purchasing agency)
maize brokerage for his town. While this is not a "traditional" route to power in
these communities, Don Leobardo has become a figure to be reckoned with. In
order to work in his town, my husband and I had to seek his permission, even
though he held no official position other than the corn brokerage. An American
graduate student working in the town asked Don Leobardo's permission to record
our conversation with him, and it was given. We went to his house with our
Mexicano-speaking interviewer. Don Leobardo was drinking with his cronies, all
important men. In conversation, .he exhibited purism as a tool of dominance,
challenging the identity of the young interviewer by attacking even such seem-
ingly innocent hispanisms as place names and personal names. This is seen in the
following brief excerpt:
320 Jane H. Hill

8. DL: In teh, ticmah, quenin motoca, non, non tlatzintli, campa titlacat?
As for you, do you how your name, that, that land, where you are born?
Ticmah? Tien, tlen motoca?
Do you know? What, what your name?
I: Quenin itoca in tliilticpac?
How its name the earth?
DL: Quen itoca in ca-, campa tiviviroa in teh?
How its name where, where you live you?
I: Pos ihcon itoca, San Miguel Canoa.
Well thus its name, San Miguel Canoa.
DL: Entonces ye morrevolveroh.
Then now it is mixed up.
I: Ah.
DL: Entonces yocmo igual.
Then it's no longer the same.

In this passage, it is evident that Don Leobardo's Mexicano has become a virtual
pidgin. He calques even routine expressions on Spanish, saying, for instance, quenin
motoca (How your name) instead of universal Mexicano tlen motoca (What your
name). In the first utterance, he does not, in fact, mean motoca, (your name), but
itoca (its name). He has forgotten to prefix the antecessive marker 6- to the past
tense verb -titlacat (you were born). The form morrevolveroh (it is mixed up) should
be morevolveroa, or perhaps omorevolveroh (it was mixed up). Don Leobardo, like
the speakers in examples 5 and 6, lacks the long-short vowel contrast. His Mexicano
is so bad that the interviewer has some difficulty understanding him, and requests
clarification. However, his performance is received with complete seriousness by his
fellow townsmen, and also by the interviewer, who is fully aware of his power.
Fortunately, after scoring several purist points, Don Leobardo grew friendly and
eventually became one of our most helpful supporters.
Confronted with the possibility of this kind of linguistic terrorism, many young
people prefer not to speak Mexicano, except in contexts where it is absolutely re-
quired. The interviewer stood up to Don Leobardo's attack because it was his job
to speak in Mexicano, even to hostile strangers to whom one would normally
speak Spanish. Thus, purist rhetoric joins other pressures in driving Mexicano
into an underground, often secret, solidarity code. Don Leobardo is "speaking
Mexicano:' but the Spanish origin of his purist voice is clearly apparent in the
form of his usage, and its result, discouraging the use of Mexicano, is entirely in
line with national policy. And, of course, Don Leobardo is in no position to tell
anyone how to say "San Miguel Canoa" in legitimo mexicano; as far as we know,
there is only one native speaker of Mexicano on the Malinche, the scholarly Don
Amado Morales of Santa Catarina Ayometitla, who owns dictionaries and gram-
mars of this language. The Spanish voice that uses Don Leobardo as its mouth-
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 321

piece can also be heard in the cities, where we were often told that there was no
point in studying Malinche Mexicano because it was so broken down and his-
panicized. The failure of this purist voice to provide an alternative derives also
from a national policy that provides no indigenous-language educational materi-
als in the Malinche region.
The debate over the structural position within the world system of populations
like that of the Malinche Volcano has been conducted almost exclusively in mate-
rialist terms. Only Arturo Warman has seen the importance of studying the "sym-
bolic flow" -the "words and ideas [which] actually connect the modes of produc-
tion and shape their relations toward the inside and toward the outside" (Warman
1980:304). In this paper, I hope I have shown that attention to language can shed
important light on the nature of consciousness, the symbolic practice of a struc-
tural position. Close examination of usage and structure in the speech of the peo-
ple of the Malinche reveals several points of interest. First, it shows that the peas-
ant use of Mexicano, far from being conservative, is a dynamic and highly creative
endeavor which draws widely on the symbolic resources of its environment.
Second, it shows that there are important differences between different kinds of
people who all "speak Mexicano." These differences in linguistic practice suggest
that the delicate balancing act of"peasant autonomy" is beginning to fail; the con-
tradictions within the material sphere, as well as the contradictions within the sym-
bolic sphere, seem to be yielding a shift in which the capitalist sector and its
Spanish voice are gaining the upper hand. Interestingly, the linguistic data are eas-
ier to interpret than the economic data. While Bartra ( 1978) proposes that Mexican
"peasant" populations are in fact a rural proletariat, in contrast to the argument of
Warman and Stavenhagen that they constitute a "peasant mode of production;' it
is in fact very difficult to test whether or not an institution like the stewardship of
the saints has been refunctionalized and brought under domination by the capital-
ist sector, or whether it is still structurally shaped within an autonomous peasant
mode. 5 But the structuralist tools of the linguist give a much dearer picture of the
relative dominance of "Mexicano" and "Spanish" voices, and provide access to a
structural index that might be consulted with profit by political economists.

Notes
Acknowledgments. Work on Mexicano has been sponsored by the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH-R0-20495-74-572), by the American Council of Learned
Societies, and by the Penrose Fund of the American Philosophical Society. I would like to
thank Naomi Quinn, Gillian Feeley-Harnick, Alice Ingerson, and the other participants in
the symposium on Language and Consciousness at the Spring 1985 Annual Meeting of the
American Ethnological Society for their comments on this paper; responsibility for error
is, of course, my own.

1. It has become customary to include a discussion of whether Voloshinov's Marxism

and the Philosophy of Language (1973[1930]), with its great article on reported speech, was
322 Jane H. Hill

really written by Bakhtin. My own view is that until the question is definitively settled (and
currently I believe it is not), we should give credit to both scholars. In the present paper I
have neglected the terminological categories ofVoloshinov's work in favor of those devel-
oped by Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, (1973[1929]), but the two treatments
of the interactions of the word are closely related. The theoretical foundations of the treat-
ment in Marxism are detailed in the Voloshinov work; in Bakhtin's treatment, they are not
(scholars like Todorov have emphasized Bakhtin's eclecticism).
2. This is not the only refunctionalization of Mexicano symbolic values by the Spanish-
speaking sector. The Mexican state has "folklorized" (Jaulin 1979) Mexicano speech, turn-
ing it into a source of handy lexical vehicles for indigenist patriotism. 'It is interesting to
note that one of the main expressions of this, the giving of Mexicano personal names such
as Xochitl (Flower) and Cuauhtemoc (Eagle Descended) (the name of the last ruler of the
Mexica Aztec) to children, has penetrated the Malinche, being currently popular among the
best-educated young couples. Many local priests strongly oppose such names, and I know
of at least one case where a couple took advantage of the town priest's brief absence at a
conference to have a more liberal-minded visitor baptize their child. Mexicano surnames
such as Xaxalpa (Sandy Place) and Tecxis (Land Snail) are common on the Malinche.
3. No Malinche people seem to be involved in collective class action. The sort of spo-
radic violence represented by the Canoa incident, was over land between towns, and a high
level of interpersonal violence are the major manifestations of the structural contradictions
facing Malinche people. Like Mexicano-speaking people elsewhere in Mexico, they do not
see themselves as "tribal;' and have not formed an "Indian Council," the kind of organiza-
tion that has emerged among some other indigenous groups with the blessing of the rul-
ing PRI party. Very few Malinche factory workers are members of unions, and many peo-
ple who have been involved in factory work see their major political outlet as being the
official national peasant organization, the CNC.
4. Both Sapir and Whorf addressed the question of what kinds of categories in language
might become the object of conscious consideration; Boas, of course, believed that pat-
terning in language was generally inaccessible to consciousness. However, Sapir noted that
both scholars and bilinguals were often quite conscious of linguistic categories of all types.
The degree of "consciousness" of a linguistic category is quite possibly related to the kinds
of social use that are made of that category. While in general lexical usages seem to be par-
ticularly accessible to stereotyping, phonological usages and grammatical usages have also
become sociolinguistic markers (as in r-less and negative-concord versus r-ful and nega-
tive-polarity varieties of American English).
5. Perhaps the most detailed treatment of this problem is found in Greenberg (1982),
where data from homicide are used to explore the structural function of the cargo system
among the Chatino of Oaxaca.

References
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- - - . 1973[1929]. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.
- - - . 1980[ 1935]. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bartra, Roger. 1978. Capitalism and the Peasantry in Mexico. Latin American Perspectives
9:36-47.
Brown, Roger, and .A. Gilman. 1960. The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. In Style in
Language. T. Sebeok, ed. pp. 253-276. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press.
The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar 323

Diebold, A. Richard. 1961. Incipient Bilingualism. Language 37:91-110.

Greenberg, James. 1982. Santiago's Sword. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jaulin, Robert. 1979. Del Folklore. In La Des-Civilizaci6n. R. Jaulin, ed. pp. 85-90. Mexico:
Editorial Nueva Imagen.
Karttunen, Frances, and James Lockhart. 1976. Nahuatl in the Middle Years. University of
California Publications in Linguistics 85.
Lastra de Suarez, Yolanda, and Fernando Horcasitas. 1979. El Nahuatl en el Estado de
Tlaxcala. Anales de Antropologia 16:275-323.
Lukacs, Georg. 1968. History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Markey, Thomas L. 1983. Change Typologies: Questions and Answers in German. Studies
in Language and Literature in Older Germanic Dialects. B. Brogyany and T.
Krommelbein, eds. (forthcoming)
Nutini, Hugo G. 1984. Ritual Kinship: Ideological and Structural Integration of the
Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nutini, Hugo G., and Betty Bell. 1980. Ritual Kinship: The Structure and Historical
Development of the Compadrazgo System in Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Nutini, Hugo G., and Barry L. Isaac. 1974. Los Pueblos de Habla Nahuatl de la Region de
Puebla y Tlaxcala. Mexico: Instituto Nacional Indigenista.
Olivera, Mercedes. 1967. Tlaxcalancingo. Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia,
Departamento de Investigaciones Antropol6gicas, Publicaci6n No. 18. Mexico.
Rothstein, Frances. 1974. Factions in a Rural Community in Mexico. Ph.D. dissertation.
University of Pittsburgh.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1981. Mikhail Bakhtine, Le Principle Dialogique Suive de Ecrits du
Cercle de Bakhtine. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Voloshinov, V. N. 1973[1930]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York:
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Warman, Arturo. 1980. "We Come to Object": The Peasants of Morelos and the National
State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
About the Book and Editors

The Matrix of Language introduces students and other readers to recent debates in the
study of language and culture. The articles in this anthology, selected for their readability,
present a range of methodological approaches and well-known case studies that illustrate
the interconnection of language, culture, and social practice. The editors' introductory es-
says compare and contrast specific approaches in four broad areas: language and socializa-
tion, gender, the ethnography of speaking, and the role of language in social and political
life. The book is a valuable introduction in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics
courses and a resource for anyone exploring the relation of language to psychology, politi-
cal theory, feminist studies, and literature and folklore.

Donald Brenneis, professor of anthropology at Pitzer College, is the former editor of

American Ethnologist. Ronald K.S. Macaulay is professor of linguistics at Pitzer College.

325
Contributors

Richard Bauman is Distinguished Professor of Folklore a~ Indiana University.

A. L. Becker is professor emeritus of linguistics and anthropology at the University of
Michigan
Ruth A. Borker was teaching in the Sociology/ Anthropology Department at Randolph-
Macon Women's College at the time of her death.
Penelope Eckert is associated with Xerox-PARC, Palo Alto, and teaches in the
Department of Linguistics at Stanford University.
Steven Feld is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Shirley Brice Heath is professor of English and linguistics at Stanford University.
Jane H. Hill is professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Arizona.
Judith T. Irvine is professor of anthropology at Brandeis University.
Jose E. Limon is professor of English at the University of Texas.
Daniel N. Maltz is an independent scholar in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Fred R. Myers is professor of anthropology at New York University.
Elinor Ochs is professor of applied linguistics at U.C.L.A.
Bambi B. Schieffelin is professor of anthropology at New York University.
Michael Silverstein is Samuel N. Harper Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and
Psychology at The University of Chicago.
Ruth Smith is assistant professor in the Department of Speech Communications at
Purdue University

Carolyn Taylor is assistant professor of speech communication at the University of

Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

327
Credits

Chapter 2: Shirley Brice Heath, "What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at
Home and School," Language and Society 11 (1982). ©1982 Cambridge University Press.
Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 3: Reprinted from Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor, "Detective
Stories at Dinnertime: Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration;' Cultural Dynamics 2
( 1989) by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.
Chapter 4: Steven Feld and Bambi B. Schieffelin, "Hard Words: A Functional Basis for
Kaluli Discourse," in Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk, ed. Deborah Tannen (Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1981). Reprinted by permission.
Chapter 5: Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker, "A Cultural Approach to Male-Female
Miscommunication," in Language and Social Identity, ed. John J. Gumperz (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge
University Press.
Chapter 6: Elinor Keenan (Ochs), "Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers: Uses of Speech by
Men and Women in a Malagasy Community;' in Explorations in the Ethnography of
Speaking, 2d ed., ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 7: Penelope Eckert, "The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in
Variation;' Language Variation and Change 1 (1989). ©1990 Cambridge University Press.
Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 8: A. L. Becker, "Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb;' reproduced by
permission of the American Anthropological Association from Text, Play, and Story (1984).
Not for further reproduction.
Chapter 9: Richard Bauman, "'Any Man Who Keeps More'n One Hound'll Lie to You;"
in Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative, ed. Richard Bauman
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Reprinted with the permission of
Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 10: Jose E. Lim6n, "Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos,
Disorder, and Narrative Discourses;' reproduced by permission of the American
Anthropological Association from American Ethnologist 16:3, August 1989. Not for further
reproduction.
Chapter 11: Donald Brenneis, "Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji
Indian Conversation;' reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological
Association from American Ethnologist 11 :3, August 1984. Not for further reproduction.

329
330 Credits

Chapter 12: Fred R. Myers, "Reflections on a Meeting: Structure, Language, and the
Polity in a Small-Scale Society;' reproduced by permission of the American
Anthropological Association from American Ethnologist 13:3, August 1986. Not for further
reproduction.
Chapter 13: Judith T. Irvine, "When Talk Isn't Cheap: Language and Political Economy;'
reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from American
Ethnologist 16:2, May 1989. Not for further reproduction.
Chapter 14: Michael Silverstein, "Monoglot 'Standard' in America: Standardization and
Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony;' reprinted by permission of Michael Silverstein.
Chapter 15: Jane H. Hill, "The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of
Grammar;' reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from
American Ethnologist 12:4, November 1985. Not for further reproduction.
Index

Abrahams, Roger D., 91, 92, 96, 97, 140, Becker, A. L., 139, 140, 142-159
141,209,230,231 Beidelman, T. 0., 254
Abu-Lughod,Lila,279,281 Bell, Betty, 309, 323
Accommodation, 119-121 Bell,Diane,239,242,254,255
Agrawal, A., 85, 98 Ben-Amos, Dan, 170, 180
Akinnaso, Niyi, 97 Bengali,289
Anshen, Frank, 302 Benjamin, Walter, 174, 180
Apte, Mahadev L., 140, 141 Bennett, C., 37, 38
Arabic, 123, 206, 266-280,.285, 289 Bennett, William, 300
Arenas, Domingo 308 Bentsen, Lloyd, 201
Aristotle, 234--235, 255 Benveniste, Emile, 148, 159
Arno, Andrew, 230 Bernstein, Basil, 8, 10
Atkins, Bowman K., 76, 80 Bernstein, M., 54
Atkinson, Jane Monnig, 230, 231, 254 Bethke, Robert D., 169, 180
Audience, 15,34,41,62,90-91,93, 104, Biebuyck-Goetz, Brunhilde, 169, 180
166,214,219 Biffle, K., 293
Aulakh, G., 85, 98 Birnbaum, J., 38
Austin, John L., 139, 141 Bloch, Maurice, 100, 114, 115, 236, 255
Australian Question Intonation, 122, Bloom, Lois, 10
123, 127 Bloomfield, Leonard, 261, 262, 279, 281,
Awadhi,218 286,305
Boas,Franz,287,302,305
Bacon, Francis, 272 Boatright, Mody C., 174, 180
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 2, 5, 141, 175, 179, Boggs, Stephen, 231, 233
182-203,307,311-316,322 Boltanski, Luc, 116, 135
Balinese, 149 Borker, Ruth A., 77, 79, 80, 81-98, 130,
Baroni, Maria Rosa, 123, 135 137
Barth, Fredrik, 279, 281 Bourdieu, Pierre, 116, 135, 268, 269, 279,
Barthes, Roland, 12, 36, 144, 294, 305 281
Bartra, Roger, 311, 321, 322 Bowerman, Melissa, 10
Bartsch, Renate, 206, 207 Brenneis, Donald L., 3, 205, 209-233,
Bascom, William, 160, 179 236,242,247,254,255,256
Basso, Keith H., 36, 37, 140, 141, 207 Briggs, Charles, 140, 141, 201
Bateson, Gregory, 144, 145, 151, 159, Briggs, Jean, 235, 255
191, 192,202 Bronner, Simon J., 96, 97
Baughman, Ernest, 167, 174, 179, 180 Brooks-Gunn, J., 87, 88, 89, 97
Bauman,Richard,9, 10,93,97, 140, 141, Brown, Carolyn Henning, 211, 232
160-181,215,231 Brown, Penelope, 120, 121, 127, 136,207

331
332 Index

Brown, Roger, 7, 10, 310, 322 Daisley, Elaine, 122, 136

Bruner, Jerome, 14, 18, 38 Davis, Ossie, 292
Brunvand,Jan, 169, 180 Degh,Linda, 160, 180
Burke, Kenneth, 143, 146, 155, 159, 176, de Leon, Arnoldo, 183, 202
180 Derrida, Jacques, 139, 140, 141, 278, 281
Burmese, 140, 142-159 Deshpande, Madhav, 158
Burns, Allan F., 231, 232 deTracy, Destrutt, 303
Deuchar, Margaret, 120, 136
Cameron, Deborah, 79 Dewey, John, 151, 159
Carson, Jane, 161, 180 Diebold, Richard A., 314, 323
Castaneda, Alfredo, 8, 11 Diemer, Larry, 135
Caste, 265-266, 274 Diop, Abdoulaye-Bara, 279, 281
Cazden, Courtney B., 14, 37 Discourse analysis, 2-3
Cedergren, Henrietta, 117, 118, 136 Dittmar, Norbert, 205, 207
Chafe, Wallace, 207 Ditton, Pam, 239, 242, 254, 255
Chanan, G., 37 Dorson, Richard M., 174, 180
Chase, Stuart, 303 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 312, 322
Chavez, Cesar, 199 Douglas, Mary, 189, 190, 193, 201, 202
Chesterton, G. K., 206 Drakich, Janice, 75, 79
Childs, C. P., 37 Dubois, Betty Lou, 76, 79
Chomsky, Carol, 10, 11 Duranti, Alessandro, 42, 54, 230
Chomsky, Noam, l, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, Durkheim, Emile, 201, 286
205, 262, 311 d'Urso, Valentina, 123, 135
Cisneros, Henry, 199 Dyson, Freeman J., 288, 289, 290, 303,
- Clark, Bette, 230, 254, 255 305
Clarke, Sandra, 75, 79
Clermont, Jean, 117, 136 Eckert, Penelope, 77, 78, 116-137
Coates, Jennifer, 79 Eder, D., 88-89, 97
Cochran-Smith, M., 18, 36, 37 Edmonson,Munro,209,232
Cognitive styles, 8, 17, 18, 36 Edwards, Alison, 117, 135, 136
Cohen, R., 17, 18, 38 Egalitarianism. See Equality
Cohn, Bernard S., 214, 232 Eliason, M., 296
Collins, James, 301 Ellis, John, 278, 281
Comaroff, John, 301 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 126, 136
Co-narration, 9, 39-55 Emotion, 235-236, 240, 244, 250, 253
Conversation, 15, 28, 66, 76, 77, 81-86, Engestrom, Y., 39, 54
91,92-96, 178,209-233,244,270 Entitlement, 10, 53
Conversation analysis, l, 231, 232 Equality, 56, 88, 89, 193, 211, 213, 220,
Conze, Edward, 157, 158, 159 230,237,243,247,263,295,297,312
Co-performance, 205, 219, 231 Erickson, Frederick, 155, 159, 269, 281
Cothran, Kay L., 169, 180 Ervin-Tripp, Susan, 279, 281
Coulthard, R. M., 14, 38 Ethography of speaking, 2, 259
Coward, Rosalind, 278, 281 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 236, 255, 278, 281
Cox,Bruce,209,232
Craven, Wesley Frank, 161, 180 Fairchild, Robert, 304
Crawford, James, 207 Fanshel, David, 168, 181
Crouch, Isabel, 76, 79 Faris, J. C., 93, 97
Index 333

Faterson, F., 38 Goffman, Erving, 114, 115, 163, 169,

Feeley-Harnick, Gillian, 321 172, 175, 180,207
Feiring, C., 40, 54, G6mez, Luis, 158
Feld, Steven, 3, 9, 10, 56-73 Goodenough, R., 38
Ferguson, Charles A. 10-11, 285, 306 Goodenough, Ward H., 264, 281
Fernandez, James, 197, 199, 202 Goodwin, Charles, 42, 54, 231, 232
Ferris, Bill, 174, 180 Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, 81, 88, 89,
Fijian, 230 90,97,209,210,217,218,230,232
Firth, John Rupert, 139 Goody, Elinor N., 37, 38
Fischer, Michael M.J., 200, 202 Gossen, Gary, 209, 232
Fisher, W., 42, 54 Gossip, 3, 84, 100-101, 103, 205,
Fishman, Pamela M., 82-83, 97 209-233
Fiske, John, 161, 180 Gould, Stephen Jay, 302, 306
Foley, Douglas, 183, 202 Graddol, David, 79
Form vs. Function, 2, 78 Gramsci, Antonio, 187
Fortes, M., 236, 255 Green, Ben K., 174, 180
Foucault, Michel, 183-184, 195 Greenberg, James, 322, 323
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 127, 136 Greenfield, Patricia M., 37
Frake, Charles, 242, 255 Grice, H.P., 140, 141
Frames, 149, 157, 191 Griffin, P., 14, 38
Franklin, Benjamin, 297 Gumperz, John J., 81, 85, 97, 98, 140,
French, 100, 114--115,206,266-280,286, 141, 220, 232, 262, 263, 259 269, 281,
297 286,306,315,316,323
Friedman, Milton, 287, 290, 306 Gutman, Herbert, 187
Friedman, Rose, 287, 290, 306 Guy, Gregory, 122, 123, 127, 136
Friedrich, Paul, 278, 301
Furman, Nelly, 79, 80 Haas, Adelaide, 86, 98
Furth,Wynne,230 Haas, Mary R., 155, 159
Habermas, J., 192-193
Gauchat, Louis, 118, 136 Haeri, Niloofar, 123, 136
Geertz, Clifford, 144, 145, 158, 159 Halliday, Michael A.K., 264, 281
Gender, 4, 75-137, 211, 239, 247-248, Hallinan, M. T., 88, 89, 97
254,255,265,297,304,310,316 Halpert, Herbert, 160, 180
Genovese, E., 187 Hamilton, Annette, 255
Genre,3,4,40-41,53,84, 139-203,205, Hanks, William F., 207, 278
213,214,215,231,269,270,273 Hannerz, Ulf, 92, 93, 98
Georges, Robert, 160, 180 Harding, Susan, 84, 98
Gibbs, James, 214, 232 Hartley, Ruth, 87
Giddens, Anthony, 250, 255 Haviland, John B., 42, 54, 217, 232
Gilchrist, L., 37 Havranek, Bohuslav, 303, 306
Gilman, A., 310, 322 Hayakawa, S. I., 304--5
Gilsenan, Michael, 169, 180 Hearn, Francis, 192, 193, 202
Ginsburg,Faye,254 Heath, Shirley Brice, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12-38,
Giv6n, Talmy, 147, 159 161, 180
Glaser, R., 33, 38 Hegemony, 284--306
Gleason, Jean Berko, 10, 11 Henley, Nancy, 79, 80
Gluckman,Max,209,232 Herzog, Marvin, 279, 283
334 Index

Hickman, M., 53, 55 Jaulin, Robert, 322, 323

Hierarchy, 90, 100, 119-120, 126, 127, Javanese, 142, 149
192,265,274,295 Jefferson, Gail, 42, 54, 90, 98
Hill, Jane H., 3, 141, 206, 207, 280, 281, John, Vera P., 81, 83, 98
301,307-323 Johnson, Mark, 150, 157, 159
Hindi, 210-233 Johnstone, Barbara, 9, 11, 140-141
Hindle, Donald, 121, 122, 136 Joking,90-91,93, 139, 193, 197
Hirschman, Lynette, 82, 91, 92, 97 Jones, Daniel, 205, 207
Holliday, Billie, 144 Joseph, John Earl, 206, 207
Holmes, Janet, 77, 79 Julien, Kitty, 97
Holquist, Michael, 52, 54
Horcasitas, Fernando, 308, 323 Kagan, Jerome, 17, 38
Horvath, Barbara, 117, 122, 136 Kalcik, s., 91, 92, 93, 98
Howard, Richard, 12, 38 Kaluli, 3, 9, 56-73
Htwe, U San, 149, 150, 151, 52, 157, 158 Karttunen, Frances, 311, 323
Humphry, F., 14, 38 Keats, John, 151
Hymes, Dell H., 2, 5, 10, 11, 29, 36, 38, Keenan, Elinor. See Ochs, Elinor
76, 79, 140, 141,206,207,215,230, Kernan, Keith T., 217, 232
232,235,256,259,261,262,268,270, Key, Mary Ritchie, 79
279,282 Knack, Rebecca, 135
Kobes, Mgr. A., 279, 282
Iconicity, 143, 153, 266, 275, 278, 294, Koch, Kenneth, 145
296 Kochman, Thomas, 264, 282, 301, 303,
Identity, 3, 117, 169, 176, 237, 238, 254, 305,306
264,310,316-317,319 Koppel, Ted, 292
Ideology,4,88, 117, 124, 192, 195, Korzybski, Alfred, 303
196,197,200,206,211,258,264,267, Kramarae, Cheris, 79, 80
274,280,299,303,312,313 Kripke, Saul, 280, 282
Imperatives, 62-66, 68-70, 104-107 Kroch, Antony, 122
Indexicality, 260-269, 275-276, 278, 279, Kuhn, Thomas, 47, 54
291,294,295
Indirectness, 78, 92, 101-110, 112-115, Laberge, Suzanne, 116, 125, 137
212-214,215,220,230,244 Labov, William, 1, 5, 9, 11, 42, 54, 116,
Ingerson, Alice, 321 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 130, 134,
Inglehart, R. F., 300, 306 136, 137, 168, 169, 176, 180, 181,217,
Interaction, 13, 18, 20, 37, 56, 57, 61, 62, 231,232,258,263,279,282,283,293,
63,65,67,69, 70, 73, 77, 78, 79,81, 302,303,304,306
82-84,86-87,90-92,94,95,96, 101, Laferriere, Martha, 117, 13 7
140, 166, 169, 171, 190, 191, 194,209, Lakoff,George, 150, 157, 159
210, 246, 250 Lakoff, Robin, 76, 79, 83, 86, 98
Interruption, 75, 82, 83, 91, 92, 244 Lastra de Suarez, Yolanda, 308, 323
Intonation, 28, 29, 31, 62, 85, 122-123, Lauria, Anthony, Jr., 191, 202
127, 198,218,299 Lave,Jean,39,55, 135
Irvine, Judith T., 206, 207, 230, 236, 245, Lederman, Rena, 242, 256
256,258-283 Lee, Richard B., 235, 254, 256
Isaac, Barry L., 307, 323 Lein,Laura,219,232
James, Deborah, 75, 79 LeMasters, E. E., 93, 98
Jameson, Fredric, 195, 196, 200, 202 Lenneberg, Eric H., 7, 10
Index 335

Leontyev, A.N.I., 40, 54 Metaphor, 32, 35, 58, 61, 92, 139, 144,
Lerner, G., 42, 43, 53, 54 148, 154, 158, 191, 199,214,262,264,
Lever, Janet, 87, 88, 89, 98 284-306
Levinson, Stephen C., 120, 121, 136, 207 Mexicano (Nahuatl), 206, 280, 307-323
Lewis, M., 40, 54 Mills, W. S., 162, 181
Liberman, Kenneth, 244, 246, 254, 256 Milroy, James, 206, 208
Limon, Jose E., 139, 160, 161, 181, Milroy, Lesley, 116, 125, 137, 206, 208
182-203 Miranda, R., 218
Linguistic change, 77, 119, 120, 134 Miscommunication, 77, 81-98
Linguistic code, 216, 262, 264, 266, 268, Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia, 230, 232
295,310,313,315,320 Moerman, Michael, 207, 208
Linguistic repertoire, 100, 210, 215, 219, Montejano, David, 183, 202
231,267 Morphy, Howard, 251, 256
Literacy, 12-38, 152 Morris, Charles, 172, 181
Littleton, C. Scott, 160, 181 Moss, H., 17, 38
Lockhart, James, 311, 323 Mukarovsky, Jan, 143, 159
Lukacs, Georg, 311, 323 Munn, Nancy, 243, 256
Luong, Hy Van, 301 1:fyers, Fred R., 3, 205, 206, 207, 209,
Lying, 139, 140, 160-181,251 230,232,234-257
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs, 196, 202 Nadel, S. F., 264, 282
Nader, Laura, 214, 232
Macaulay, Ronald K.S., 75, 80, 96, 117, Narrative, 9-10, 12-38, 39-55, 90,
137,206,208,230,231 92-93, 139, 160, 161, 166-169, 171,
Madsen, William, 201, 202 172, 175, 177, 179, 182-203,217,218,
Malagasy, 76, 78, 99-115 231
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2, 272, 282 Neikirk, B., 293, 298
Maltz, Daniel N., 77, 81-98, 130, 137 Nelson, Katherine E., 8, 11
Mandelbaum, J., 42, 43, 53, 54 Newman, Edwin, 299
Mann, R. D., 82, 83, 98 Nicholls, Johanna, 207
Marcus, George E., 183, 188, 202 Nichols, Patricia C., 125, 137
Marcuse, Herbert, 192, 193 Ninio, A., 14, 18, 38
Markey, Thomas L., 314, 323 Norms, 92, 99-115, 119, 243, 250, 264,
Marshall,Lorna,254,256 285,286,295,314
Marxism, 182-203, 307, 311 Northern Cities Shift, 130-134
Matisoff, James A., 155, 159 Nutini, Hugo G., 307, 309, 323
Matthews, W. S., 87, 88, 89, 97
Mayer, Adrian, 211, 232 O'Barr, William M., 76, 80
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 79, 80 Ochs, Elinor, 3, 9, 10, 11, 39-55, 76, 78,
McKellin, William, 230, 232 99-115,230,231,233
Meditch, Andrea, 86, 98 Okell, John, 153, 157, 159
Meggitt, Mervyn J., 242, 243, 249, 254, Olivera, Mercedes, 309, 323
256 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 146, 159
Mehan, Hugh, 14,38 Orwell, George, 303
Merina, 99-100 Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 145
Merritt, M., 19, 38
Mertz, Elizabeth, 259, 282, 301, 302 Padarath, Ram, 211, 231
Metalinguistic practice, 56, 61, 71, 72 Paine, Robert, 209, 233, 236, 256
336 Index

Pali, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158 Resistance, 139, 187, 188, 312
Paredes, Americo, 140, 141, 187, 201, 202 Rhetoric, 62, 65, 71, 144, 148, 154, 169,
Parmentier, Richard, 259, 282, 302 176, 177, 178, 184, 197,209,269,288,
Passive voice, 320
Payne, Arvilla, 121 Rickford, John R., 161, 181
Payne, C., 37, 38 Ricoeu~Paul, 118, 143, 158, 159
Paz, Octavio, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, Robins, Lynne, 117, 136
188, 190, 193, 195,200,203 Rogers, Inge, 122, 136
Peacock, James, 190,203 Rogoff, Barbara., 39, 55
Performance, 4, 19, 23, 57, 93, 152, 153, R6heim, Geza, 235, 256
161, 169, 170, 173, 175, 188, 190,213, Romaine, Suzanne, 10, 11
214,215,218,220,237,259,260,272, Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 230, 233, 235, 236,
274,275,276-277,320 242,247,254,256
Peirce, C. S., 259, 275-276, 278, 279 Rosaldo, Renato, 201
Peters, A., 28, 38 Rosenbaum, David E., 201, 203
Philips, Susan U., 79, 80 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio, 258, 268, 282
Philipsen, Gerry, 93, 98 Rothstein, Frances, 309, 323
Pig Latin, 264 Rouseau, R., 279, 283
Pike, Evelyn G., 148, 159 Rubel, Arthur, 201, 203
Pike, Kenneth L., 148, 159 Rude, George, 187
Pintupi, 205-206, 234-257 Rudolph, D., 54
Play, 87-91, 163, 193, 194
Policastro, M., 41, 55 Sabsay, Sharon, 217, 232
Politeness, 20, 77, 78, 92, 120, 127, 207, Sacks,Harvey,42,55,90,91,98
279 Sacks, Karen, 126, 137
Political economy, 192, 206, 258-283 Safire, William, 200
Potter, Robert J., 169, 181 Sankoff, David, 116, 117, 125, 135, 136,
Powerful speech, 76, 310 137
Powerless speech, 76 Sanskrit, 157, 215
Preisler, Bent, 79, 80 Sansom,Basil,236,246,254,255,256,
Proverbs, 142-159 272,280,283
Pulaar, 265, 279 Sapir, Edward, 4, 5, 140, 141, 322
Putnani, Hilary, 270, i7l, 280, 282, 288, Sartain, James Alfred, 162, 181
306 Sartre, Jean Paul, 145
Sattel, Jack W., 126, 137
Questions, 14-17, 23-25, 29, 31-32, 34, Saussure, Ferdinand de, 258, 259,
82,85,91,94 277-278,281,283,286,287,306,312
Quinn, Naomi, 321 Savin-Williams, Richard C., 90, 98
Rabelais, F., 202, 313 Schegloff, Emanuel A., 230, 231, 233
Ramirez, Manuel, III, 8, 11 Schieffelin, Bambi B., 5, 10, 11, 53, 55-73
Ramos, Samuel, 182, 183, 184, 187, 188, Schieffelin, Edward L., 56, 58, 63, 73
190, 193, 195,200,203 Schiffrin, Deborah, 42, 55
Reading, 12-38 Schneider, Judith Morganroth, 302
Reay, Marie, 254, 256 School,8, 13-38, 128-130, 144,216,266,
Redundancy, 17, 57 268,288,301,302
Referentiality, 62, 169, 209, 210, 214, Scollon, Ronald, 10, 11, 14, 18, 33, 38,
217,260-261,292,301,312,314 155, 159
Reisman, Karl, 264, 282 Scollon,Suzanne,14,18,33,38
Index 337

Scotton, Carol Myers, 205, 208 Stanner, W.E.H., 243, 257

Searle, John R., 139, 140, 141 Stavenhagen, R., 321
Secco; T., 55 Stead, J. 249
Sendak, Maurice, 182, 196, 203 Steele, Susan, 79, 80
Shakespeare, William, 151 Stein, N., 41, 55
Shapiro, Warren, 251, 257 Steiner, Richard, 130, 137
Sharff, S., 43, 55 Stevens, W. K., 293, 296
Sherzer, Joel, 140, 141 Story-telling. See Narrative
Shultz, Jeffrey, 155, 159, 269, 281 Strathern, Andrew, 230, 233
Shuman,Alny, 10, 11, 140, 141 Strehlow, T.G.H., 236, 253, 257
Siegel, Jeff, 207, 208 Strodtbeck, F. L., 82, 83, 98
Sigel, I., 17, 38 Style, 4, 8, 58, 94, 209, 210, 216, 219, 240,
Silence,57,82, 143,246 248,279,303
Silla, Ousmane, 274, 280, 283 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 37, 38
Silverstein, Michael, vii, 3, 206, 210, 230, Swann, Joan, 79
233,259,283,272,278,289,280,282, Swartz, M., 254, 257
284--306 Swe, U Thein, 151,158
Sirnmel, Georg, 166, 174, 181, 252, 257 Sydnor, Charles S., 161, 181
Simon, John. 299 Szwed, John, 209, 233
Sinclair, J.M., 14, 38
Slobin, Dan, 10, 11 Taboo words, 58, 59, 67
Slow disclosure, 43-46 Tag questions, 76-77
Slow emergence, 155 Tallman, Richard, 169, 181
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 139, 141 Tannen,Deborah,79,80,85,97
Smith, Philip M. 304, 306 Tanton, John, 305
Smith, Ruth, 3, 9, 39-55 Tanz, Christine, 79, 80
Snow, Catherine E., 10, 11 Taylor, Carolyn, 3, 9, 39-55
Social class, 8, 14, 19-37, 116, 118, 120, Teasing, 65, 68, 70, 139
122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 183, 184, Thibault, Pierrette, 116, 117, 137
185, 187, 189, 190,258,263,297 Thompson, E. P., 187
Socialization, 3-4, 7-73, 77, 95-96 Thompson, Stith, 167, 179, 181
Sociolinguistics, 1, 78, 82, 84, 90, 94, 95, Thomson, John, 279, 280, 283
116-135,253,261,262,264,267,268, Thorne, Barrie, 79, 80
269,270,277,280,287,304,307,322 Thwin, Michael Aung, 158
Socrates, 160 Todorov, Tzvetan, 311, 322, 323
Solis, D., 297 Toelken, Barre, 167, 180
Soskin, William F., 81, 83, 98 Tok Pisin, 56
Spanish, 182-201,206,286,307-323 Trabasso, T., 41, 55
Speech community, 205, 284, 285 Transcripts, 2-3, 73, 205, 216, 217, 218
Speech play, 96, 188, 190, 191, 193, 219 Translation, 142-159
Speech styles, 119, 206, 244--245, 263, Trudgill, Peter, 118, 119, 120, 137, 304
265-266,275-276 Tuden, A., 254, 257
Spielberg, Joseph, 183, 185, 187, 188, Turne~ Terence,254,257
190, 193, 196,203 Turner, V., 254, 257
Spielberg, Steven, 186 Tum-taking, 2, 81, 244, 264
Stalin, J., 202 Tyler, Stephen A., 201, 203
Standard language, 3, 120, 125, 139, 264,
284--306 Uchida, Aki, 77, 78, 80
338 Index

Umiker-Sebeok, J. D., 37, 38 Welsch, Roger, 174, 181

Urban, Greg, 207, 208 Welsh, 289, 290
Wertsch, James, 39, 40, 53, 55
Valery, Paul, 139 West, Candace, 82, 83, 98
Van Den Broek, P., 55 White, Geoffrey M., 207, 208.
van der Leeden, A. C., 251, 257 Whitten, Norman E., Jr., 230
Vazsonyi, Andrew, 160, 180 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 285, 303, 306, 322
Veblen, Thorstein, 127, 137 Will, George, 292
Verbal art, 2, 169, 192, 193, 209 Williams, Nancy, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253,
Verhoeff, Mary, 161, 181 254,257
Voloshinov (also Volosinov), V. N., 218, Williams, Raymond, 3, 5
233,307,311,313,321,322,323 Willis, Paul, 188
Vonwiller, Julia, 122, 136 Witkin, H., 17, 38
Vygotsky, L. S., 39, 52, 55 Witt, H., 293
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 142, 147, 148, 159
Waletzky, Joshua, 9, 11, 169, 176, 181, Wolf, Eric, 309
218 231, 232 Wolfram, Walt A., 117, 137
Wallerstein, I., 278 Wolof, 206, 265-280
Ward, Martha Coonfield, 8, 11 Woodward, M., 300, 306
Warman,Arturo,308,309,321,323 Woolard, Kathryn A., 269, 283, 300
Warner, W. Lloyd, 251, 257
Watson, Jeanne, 169, 181 Yaeger, Malcah, 130, 137
Watson-Gegeo, Karen, 206, 208, 231, 233 Yoruba,97
Weiner, Annette, 242, 254, 257, 278, 280, Young, Robert, 195, 202, 203
283
Weinreich, Uriel, 279, 283 , 303 Zapata, Emiliano, 308
Weinstein, Brian, 302 Zavella, Patricia, 201, 203
Weisner, T., 54 Zimmerman, Don H., 82, 83, 98
Weiss, A. P., 279 Zurbuchen, Mary S., 149, 150, 159