Language and Social Relations - Cultural Anthropology PDF

Language and Social Relations 4 75 HUMAN LANGUAGE...

Language and Social Relations 4 75 HUMAN LANGUAGE AS A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM 77 THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 84 MAKING SOCIETY THROUGH LANGUAGE: LANGUAGE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY 92 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS 96 SUMMARY In Malagasy, a language spoken on the island of Madagascar, there are three styles or “voices” in which to phrase a sentence. Two of these correspond to the active and passive voices in English, but the third is known as the circumstantial voice and has no precise English equivalent. The circumstantial voice shifts the subject of the sentence from the person being addressed to the object that will be used to perform an action. The difference between the three speech forms appears in the various ways to give an order: Active: Manasa ny lamba amin’ny savony or “Wash the clothes with soap.” Passive: Sasaa ny lamba anim’ny savony or “Have the clothes washed with the soap.” Circumstantial: Anasao lamb any savony or “The soap is to be used to wash clothes.” (Ochs 1996: 105–6) The question for a speaker is, when do you use each particular form, and what difference does it make? In simple declarative sentences as well as imperatives, it is always preferable to use the circumstantial voice if possible. According to Ochs, Namaizamanga village in central Madagascar was an egalitarian and non-violent place, with no formal leaders and few differentiated statuses, where it was regarded 74 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES as impolite to express direct anger, disagreement, or criticism. So the active voice was considered to be “harsh and abrupt, without respect” (106). Indirect speech was regarded as appropriate as well as sophisticated – a quality of the formal and stylized speech style known as kabary. One of the most conspicuous areas of difference between human groups is their language. Sometimes language difference has been taken as the defining feature of a distinct society, although not always: two or more societies can speak the same language (e.g., the U.K. and the U.S.A.), and one society can speak two or more languages (e.g., Flemish and Walloon in Belgium). The overt qualities of language – the specific sounds, words, and grammars of each – are easy to observe and clearly fall within the prerogative of anthropology. In fact, language is such a vast subject that anthropology has developed a specialized subdiscipline to investigate it, namely linguistic anthropology. However, linguistic anthropology is interested in more than the sounds and grammar of languages. It is also concerned with what kinds of variations and choices exist within a language, how people use those variations and choices to convey social information and to express and maintain social relations, and how the concepts and values in a language shape the experience of its speakers. That is, linguistic anthropology holistically relates language to other aspects of society and culture. PLATE 4.1 Linguistic anthropologists began collecting language in the field in the late 1800s  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 75 HUMAN LANGUAGE AS A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM Humans are hardly the only species to communicate. All species, even plants, communicate in various ways, in the sense of transmitting and receiving “infor- mation,” for example, by exchanging chemical markers. Bees are famous for their “dance” that communicates the distance and direction to flowers. Humans are not even the only species that communicates “orally.” Cats, dogs, and birds, and of course monkeys and apes, make sounds that carry meaning for others of their kind. In the laboratory we have discovered that the primates related most closely to us are the most like us linguistically; they cannot speak, but they can understand speech and can communicate through linguistic media such as hand signals, shapes and objects, and buttons and keyboards. That non-human primates have some linguistic ability is no surprise, given their physical and behavioral similarity to us. Most of what we consider human language is performed in the medium of speech, but not all of it. People who are completely without speech ability can com- municate linguistically, as with American Sign Language. Beyond that, all humans communicate non-verbally all the time, using hand gestures, facial expressions, body postures, and so on. Regardless of the medium, however, language has a set of distinct characteristics, referred to as “design features” (Hockett 1958; 1977). Among these features are: rapid fading – the communication lasts for only a brief time (except for writing) interchangeability – individuals can be both senders and receivers of messages feedback – language users can monitor their own messages and correct errors in them semanticity – the elements of language have “meaning” or reference to the world arbitrariness – the connection between a linguistic signal and its “meaning” is not “natural” or “given” discreteness – language is composed of small, separate, and reusable “bits” displacement – language can refer to things that are not “present” in time or Displacement space The linguistic feature that allows for communication productivity – language users can make and understand new messages using old about things that are “not familiar “bits” here” in the sense of absent reflexiveness – language users can employ language to communicate about or out of view, past or language future, conceptual or even prevarication – language use can be false, deceptive, or meaningless imaginary. learnability – users of one language can learn another language Productivity cultural transmission – the rules or conventions of language are the property of The capacity of language a social group and are acquired or learned by interacting with that group. to combine meaningless sounds to create new words Clearly, then, language is profoundly connected to culture. The human abilities or or to combine words to skills or tendencies that make culture possible also make language possible. In fact, create new utterances. many of the features of language on Hockett’s list are also features of culture in general. 76 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Language first of all consists of symbols; it depends on the capacity to engage in symbolism, to think symbolically. Language is a set of acts or gestures – largely but not essentially verbal – that “mean something.” Many things “mean something”: when a dog barks, it means something to the dog, to other dogs, and to us. When dark clouds appear on the horizon, it means something (that it might rain, for example). But no one would call the dog barking, or the clouds appearing, symbolic. The difference between such signs and real symbols is that symbols are conventional See Chapter 2 and arbitrary vehicles for their meanings. There is no necessary or “natural” rela- tionship between a symbol and its meaning. We could use any sound or hand gesture or facial expression or picture to represent any meaning, as long as we all agree to use it and understand its use. In a sense, we are “free” to make and use symbols, including language symbols, in a way that the dog, let alone the cloud, is not. There are of course certain words in any language that sound like the thing they mean, such as the word “boom” for an explosion or the child’s word “choo-choo” for a train, but these are a special class of words called onomatopoeia and are not typical of human language. One of the marvelous aspects of human language is that a relatively small number of basic linguistic units can be combined in various ways to produce a theoretically unlimited number of meanings or utterances. There are two ways to look at this. The first is that meaningful language at bottom consists of meaningless bits, that is, sounds. The sound “d” has no meaning, nor the sound “o” nor the sound “g,” but together in a particular arrangement (d-o-g) they have meaning in a particular language. Together in a different arrangement (g-o-d) they have a very different meaning. Together in any other arrangement (say, g-d-o) they have no meaning in that language. The second is that we can use our newly meaningful sound groups (“words”) in novel combinations to generate original and previously unheard utterances – phrases, sentences, speeches, stories, entire books like this one. This is not to assert that all or even most of human speech is particularly original; in fact, very much of what humans say during a day is highly conventional, virtually “script-like,” whether they are exchanging greetings or quoting a proverb or famous saying. However, while a line like “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is conventional today, perhaps no one ever combined those words in quite that way before Shakespeare did. Finally and remarkably, humans can talk about things that are “not here” in a variety of senses. For example, humans can talk about things that are not immediately in front of us – behind us or in another room or on the other side of the planet. We can also talk about things that do not exist in the present at all, that is, the past and the future. Humans can talk about things that are blocked from view, invisible, or even completely abstract or general – things like ideas or concepts or relationships, such as “justice” or “same/different.” We can even talk about things that are purely imaginary or fictional: we can talk about dragons and leprechauns and elves and Hamlet or Harry Potter just as easily and surely as about dogs and cats and clouds. In fact, in a certain important way, it does not really matter whether these things are real or not; if people think they are real and act as if they are real, then those things have real social consequences.  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 77 The point is that human language ultimately and crucially exploits some unique human cognitive or mental abilities. Humans could not produce symbols unless they were cognitively “free” to make meaning. Similarly, our kind of language would be impossible without the human talents of creativity, imagination, and even fantasy. In language, as in culture in general, humans invent their own worlds and live in them. Humans can create their own cognitive, “meaningful,” world, and they must create it. THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE Any particular language has a finite set of elements and a finite set of rules for combining those elements into larger and more complex units. The speaker of the language must learn and master these elements and rules, achieving linguistic competence, the ability to make intelligible utterances. To learn a language – and Competence for anthropology to study the cultural phenomenon of language – we must start with In language, the mastery of the smallest bits and build up higher and more complex linguistic behavior out of the elements (sounds, semantics, and grammar) of these lower order units. Language thus proceeds from sound to meaning to utterance, a language to be able to and finally to practical use. make intelligible utterances. Phonology The most basic bits in any human language are its sounds, and phonology (from the Phonology root phone for sound) is the study of how those sounds are combined and used in The study of the sounds used in a language. language (phonetics is usually understood to refer to the processes of the physical production and sensory reception of sounds). More specifically, phonology is the study of which sounds are used in a language and how those sounds are used to generate words. We are not talking yet about meaning; we are still at the pre- meaningful stage of language. Humans can make very many different sounds, but no language employs all of them. Any particular language will contain some sounds and not others; it will use sounds that other languages do not and will use them in ways that other languages do not. English contains th and f and sh sounds that do not occur universally, and some speakers of other languages have difficulty distinguishing or producing such sounds. French, for example, does not contain the th sound, which is often replaced with a z sound, rendering the word “the” as “ze.” Japanese speakers struggle with the r and l sounds in English. Other languages use sounds that are foreign to English. The !Kung or Ju/hoansi in Africa’s Kalahari Desert use a set of click sounds in their words that English speakers can make but would never pronounce as parts of English words. (Even the names for their society include sounds that are not part of any possible English word and for which English has no alphabetic symbol, which is why we use punctuation symbols to represent them.) The total number of sounds available in a language can vary widely: Warlpiri (Australian Aboriginal) has only 78 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES three vowel sounds – “ah,” “ee,” and “oo.” Nuer (African) reportedly has fourteen vowels, each with at least three “lengths,” two degrees of “breathiness,” and three “tones,” producing over two hundred possible combinations (Needham 1972: 18). Some languages, like English, use stress or emphasis to modify their sounds, and others, like Chinese, use tone. When a person pronounces the words of one language with the phonology of another, it is known as “speaking with an accent.” Beyond the simple matter of which sounds are used in a language, there is the Phoneme matter of how those sounds are used. Phonemes are the smallest bits of linguistic The smallest bit of sound in sound. For example, [b] and [p] (phonemes are usually written within square a language. brackets) are two distinct phonemes in English, which can be verified by asking a native speaker if “bit” and “pit” are the same word. These different phonemes make a linguistic difference. The phonemes [r] and [rr] (a “rolled” r) do not make a difference in English (“ruffles” and “rruffles” are not different words), but they might make a difference in some other languages. An example is Warlpiri, which actually has not two but three forms of the “r” sound – [r], [rr], and [rd] (a kind of “flapped r” sound). The difference – and the significance of the difference – can be noticed in the Warlpiri suffix -kurra as opposed to the word kura. The first means “toward” while the second means “sex” – a difference in meaning that an English speaker attempting Warlpiri would surely want to pay attention to. On the other hand, Warlpiri does not distinguish between the sounds [b] and [p]. In fact, the Warlpiri sound is neither [b] nor [p] but something in between. “Bit” and “pit” would be the same word to them, but neither would be pronounced quite correctly. Try making a sound intermediate between [b] and [p] and you will see how elusive these skills can be. The second issue is how those sounds are used in combination. There are often rules, for instance, for which sounds may occur together or where a sound may occur in a word. English allows for clusters of consonants, as in the word “straight,” with its initial string of three consonants, [s], [t], and [r]. Abbreviating “consonant” with C and “vowel” with V, linguists would represent the sound structure of the word “straight” as CCCVC. Not every language can do this, and some do not do it at all. English also allows many other variations, such as CVC (“sat”), CV (“so”), VC (“is”), VCV (“away”), V (“a”), and even CCCVCCC (“squirts”), some of which are difficult or nearly impossible for other language speakers to master. Languages like Tahitian and Hawaiian only allow CV or V syllables; that is, every consonant must be followed by a vowel, and a vowel can occur alone. There are also linguistic norms governing where a sound can occur in a syllable or word. The sound [ng] (as in “sing”) exists in English but has specific (if implicit) rules for its use: it may come at the end of a word (like “sing”) or in the middle of a word (like “singer”) but never at the beginning of a word. Any word that started with the sound [ng] would be immediately recognizable as a non-English word. Warlpiri, on the other hand, uses the [ng] phoneme as an initial sound in many words, such as ngapa (water), ngarni (to eat), ngaka (after), and ngarlarrimi (to laugh). Most English speakers, while they can make the sound, cannot pronounce these words easily; the initial [ng] is just too unfamiliar. Conversely, the Shoshone (Native  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 79 American) language contains several consonant sounds (including but not limited to [ch], [f], [j], [k], [p], [sh], [t], and [z]) that cannot be used as initial sounds. The appearance of a sound in a syllable or word may affect its surrounding sounds. One example from Warlpiri requires that an [i] sound not be followed by an [u] sound. In English, a noun that starts with a vowel will be preceded by an article that ends with a consonant and vice versa (“an apple” versus “a banana”). In French, explicit standards of liaison and elision link one syllable or word with another: ils ont (“they have”) is pronounced “eel zon” (“on” pronounced nasally, not as in English), somewhat similar to the English tendency to run sounds together (“the mall” sometimes sounds like “them all”). Back to French, je (“I”) and ai (“have”) are spoken as j’ai, and de (“of”) and les (“the”-plural) are combined as des. Turkish practices a form of vowel harmony, in which different kinds of vowels (called “front vowels” or “back vowels”) never occur in the same word: a word will contain all front vowels or all back vowels but not both. Sounds can also be employed for semantic Morphology (meaningful) or grammatical effect, as discussed below. The area of language dealing with how meaningful bits (usually but not exclusively Morphology or semantics words) are created and manipulated by the Speakers can begin to build a set of meanings on the foundation of orderly sound, combination of language sounds. depending on the structural relations between these sounds; the form or shape of the combination of (meaningless) sounds carries us to meaning. Therefore, linguists Semantics call the study of the “meaningful bits” of language morphology (from the root morph The study of meaning in for form or shape) or semantics. language. See morphology. Just as phonemes are the smallest bits of usable sound in a language, morphemes Morpheme are the smallest possible bits of meaning. Words constitute a class of morphemes The smallest bit of called free morphemes – that is, morphemes that can stand on their own to convey meaningful sound in a meaning. “Dog” is a free morpheme, since it is independently meaningful. There is language, usually a word another class, however, called bound morphemes which convey meaning but only but also a prefix or suffix or in combination with another morpheme. In English, these usually take the form of other meaning-conveying prefixes and suffixes. The morpheme -s “means” plural, just as the morpheme un- sound that may be used in conjunction with a word. “means” not, when used in conjunction with a free morpheme and in the right orientation. For instance, if an English speaker simply said “-s,” others would not Free morpheme know what it meant. But if the speaker attached the sound to “dog” and said “dogs,” A morpheme that has other speakers would understand perfectly. In the wrong order (“sdog” or “happyun”) meaning in its own right, they would find the words erroneous, unclear, or nonsensical. that can stand alone as a meaningful sound (for the Not all languages function the same way morphologically. In English there is most part, a word). only one semantic plural form, which means “two or more” (although there are two phonetic forms, [-s] and [-z], depending on what sound precedes it, e.g., [dog][-z] Bound morpheme but [cat][-s]). However, Warlpiri has two plural forms, neither of which use -s. To A morpheme that has say “two dogs” in Warlpiri the suffix -jarra is added to the word for dog, maliki; this meaning but only when it is means exactly two dogs. To say “three or more dogs” the suffix -patu is used. German used in conjunction with a word. tends to use -en as the suffix to indicate plural (Frau for “woman” becomes Frauen for “women”). Languages with “gender” like French and Spanish and German add 80 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES another wrinkle: for instance, French words tend to attach an e at the end of feminine words, which is not pronounced but changes the pronunciation of the syllable before it. Thus, chien (male dog) becomes chienne (female dog), changing the nasal -ien of the first word into a more familiar n sound for English speakers. Many languages apply stress or emphasis to certain parts of words, either typically or to alter their semantic form. English is a stress language, with every word given its unique emphasis pattern, producing a kind of “rhythm” in speech which can be exploited in poetry (known technically as “meter”). There is no consistent rule on how English stress operates, but one frequent pattern is emphasizing the final vowel (by stressing or “lengthening”) in verbs but other vowels in nouns or adjectives; thus “to elaborate” or “to articulate” stresses the final [a] sound, while “elaborate” or “articulate” as adjectives shorten it. Old Irish, by comparison, always stresses the first syllable of nouns and adjectives, with stress on the second syllable for some adverbs. In Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, sound stress has more profound morphological consequences, changing the word’s meaning completely: for instance, gabi with emphasis on the second syllable refers to a particular starchy root but with emphasis on the second syllable means “night.” Another class of languages does not use stress/emphasis but rather “tone” to convey meaning; that is, the meaning of the word depends on the pitch, or change of pitch, in which it is spoken. Instead of rhythm this gives the language a melodic quality. While rare in Western languages, this practice is common in Eastern and African ones; in fact, more than half of the world’s languages incorporate tone in some way (Crystal 1987: 172). Some, like Zulu, use only two tones (high and low), others, like Yoruba, use three (high, middle, and low), and Cantonese Chinese uses six (middle, low, high-then-falling, low-then-falling, high-then-rising, and low- then-rising). Thus a single “syllable” like si in Cantonese can mean “poem,” “to try,” “matter,” “time,” “to cause,” and “city” depending on how it is intoned. The Tai- Kadai language family of Southeast Asia and southern China reportedly contains eleven different tones. Grammar or syntax Syntax Grammar or syntax refers technically to the rules by which a language combines The rules in a language for words (and other morphemes) into meaningful and intelligible utterances, like how words are combined to sentences. Obviously, being able to say “dog” or “dogs” is necessary, but it would make intelligible utterances or speech acts (for example, not be very useful if that was all a speaker could say. Hopefully speakers can use the sentences). Also known as words in more sophisticated and informative utterances to convey complete ideas grammar. or statements. There are some basic grammatical rules in each language that organize the “structure” of normal “good” speech. In English, the most fundamental rule or variable in sentences is word order. That is, English speakers make and understand sentences based on the sequence of the words: in a regular declarative sentence, they know to put – and expect to hear – the “subject” word first, then the “verb” word,  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 81 then the “object” word (notated as SVO). Of course, things can get much more complicated, with dependent clauses and participial phrases and such, but this is the skeleton of a basic sentence. So, the sentence “The man hit the dog” has a specific meaning. The sentence “The dog hit the man,” with exactly the same words in a different sequence, has a specific but different meaning. And any other sequence – like “The the hit man dog” – yields no meaning at all. Up to 75 percent of the world’s languages follow a SVO or SOV pattern (Crystal 1987: 98). However, other orders exist. Standard Turkish sentences place the subject first and the verb last. Old Irish typically took the VSO order. Tagalog can give the predicate before the topic (according to the Philippine Center for Language Study (1965: 13), concepts of “subject,” “verb,” and “object” do not quite apply to Tagalog grammar, since a verb can be a subject) or in reverse order with the addition of the morpheme ay. Thus “The dress is beautiful” can be said as Maganda ang damit (“beautiful” + “is” + “dress”) or as Ang damit ay maganda (“is” + “dress” + ay + “beautiful”). Some languages do not depend on word order at all or do not have to provide every grammatical element for a sentence. The order of words in a Warlpiri sentence does not determine its meaning. For instance, to communicate that a man hit a dog, in Warlpiri one would use the words wati (“man”), pakarnu (“hit” – past tense), and maliki (“dog”), but to make the appropriate sentence one cannot simply say wati pakarnu maliki. The subject word in a Warlpiri sentence is identified not by its location in the sentence but by a bound morpheme that indicates “subject,” in this case the suffix -ngki. The correct utterance thus is wati-ngki pakarnu maliki. In any order the meaning is the same. To change the meaning so that the dog is doing the hitting, the suffix must go on maliki, the correct suffix being not -ngki but -rli (based on the number of syllables and the terminal syllable of the word). Now the sentence is maliki-rli pakarnu wati, which can be arranged in any order. Latin is similar in using suffixes to indicate a word’s role in a sentence, rather than the order of words. Spanish does not even require that all of the elements of a “good” English sentence be included. The Spanish equivalent of the English “I love you” can take the form OV, without a “subject”: Te amo (“you” – object + “love”). If an English speaker said “You love,” the meaning would be ambiguous, since “you” can be a subject pronoun or an object pronoun (unlike “I” and “me”). However, Spanish makes clear the reference through the verb and its conjugation (amo is “love”-first person, as opposed to amas (“love”-second person). While this might seem confusing to English speakers, English does something similar in imperative sentences, like “Go to the store!” in which the subject is not spoken but understood (“you-understood”). Syntax/grammar can of course be much more intricate than these simple matters, and grammatical principles found in English may be absent in other languages and vice versa. For instance, English contains articles (“a” and “the”), but Turkish and Warlpiri do not. At the same time, many languages, including French, Spanish, and German, contain the concept of “gender” in which every noun is assigned one of two (or in the case of German, three – masculine, feminine, and neuter) genders. So, chat (“cat”) in French is masculine, and television is feminine. Then, articles and 82 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES adjectives must agree with the noun in gender and in number: le chat, la television, les chats, les televisions, le grand chat, la grande television. In English, nouns and pronouns are distinguished by “case,” that is, their role in a sentence (basically, subject and object). In other languages the situation is con- siderably elaborated. For instance, German has four cases (“nominative” or roughly subject, “accusative” or roughly direct object, “dative” or roughly indirect object, and “genitive” or roughly possessive), each of which requires a modification of articles; added to three genders and two numbers (singular and plural), many people find German declensions maddeningly difficult. In Russian, nouns have cases – six of them, depending on the noun’s function in the sentence (as subject, direct object, possessive/quantity/negation, indirect object, location, or means (i.e., by/ with)) – and must be conjugated with the proper suffix (also considering gender, of which there are three). Finally for our purposes are “person” and “tense.” “Person” is the grammatical category that indicates who the speaker and the audience of an utterance are; in English this includes the first (I/we), second (you/you all), and third person (he/she/it/they), divided into singular and plural. Verbs are conjugated somewhat differently for each person (although not as differently as in Spanish). Warlpiri contains more person forms than English, including a second- and third-person inclusive and exclusive (that is, “we-but-not-you” and “we-all,” and “they-but-not- you” and “they-all”), each taking a different verb ending. “Tense” is, generally speaking, the time element in speech – present, past, and future – although this can be joined with “aspect” – that is, the relation of the action to other facts or events (e.g., completed in the past, ongoing in the present, simultaneous with some other actions). Not all languages can fit neatly into the tense and aspect categories of English. For example, Shoshone verbs can take progressive (ongoing over time), continuative (happening over and over), customary-habitual, resultative (resulting from some previous action), future, completive (finished in the past but having effects in the present), and expective (expected to occur) tenses and aspects, each with different suffixes and other rules of use (Gould and Loether 2002). Pragmatics or sociolinguistics Pragmatics Our speech choices have social meanings and social consequences. There may be The rules or practices regarding how language is grammatical ways to say things that are not appropriate ways to say things. This used in particular social indicates something very important: language does much more than exchange factual situations to convey information. As in the alternatives of Malagasy “voice,” all of which convey the same particular social factual data – that I want you to wash the clothes – each conveys other critical information, such as the information as well and may elicit a very different response. It may actually be, in relative status or power the end, that most of what language conveys is not facts but other kinds of “social” of the speakers. information. Sociolinguistics Pragmatics (from the root pragma for practical or practice) or sociolinguistics See pragmatics. (literally, society + language) refers to the rules or conventions for using language  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 83 appropriately in social situations – that is, for saying the right thing to the right person in the right circumstances. The point is that a language is a “code” not only for factual information but for social information as well. The kinds of social information encoded, and how, will depend upon the society and the distinctions it makes between “different kinds” of people and situations. There is no society in which all individuals are exactly equal in status or in which all situations are exactly the same in meaning and value. Minimally, some people are “higher” than others and some situations are “more important” than others. Different speech forms will be appropriate in regard to these different people and conditions. One good example of the social use of language is the area of honorific fics or Honorifics language forms specialized to indicate the relative social status or relationship of the Language forms specialized speakers. In French, there are two forms of the pronoun “you” – the singular or to indicate the relative social status or relationship of the familiar tu form (for friends and equals) and the plural or formal vous form (for speakers. strangers and superiors). Employing the tu form in talking with your superiors would either indicate closeness, disrespect, or error, just as employing the vous form with your spouse or friends would seem overly formal or distant. English lacks such basic vocabulary distinctions, but there are ways to convey respect, from “polite” terms of address like “sir” and “ma’am” to more specialized ones like “your honor” and “your majesty,” as well as semantic additions like “please” and “may.” We might even use a respectful syntax, like a question rather than a command, and a deferential tone of voice. Other languages can go much further. For instance, in Thai there are thirteen different forms of the first-person pronoun (“I”) depending on whom one is addressing. Phom would be an appropriate polite word to use between equals, while kraphom would sound better when talking to someone higher in rank (say, a monk or a government official), and the most formal klaawkramom would be correct for addressing a member of the royal family. Japanese also has an extensive set of linguistic choices, expressed most simply in the distinction between tatemae (polite Foley, William A. 1997. forms for strangers or people outside your in-group) and honne (familiar forms for Anthropological Linguistics: close friends and family). The idea “Sakai drew a map for Suzuki” can take the An Introduction. London: following forms for the following reasons (Foley 1997: 319–21): Blackwell Publishers. 1. Sakai ga Suziki no tame ni chinzu o kai-ta (used if the two people mentioned, Sakai and Suzuki, are familiar or inferior to the speaker). 2. Sakai san ga Suzuki san ni chizu o kai-ta/kaki-mash-ta (used if Sakai and Suzuki are equal to the speaker). 3. Sakai san ga Suzuki san ni chizu o o-kaki-ni nat-ta/nari-mashi-ta (used if Sakai is considerably higher in status than the speaker). 4. Sakai san ga Suzuki san ni chizu o o-kaki shi-ta/shi-mashi-ta (used if Suzuki is considerably higher in status than Sakai). 5. Sakai san ga Suzuki san ni chizu o kai-te kudasai-ta/kudasai-mashi-ta (used if Suzuki is considerably lower in status than Sakai but the speaker wants to show his solidarity/familiarity with Suzuki). 84 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES And so on. Clearly, learning Japanese involves much more than simply learning the Japanese translations for English words. Indeed, it would be difficult to render the Japanese connotations of these sentences into everyday English at all. Overall, the style variations in a language are codes for the important social distinctions made by the society. These can include such social factors as age, gender, power, office, education, interpersonal relationship, class, title, race, geographical region, and many others. No doubt if a non-native speaker said any of the five Japanese sentences above, all Japanese speakers would understand the factual content of the utterance: somebody drew a map for somebody. However, all but the correct form would “feel wrong” to the native speakers and perhaps evoke negative reactions. As we noted, English has a set of possibilities for communicating relative status and prestige and the formality of the situation, albeit limited compared to those of Thai and Japanese. In the U.S.A. in particular, there are not many honorific forms because there is no use for them. Americans do not make the same distinctions, or attach the same importance to them, that, say, the Japanese do. If Americans made such distinctions, they would have to have a way to talk about them. At the same time, British English includes forms of address to nobility and royalty, because nobility and royalty exist in that society. The fact that Americans do not have regular linguistic forms for such social distinctions means that they do not make those distinctions: there is no royalty in the U.S.A. It is probably fair to say that America, as a society with an egalitarian ideology, deliberately and consciously avoids making many social distinctions in its speech. For example, the fact that students usually speak in a comparatively informal style to teachers indicates that the “social distance” between students and teachers is not great. Americans would even address their president with the informal “you” because they have no other semantic choice (although they might express respect in other ways, including polite forms, tone of voice, and body language). Much of the remainder of this chapter will explore the forms and occasions for pragmatic language use. Language will be seen not only to describe social (and of course “objective”) facts but also to create, sustain, and contest those facts as well. MAKING SOCIETY THROUGH LANGUAGE: LANGUAGE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY The previous discussion of speech styles and social status barely scratches the surface of the complex and intimate relationship between language and society. Language is much more than a set of words for things. It also fundamentally expresses and constructs social relationships, including political and religious as well as gender and age and other status relations, not just in terms of what different individuals and groups talk about but how they talk. We should think of language and its skillful manipulation as a social resource that both is produced by and produces interpersonal and intergroup bonds and fractures.  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 85 Language as performance Performatives Linguistic utterances that do not merely describe One of the best ways to introduce the social efficacy of language is in terms of what but actually accomplish J. L. Austin called performatives. In How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin a transformation in the distinguished between speech acts that describe the world and ones that change the social world. world in some way. For example, there is a big difference between a declarative Austin, J.L. 1962. How To sentence (“You are getting married”) or an imperative sentence (“Get married!”) and Do Things with Words. a performative sentence (“I now pronounce you man and wife”). In such utterances, Oxford: Clarendon Press. the saying of it makes it so – the words are more than words but a real social act that accomplishes some social effect. Put another way, speaking in such cases is not just saying something but doing something. There are many kinds of linguistic performatives in any society. When a judge says, “Case dismissed” or a king says, “I knight thee,” a social change has been worked. Notice that only certain kinds of people can perform certain linguistic acts; issuing performative statements is part of the role they occupy. Ordinary citizens cannot dismiss court cases or bestow knighthoods (in fact, no one in the United States can bestow knighthoods). Furthermore, the social context must be correct: a priest cannot walk down the street marrying people by saying, “I pronounce you man and wife.” In extreme situations, the proper people must be present, the proper rituals must be observed, perhaps even the proper clothing must be worn. The speech act is part of a much more comprehensive social setting or “ritual.” Austin distinguished a variety of kinds of performatives, including “verdictives” in which a “ruling” of some sort is made, “exercitives” in which power is exercised such as to appoint or advise or warn, “commissives” in which a commitment is made, such as a promise or agreement (e.g., an oath), and “behabitives” that express a socially recognized behavior, such as an apology or a congratulation. Two other interesting aspects of performatives are interrelated. One is that the “sincerity” of the utterance does not determine its effectiveness: if I am still angry with you but I say, “I forgive you,” the words can be just as socially “successful.” However, as in other dimensions of language, performatives allow for the possibility of deception or failure; that is, I can say, “I promise to do so and so” and never intend to do it, and I can attempt to apologize and fail, either because the recipient sees through my false sentiment or because I do not execute the verbal behavior correctly. Then they might say, “No, give a real apology!” or “Apology not accepted.” Performatives have what Austin called “illocutionary force” in that they do not convey meaning so much as bring about a social outcome – actually making someone a knight or a married person. Other kinds of utterances can have “perlocutionary force” in that they can have an effect on the audience and lead them to have certain feelings or to take certain actions. Persuading is a key perlocutionary effect; others include frightening and upsetting. Perlocutionary acts do not directly change the social world, but they change people’s attitudes, prompting them to put those changes into action. 86 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Language and political power One thing that gets a leader elected in a democracy is the ability to give a good speech; sometimes it is the main thing. Pericles in ancient Athens and Marc Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar swayed the crowd with skillful oration. Language is central to obtaining, exercising, and challenging power in many societies. Michelle Rosaldo describes the Ilongot of the Philippines as a society that took linguistic abilities very seriously; for them, “true verbal art has social force” (Rosaldo 1984: 140). Oratory or purung was a highly prized and formally structured speech form in which “art and politics are combined” (138). It was contrasted to ordinary forms such as gossip or berita, myths or tadek or tudtud, and tales, where the content was more important than the style; in purung the most important thing was how things were said rather than what was said. PLATE 4.2 Masterful use of political speaking is a path to power in many societies, as for American President Barack Obama One of the characteristics of good Ilongot purung, as in many societies, was a certain amount of indirectness and wit (beira or elaboration, ‘amba’an or witty flourish, ‘asasap or “crooked” speaking). This was possible because the community already shared knowledge and memories of past actions and events, and it was important to prevent emotions from becoming too enflamed. In practice, purung was delivered in the form of verbal exchanges, in which the speakers claimed that they were “giving” or even “feeding” each other words. The target of a speech would repeat the words of the speaker, insisting that they “will not ‘hide’ their hopes, that in their hearts are no ill thoughts, that in their breath they know that they are kinsmen” (143). The ultimate purpose of these performances was to restore the kin  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 87 bonds of the two speakers or sides, but this was accomplished “through deception, pretense, wit, and the display of unity and strength by ‘sides’ that are, initially, opposed” (143). As in this and most such instances, a kind of verbal negotiation not only of interests but of statuses was taking place, and neither side could afford to totally dominate or humiliate the other. From the holistic perspective of anthropology, it is clear that the style and substance of political speaking would be related to the general quality of politics and to the hierarchies or lack thereof in the society. Box 4.1 illustrates a clear contrast between the form and the intent of public oratory based on the political relations within the society. BOX 4.1 SPEECH AND POWER – A CULTURAL COMPARISON In the descriptions by Atkinson and Firth, the Wana of Sulawesi (Indonesia) and the Tikopia had very different manners of public speaking, reflecting their very different social and political systems. The Wana were an acephalous (i.e., without a head or leader) and mostly egalitarian society in which no enduring political roles or groups existed. Tikopia was a highly stratified society with a formal system of chiefs with coercive power. When Wana men met for the purpose of public speaking, they practiced kiyori, an extremely stylized poetic form broken into stanzas with rigid principles about syllabification, emphasis, and rhyme. They might also use specialized terminology, especially as part of religious or legal occasions. It was ordinarily addressed to one man by one man, and the listener might repeat the speech several times as if memorizing it. Sometimes the receiver of the kiyori would answer with his own, setting off an exchange of lines. The intentions of speaking kiyori varied from establishment of alliances to advice to strong criticism. One of the key features of kiyori, however, was the use of ambiguous or conventional references, like aphorisms and metaphors. In fact, it was “an expressive form well suited for speaking in oblique and clever ways” (Atkinson 1984: 57), and skillful speakers took full advantage of the potential for ambiguity. In Tikopia, a public assembly or fono might have a very different quality. The occasion of a fono was usually an announcement by a chief or one of his functionaries; it was for proclamation, not discus- sion. As Firth (1975) describes it, the speaker addressed the crowd with restraint, possibly standing still or walking back and forth. He spoke in a forceful staccato voice, issuing direct commands and declarations, without personal opinion or ingenious proverbs and allusions. There was no attempt to avoid directness. The difference between the two oratorical styles relates to the two political contexts in which they occurred. Wana speakers, without permanent status or followers, could not afford to be abrupt. They had to appear to be intelligent and wise even while they avoided conflict and open opposition, because they were actively and precariously recruiting their allies via the speech act. Tikopia speakers did not have any such reticence, because their political positions were already firm. Being the dominant members of officially stratified societies, they did not have to spare any feelings or circumvent any conflict: they had the social right and duty to issue orders and expected the compliance of their listeners. 88 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES Oral literature and specialized language styles There are many other areas where language and social relationships intersect, including gender, to which we will return in the next chapter. However, one more that calls for our attention at this point is “cultural knowledge” and the specialized language styles that communicate it. Anthropologists and others often refer to this Folklore body of knowledge and the genres in which it occurs as folklore, a society’s primarily The “traditional,” usually oral and traditional knowledge which is “told” or “performed” in specific, appropriate oral literature of a society, ways. To gain some idea of the range of linguistic activities that may be regarded as consisting of various genres such as myth, legend, folklore, consider Alan Dundes’ list: folktale, song, proverb, and Folklore includes myths, legends, folktales, jokes, proverbs, riddles, chants, many others. charms, blessings, curses, oaths, insults, retorts, taunts, teases, toasts, tongue- twisters, and greeting and leave-taking formulas.... It also includes folk costume, folk dance, folk drama, folk instrumental music... , folksongs... , folk speech... , folk similes... , folk metaphors... , and names. Folk poetry ranges from oral epics to autograph-book verse, epitaphs, latrinalia (writings on the walls of public bathrooms), limericks, ball-bouncing rhymes, jump-rope rhymes, finger and toe rhymes, dandling rhymes (to bounce children on the knee), counting-out rhymes... , and nursery rhymes. The list of folklore forms also contains games; gestures; symbols; prayers (e.g., graces); practical jokes; folk etymologies; food recipes; quilt and embroidery designs; house, barn, and fence types; street vendor’s cries; and even the traditional conventional sounds used to summon animals or to give them commands. (Dundes 1965: 3) See Chapter 10 Myth will be discussed in more detail in the context of religion, and there are too many others to explore them all here, but a few of these oral literature styles will highlight the variety and social importance of specialized linguistic performances. 1. Proverbs. In many societies, much “conventional wisdom” is contained in proverbs and other such traditional sayings. They tend to be brief, pithy, and often meta- phorical. American English is full of them – “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “A leopard can’t change its spots,” and so on. Other societies have their own culturally specific sayings as well as socially appropriate occasions for using them. Ilongot purung or Wana kiyori may incorporate apt proverbs, as well as original metaphors. John Messenger notes that the Anang in Nigeria employed proverbs for a variety of purposes, including entertainment and education but also more serious ones like rituals and court hearings. Particularly in the traditional courts known as esop, Anang litigants “take every opportunity to display their eloquence and constantly employ adages” (Messenger 1965: 303–4). A well-met proverb could make the case and determine the outcome of the proceedings. Of course, many of these maxims do not make much sense outside of their cultural context, for example: “If a dog plucks palm fruits from a cluster, he does not fear a porcupine.” “A single partridge flying through the bush leaves no path.”  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 89 PLATE 4.3 Herbert Jim, a contemporary Seminole (Native American) story teller “If you visit the home of the toads, stoop.” “The crayfish is bent because it is sick.” To use and understand such utterances well requires an understanding of the society’s world of meaning. 2. Riddles. Like a proverb, a riddle “seems to depend on metaphor, on a kind of poetic comparison drawn between the thing actually described and the referent to be guessed” (De Caro 1986: 178). In contemporary American society, riddles are mostly told for fun and most often by or to children. However, in other societies they can have other and more serious functions. De Caro notes six contexts in which riddling takes place across cultures, including leisure, education (for instance, the famous Buddhist koan), courting and mating, greeting, initiations and funerals, and folk narrative. In Dusun society, riddles could be combative as well as humiliating, and Turkish society used riddles in festivals such as weddings and actually had professional riddlers and neighborhood riddling teams. Beuchat (1957) tells that the Bantu made riddles for fun and to demonstrate intelligence and wit. The riddles were characteristically short verbal analogies which required a “solution” or answer, such as: “I have built my house without any door.” Answer: an egg. “The little hole full of grass litter.” Answer: the teeth. 90 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES “Two little holes that refuse to be filled; there enter people, oxen, goats, and other things.” Answer: eyes. 3. Ritual languages. In many societies, one or more specialized linguistic genre(s) may exist for specific purposes. Sherzer (1983), for instance, identifies three quite distinct speaking styles in Kuna society in Panama, associated with a particular ritual activity and distinguished from everyday speech or tule kaya. Political or chiefly speech (sakla kaya), curing song or “stick doll language” (suar miimi kaya), and girls’ puberty rite language (kantule kaya) each had different pace and tone qualities, as well as specialized vocabularies and other aspects of increasing formality. Latin served the same general purpose in medieval Europe, conveying a gravity that ordinary vernacular languages did not. The use of archaic forms like “thee” and Bauman, Richard. 2001. “thou” in English still confers an artistic and even religious aura. Richard Bauman “Verbal Art in (2001) proposes eight characteristics or “devices” that set specialized or ritualized Performance.” In Alessandro Duranti, ed. speech apart from everyday talk: unique “codes” including archaic or esoteric terms, Linguistic Anthropology: A formulas like conventional openings and closings (e.g., “Once upon a time”), Reader. Malden, MA and figurative language like metaphors, stylistic alternatives like rhyme or repetition, Oxford: Blackwell patterns of tempo or stress or pitch, “paralinguistic” usages (see below), overt appeals Publishing, 165–88. to tradition, and “disclaimers of performance.” Paralanguage and non-verbal language Not all of human communication, or even of language, is verbal, and verbal language is not limited to its “words” or morphemes. Non-verbal gestures of various kinds can have meaning independent of spoken language, and they can be added to alter Paralanguage The qualities which the meaning of speech. At the same time, the ways that speakers modulate speech speakers can add to can also affect its meaning. language to modify the Paralanguage includes the vocal features that shape the delivery of spoken factual or social meaning of language, such as tone, pitch, speed, rhythm, and volume. Saying the same thing speech, such as tone of rapidly or slowly, or in a high- or low-pitched voice, can change its meaning. Some voice, volume, pitch, speed and cadence, and “non- specialized forms of speech, like the Tikopia fono mentioned above, are associated linguistic” sounds like with particular paralinguistic variations. We can also communicate emotion and grunts and snickers. sincerity through voice qualities, as well as advanced skills like irony and sarcasm. Other paralinguistic features include sounds that are not strictly linguistic but that Vocalizations convey meaning; called vocalizations, some examples are “um” and “shhh” and “tsk- Non-linguistic sounds that tsk.” can accompany and affect the meaning of speech. The vocal apparatus is not the only part of humans involved in the construction of meaning, including linguistic meaning. The entire human body can be a meaning- Kinesics conveying medium. Kinesics is the general name for the bodily movements or The study of how body gestures that augment and modify verbal communication (sometimes called “body movements are used to language”). Among kinesics issues are facial expressions, hand gestures, and the communicate social information, sometimes physical distance between speakers. For example, a wink in America can suggest referred to as “body dishonesty or conspiracy between speakers. Raised eyebrows indicate surprise, and language.” lowered brows can express doubt or displeasure. In some societies there is a more  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 91 or less complete “language” of hand signs, as in the Warlpiri system known as rdaka rdaka (literally, “hand hand”). There are hand signs for many common words, used by hunters to maintain silence, by mourners when certain words are forbidden, and most widely by women. In many other societies, there are less complete but still important culturally relative gestures. BOX 4.2 GESTURES ACROSS CULTURES Like so much else, gestures are culturally relative; the same gesture can have a different and even opposite meaning in different cultures. For instance (based on Axtell 1991): Sticking out your tongue is an insult in the U.S.A. but a greeting in Tibet. In the U.S.A., the thumb and forefinger circle means “OK,” but in Russia, Germany, and Brazil it is an insult. In Japan it is the sign for money (a round coin). In Holland, tapping your forefinger on your forehead means “You are stupid.” In Iran and Australia, the “thumbs up” signal is rude. In Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iran, and Bengal, nodding your head means “no” and shaking your head means “yes.” In England, the two-fingered “V” gesture is an insult if the back of the hand is facing the audience; in that case, it means “Up yours.” Finally, proxemics looks specifically at the use of personal space in interactions. Proxemics Different societies maintain different degrees of physical distance between members, The study of how cultures depending on their relationship. American casual speakers keep a twenty-four-inch use personal space (or “proximity”). or so zone between them, while Japanese maintain more distance and Middle Easterners less (the latter may even hold hands, as we noted at the opening of Chapter 1). Diverging from these standard distances can communicate intimacy, respect, avoidance, or invasiveness depending on the culture and the distance. Language change, loss, and competition Like everything else in the cultural world, language is dynamic, constantly changing, and available for humans to manipulate and compete over and through. One impor- tant aspect of real-world language use is the multilingual situation in many societies. In places from Belgium to New Guinea, multiple languages co-exist side by side, with various relationships, from cooperative to hostile. “Linguistic nationalism” can threaten to pull societies apart, as in Canada, where the French-speaking Quebecois have tried several times to pass a referendum separating Quebec from Canada to form 92 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES their own officially French-speaking country. When two languages share a social space, the choice of language may be a “political” or “symbolic” statement, as Leach (1954) noted in Burma: which language you speak, at any given time or habitually, can indicate “whose side you are on.” Even within a single language, there may be two or more forms treated as “high” and “low” or “prestigious” and “common.” This Diglossia phenomenon is known as diglossia and is found in distinctions of function (say, lower The use of two varieties of form for “popular” or casual uses and higher form for official or formal uses) as well a language by members as class and stratification. of a society for distinct In situations of sustained and, particularly, imbalanced culture contact, changes functions or by distinct groups or classes of people. may occur to one or both of the contact languages. Often a simplified working version of the dominant language, showing certain features of the subordinated language, Pidgin will emerge for basic purposes like trade. Such a hybrid language is called a pidgin A simplified version of a and tends to have a significantly reduced vocabulary and grammar; one defining language that is usually feature is that a pidgin is not the first or primary language of either party. However, used for limited purposes, such as trade and economic over time a pidgin may become more sophisticated and multi-functional, even interactions, by non-native becoming the first language of a community. When a new or hybrid language has speakers of the language (as achieved this level of sophistication and use, it is called a creole. Another possible in Melanesian pidgin and common consequence of language contact is language loss, which can occur versions of English). Usually when the members of a speech community adopt a foreign language to the exclusion an incomplete language that of their previous one, whether voluntarily or not. Young people may cease learning is not the “first” language of any group. it, and elders may be the last to speak it. In the worst cases, the entire language- bearing society dies or is exterminated. Creole Finally, language may be a focus of struggle between two societies, communities, A pidgin language that has or subcultures, or it may be a medium for staking out distinct and competitive or become elaborated into a resistant identities vis-à-vis the dominant society. Technical or subcultural jargons multi-functional language and distributed into a first or argots can signal differentiation from or even rejection of other segments of society. language of the community. Halliday (1976) coined the term anti-language to refer to the most dramatic form of this behavior, a speech style (specialized phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and/or Anti-language pragmatics) used by individuals or groups in the performance of roles opposing or A speech style used by inverting the society outside of their group. individuals or groups in the performance of roles opposing or inverting the society outside of their LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE LINGUISTIC group. RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS No one is born knowing and speaking any particular language, yet we all have one within a few years of birth. Language is learned and shared like the rest of culture. For some researchers, this has profound implications. It seems evident that language is not “in the brain” at birth; if language was innate, all humans ought to speak the same language. It also seems evident that there is something in or about the human brain that extracts or constructs language from experienced speech, some neurological capacity to acquire and use language. There is nothing contradictory in accepting both of these realities. Whatever the biological substrate, different societies speak different languages; language is relative to a  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 93 particular society. However, theorists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf went far beyond that obvious truth. They suggested that not just the words and the sounds but the very minds that produce those words and sounds are quite different. As Whorf wrote: the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each lan- guage is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impres- sions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. (Whorf 1940: 231) Edward Sapir, one of the great early professional anthropologists, joined Whorf in this assessment of the role and power of language. As he said: Human beings do not live in the objective world alone nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be con- sidered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different Linguistic relativity societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels hypothesis attached. The claim that language (Sapir 1949:162) is not only a medium for communication about This quotation explains what is known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis or the experience but actually Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The idea is that a language is not just a list of words for a more or less powerful constituent of that things, not just vocabulary. It is also a code for concepts, ideas, relationships (and not experience. Language just social ones but “natural” ones like cause, similarity and difference, time, and consists of concepts, such), and even values and meanings. Humans are not born with any vocabulary, nor relations, and values, and are we born with any concepts, ideas, relationships, values, or meanings. Then, as speakers of different we acquire the “linguistic code” of our society’s language we acquire these concepts, languages approach and interpret reality through ideas, relationships, and so on. If so, speakers of different languages (especially different sets of concepts, radically different ones) acquire different concepts, ideas, relationships, values, relations, and values. Also meanings, and so on and come to experience the world through them. In the ultimate known as the Sapir-Whorf formulation of the hypothesis, speakers of different languages live in very different hypothesis. 94 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES mental worlds. As Whorf defines it, then, the linguistic relativity hypothesis “means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. must arrive at somewhat different views of the world” (1956: 221). This is clearly a Language, Thought, and controversial suggestion and can probably be taken too far. Some concepts, like Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. causality or space, for instance, can at least partially arise from embodied experience Cambridge, MA: The in the physical world. Yet even in these “basic” concepts, some cultural variation can Massachusetts Institute and does occur. of Technology Press. Attempts to test the linguistic relativity hypothesis empirically have yielded mixed results. One area of testing has been color perception and terminology. While some cultures have as few as two color terms (essentially “black” and “white”), many have no more than four. Does the presence or absence of color terms affect the actual perception of color? The comparative work of Berlin and Kay (1969) suggests not: they discovered what they regarded as a set of standard hues that societies (although not all societies) recognize and name, as well as a universal sequence of named hues, starting (and sometimes ending) with black and white, followed by red, then yellow or green, then blue. But the fact that not all societies get beyond black and white, and that many do not get beyond black and white and red and yellow, makes the research inconclusive. A much more recent experiment, however, suggests the power of the linguistic effect on thought. Ross, Xun, and Wilson (2002) studied bilingual Chinese- Canadians on a series of psychological and personality items. Some individuals were given the test in Chinese, and others were given the same questions in English. An even more provocative version of this investigation was conducted by Ramirez- Esparza et al. (2006), in which they surveyed the same bilingual English-Spanish individuals twice, once in each language. Both studies found that the language of response affected the responses. Chinese-born individuals writing in Chinese showed significantly more typically Chinese views and self-perceptions than the same population writing in English. Likewise, English-Spanish bilinguals evinced personality traits that were more consistent with Spanish speakers when function- ing in Spanish and more consistent with English speakers when functioning in English. Ramirez-Esparza et al. attribute the results to “cultural frame switching,” a phenomenon in which individuals “change their interpretations of the world, depending upon their internalized cultures, in response to cues in their environment... as subtle as language” (2006: 20). Ross et al. go so far as to propose that “East- Asian and Western identities are stored in separate knowledge structures... in bicultural individuals, with each structure activated by its associated language” (2002: 1048). The place of language in experience is most immediate and obvious in the area of social and cultural concepts, which may have no correlate at all in other cultures. The concepts may be embedded in language, or they may be lexical items themselves. As an embedded case, one cannot speak Japanese well without learning to make and express major culturally specific social distinctions, like those mentioned above.  LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS 95 Likewise, in Ilongot or Tikopian society, the use or understanding of different speech styles attunes a speaker to matters of egalitarianism and hierarchy, fixed and fluid roles. On the other hand, there are some ideas and concepts captured by words in any given language and culture that are divergent, if not absent altogether, from others. The Warlpiri religious concept of jukurrpa has no cognate in English or any other non-Aboriginal language; it is not just another name for God or heaven or even for dreams, although its literal translation is “dream” or “dreaming.” The “field” of this key term includes dreams as well as the creation time at the beginning of the world, sacred designs and objects, and rituals; no single English word does or can convey all these meanings. Even when a society has a word that we might render as “god” or “spirit” or “soul,” we cannot assume that their meaning is identical to ours or each others’. Culturally specific words like brahma in Hinduism, nirvana See Chapter 10 in Buddhism, diyi (“luck”) in Apache, even jihad in Arabic, as well as many others, cannot be simplistically translated into some supposed “equivalent” in another language; yet these terms and concepts are central and motivational in their societies. This presents a fascinating challenge to cross-cultural translation and understanding: the key terms and concepts of another culture, expressed in language and also in practice, may be constitutive of a very different social experience, a very different “cultural reality.” BOX 4.3 CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CONTROVERSIES: THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN THE U.S.A. In George Orwell’s prophetic novel 1984, the philosophy of the regime was “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” And the regime understood that control of the present rests in the language, which was why it devised “Newspeak,” a form of language in which it was easy to say and think certain things and difficult or impossible to say or think others. Opinion-makers and politicians of all points on the spectrum have equally understood that language may be used not only to inform but to persuade, motivate, and even “disinform” – usually to propagate their power or policies (hence the term “propaganda”). Recently, a figure named Frank Luntz has been using this insight to reframe the political discourse in American society. Acting primarily as an advisor for the political “Right,” he has conducted “market research” on different words and phrases to determine which will best influence public opinion. It was his idea to replace “estate tax” with “death tax” and “global warming” with “climate change.” He has actually advocated dropping certain terms like “globalization,” “drilling for oil,” and even “government” completely. Some people see this as blatant and dangerous manipulation. What do you think? 96 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: GLOBAL FORCES, LOCAL LIVES SUMMARY Language is both a medium of human communication and interaction and a shaping influence on that communication and interaction. Humans are not the only species that communicate, nor even communicate linguistically. However, humans have unique linguistic skills, which are also the same skills that make culture in general possible: symbolism productivity displacement. Language takes the form of a set of basic items and combinatory rules, from sound units to meaning units to utterances to socially appropriate speech acts. Each of these dimensions is studied by a specific area of linguistics: phonology morphology or semantics syntax or grammar pragmatics or sociolinguistics. Language in its social production and use is much more than a list of names for things. It is a code for social information and social relationships. Any language includes a variety of specialized speech forms for different individuals and groups, different occasions, and different relationships. Language as a social phenomenon can express or determine functions such as: changes of social status and role politics and power relations performance of specific linguistic genres, such as ritual or story-telling blending, stratifying, or differentiating of social groups. Language, as a set of concepts or categories, may also influence the way in which humans experience and interpret, and therefore respond to, their world – both physical and social. The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that language mediates human thought and experience such that members of different speech communities think and experience differently. This is an area of controversy and ongoing research.