Andrew J. Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart - Language and Culture in Dialogue-Routledge (2019)

Language and Culture
in Dialogue
Also available from Bloomsbury:
An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Sharon K. Deckert

Ritual, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern
Violence: Theory and Ethnography, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern
Where Is Language?, Ruth Finnegan
Language and Culture
in Dialogue
Andrew J. Strathern
and
Pamela J. Stewart
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, 2019
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To words of love and sounds of being
vi
Contents
About the Authors viii

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Language as Cultural Practice 1

2 Origins 7
3 Language, Practice, and Embodiment 15
4 Themes in Language Practice 21
5 Cognition and Categories: The Work of Roy Ellen 31
6 Cognition and Categories: The Work of Anna Wierzbicka 37
7 Cognitive Science and Language 49
8 Language and Ritual: The Merina and the Melpa 59
9 Language and Ritual: Maring and Melpa 69
10 Language and Power 79
11 Language, Literacy, and Change: Scots and Tok Pisin 89
12 Excursions, Translations, and Explorations 115
References 120
Index 131
About the Authors
Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern) and Andrew J. Strathern are a wife and husband
research team who are based in the Department of Anthropology, University of
Pittsburgh, and co-direct the Cromie Burn Research Unit and the Okari Ritual/
Environmental Program. They are frequently invited to be international lecturers
and have worked with numbers of museums to assist these organizations in
documenting their collections, especially from the Pacific. They have worked
and lived in many parts of the world.
Stewart and Strathern have published over fifty books and hundreds of
articles, book chapters, and essays on their research in the Pacific (mainly
Papua New Guinea and the South-West Pacific region, e.g., Samoa, Cook
Islands, and Fiji); Asia (mainly Taiwan, and also including Mainland China and
Japan); Europe (primarily Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and the European Union
Figure 1 “Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern at Mbukl area, Hagen, WHP,
Papua New Guinea, 2017. Photo authors’ own.”
About the Authors ix
countries in general); as well as New Zealand and Australia. Their most recent
co-authored books include Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip (Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Kinship in Action: Self and Group (Routledge, 2016,
originally published in 2011); Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New
Guinea Perspectives (University of Queensland Press with Penguin Australia,
2011); Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Working
in the Field: Anthropological Experiences across the World (Palgrave Macmillan,
2014); Diaspora, Disasters, and the Cosmos: Rituals and Images (Carolina
Academic Press, 2018); Story of the Kuk UNESCO World Heritage Prehistoric
Site and the Melpa, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea: Pride in
Place (Angkemam Publishing House, 2018); and Sacred Revenge (Cambridge
University Press, 2019).
Their recent co-edited books include Exchange and Sacrifice (Carolina
Academic Press, 2008); Religious and Ritual Change: Cosmologies and Histories
(Carolina Academic Press, 2009, and the updated and revised Chinese version:
Taipei, Taiwan: Linking Publishing, 2010); and The Research Companion to
Anthropology (Routledge Publishing, 2016, originally published in 2015).
Stewart and Strathern’s current research includes the new subfield of Disaster
Anthropology, which they have been developing for many years. They are the
Series Editors for the new Palgrave Studies in Disaster Anthropology. Also, the
topics of Cosmological Landscapes and the Environment; Healing Practices;
Ritual Studies; Political Peacemaking; Comparative Anthropological Studies of
Disasters and Climatic Change; Language, Culture, and Cognitive Science; and
Scottish and Irish Studies are all research topics that they are engaged with.
Stewart and Strathern have been, respectively, Visiting Research Fellow and
Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Durham,
England. They are also Research Associates in the Research Institute of Irish
and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2003–present), and
have continuously been Visiting Research Fellows at the Institute of Ethnology,
Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, during parts of every year from 2002 to 2014.
They are affiliated faculty at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland (2015–
present). They have served as Senior Visiting Fellows at the International Institute
for Asian Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands (1998); as Research Visitor
and Research Scholar (respectively), Minpaku, National Museum of Ethnology,
Senri Expo Park, Osaka, Japan (2000 and again in 2014); as Visiting Scholars,
Department of Anthropology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
(2006–2011); as visiting professors, Department of Anthropology, James Cook
University, Townsville, Australia (1997–1999); and (2004–2005, and 2017–2018)
x About the Authors
as invited lecturers at a number of Chinese Universities: Peking University,

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

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

and its relevance for both the humanities and the social sciences. We include in
earlier chapters materials of a kind needed for both undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as materials in later chapters from our own field researches that
go deeper into contemporary debates on issues of meaning in language practice.
The plan of the book is as follows: the overall emphasis in the book is on
practice theory, highlighting its stress on language in action, an emphasis that
also informs our work on kinship (Strathern and Stewart 2011a) and in ritual
studies (Bell 1997; Stewart and Strathern 2014).
In Chapter 1 we relate this approach to Dan Everett’s concept of “dark matter”
as the substratum of culture and to his concept of “cultural grammar.” Chapter 2 is
an excursus into the question of the origins of language as a human capacity, using
Alan Barnard’s idea of the importance of narrative structures in the development
of language, which jibes with our own interest in language as practice. We also
broach Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and critiques of it. Chapter
3 discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of practice and embodiment theory, extending
the general approach of language in practice. Chapter 4 rounds out this part of
the book by looking at arguments between scholars on the correlates of literacy as
a modality of practice and its possible influences on patterns of thought, a theme
stemming from the seminal work by the anthropologist Jack Goody and his early
collaborator Ian Watt. We include here a brief discussion of performativity and
illocutionary forms of expression that lead into cognitive issues.
In Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 we move from our general exposition of a practice
approach to a more specific investigation of studies on cognition and culture, all
the time hewing to particular ethnographic cases, while relating these to broader
issues, such as modes of classification and cross-cultural perceptions, and the
way that verbal and non-verbal elements enter into ritual practice. These chapters
form the heart of our approach to questions of meaning, including an appraisal
of the contributions of cognitive science to the understanding of language use.
Chapters 10 and 11 deal with issues of language and power and with language
change, as especially evident in studies of vernacular and lingua franca forms of
expression that develop in contexts of social enclavement or correlate with the
persistence of minority identities within larger dominant contexts.
Finally, Chapter 12 moves to a short consideration of problems of translation
between languages, and adds a further dimension of significance by noting the
importance of the ecological functions of language and language itself as an
instrument of adaptation to the environment made more complex by the advent
of artificial intelligence.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Publishing who have assisted
us in the production of this book. We also wish to thank the many people
who have worked with us in our global traverses, stays, and movements. In
particular, we express our thanks to all the people who have collaborated with us
in the field, especially in Papua New Guinea [e.g., the Highlands areas of Hagen
(Melpa speakers), Duna (Duna speakers), and Pangia (Wiru speakers)]; in the
Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland we especially thank the Ulster-Scots
Agency and the Ulster-Scots Language Society; and in Scotland we express our
appreciation to the Scots Language Society. We thank the many colleagues at
institutions where we have been based while conducting research and lecturing
around the world. Sections of this manuscript were composed while staying in
New Zealand as Visiting Fellows in the Department of Anthropology, University
of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, during a part of 2017–2018. We thank the
supportive staff members and our colleagues within the Department, especially
Professors Glenn Summerhayes and Richard Walter, for their assistance. We also
thank everyone who helped us during our 2018 Study Abroad program, Pitt in
the Pacific (University of Pittsburgh, Summer School at the University of Otago
campus—a study program that we created), which we were also running during
our stay in Dunedin. We also thank the Office of the Dean, in the Dietrich
School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, for continued support of
our work in general. We also worked on this manuscript while we were serving
as Guest Professors at the University of Augsburg, Germany, in 2018, teaching
a master’s degree course in Medical Anthropology. We want to thank our kind
sponsors and helpers in Augsburg, especially Professor Klaus-Dieter Post and
also Professor Guenther Kronenbitter, Dr. Ina Hagen-Jeske, and Dr. Carolin
Ruther, of the Department of European Ethnology, and the assistance from
the Center for European Studies, University Center for International Studies,
at the University of Pittsburgh. The final pieces of this book were completed, and
the manuscript was made ready to send to the press while we were researching
the outcome of the 2016 Referendum in the UK that voted to exit from the
European Union (EU) (BREXIT: British Exit from the EU). We have worked
for decades in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, so it
xiv Acknowledgments
was especially moving to be staying in those three locations in June, July, and
August of 2018, after this vote by the UK to exit the EU and the negotiations
to attempt to resolve relationship matters. A mindful anthropology would also
be needed to study this situation in all its ramifying complexities (for a fuller
discussion on our concept of Mindful Anthropology, see Pamela J. Stewart and
Andrew Strathern, Breaking the Frames: Anthropological Conundrums, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017).
1
Language as Cultural Practice
This chapter begins to explore, in a preliminary way, aspects of meaning in

language practices, concentrating on cultural patterns and relating these to the
idea of “dark matter,” as discussed by the linguist Dan Everett (Everett 2016).
In accordance with our overall approach, we start from a familiar interactional
context. How do you greet people? How do you say goodbye? What can people
tell about you when they first hear you speaking? In everyday life what we say,
to whom, and how we say it constantly influence our social relationships. This
is the context of usage that we refer to as language in practice. Moreover, when
we move to different places or use a different language, our performance of
practices and sensibilities changes. The subtle or sometimes obvious ways in
which language use is enmeshed with and influences practically every aspect
of our lives make it evident how important the study of language is. Linguists,
anthropologists, philosophers, and scholars in the fields of communication and
media studies have constantly explored the intricate symbiosis between language
use and human activity in general. Language has sometimes, indeed, been
upheld as the one cultural characteristic or achievement that makes us human
or distinct from other living creatures. All living things have distinct ways of
communicating with the world, and there is clearly a continuum between such
ways (including vocalization and gestures) and human language, but humans
have developed flexible and adaptable methods of symbolizing the world in
ways that give them some communicational advantages over other creatures,
although these creatures also have their own capacities for thought and in some
respects superior sensory abilities. In this book we explore some dimensions
of this immensely rich field of enquiry, with a concentration on language but
seeking always to situate language in its practical contexts, rather than isolating
it as a “thing in itself.”
From earliest times people have probably been attuned to similarities and
differences in speech among themselves. The origin of this tendency lies partly in
2 Language and Culture in Dialogue
the imperative to distinguish insiders from outsiders or friends from foes. How
often if one enters a new social milieu do we find that sooner or later, someone will
say “What kind of accent is that you have there?” Or, in another version, “Where
do you come from?” As scholars who frequently move around different parts of
the world this has been a recurrent experience for us, one to which we provide
situational answers. A world of inferences about identities hides in that simple-
seeming question, but the answers are indeed various. In many contexts political
identities are at stake. One’s accent and ways of speaking can vary in different
places, consciously or unconsciously, and over time may take on an intermediate
or hybridized character, making it harder for listeners to “place” one, and this is
because one belongs partially to many places. In a cosmopolitan world this is
bound to happen, yet it does not mean that senses of identity are flattened or
obliterated by this process. Language differences are often referred to as a source
of barriers between people, and the question of how they have diverged over
time and whether there was at some remote time a single human language teases
the imagination. Relatedly, scholars have debated whether there is a universal
capacity for language that is innate in humans or whether all languages conform
to some universal pattern. Scholars looking for deep cross-cultural patterns
that are shared can be characterized as universalists, while those who are more
interested in what makes languages and cultures different from one another can
be described as particularists. What all scholars agree on is that language and
culture are interdependent and influence each other. Clearly, language varies
according to the requirements of the broader culture to which it contributes. At
the same time, we can acknowledge that there is an active role of language as a
pervasive influence through all dimensions of cultural life, and so it is more than
a tool of culture at large and is rather a tool integral to the creation of culture. It
is also important to recognize from the outset, and in line with recent trends in
the analysis of both sociocultural life in general and language in particular, that
individual variation is significant in the overall production of meaning and that
meaning is an outcome of practical usage, or as one prominent theorist Nick
Enfield has argued it is shaped by broad considerations of utility (Enfield 2015).
Utility, in turn, can be related to cultural context, since utility is itself a culturally
articulated concept. A related way of putting this is found in Dan Everett’s recent
work on “dark matter” (Everett 2016). In his usage, dark matter signals a broad
range of assumptions, norms, images, attitudes, and ideas that underlie people’s
actions and may not be directly expounded by them. Everett also refers to this
realm as “the culturally articulated unconscious” (the subtitle of his book). In his
viewpoint, this realm is formed in every individual via their lived experience. It
Language as Cultural Practice 3
underpins language usages but is not necessarily directly expressed in linguistic

ways of expression. Everett notes further that it “is a combination of culture and
individual psychology” (2016: 26); in other words, this is not a theory that posits
a collective unconscious separate from individual consciousness. The use of the
term “dark matter,” however, suggests that there is a preponderance of it in the
makeup of the world of any given culture and that culture depends on it for its
continued maintenance. Everett uses this image very effectively to convey the
importance of cultural learning through experience, and to elaborate on a view
that he has long sustained on the question of linguistic universals. (See also his
earlier work on language as a cultural tool, Everett 2012.)
Everett refers to the concept of dark matter in various ways, for example (p. 3),
“the invisible hands of … cultural values” that are mostly unexpressed in explicit
terms and are embodied and derived from the individual experience of living.
Another way of putting it is that dark matter is tacit knowledge that is learned,
internalized, and forgotten until called upon (p. 11). Implied further is that dark
matter is an important cognitive resource.
Dark matter is found everywhere but is particular to each culture in which it
is carried. Everett has opposed Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar
as a domain of cognitive hard-wiring that supposedly distinguishes humans
from other species, preferring instead to posit flexible learning capacities as the
hallmark of humanity. Culture remains preeminent in Everett’s analytical scheme
and one of the interesting explorations he makes linking language and culture
together is in the sphere of how culture influences grammar. Everett’s discussion
of this topic is quite complex and depends on displaying some features of the
Amazonian language he studied in detail, Piraha, which has elaborate tones
and stress rules that define meanings, as well as speech channels such as hum
speech, yell speech, musical speech, and whistle speech. Understanding how all
this is a product of culture further means that the operative grammar cannot be
understood without considerable cultural knowledge.
We find this a productive perspective. For example, in the Papua New Guinea
Highlands languages, numbers of culturally significant features are embedded
in verbs that replace a state of being with bringing things into being. Such
embeddings mean that linguistic expressions are invariably marked in ways that
flag important cultural values and because of their embedding they operate as
dark matter in social practice. In other words, these are elements of language
usage that both align with cultural values operative beyond language and also
themselves assist in shaping and reproducing these values. Two examples may
help here to elucidate this point. In the Melpa language of the Mount Hagen
area, an infix /nde/ can indicate an action that is done on behalf of someone else
or causes something to be (on Melpa see, for example, Stewart, Strathern, and
Trantow 2011). Thus, /menem/ signifies “carries,” while /mendenem/ indicates
that the carrying is done for another person. A comparable feature is found in
the Wiru language of Pangia in the Southern Highlands Province, where /kako/
means that a person is standing, and /kakako/ with the /ka/ infix means to make
something stand up (on Pangia see, for example, Strathern and Stewart 1999a,
2000a). Making things happen or doing something on behalf of someone else is
an important cultural pattern in these two areas, and much emphasis is placed
on actions. Of course, this can also be true of cultures where these grammatical
features are not found, but the point here is that in these two languages the
speakers automatically exhibit the emphasis on socially oriented action, so
that the grammatical features become carriers of dark cultural matter. The idea
of dark matter thus provides a bridge between universalist and particularist
perspectives on language and culture.
Expanding the idea of grammar, Everett further develops a concept of
“cultural grammar” (pp. 26–27), which he sees as the outcome of several
influences working together to produce senses of identity. The same may be said
of our two grammatical examples just given.
A related point about the creative powers of language in social relations
is integral with our overall approach in this book. Another broad debate has
engaged writers in parallel with arguments about universals versus particulars.
Does language fix identities in cultural milieus or can it also be an instrument
for the creation of new identities or bridging across identities? The answer is
that, because of its creative potentialities, language can be used performatively
to do all of these things. The globalization of forms of language such as English
is also matched by the constant creation of dialects and sub-dialects and hybrid
forms that emerge from migration and cultural interchange. As anthropologists
who specialize inter alia on the Pacific region, we think it is important to write
about the creation of lingua franca or creole vernacular forms such as Tok Pisin
in Papua New Guinea, which illustrate the flexibility and ingenuity of human
cultural creation, as well as being poignant historical markers of colonial and
postcolonial histories. In addition, we bring attention to rich vernacular forms
that are enclaved within wider majority language environments, such as the
Scots language within the English-speaking world of the UK.
A major overall theme that intersects with the above argument is the
formation of speech communities, identified by Gumperz (1968, reprinted
in Duranti 2009) along with Dell Hymes’s development of the “ethnography
Language as Cultural Practice 5
of communication” concept and the study of “communicative competence”

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

level of dark matter that we have discussed above in this chapter. There remains
the possibility that there are levels of shared universal domains of meaning
expressed within culture, but dark matter is always specific or particular in its
content. If universality is to be found, it is within general cognitive capacities
shared by humans and in generalities of custom, such as the existence of systems
of kin classifications (see, for example, our book on kinship, Strathern and
Stewart 2011a).
2
Origins
Linguists and anthropologists have been interested in questions of origins. So,

indeed have been most of the peoples of the world, who have been concerned
to explain basic issues of their identities as humans in the wider worlds of life,
including the invention of language, marriage, relationships with spirits, and the
like.
There are two foci of discussions about origins of language forms: (1) the
emergence of human language as such and its universal or variable features, (2)
the historical reconstruction of worldwide or regional language families, such as
the categories of Indo-European, Austronesian, etc.
We will discuss (1) in relation to functional theories in general and with
particular reference to Noam Chomsky’s famous ideas of universal grammar
(see Chomsky 1965), learning acquisition device, and recursion as a putative
universal grammatical or syntactic feature of language. Much theorizing
has surrounded the broader issues of how and why language, whatever
its characteristics, emerged in society, and how it enabled a speeding up of
cultural evolution. We will therefore deal with this arena also. We will not be
dealing with the second focus mentioned above, the classification of language
families by the tools of historical linguistics, although this is a fascinating
part of overall language and culture studies. This is because in this chapter
our focus is at the level of language origins in general and the evaluations of
Chomsky’s general ideas, which do not depend directly on the classification
of language families.
Origin stories in folk traditions answer to some of the same concerns as those
of scientists: what makes humans unique or not unique, what links them to other
beings, how did customs (including different languages) emerge, what is the role
of spirits in people’s lives—these are some of the concerns. The fundamental
tendency to explain things in terms of first origins is shared widely among cultural
patterns and provides momentum for historical linguistics and glottochronology
(the study of time depths of language forms and their interrelations) as well
as appearing in folk mythologies. An interesting feature of such mythological
stories is that they sometimes portray animals as communicating with humans,
guiding them on difficult journeys into mountain interiors that are gateways
into a spirit world. Or they may center on a motif that dogs could once speak
with people but that this capacity was lost owing to a mistake that was made
or some wrongdoing on either side. In general, these stories portray the lives
of people and other beings as closely linked together, a feature that may have
originated at an early time when humans were hunter-gatherers, especially in
relation to dogs, which are widely used for hunting purposes.
How humans came to invent and possess language has been a favorite topic
for theorists for a long time. From what we have said in Chapter 1 it is obvious,
to begin with, that the genesis of language is inseparable from the genesis of
culture in general.
Most theories have gone on from that starting point to trace the beginnings
of human language forms to sociopolitical causes, such as the development of
group structures and the need for effective communication stemming from
shared activities, the pressures of armed conflict and defense of territories, the
contexts of the food quest, and the need for equitable distribution of resources.
All these are self-created factors. Alan Barnard has carried this discussion
productively forward by pointing out that language capacities developed during
the long period of time in which humans were hunter-gatherers. It is not
possible to pinpoint exactly when or how language abilities arose, or whether, for
example, earlier populations such as Neanderthals or Denisovans possessed this
capacity. (For details on the category “Denisovans” see Barnard 2016: 58ff.) It is
apparent that Neanderthals possessed complex aspects of culture shared with
Homo sapiens and that they interbred at times with the latter. Similarly, with the
populations now known as Denisovans. Barnard notes that the development of
forms of language out of gestural communication methods depended on the
production of sounds associated symbolically with meanings, and there are no
records that could tell us when this innovation took place. What is more certain
is that language began for social reasons, for communal aims rather than simply
communication, and that it was instrumental in the growth of culture through
its provision of a way of storing, passing on, and elaborating knowledge beyond
the immediacies of experience, a way that was not available without it. There is
a world of difference, we can agree, between pointing to a tree and naming the
tree in its locality and as a marker of a leader’s place or speeches made under its
shade.
Origins 9
Language also enables the creation of a kind of narrative memory distinct

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

and grammar must come into play. Some theorists, notably Noam Chomsky, have
laid stock on a particular grammatical feature, recursion, in which one clause is
encapsulated within another. Barnard cites (p. 75) another scholar who opined
that location is another prerequisite, that is, a way of indicating linguistically
where the action is taking place, a version of directional indicators that can also
be expressed in gestures. Doubtless all these are significant enabling factors
but whether there is a finite set of such factors is hardly possible to determine.
One thing we can suggest is that in small-scale face-to-face societies embodied
aspects of language usage are prominent, and also that where people are or are
said to be is socially very salient, hence these societies are likely to have highly
developed linguistic and paralinguistic (gestural) spatial indicators tied in with
landscape as their life-world.
The strongest overall proposition that Barnard puts forward is that we
cannot say whether language came first and facilitated thought or whether the
reverse is true, but we can safely say (as Barnard, p. 78, does) that they have
coevolved over time, strengthening each other and creating complexity in
modes of expression, in a stochastic or aleatory progression. Language thus
evolves in a mode analogous to the way that learning in general does. Given
this, it is worth noting also that contemporary hunter-gatherer languages and
modes of cognition are not in general simple but are often enough as complex as
the languages of agriculturalists or pastoralists living around them, if not more
so. Hunter-gatherer languages as they are known today may not be like what
they were in prehistory, of course, but they surely show evidence of long-term
tendencies and structures that give us some insight, at least, into their past. Here
a feature brought into focus by Barnard can be adduced.
Barnard asks what part story-telling may have had in the development of
language. He answers that stories are intrinsic to human communication and are
found in early forms of mythology and their stories of the interactions among
spirits, deities, and humans. Such stories, we may further note, require various
equivalents of indirect and reported speech, and thus specific grammatical
mechanisms, for them to work as comprehensible sequences of sentences. This
point can be confirmed from studying how stories are constructed in consecutive
pieces linked grammatically.
In Melpa language stories from Mount Hagen, each new piece of this kind is
linked grammatically to the piece before it with a specific participle verb form
indicating that the new subject of the piece is the same as or different from the
preceding piece. Thus, for example, if the verb /iti/, “to do,” is the linking form,
Origins 11
it can appear as /etepa/ (“doing”) if the action is by a single person and that
person continues as the actor, or as /elinga/ (“being done”) if the action switches
to another single actor. Correlative shifts or correspondences are made with
plural or dual actors in focus. This “piecing” formula thus becomes the means
whereby multiple actors enter and leave the scene of action as the story develops.
Without the relevant verb inflections this could not be achieved, that is, without
the whole range of subject continuity or discontinuity forms of all verbs in the
language, extending also to “irrealis” forms that depend on an imagined future
state. The language here literally provides the correlates of time that are needed
for a story to move along. Exactly the same mechanisms, with a further twist,
are found in the Wiru language of Pangia south of Hagen. There, a composite
verb form /niroa/ means “doing so” (literally “that doing”) with continuity of the
subject, while /nirikolo/ is the subject-change form when the action belongs to a
single flow linking the actors together and /nirikale/ when there is a disjunction
of action, plus all correlative forms. These features are a part of the fact that
each grammatical form also has culture imprinted on it. Demonstration of
this point is in fact a favored pastime of anthropologists. The Melpa language
distinguishes between dual and plural forms of pronouns and between inclusive
and exclusive forms with regard to who is talking with whom, and this is because
such distinctions are important on a daily basis for face-to-face relationships.
(Melpa, Wiru language materials are taken directly from the Stewart Strathern
field language materials.) Barnard notes (2016: 90) that Harold Conklin was
able to explain a much more complex set of pronominal distinctions among the
Hanunoo people of the Philippines.
Since language and thought are so closely bound together, it seems that it is
not feasible to try to determine priority between them. In fact, we can go one
step further here and comment on how language itself may skew thought in a
particular direction. The existence of these two words “language” and “thought”
suggests to us that we are dealing with two different bounded “things” on the
assumption that words identify in a bounded way such “things” in the world.
However, this is not necessarily the case. What has become represented by
these two words may signal an interlinked domain of reference, dealing with
experience that encompasses both concepts. Thus, the issue may be created by
language usage itself. The answer to the conundrum about priority may be to
reframe the question and examine not only how language constrains thought
but also how efforts to rethink problems lead to creative changes in language
use. We may cite, for example, the proliferation of neologisms in language used
to describe computer operations, a whole new technical world of terms.
A reason why issues of priority among processes have arisen and occupied
theorists is that they have sought to establish both why and how language
developed in human populations, with the obvious corollary that language
greatly facilitates social life. Was it, then, preceded by thoughts that guided how
language would emerge? Or was it guided by some biological characteristics,
such as a particular gene mutation in humans? Intersecting with such questions
but from a different perspective is the well-known theory of Noam Chomsky
that there is a language instinct in humans that sets them apart from other
species and that along with this goes a universal grammar underlying all forms of
languages. Chomsky’s theory starts from the factual observation that all peoples
have languages and that children rapidly learn the first language or languages to
which they are exposed.
Chomsky then hypothesizes that the reason for this is that there is an inbuilt
capacity for language in the child, genetically encoded at the species level and
accompanied by an equally inbuilt learning acquisition device that enables the
coding to be applied. Other theorists argue, however, that a whole range of genes
may be involved, or that all we are dealing with is a general aptitude for learning
cultural practices and values that require skill and commitment. Everett takes
this further by arguing that there is no universal grammar of languages, but each
grammar is a cultural artifact. It could be that there is a universal pattern, and
that cultural particularities are then added to it. Chomsky wished to argue that
one particular feature is common to all grammars, and this feature is recursion.
However, Everett also argued that this feature precisely is not found among
the Piraha, whom he spent many years studying. At this point the argument
becomes rather intractable. Perhaps it is best to note that recursion is a very
common grammatical motif, but there is no a priori reason why it must occur in
all languages or to consider it to be diagnostic of our species.
There is another level of argument. Chomsky made a clear break between
humans as language users and other species without explaining how language
could have arisen. Other theorists, however, have, per contra, seen language as
arising and developing out of earlier evolutionary processes, with a stress on
the advantages for survival that it conferred on its users. The ability to talk and
persuade others to listen, the utility of knowledge being retrievable and accessible
to memory, and the ease with which further innovations could occur, all these
factors would go together and coincide with the capacity for language, making
a strong pressure for its development. As with general cultural learning, so also
with language. Mistakes have to be corrected, and a trial-and-error process of
learning holds sway.
Origins 13
A systematic scheme of theorizing on the origins of language is provided

by Derek Bickerton (1990). Bickerton takes as his initial point that language
involves consciousness, and that consciousness depends on learning
representations that can become formalized as categories, developing out of
what he calls our species’ primary representational system (PRS) of perception.
Language provides a secondary representational system (SRS), which facilitates
thinking via the operation of a syntactic system or module, and language also
is the means whereby other parts of the brain are co-ordinated. Language also
provides a platform for the evolution of an idea of the self and self-consciousness,
through which we are able to comment on and evaluate our own actions. It is
a fundamental and illuminating observation that gives language a pivotal and
central place in the genesis of thought: language is necessary in this scheme for
the operation of thought itself, if thought is to be seen as a conscious operation.
Bickerton formulates this: “what we are conscious of is what we are able to
process linguistically” (Bickerton 1990: 216). Bickerton fully recognizes that
some aspects of the operations of the brain are not, at least ordinarily, accessible
to the self, while others are accessible via language. He also notes the point we
have made above about binary classifications, that language often divides the
world into two opposed categories, and this can be misleading. Language also
tends to posit an agent of any given action, so that a personal subject is invoked
by linguistic usage itself. “It thunders” thus leads potentially into an idea that a
powerful agent has caused the event (p. 226). Myth follows easily from this.
In the Melpa language, the phrase /kona ronom/ means “it is raining,” but
its literal form is “rain strikes,” where the subject is expressed but the object is
not. Rain is given an agentive role in this usage. Alternatively, another agent
may be implied, such as an ancestral spirit that wished rain to fall. As Bickerton
notes, the way is thus opened, through the portal of syntax, “for the setting up
of unlimited hypothetical entities” (p. 227). Language can therefore be either
adaptive or maladaptive in terms of the concepts it makes possible. Language
usages can also deal with embodied processes in ways that do not fit a simple
subject/object predicate. In Melpa the statement /na mindil enem/ means
“I am feeling pain,” but it literally parses as “me pain (it) makes.” By starting
the statement with the firstperson pronoun the speaker draws attention to the
immediacy of the pain they are feeling. The pain and the person are conflated in
a kind of double predicate.
An interesting further set of considerations is supplied by Robbins Burling
(Burling 2005). He remarks on something that is well-known, but not always
discussed, the ability to learn and understand many words in a new language
in advance of being able to speak them (p. 17). Something similar may have
happened with language itself in a gradual development over time. Burling
is also in accord with the views of scholars who have taken the position that
language is likely to have come into being gradually (p. 18). He adds that at
each step comprehension would have to be shared before another stage in
production could be achieved (p. 21). Later in the book, he goes on to show
that language learning depends on certain shared cognitive orientations, such as
an idea that words can be names of things, that facial expressions and gestures
can contribute to communicative processes, that interactions are important, that
word order is stable allowing extrapolation of syntax, that we can successfully
mimic or imitate sounds, that we seek for patterns, and the like. Burling stresses
(p. 73) that concepts and categories must exist in a cognitive sense for language
to come into being. However, we cannot assume too much uniformity here
because otherwise we would be disposed to elevate culture-specific concepts
into universal categories. As he himself recognizes, uniformity is matched by
variability, because otherwise all languages would be the same. One way in
which variability and flexibility would be selected for, he notes, is the movement
by humans into new environments requiring them to pay attention to different
stimuli crucial for their adaptation. The point is a good one, reminding us that
our species is a mobile one, and pointing again to the use of language in practice,
a topic that we pursue in the next chapter.
In the present chapter, we have not been concerned with a detailed
examination of all factors at work in the evolution of language from a biological
perspective, because we have started from the perspective of language in culture,
but this does not imply that such biological enabling factors are unimportant,
only that they are not the immediate focus of our discussion here.
3
Language, Practice, and Embodiment
The study of language, as employed in practical speech contexts, meshes with

approaches in practice theory generally in anthropology. “Practice theory” is
well exemplified in general by the complex work of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu
1977). Bourdieu’s early work was carried out among the Kabyle of Algeria, and
he often gives examples of linguistic usages derived from this work, but his work
is in general important for its combination of both sociological and semantic
insights. Insights from the Kabyle work also informed his later work on language
and symbolic power and on cultural themes such as “taste” (in the sense of
aesthetic discrimination). Bourdieu was engaged with marxist theorizing, and
in his discussion of aesthetics he notes that such matters are greatly inflected
by class identities (Bourdieu 1984). His theories are also relevant to the analysis
of what speech communities are and how they operate in social terms. Such
communities need not be homogeneous, as William Labov (1972) famously
pointed out through his study of Lower East Side New York City in the 1960s.
(See also Bourdieu 1991.) “Practice theory” in language studies also owes much
to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea.
Malinowski stressed the importance of context in understanding linguistic
usages, and this viewpoint corresponds closely to a standard ethnographic or
cultural approach, in which culture is invoked as the means of understanding
language. Malinowski’s work on the language of magical spells well exemplifies
his approach (e.g., Malinowski 1935, and see also Tambiah 1968 for a close
analysis of the language of Trobriand spells and their performative structures).
In taking readers into Trobriand garden magic, Malinowski immediately places
us in a Trobriand garden, not far from the ocean, in the presence of the appointed
garden magician, who exerts his influence on the garden plants, perhaps taro and
types of yams important in the ceremonial economics of the village chief. The
magical expert is chanting a spell over the garden soil containing the growing
plants, exhorting the plants to grow big and healthy. The logic of the spell is
contained in its imagery, which envisages the process of fertility in the ground as
like the way a child grows inside its mother. In a society in which ties of descent
through the mother are fundamental to identity, the image carries great force.
Human and garden fertility are brought together, while the agency that brings
this about is male. So, the specialist intones, “The belly of my garden swells” and
from a linguistic viewpoint another feature is interesting. The magician literally
visualizes his magic by presenting the growth of the garden plants underground
as actually happening, not just a wish or a command, but an event unfolding in
response to his words. This makes his utterances on a par with what linguists
have called “illocutionary statements,” words that actually perform what they
portray, following the original use of this term by the philosopher J. L. Austin
(Austin 1962).
Language pragmatics, as a special component of practice theory in general,
investigates how language forms are used, for example, in the sphere of pronouns
and possessives as explained in the early and ongoing work by Stephen Levinson
and his collaborators. (See also above Chapter 2, on the Hanunoo.) How “things”
are used is also the basic starting point of Bourdieu’s work, and is well exemplified
in his classic reexamination of the theme of “The Gift” in the writings of his
predecessors, Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Mauss gave an account of
the rules underlying gift-giving, while Lévi-Strauss systematized these under the
rubric of general reciprocity, Bourdieu says (Bourdieu 1977: 5). However, neither
of these theorists, he says, established how the gift was organized in practice,
depending on two principles, one that returns for the gift must be deferred
rather than immediate and the other that the return must be different from its
predecessor. The fact of deferral gives scope for management and also for failure.
It is vital that the return should not simply be the same as the earlier gift because
that would amount to a refusal to redefine the gift itself as a way of strengthening
social ties. Bourdieu presents these propositions as universals. Whether this is
so or not, the formulation is a perfect characterization of how gifts work in the
Mount Hagen moka system in Papua New Guinea, with the addition that return
gifts should exceed their predecessors’ levels. (See, for example, Strathern and
Stewart 2000b.)
Bourdieu attempts to introduce another point, that this kind of system
involves that the participants “misrecognize” the true conditions under which
they produce their actions. We do not follow him in this regard because he says
that participants are not aware of or do not recognize the strategies that actually
constitute the dynamics of their activities. Our observation here is that all the
strategies he enumerates relating to gift-giving are known to and commented
Language, Practice, and Embodiment 17
on by the Hageners themselves in the moka system. Indeed, from his own
ethnography on the Kabyle (pp. 8ff.), exactly the same conclusion emerges from
all the Kabyle categories he proceeds to enumerate, dealing with the intricate
practices of making gifts to keep relations going, via “necessary improvisations”
enacted in time (p. 8). An uncertainty of outcomes, and the possibility of failure,
also accompanies this process (p. 9). Time and tempo rule what happens,
what transpires. Rules do not. Meanings emerge pari passu with the flow of
interactions; they elicit one another. Kabyle men, like many Pacific Islanders,
are very conscious of their honor, as something to be asserted, defended, and
maintained, he says, and a competitive game of challenge and counter-challenge
or refusal of challenge emerges, depending on the status of the actors. Among
Kabyle, there is much ambiguity of status, with an ever-present possibility of
suffering or inflicting shame (again, as in the Pacific Islands). Kabyle express
honor in an embodied expression calling it /nif/, “nose” (p. 15). A man of honor
is said to “face east” and to “look to the future.” In his discussion here, Bourdieu
hits on a fundamental and enduring point, the significance of embodiment. The
sense of honor is inscribed in bodily schemas as well as in schemes of thought
(p. 15). The Kabyle language expresses all this.
Building on these observations, we can say that key semantic concepts in
particular cultural contexts play important pragmatic, and also cosmological,
roles. We will instance here two concepts from the Mount Hagen area of Papua
New Guinea: popokl (“anger”) and noman (“mind”) (Stewart and Strathern
2001). Throughout our discussions, we deal with the intersection of culture and
language, primarily but not exclusively, through the lens of language itself. This
does not mean that we give any absolute priority to language as a part of culture.
In general terms, culture is a holistic concept, dealing with all aspects of learned
and transmitted patterns of human activity. Alessandro Duranti (1997: 23–59)
advances the idea of culture as separate from nature, culture as knowledge,
culture as mediation between humans and the environment, culture as practice,
and culture as a system of communication. To these standard analytical
classifications, we would add culture and creativity, as we have mentioned already
above. The concept of creativity makes it easier to incorporate a recognition of
individuality and change into practices, and the place of language in creating
change, adaptation, and variation. Thus, culture is important throughout our
discussions, even though we are concerned in our ethnographic cases, primarily
with language in culture. Our citations from the influential work of Bourdieu
indicate that he, too, was concerned to build change and creativity into his
analyses, via his recognition of strategy and uncertainty. Our two examples from
Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea will illustrate this general approach to our
topic. With their immediacy of reference to embodiment, they also point to a
link between the sensory physical world of experience and the world of language.
Popokl and noman are closely linked topics that tie together body, mind,
emotions, thought, action, and causation, in configurations of practice that
are dynamically seen as embodied. Popokl can be glossed as “anger” or
“frustration,” while noman means in general “mind.” The connection between
the two concepts is that popokl is thought of as experienced in the noman. In
turn, noman is conventionally located in the chest area, and when popokl enters
it the noman is said to lie athwart or “crooked” ( /peta ronom/) against the
windpipe, so that thoughts cannot proceed in a proper or “straight” ( /kwun/)
way between the head and the rest of the body. In this circumstance, there are
two possible outcomes. One is that the popokl leads the person experiencing it
to take retaliatory or redressive action, such as taking revenge for the death of
a relative or attacking a co-wife in a polygynous marriage. The other possibility
is that the person will internalize their feelings and not take redressive action,
with the result that they will fall sick and draw attention to their suffering by
this means, so that others will take notice and try to rectify things, in the first
place by sacrificing a pig to the sufferer’s dead kin, so that they will release their
grip on the person’s life force, and in the second place by finding out the source
of the popokl and setting things to rights. After all this is accomplished the
person’s noman will lie straight again. Otherwise, the cycle of sickness and/or
violence will continue until it can be brought to a close. The popokl/noman
nexus is clearly an ethno-psychological site where complex concatenations of
social issues can be mediated. The nexus links living kin together via the notion
of empathy between persons, and it also links the living with the dead because
dead kin are responsible for sending sickness as a mark of their pity for their
descendant suffering from popokl, or else the dead are held to demand that their
descendants act on their popokl and exact revenge for deaths. This is therefore a
primary driver of dealing with “trouble” in social life.
The concept of the noman is important in all spheres of social life. Good
behavior and bad behavior are both referred to the state of the noman. Pleasure
and joy also belong to the noman. Powers of creativity, memory, and sincerity
also are associated with the noman. Noman is a concept that relates body and
mind together. Sickness and health are both seen as products of the state of the
noman. If a person is well and looks healthy, friends will comment and ask,
“What thoughts are you having?” Sickness, as noted above, is often seen as the
product of some hidden popokl, which must be brought to light if the person
Language, Practice, and Embodiment 19
is to get better. The sick person is encouraged, therefore, in a special meeting of

kin, to tell of any resentments they have, to put these into the domain of their
kin and to settle them in any way possible. Also, friends and kin will advise an
aggrieved person not to give way to becoming popokl over their upset because
otherwise they will fall sick. This intricate set of practices and concepts is a self-
regulating mechanism that depends on a set of assumptions about personhood
and the body that join well-being and the state of the body, and also link this
theme further with issues to do with conflict, violence, and dispute settlement.
(We have discussed these ideas in a number of previous publications, e.g.,
Stewart and Strathern 2001; Strathern and Stewart 2010.)
As Bourdieu would put it, none of this operated automatically and all depended
on which way the actual feelings of persons took them. What we have called
concepts operate only in the way that practice theory indicates, that is, in the
embodied actions of individuals, so each stage of enactment is contingent on the
will and understandings and intentions of these individuals. Indeed, the theory
of the noman itself encompasses all of these complications, along with another
point of indeterminacy, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to know what the
state of mind of any individual actually is. Furthermore, the Hagen area has for
many years been subject to the teaching of varieties of Christian churches. These,
particularly the newer Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, have generally set
themselves against indigenous practices without understanding their vital roles
as the carriers of morals and values. Anger leading to conflict is something they
preach against. People should not have anger and should forgive each other.
However, this admonition does not carry over into specific action except in
very small-scale and intimate contexts and so it cannot function as a means of
social control in the way that the indigenous concepts are designed to do. So, a
gap emerges in the process of mediation (see Stewart and Strathern 2009). The
problem starts as a problem of translation. “Popokl” is taken out of the nexus of
meanings that give it its pragmatic value, and it is equated with “anger” in the
English language and the negative sense that it carries. So, it acquires this new
pejorative sense in the local language also. A cultural mismatch is then imported
back into the indigenous language.
The next chapter looks into arguments about the effects of literacy on human
communication and thought.
20
4
Themes in Language Practice
Language is built up out of parts, which linguists study via a range of concepts
and tools: phonetics, phonology (phonemes and their allophones), morphology
(morphemes), semantics, grammar, and syntax. The practical use of language
in speech and writing depends on these tools, although speakers may not be
consciously aware of them. A basic concept is that of the phoneme, a unit of
sound that makes a difference in the meaning of a word in a particular language,
determined by the study of minimal pairs of words, for example /pin/ and
/bin/ in the English language, which demonstrates that /p/ and /b/ are different
phonemes. Allophones are versions of phonemes that do not make a difference in
meaning. Morphemes are combinations of phonemes that enter into grammatical
forms and also mark differences in meaning, for example, in terms of plural or
singular forms of words, as in English plurals are sometimes marked by /-s/,
with variants as allomorphs. Grammar builds on the structures of phonemes
and morphemes by applying basic ways of making statements, for example, by
ensuring agreements between words in tense, number, or mode of expression,
such as whether the mode indicates a real or a hypothetical situation. Syntax adds
a further level by way of acceptable co-ordination, for example, the placement
of subject, object, and verb within a unit such as a sentence. Languages differ
noticeably in regard to word order. The English language order of subject, verb,
object contrasts with Melpa (Hagen) subject, object, verb, where the verb, which
carries great importance in the language, is kept to the end, as it is in German
also. We join here to the discussions in Chapter 2 about universals and cultural
particulars by pointing out that all descriptions of languages tend to follow the
structure of these grammatical terms, even if the substantive aspects of each
example vary: in other words, if there is no universal grammar as such, there are
still recognizable variants of word order in sentences.
As noted in Chapter 3, linguistic practice has most patently been studied
in the domain of speech and its social contexts, looking at how context and
speech mutually mold each other. We discuss the implications of this point in
terms of two major domains of practice: (1) orality versus literacy, with some
reference to the theories of Jack Goody and critical commentaries on these
and also the emergence of the useful concept of the “lecto-oral domain” and
(2) performative practices in language, with reference to J. L. Austin’s work
on illocutionary and perlocutionary forms of language performance. In broad
terms, illocution depends on social power and personhood. The philosopher
John Searle has explored this topic in his work on speech acts generally, showing
how large numbers of expressions in English reveal values and assumptions
about motivation and personhood. (Searle 1969; and see discussions of this
arena of study in Duranti 1997.) Anna Wierzbicka has provided further cross-
cultural perspectives on this topic, highlighting the cultural biases that are
built into the English language (Wierzbicka 2010). Clarifying the analysis of
figurative ways of expression, another philosopher Charles Peirce distinguished
between different types of signs (indexes, icons, and symbols), in terms of
closeness to or abstraction from embodied reality, providing another tool for
the analysis of pragmatics in language, that is, how speakers actually use forms
of expression (Peirce 1977). Indexes reveal a tangible relationship between the
index and what it points to; for example, smoke is an index of fire. Icons show
a similarity between icon and what it represents; for example, road signs often
visually depict what they are communicating, such as a steep incline or road
work. Symbols, in Peirce’s scheme, have an arbitrary relationship to what they
indicate, for example, letters of an alphabet and words that are built from them.
These different relationships influence the ways in which language in practice
is used and speakers or writers consciously or unconsciously operate with
understanding of this in their conventional or innovative usages.
In addition to the sphere of pragmatics—how language operates as action
in the world—there is a further sphere of study, the sphere of metapragmatics.
This sphere is concerned with the conscious use of pragmatic forms by people
who are reflexively tuned in to how these forms work and how they may be
manipulated. It thus refers in general to how people think about the effects of
their uses of language. Metapragmatics has reemerged as a focus of study, possibly
in part because the proliferation of media forms conduces toward an increase in
self-consciousness (but see Cohen 1994, who stresses the importance of self-
consciousness as a cross-cultural feature of human action). Metapragmatics in
turn merges further with metalinguistic awareness generally and with contexts
of indexicality. In the Hagen area of the Western Highlands, rhetorical language
expressions reference forms of identity, playing on an equation of individual
Themes in Language Practice 23
leaders as speech-makers with their descent groups, and thus creating a special
aura of indexicality. The speaker speaks of “I” as a category when it is not himself
as an individual that is meant but the collectivity of the group. Metapragmatics
as a field of study is also related to the question of language ideologies, ideas
about the place of language in action, including conflict (Goldman 1983) and
gender (e.g., Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). Notions of what language actually
does or can do in social interaction inform concepts of personhood and identity.
Language ideology has developed as a prominent modality of analysis,
for example, in writings by Bourdieu (1991), Gal (1989), Irvine (1989), and
Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity (1998). Language ideologies are linked to
social hierarchies, especially those of social class, and social ideology operates
differently in non-class societies, such as those of the Papua New Guinea
Highlands, where ideologies establish differentiation without class domination,
for example, in contexts of gender and conflict.
We have dealt with the above range of topics only briefly, in order to give
readers an idea of the diversity of topics that are relevant for the study of language
in practice, giving also a few elementary technical definitions to begin with. We
now move on to investigate orality and literacy in some more detail.
Orality and literacy
Language began in human prehistory as speech. It is also marked by the initial

primacy of speech as children learn it. Adults note the timing of the acquisition
of speech by children, and are concerned if acquisition is comparatively slow,
because speech is a marker of social personhood. Human interactions depend
for their full embodied realization on the characteristics of face-to-face
relationships. However, the power of language has been enormously increased
by the phenomenon of literacy, the ability to write down forms of speech and
transmit them to others, and the correlative ability to read what is written. Just
as speech perhaps gave humans an adaptive advantage over other primates, so
literacy in general enabled new adaptations by the humans who developed it
to achieve and share skills and knowledge in more explicit and codified forms
than had been possible before, a result that was exponentially increased by the
invention of printing and subsequently by digital technology. However, the
story is not so simply one of unilineal progress or universal benefit. Literacy
in hierarchical societies was first developed as a tool of control by ruling elites,
counting numbers of people, resources, amounts of land, and the like, for
military and taxation purposes, along with forms of currency that allowed for
a quantification of values. Control of copies of information was also integral to
how everything worked.
Arguments about the functions or correlates of literacy have tended to
concentrate on more recent developments in human history. The noted
anthropologist Jack Goody and his collaborator Ian Watt broke ground in 1963
with an article on the effects of literacy on modes of thought. Generally, they
argued that literacy produces a new kind of logical thinking because it enables
a more systematic listing of steps in arguments or propositions than is available
without it, both in terms of memorization and in terms of the ease of scrutiny.
Thus stated, the argument has to do with a very limited and specific arena of
human capacity, scarcely touching on religion, aesthetics, poetry, storytelling,
or song: all of which spheres Goody actually considered in depth in later
publications (see Goody 2000). Certainly, powers of speech itself go with, and
depend on, powers of memory that are highly developed. Oral forms often carry
with them techniques of memorization. These techniques have been intensively
studied by Richmond Lattimore (1951) and many others in relation to traditions
of oral epics, including the Odyssey and the Iliad of the ancient Greek poet
Homer.
We ourselves have investigated such techniques in Papua New Guinea in
relation to oral balladic epics among the Hagen people and the Duna of the
Highlands region. Performers sing these extended ballads at nighttime to
immediate audiences. Each ballad recounts an elaborated form of a folktale
that is well-known in ordinary spoken form, but while many people can give a
version of the spoken narrative, the longer sung ballad is the prerogative of a few
specialists. The sung story encapsulates vocabulary that is archaic and represents
material culture going back to earlier generations. The performer’s artistry is
highly appreciated, and the audience shows their attention with encouraging
comments as the story line continues. The performer has recourse to numbers
of standard repetitive lines that provide time for the next memory flow and for
the audience also to keep up with the basic narrative. Plot variants can easily be
introduced because there is no canonical or ritualized form, and the main aim
is to entertain the listeners, while conveying a good deal of cultural information.
The oral form does not seem to impose any absolute limit on the length of the
performance (see Stewart and Strathern 2005a, b). Regular rhythms make the
process of reciting easier to remember, along with the melodic patterns.
What difference, then, does literacy make to such genres of expression?
At the start of the discussion here a caveat needs to be entered. “Literacy” is a
word containing a number of potential or actual characteristics: the ability to

read, to write, to repeat or summarize orally or in writing what one reads, to
comprehend, to review, to criticize, and the like. In other words, literacy is subject
to qualitative and evaluative differences, depending on social circumstances.
This caveat is germane to all of the critical discussions that emerged in response
to the initial formulations of Goody and Watt. If we regard literacy simply as
a technological practice, and we go on to link it to the technical inventions of
different forms of writing, such as the Greek alphabet, and then continue by
suggesting that this invention in itself changed society or cultural patterns, it is
likely that we may be placing too much weight on a single factor as causative of
others, whereas in fact the factors are all interrelated and none are unilaterally
causative. This is the burden of argument taken up by Brian Street in his diatribe
against Goody’s work (Street 1984). Street declared that Goody had attributed
to literacy an autonomous power to change ways of thinking, whereas in Street’s
view literacy was one influence among others. What we need to do, then, is
specify the linked factors and delineate how they are linked together, and in
doing so we may conclude that literacy is, or is not, a leading factor in the genesis
of change (Scribner and Cole 1981).
It is safe to say, in any case, that literacy is a strong enabling factor in many
processes of change, depending on who controls it, who gets to exercise it, and
for what purposes it is used. Libraries are a good example to draw on here. They
may be created as archives of knowledge with access only to a few users or they
may be instruments of sharing knowledge among those who can read and write.
An inspiring example of a library of the latter kind is to be found tucked away in
a corner of Perthshire, near to Crieff and Auchterarder in Scotland. This is the
Innerpeffray Library, which we have visited on several occasions. The Library
originates from collections made by its founder, David Drummond, 3rd Lord
Madertie, and Archbishop Robert Hay Drummond, who commissioned the
building of the Library and completed it in 1762. The Library was set up from
its beginning to be a lending library, the first in Scotland, making available its
books to the farming population around, for their edification and participation
in contemporary affairs. Lending began in 1747 and continued until 1968, with
a careful record of every borrower and what they borrowed. Most of the books
in the Library belong to periods before 1800, and the Library’s stock amounts to
a total of about 5,000 volumes. In June 2018, when we made a second visit there
after an interval of some years, there was a new room that had on display an
early book by the theological scholar John Duns Scotus, published in Venice in
1476. Such books were the fruits of growing technological abilities for producing
materials that could then be shared by those who could read and write. Literacy,
for the farmers and craftsmen around the Library, meant actual access to vital
forms of knowledge and the values that went with it.
Just as when we reviewed the whole issue of language and culture, language
structure itself can be misleading. “Literacy” by itself does not do things. It is a
noun that can take a grammatical subject position in a sentence, but that does
not make it an agent. People are agents who do things, including things with
literacy as the object of their actions. From this perspective literacy becomes a
tool for doing things, and this in turn depends on whether it is the possession
of a few or of many, and what content is given to it. The same argument applies
to the Internet in a latter-day transformation of the discussions about literacy in
general, since the Internet is simply a further technological version of literacy.
The Internet can also stand here for the most general argument about literacy,
which is that it potentially opens up a world of information that can transform
people’s lives and their consciousness of their lives. We must also realize that
“the Internet” is itself an ongoing human invention, not something separate
from human endeavor and also manipulation. Once again, technology is not an
agent but a medium of facilitation for agency. It affords possibilities or makes
possible things that were previously not feasible, but it does not in itself do
these things. When critics of Goody’s ideas charged him with “technological
determinism,” they were themselves perhaps forgetting that an invention such
as an alphabetic script is a product of motivated agency, and we must ask what
the human intentions were that produced it and how it was put to use, as well
as what developments it intrinsically made possible (as with, for example, any
invention, such as the telephone or digital tape recorders).
A very well-balanced discussion of the main issues in the debates that
emerged from Goody’s work is provided by Ross Collin (Collin 2013). Collin
concludes that an interaction model specifying ways that factors all influence or
condition one another in the context of literacy studies is the appropriate way to
go forward. He notes that some studies highlight globalizing influences, while
others stress the local and historical forces at work in shaping the concomitants of
literacy. He advocates a nuanced approach avoiding single-stranded arguments,
and also steering clear of arguments that equate literacy with “civilization” and
preliterate cultures as “primitive.” It is clear, however, that literacy works very
differently in contexts where it is newly introduced compared to ones where it
is long-established.
Nico Besnier has given a detailed ethnographic account of the workings
of introduced literacy in a small-scale Polynesian society on Nukulaelae Atoll
(1995). Literacy came to Nukulaelae from the outside, in association with early
Christian missionization by the Anglican Church in the nineteenth century. The
first evangelist who came was Elekana, a Cook Islander from Rarotonga who
visited in 1861 and left behind some knowledge of hymns that are still sung today.
When Elekana left, it is said that the people also asked him to tear out pages from
a copy of the Bible in Rarotongan so that they could keep close to his teachings
by contact with the words. The expatriate missionaries later brought in trained
pastors from Samoa, whose language was related to the Tuvaluan language of
Nukulaelae, and who saw it as essential that the islanders should learn Samoan
in order to read the Bible and follow sermons spoken in Samoan. Nukulaelae
people have been exposed to a complex multilingual set of contexts since early
colonial times. Their own language is a dialect of Tuvaluan that differs from
other dialects, including the dialect spoken on Tarawa Island and on Funafuti,
where numbers of Nukulaelae go on labor migration. Formerly, the Gilbert and
Ellice islands were a single colonial unit of administration, and Gilbertese was
the language predominantly used as a vernacular for communication in oral
contexts. The missionary pastors in Nukulaelae, however, insisted that Samoan
be used as the language of instruction for the introduced religion of Christianity,
including the study of the Bible in Samoan and for church services. A diglossic
situation resulted, in which Samoan was regarded as the language of literacy and
high status and Nukulaelae as the language of oral everyday communication
for the local islanders. Samoan was not too difficult for the islanders to learn
because it is related to Tuvaluan. Samoan was used as a legal language also until
the 1930s and the Samoan Bible was not replaced by a Tuvaluan translation until
1987. Words borrowed and adapted from Samoan are still found in religious and
rhetorical contexts, Besnier notes.
Nukulaelae is an isolated place, and the English language only gradually came
to be of importance for the bulk of its people, eventually displacing Samoan as a
language of status, based in the educational system. Literacy was also established
in Tuvaluan and circulates as a written equivalent of its use in oral interactions,
for letter writing between migrants working elsewhere and their relatives
on Nukulaelae, and as the language of primary schooling. Secondary school
education is available only in Vaitupu, a location that is 125 nautical miles distant
from Nukulaelae, and pupils there tend to drop out of school because of feeling
far from home and because of the high school fees that are charged. It is primary
school that provides schoolchildren with basic skills of reading, writing, and
counting that they then apply to keeping all kinds of records, writing invitations
to feasts, preserving family genealogical history, and pursuing correspondence
with kin away on labor migration in other islands. Missionaries brought with
them a pejorative way of categorizing traditional culture as “darkness,” contrasted
with the “light” of Christianity, and this idea is sedimented into conventional
evaluations that the people themselves make, but many of the tasks literacy is
put to also provide continuity with the past, preserving and guarding specialized
knowledge belonging to particular family groups. Besnier adroitly extends his
discussion into the context of letter writing, which turns out to be a major way of
maintaining relationships of kinship between people on Nukulaelae and migrants
away working elsewhere. Besnier was able to collect a large corpus of letters of
this kind, and in asking about them he learned that letter senders always like to
have someone carry the letter who can either read it to the intended recipient
or help the recipient to understand it. Besnier points out that this means that a
written form is not in itself considered more trustworthy than the oral form, and
that both forms may be needed. Context is all. This point can be generalized.
Literacy itself does not determine reliability of communication. In other literacy
contexts, such as the legitimacy of oral history, a written form may carry more
weight, depending on its provenance, because it can be cited in court cases,
whereas in letter writing the personal ties are the most important factor. Letters
take time and effort to compose and are taken to their destination only when a
ship calls in. Writers treat the letter as a substitute for face-to-face interaction.
Most letters pass among kinsfolk, and salutations in them include hopes about
health and thanks to God for being alive and healthy. Older relatives try to keep
in touch with younger kin away in Funafuti, and the underlying current is the
flow of transactions and requests for transactions. A radio telephone link has
been established with Funafuti, but it does not effectively conduce to privacy,
Besnier notes.
Recent experience in other Pacific islands indicates that the establishment
and availability of relatively inexpensive cell phone communications greatly
speed up distance interactions, so if this has happened on Nukulaelae letter
writing may have fallen into decline. (See, for example, the note by Lin Hao-
li in our “Oceania,” second edition 2017, pp. 15–16, with references.) Also, if
Islanders now have access to e-mail, that would render letters obsolete, but this
would depend on costs of computers or cell phones capable of handling e-mail,
Skype, Facebook, etc. As a sideline, but a significant one, we did not find any
reference to stamps or a postal service on Nukulaelae, so this in itself would
explain why letters needed to be delivered by a trusted messenger. In addition,
however, the letters were often supplemented with oral messages, and the writers
often remarked that they regretted they could not talk directly and sent messages
of love that indicated strong affect, just like “love and kisses” at the end of letters
to some relatives or friends among native English language speakers. These
expressions of feeling are balanced in letters with constant reference to gifts and
economic transactions that constitute the material backbone of ongoing kin
relationships.
Letters require that they be read as well as written, and on Nukulaelae often
a letter would be read or a reading of it listened by an assembly of kin. Similarly,
with church sermons, which pastors will write but deliver orally, and therefore
acquire their social form of usage in the face-to-face domain. These kinds of
contexts correspond to what Jack Goody called the lecto-oral domain, in which
we can see literacy and orality intertwined rather than contrasted or opposed,
either conceptually or in practice. This interconnection between oral and literate
forms of language use underlines the point made by Ruth Finnegan in her study
on the significance of performance as the context that links different aspects of
language together (Finnegan 2015). Finnegan advocates an action approach to
the production of meaning in which performance plays a central part. In this
regard, her approach is similar to that of Dan Everett who has stressed the idea of
language as a cultural tool (Everett 2012). Finnegan also perceptively stresses the
importance of song as an expressive genre and explores the relationship between
words and music in song performance.
Performativity and illocution
This observation applies further to the domain of performative uses of language,

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

A more cheerful example would be “I now pronounce you man and wife” or
equivalent; or the conferring of an educational degree, perhaps in Latin, as
“Auctoritate hac mihi commissa, admitto te in gradum doctoris philosophiae”
(“By the authority that has here been invested in me, I admit you into the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy”). In all cases, it is not the words themselves but the
social status of the speaker of the words that makes them ritually effective, and
in turn may produce a secondary cascade of effects. Illocution thus depends
on power, which is extra-linguistic in character. Language reflects that power,
rather than creating it, yet at the same time the power may be realized only in
the pronouncement of the signifying words themselves.
A general point that underlies the topics broached in this chapter as well
as the whole book is that cultural preferences and values shape or influence
language practices, including the ways in which literate and oral domains are
put to use and what usages constitute illocution or perlocutionary effects. Anna
Wierzbicka has been a prominent theorist in this arena, warning against taking
meanings or values in English as universal. She is adroitly able to show how
deeply philosophical and scientific arguments purporting to deal in universal
human categories are in fact rooted in Anglo traditions that are not universal
but culturally and historically particular, for example, the idea of a sense of right
and wrong or what is meant by the word “sense” itself, or even ideas of truth
and lying (see Wierzbicka 2014; and her earlier work on “Experience, Evidence,
and Sense,” 2010). Her work is a salutary reminder of the importance of a kind
of methodological relativism in semantics and the pitfalls of translation that
we need to bear in mind when discussing language practice and pragmatics.
Culture is always at work, like Dan Everett’s “dark matter.” The point helps us
to understand the controversies about orality and literacy discussed earlier in
this chapter. If we look on literacy as a formal technology influencing thought,
this may be a result of thinking about it in terms of books and philosophy, a
procedure that would have minimal relevance to the people of Nukulaelae.
Also, in terms of illocution, a statement that a person is fired would have no
application in a culture without bosses having power of such a kind over others.
In the next chapter, we return to the topic of cognitive representations as
these appear in language classifications.
5
Cognition and Categories:

The Work of Roy Ellen
Languages categorize the world. This might seem a straightforward statement,

but it is not. Languages do provide people with ready-made ways of talking about
or dealing with reality, but in doing so they also create their own reality and
afford practitioners ways in which to alter that reality by a changed arrangement
of categories. The world, therefore, is not something that exists in an objective
way that is simply recognized and labeled in linguistic form. Rather, linguistic
forms construct the world in particular ways. This does not mean that language
categories are arbitrary. For instance, many languages may have terms for birds,
a recognizable category of living things, but what is included in these terms
must vary in accordance with the types of birds that are found in the language
area but also in terms of what is included in the general category itself, as the
anthropologist Ralph Bulmer pointed out in his well-known article “Why Is the
Cassowary Not a Bird?” (Bulmer 1967). Bulmer’s discussion of this intriguing
problem took two forms. The first was specific to Karam (Kalam), a people who
live in the northern peripheries of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. They did
not classify cassowaries as birds, because they were large, very aggressive, and
could not fly but ran along the ground in forest areas. In addition, because of
these anomalous characteristics, they were credited with kinds of spirit powers.
Second, Bulmer added a proximity principle (Douglas 1996: 145–147). Distance
from human habitation and/or intrusion into human arenas of habitat control
may influence classification patterns. With regard to cassowaries, these are
intrinsically wild creatures of the bush that can be dangerous to humans if
disturbed. They are hunted and trapped as a source of protein, and in many
places, they are used also as prestigious gifts in exchange relationships. A key to
how cassowaries may be regarded by people who encounter them can be found
in the responses of some prominent individuals in another Highland area, the
Pangia area of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Asked
to explain why cassowaries carry a special significance, men replied that the
cassowary is a man (ali); in other words, that it encapsulates male values of
strength and aggression. Its name kembi is also a stand-alone signifier, without
the classifier ini (“bird”) in front of it (Strathern and Stewart 2000c).
We have explored shared comparative themes about cassowaries in an
expanded arena of the cultures of Eastern Indonesia as well as the whole island
of New Guinea. In all of the cases we examined, the cassowary was seen to be
an important vehicle of symbolic experience and values. It is often connected
with mythologies relating to originating spirits and their ongoing powers in the
world. For example, in the Ok region (Telefomin and other places) a powerful
female spirit figure Afek is connected with the cassowary (Strathern and Stewart
2000c: 53), and in the Aru Islands the cassowary, a land creature, is nevertheless
connected in myth and ritual with the types of seashells that are esteemed as
valuables in the world of water (2000c: 44). In Hagen (Melpa language) folk
narratives women may change into cassowaries in response to life difficulties. In
some stories, it is a man’s sister who experiences this transformation (Vicedom
1943–8: vol. 3). This folk theme reveals to us aspects of the cross-sex sibling
relationship in Hagen, as well as of gendered relationships generally. Sisters
who marry and move away connect their brothers to other families. They
“go out” to marry. There is something mysterious in this process, relating to
the interstitiality of women in their identities. Like cassowaries, they can be
unpredictable and elude male influence. Here, also, the cassowary takes on a
female aspect, whereas in other ways it has a masculine sense because of its size
and strength. It is a polyvalent symbol that can be linked to various, sometimes
contradictory, dimensions of experience and thought, as also remarked on by
Alfred Gell (Gell 1975).
Ralph Bulmer, whose essay we have cited on the classification of, and ways of
conceptually understanding, cassowaries among the Karam speakers of Papua
New Guinea, made it clear in his work that he was studying ethnobiology, not
just linguistic classifications, but also how these classifications arose out of
observation of and interaction with creatures in their environment. He made, for
example, a detailed study of how the Karam classify types of frogs. Frogs form an
occasional part of the diet of the Highlands people of Papua New Guinea, and
in earlier times children would go on expeditions along streams to catch them
and cook them up. Interest in different types, then, would be geared in to how
to find them and what they tasted like. Bulmer was able to show, however, that
classification depended on observation about the bodies of frogs, sizes, colors,
and their habitats. The classifications made by Karam were quite detailed and
Cognition and Categories: The Work of Roy Ellen 33
based at least partly on a taxonomic model, always linked to observations of

the behavioral patterns of the frogs. While a kind of classifying impulse can be
seen to be at work, because frogs were not a primary part of Karam experience
or practice, nevertheless there would have been no classifications at all if frogs
were not considered to be of some practical use to people. An anthropologist
who has spent much time and effort in studying classifications of natural kinds
among a people of eastern Indonesia (Seram) the Nuaulu, is Roy Ellen. Ellen
dedicated his book on this topic (Ellen 1993) to Ralph Bulmer, in memory of
his work in the field of ethnobiology. Ellen had a number of vital concerns in
this book. One was to acknowledge and document the point that innovations
of classification occur over periods of time and that these entail what he calls
“cognitive reorganization” (p. 214). We can illustrate this significant process also
from different ranges of data regarding the Melpa language of Mount Hagen.
The Melpa term for pig is kng (northern Melpa) or kung (central Melpa), with
another variant used colloquially and as an affinal taboo name term kanga. (If
a person has an in-law called Kng, they will use the kanga term for “pig” rather
than the standard term because they may not use the name of an affine.) When
outsiders introduced horses, cattle, sheep, and goats as domestic animals in
Hagen, these were all classified by people under the category of kng/kung, so that
kng became automatically a wider or higher level classification than it had been
before. In other words, kng became repurposed in order to accommodate a new
set of animals, none of them particularly like pigs in their appearance, but all
large animals that were considered potentially amenable for use in ceremonial
exchanges and were also potentially edible. This recategorization well illustrates
the elasticity of cognition, as well as the drive to assimilate or domesticate new
experiences into an existing repertoire, and to contain new experiences within a
world of practice (rearing of animals and their use in exchanges). The terms for
the animals themselves were simply imported into the language from various
sources, so that “horse” became ot (there is no /h/ phoneme in Melpa); cattle
became bulmakau, a Tok Pisin lingua franca term derived from “bull” and “cow,”
and used for all cattle; sheep became tiptip (sheep-sheep, with a characteristic
reduplication shared with Austronesian languages, and perhaps derived from
an Austronesian-speaking coastal context); and goat became meme, a term that
is mimetic of the sounds goats make. All of these new categories are invariably
prefaced with kng as an overall classification, and this is not changed (at least
according to observation) into kanga, so that horse remains kng ot even for
those who have an affine called Kng. These details show the intricacy with
which people have assimilated new experiences into their lives, both changing
these experiences into something cognitively akin to existing categories and also
quietly revolutionizing those categories themselves in doing so.
In seeking to express this and many other points about cognition and
practice, Ellen adopted the term “prehension” to identify the cognitive processes
he was interested in. He further makes a very useful distinction between general
cognitive processes or instruments that can operate across different domains,
whether the analyst sees these as “mundane” or “symbolic” (p. 215), and the
specifics of culturally established representations (p. 215). In his own work in
ethnobiology, Ellen chose to concentrate on the classifications of animals because
of his supposition that these were closely linked to the empirical experience of
the natural world. This viewpoint is obviously related to that of analysts who have
considered “natural kinds” to be a kind of universal category of classification and
have, moreover, elected to see such classifications as organized by taxonomies.
As Ellen remarks, the concept of a taxonomy involves “linked notions of rank,
level, and contrast” (p. 216), and its development is tied in with the classificatory
work of Linnaeus and the passage of his work into contemporary biology. Ellen
notes that this concept of the taxonomy has underlain the work of scholars in
“the American school of ethnosemantics” (e.g., Brent Berlin and Paul Kay 1969),
and he lists many authors who have critiqued this approach, including himself
(p. 217, q.v. for references, also the shrewd comments by Lucy 1992: 177–187).
Ellen organizes his own critique under a number of headings.
First, he remarks on confusions about what the term “taxonomy” means.
Some linguists have used taxa, he says, to refer to all linguistically recognized
groupings that refer to varying degrees of inclusiveness. However, it is what is
meant by “varying degrees” here that is at issue. Second, therefore, it is the notion
of hierarchy, and thereby contrast, that is crucial, and further an insistence that
terms should be assigned to a single hierarchical level and that there is a universal
set of categorical types that constitute such a hierarchy (p. 218). Here Ellen points
to problems that such a universalist, and we might say etic, scheme leads to. The
main problem lies clearly in what is meant by a hierarchy. If this means a unique
beginner term under which a set of distinct levels are all organized, the model
appears to be too systematic and determinate to fit with many folk classifications.
More importantly, perhaps, instead of revealing local cognitive processes, the
model may sideline these or consign them to an anomalous status. Ellen here
mentions the work by Lancy and A. Strathern, based on fieldwork testing among
Melpa speakers by Strathern (1981), which showed a Melpa penchant for pairing
categories together without an implication that these belong to a single cognitive
higher category. Many other possible organizational models are available, for
Cognition and Categories: The Work of Roy Ellen 35
example, in terms of classification of space with closeness or distance from the

speaker being operative (reminiscent of Bulmer’s work on cassowaries).
Next, there is the question of contrast. Categories, Ellen says, are not always
mutually exclusive and digital. (For a classic exposition on dualistic classification
in Eastern Indonesia, see the systematic work by Gregory Forth 2001.) Instead,
they may be fuzzy or organized in analogical terms such as “more this than that.”
Categories can thus be polythetic (p. 220), and thereby flexible. The application
to data of a rigid taxonomic model fails to reveal such flexibility or fluidity of
expression. The idea of cross-cutting classifications compounds confusion by
placing in question the taxonomic model itself. Ellen notes here the Nuaulu
category notame, glossed in English as “bat,” which the Nuaulu speak of as fruit-
eaters versus others but also cave dwellers versus others, and these alternative
classifications overlap. There is no category that universally distinguishes fruit-
eaters by contrast with cave dwellers, only the general term “bats” (p. 221).
Ellen’s next point, which we take to be of prime significance, is one we have
also discussed above, that classifications must be related to experience and
practice. Here Ellen adds the point that removing classification from practice
gives the illusion that knowledge is only about perceived formal resemblances,
and in turn that knowledge constitutes an abstract system. Embodiment theory,
by contrast, we may add here, always makes experience and practice central to
understanding. We may take here the example mentioned above of “pairing” in
the Melpa language. Pairing, expressed by the term rakl (“two”), essentially refers
to a kind of alliance between things that are seen as going together, including
numbers themselves, so that ceremonial counting of items in exchanges is done
in twos rather than single numbers. Special kinds of valued vegetables are also
paired, for example, types of taro or yams or with plantains, the kinds called
keninga and membokl. Such classifications reflect syndromes of prestige and
appreciation. As types, they are not necessarily systematically distinguished from
all other plantains or taros, etc. The most salient use of pairing has to do with
the expressions of alliance between groups, at the highest level between whole
tribes. At all levels such pairings represent historically contingent circumstances
buttressed by particular events and processes between the groups involved, and
complicated by further ties and enmities with different groups that have emerged
through warfare or from intermarriages and changes of residence of persons.
We do not argue, as Durkheim and Mauss originally did, that something called
“society” or “social structure” has provided to the Melpa their categories of
thought, such as pairing in this example. Rather, we would see pairing in all
instances as an example of symbiosis and special relationality, always realized
through experience. Paired types of special vegetables, for example, are sought
out and steamed together in earth ovens for ceremonial feasting in association
with life cycle or political exchanges. So, pairing is not a taxonomic process at
all. It is a process of sociality (and in this regard would fit into a reinterpretation
of Durkheim’s social-deterministic mode of explaining cultural patterns). Ellen,
citing work by Anna Wierzbicka among others, casts doubt on the importance of
taxonomic classifications as markers of thought processes. He further notes—and
this is also very important—that taxonomic modes are not the exclusive modes
of classification of the world that people employ, and they are not necessarily
used as aids to memory or are signs of thought processes at all. There may be
different processes involved at different levels of inclusiveness, as Hunn 1976
argues (in Ellen, p. 222). The category of “birdoid” (sort of bird) may be derived
by inference, whereas specific kinds of “birds,” such as sparrows, etc., may be
derived from direct observation. Here, we ourselves would like to comment
that “pairing” does seem to be a thought process for the Melpa speakers and is
therefore a marker of Melpa cognition that shows itself in a number of domains,
including kin terms, group structures, evaluations of food, and religion. Pairing,
of course, is not in itself a taxonomic operation.
Ellen alerts us to the likelihood that a taxonomic kind of theory and
methodology may induce in its proponents an inordinate value in finding
taxonomic structures (p. 226). He points out that taxonomy is just one resource
that people may use for making classifications and that the degree to which they
do so also varies from place to place or from one domain of classification to
another. Ellen gives here as an example the fact that the Nuaulu classify fungi
not taxonomically but in terms of the hosts they live on, as well as other criteria
(possibly edibility, taste?).
Given all these considerations, Ellen suggests that instead of speaking of
cognition or perception we can identify the mode of “classifying” that people
employ as prehension (p. 229), meaning the total embodied processes by means of
which they relate to the world around them. Ellen also speaks here of “cognitive
bricolage” (p. 230) and refers to its workings as a “social process,” which emerges
in language only as a partial representation of complex modes of knowledge
acquisition that have their roots in bodily experience and biographical events
(p. 234). We are at a far cry here from the suppositions of the ethnoscience of
the 1970s, and with all this in mind we turn in the next chapter to the issue of
color categories.
6
Cognition and Categories:

The Work of Anna Wierzbicka
We encounter here immediately the salience of the work of Berlin and Kay, who
employ exactly the kind of reifying methodology in relation to “colors” that Ellen
criticized in his discussion of the use of taxonomy. In their 1969 treatment of the
topic, Berlin and Kay proceeded from the idea that there are basic monolexemic
“color” terms that are found universally, but that vary in their numbers in different
cultures according to a definite pattern of inclusiveness. They found that all
languages have terms for white and black (broadly conceived); if a language has
three terms the third is red, if four it has either green or yellow; if five it has both
green and yellow, and so on. They went on to suggest that as languages developed
more color terms over time, this development must have followed the sequence
as they observed it. As a part of their reasoning, they also suggested that black
and white at first would have included a range of other colors, but in the next
stage these were given their own separate terms. It is puzzling then to know why
such terms would be translated as black and white in the first place, since they
admittedly covered many things in addition to white and black. To deal with this
issue, Kay proposed that terms should not be seen as coding “semantic primes”
but rather as composing “fuzzy sets” whose boundaries could shift over time.
Fuzzy sets do not have firm boundaries, and they contain examples that people
may feel are more ideal than others, with approximations to such ideal norms.
These ideals are then taken as exemplars of the basic color terms, within sets
that are continuously graded. The upshot is that the concept of basic color terms
is preserved as sets of well-defined categories, even though these are no longer
seen as discrete. The complex operations and graphings of data by Paul Kay and
his collaborators correspond exactly to the strictures that Roy Ellen offered with
regard to taxonomy. Moreover, they are all dedicated to the ideal of preserving
the analyst’s view of linguistic universals, based moreover on neurophysiological
perceptions, and therefore negating the position, conventionally associated
with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, that there are no universals, just
variations from one language to another. Other authors (notably Elinor Rosch
1987) have taken the idea that some examples of a category can be considered
prototypes and suggested that those examples that are not prototypes would lead
over time to the emergence of further terms in the order postulated originally by
Berlin and Kay purely on the basis of typological study.
There remains a fundamental question of topical approach relating to authors
who deploy a kind of method by using Munsell color chips and building profiles
of color terminology and by asking decontextualized questions of “informants”
as to how they would name different chips. This method predisposes the
enquirer to finding out boundaries between categories elicited from the
informants without any application to their use of such terms in their own lives.
While informants no doubt bring their experience to bear on the answers they
give, the chips themselves filter that experience into an etic grid designed to
elicit data that will be amenable to testing in terms of the investigator’s own
topical interests, which result from the very starting point of “color categories”
or semantic primes. That is, they assume that there is an essential category of
“color” associated fundamentally with properties of the (human) eye and its
perceptions of light wavelengths. This category is then taken as the universal
constraint on the representation of color in language. Anna Wierzbicka,
by contrast, used another basic yardstick of experience that is broader:
ideas of everyday experience of variation and alteration in the environment,
conditioned by sunlight and darkness, the sky and the ground, and the like. In
many ways these two approaches cannot be used to disprove each other. They
simply represent different topical concerns and starting point assumptions or
propositions.
In an excellently contextualized study of Chinese (Mandarin) color terms,
Xing (2009) lists the eleven basic terms recognized in the language (happening
to correspond to the maximal list in the Berlin and Kay original protocol),
and then proceeds to concentrate on the seven most commonly used terms.
She provides a roster of the culturally extended meanings of the terms, and
the basic processes of metaphorical and metonymic operations by which the
extensions are made. Starting with white and black, she delineates clearly what
the extensions are. Bá, glossed as white, becomes daylight and thence clarity of
understanding (metaphor) or “funeral” (from the fact that people wear white
at funerals = metonymy), or even “nothingness” or “free.” Black (héi) simply
has a metaphysical extension as dark secret, bad. Red (hóng), by contrast with
black, comes to have good or favorable connotations by metaphorical extension,
Cognition and Categories: Work of Anna Wierzbicka 39
although it can also mean “jealous,” from the idea that when people inordinately
desire something their eyes turn red.
In expounding these meanings, Xing pushes her explanations beyond
physical perceptions into the realms of sociality, that is, into pragmatics as well
as historical change. The color green (lù), for example, was contrasted with
yellow (huáng) because yellow was the color of the Emperor’s clothes, whereas
green was the color worn by common people and hence by prostitutes, taking
us clearly into the context of status-signaling. Xing further pursues parallels
and contrasts between Chinese and English and finds that while there are some
obvious parallels, cultural factors enter; for example, in Chinese “white” came
to signify “funerals” and so did not develop the meaning of “morally pure” that
it has in English. Red (hóng) in Chinese has mostly positive extensions and so
would not develop the negative meanings it can have in English, as in “red flag”
for wrong, warning, danger, stop, and so on. In general, Xing’s study shows a
useful combination of analysis of semantic and pragmatic processes. As she
admits at the end of her essay, her discussion does not negate the position of
the universalists on the neurophysiological constraints on perception. This is
because she accepts the concept of the basic color terms, as outlined by Berlin
and Kay. What she adds is a nuanced philological appreciation of how meanings
develop by cultural extensions.
Stephen Levinson’s work on Yélî Dnye linguistic usages takes us productively
into the issue of what is meant by “basic color terms” (Levinson 2001), as well as
a concise survey of work to date on the controversies surrounding the topic (up
to the time of his article). He comments on Rosch’s findings for the Dani case,
from the Highlands of West Papua (Irian Jaya). Rosch established the viewpoint
that there are focal emphases in color terms and these fit with universalist
propositions, although for the Dani she argued that there were only two basic
color terms, white and black, with certain values being more focal to each of
these categories than others. (For further discussion, see Deutscher 2010, and
for a scholarly and sensitive case study, on the Trobriand Islands, see Senft 1987.)
Technical issues of methodology further arise here. How do we know where
to start with the investigation of color terms if the language of the people we are
talking with does not have a general term meaning “color”? Of course, as Anna
Wierzbicka has pointed out, people can perceive colors physically (because of
how the eye works) but this does not mean that they will everywhere have the
same conceptual set of ways of talking about what they perceive (Wierzbicka
2008). Wierzbicka’s discussion starts at the point of how people encode the
world of their experience, and she takes seriously the point that if they do not
have a term that translates as “color,” we cannot assume that color is a universal
category that can simply be investigated cross-culturally. Similar arguments, we
may note, surround the acrimonious controversies about the term “kinship”
(see, for example, Strathern and Stewart 2011a, with references).
Wierzbicka deals with the counter-objection that “the absence of a word does
not prove the absence of a concept” (p. 408). The absence of words (or, perhaps
also, we might add, expressions), for a particular aspect of human experiences,
has sometimes been dismissed as a “lexical gap,” she notes. Rightly, she
comments that such a dismissal may be an example of overprivileging English
as a universal language itself. In fact, if she is right here, it would be a blatant
example of the prime error, taught to all introductory courses in anthropology,
of ethnocentrism, or in this instance, English language logocentrism. She also
raises the question of how one could prove the existence of a concept if there is
no word for it. Presumably the scholars of color would point to the Munsell chip
array (surely a complex cultural artifact itself rather than anything universal).
It is not that Wierzbicka’s approach is opposed to the idea of universals. Her
concept of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage does posit universals, and one
of these is “seeing,” she says (p. 408). This is one among sixty-five semantic
elementary units of meaning that Wierzbicka and her collaborators have
identified. (The list is not meant to be exhaustive.) Color, she says, emerges as
a specific “molecule” of meanings when people become interested in purely
“chromatic aspects” of the appearances of things, and this is often because of
technological changes. One can think here of paints used in decorating houses,
or colors of cars, or of clothing dyes. Cultures that do not have a term for color
in general also, she says, tend not to have specialized color words (p. 410), and
they may borrow such words as a result of culture change.
Wierzbicka moves next to consideration of the Warlpiri language of Central
Australia. The Warlpiri are a well-known people studied by anthropologists
(e.g., Mervin Meggitt 1986). The Warlpiri lexicon includes terms such as
yalya-yalya (blood-blood), karntwarra-karntwarra (ochre-ochre), yukuri-yukuri
(grass-grass), walya-walya (earth-earth), and kunjuru-kunjuru (smoke-smoke)
(p. 410). The local, landscape-oriented, and embodied meanings of these terms
come from the Warlpiri ways of talking about the environment. Thus, yukuri-
yukuri refers not just to grass but to the brilliant appearance of grass that springs
up after heavy rain, fresh new grass. Terms like this have to be understood,
then, in terms of Warlpiri experience. Wierzbicka argues that in the Berlin–Kay
paradigm yukuri would be glossed as “green” and classed as a “colour word”
(p. 411). In other words, the putative universal meaning is not universal at all,
but a product of a particular translation exercise that fits the Warlpiri term into
a predetermined research paradigm.
Wierzbicka argues, instead, that what attracts Warlpiri interest in the visual
experience of things is how conspicuous things are in their environment, those
that shine at a distance, those that are striking because they are not the same
all over, for example, striped, and those that look like other familiar aspects of
the environment, such as the yukuri terms discussed above. In asking about the
environment in the Warlpiri language, one can ask “What does it look like?”
but not “What color is it?” One visual contrast that the language does encode is
whether something is shiny or dark in terms of high or low visibility. Brightness
or high visibility appears in a number of different expressions, such as pirarr-
pirarrpa, a term that can cover many different “colors” (i.e., white, yellow, orange,
red, silver, p. 412). Another range of words denote things that shine, for example,
jararlang of rocks that shine after rain, and may be sources of water in the desert
environment. Another range of Warlpiri interests has to do with the appearance
of animals, many of which are striped or spotted (as camouflage?) and described
as kuruwarri-kuruwarri or other terms that gloss as speckled. (The equivalent
in the Melpa language of Papua New Guinea is mbilinga-mbalinga.) These
kinds of contrasts, we may note, are also like those represented in indigenous
Australian paintings, including how people traditionally paint their own bodies
for ritual occasions. In fact, one term, kuruwarri-kuruwarri, refers to acts of
painting the body linked to the Dreamtime and expressive of spiritual forces.
Animal patterns, then, are linked with creative patterns tied to the origins of
ritual power. Myths and tales about animals reflect these concerns. To translate
all of these representations into color terms distorts the Warlpiri world. Warlpiri
language usages, instead, reflect a concern with visual appearances, expressed by
the reduplication of mass nouns (such as grass or blood).
The basic issue here is, as with many other controversies, what are we trying
to elucidate? And what are we trying to infer or demonstrate from the data?
This is in line with the sentiments expressed by Roy Ellen at the conclusion
of his detailed and long-term study of Nuaulu ways of describing the world of
creatures, remarking that we must beware of assuming the universal applicability
of the concepts of taxonomy and system. The same applies here to the concept of
color. If we are trying, via translation glosses that pick on only one dimension
of a term’s meaning, to call that dimension “color,” we will inevitably produce
data that fit into a spectrum of so-called basic color terms. If, however, and by
contrast, we are trying very hard to enter into the complex world of the people
studied, we must try to follow the nuances of usage in practice. Then, as with
the Warlpiri case, we will also enter into the local worlds of affect and social
experience. These are issues that have received detailed scholarly consideration
in the work of John Lucy, see in particular Lucy 1992, Chapter 5, especially
pp. 184–186, with reference to the assumptions behind the work of Berlin and
Kay 1969.
Wierzbicka’s approach here is entirely in line with Malinowski’s view that as
anthropologists we aspire to understand the “native’s” view of the world. Her
suggestions about the Warlpiri life-world resonate with usages of the Melpa
speakers in Mount Hagen in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. A
dominant contrast in the Melpa language is between perceptions of things or
people described as kund or kundi, and those described as pombora. Kund and
pombora also form a linguistic pairing. The terms can be glossed as “red” and
“black,” although these glosses may appear to exemplify the kind of labeling that
Wierzbicka has criticized for selecting out one dimension of meaning and filling
these into a scheme of “color terms.” Kund and pombora have a complex fan of
polyvalent referents and might be glossed in this respect as “light” and “dark,”
with the proviso that not all things that would be considered “light” would
be described as kund because some would be simply described as eng nonom
(“shiny,” “bright”) and some such things could also be classified as körök, glossed
as “white.”
This cognitive polyvalence holds across different language and culture
contexts in which the cassowary may or may not be classified as a “bird.” For
example, in the Melpa language, the cassowary is classified as a bird (köi raema,
where köi signifies bird and raema the cassowary) (on Melpa see, for example,
Stewart, Strathern, and Trantow 2011). Among the Karam studied by Bulmer
(see Chapter 5 in this book), it was not so classified, yet in both cases it held
recognizably related symbolic significances; and the same for the Wiru language
of Pangia, the main point being that the cassowary is semantically framed as
more like humans than some other creatures are and hence corresponds to
Bulmer’s proximity principle. On the classificatory plane itself, it is useful also
to note that the Melpa term köi, which we have glossed as “bird,” also covers
bats, which are called köi aepa. The boundaries of folk terms vary in different
folk classifications. In all cases, we see a framing that has picked on certain
perceptual features that are understandable but not necessary. Bats have wings
and fly, and can therefore plausibly be categorized as birds, although in other
taxonomic schemes they are not.
A general point here is that structures of linguistic classifications do not
exist in isolated taxonomic splendor. They are parts of wider arenas of cultural
practice. This is why we have given some examples regarding cassowaries and
their classification in a number of Highlands Papua New Guinea cases.
Pombora in Melpa categories also can cross-cut other classifications, so
that leaves can be described as nde omong wening, “tree leaf fresh, new” and
nde omong pombora, “tree leaf mature, dark.” “Dark” is here contrasted with
wening, “light,” rather than with kund, its conventional pair in other contrasts.
In ritual and cosmic terms, the predominant pairing comes out also as kund can
represent danger or hostility, as well as in other contexts a mark of fertility and
alliance, while pombora can represent safety, ordinary, as well as in other contexts
ancestors or aggressive solidarity. Facial decorations and shield painting tend
to follow a pattern of “colors” that are in line with a preference for “red/white/
black,” expressed in earth ochers and charcoal mixed with pig grease. What we
gloss as “color” is therefore also a product of available resources and technology.
Finally, here, in terms of visual salience, one of the criteria that Wierzbicka
identified as significant for the Warlpiri, aesthetic contrasts between red, black,
and white produce designs that Melpa obviously consider to be striking because
they use these as elements in their designs for facial transformation and to signal
to allies and enemies alike messages of strength, vitality, and determination.
Seeing kund and pombora as a basic pairing, followed by körök as an ancillary
term, we can identify other “colors” as terms taken from the environment, such
as leaves, the skin of types of sugarcane, dry leaves (“yellow”), blue earth (muk),
and gradations such as “-like” (-mel) just as in Warlpiri usage. If we wish, we
can fit such a scheme roughly into the Berlin and Kay scheme, so that we find
white, black, and red as the basic terms, and others added as non-basic terms;
but this does not tell us about the way the Melpa think about the kund/pombora
pair, nor would the Berlin and Kay scheme predict that “red” or “black” would
be paired rather than “white” or “black.” The Melpa penchant for pairing is the
important element here, not the putative scheme of evolutionary development. In
conclusion, the “color terms” debate shows all the points that would be revealed
by the examination of further cultural domains. There is a danger in reifying
and simplifying categories that are vitally complex and culturally specific, and
the danger in fact begins with the problem of translation itself. We will follow
this point with some consideration of “emotion” terms. In all cases, also, it is
important to note that in some cultural contexts color categories get elaborated
and they have to be explicitly taught to either younger people in general or older
people who have to learn rosters of new terms for marketing purposes (e.g., as we
have noted, for paints or car colors or clothes). There is a physiological capacity
for all this, but it can be moved in one direction or another by particular cultural
choices and development. The focus of our analysis here is on the importance of
recognizing and following in detail such cultural and experiential nuances rather
than the technical niceties surrounding the issue of referentiality in linguistics,
and how various theorists may be ranked in terms of their supposed stances
on that issue. Wierzbicka’s ethnographic work on Warlpiri ways of being in the
world takes us into the heart of a cultural understanding that is based ultimately
on comprehending Warlpiri experience rather than simply sets of words in the
Warlpiri language. If this is “referentialist” for some linguistic anthropologists,
then at least what it refers us to is Warlpiri embodied and emplaced culture.
In the arena of studies of emotions, we see the same juxtaposition of
apparently universal features or processes and very particular inflections and
modulations that indicate special ways in which the emotions enter into social
events of conflict, conflict settlement, harmony, dislike, etc. Here, another issue
enters that has greatly to do with putative dichotomous differences between
“cultures.” One model of the emotions suggests that these are internally
generated in the individual, while another model locates them in contexts
of sociality between people. Egocentric societies are then said to hold to the
first model, while sociocentric societies hold to the second. Typically, and
stereotypically, a distinction is made between “developed” or “evolved” societies
and “simple” or “undeveloped” ones, the former seen as more individualistic, the
latter as collectivist. This dichotomous contrast, much discussed and reviewed,
is oversimplified and is basically a product of evolutionary schemata of analysis.
All societies contain mixtures or balances between individualist and collectivist
orientations. The balances do vary, of course, and appear in different domains of
activity. In terms of the emotions, it is important to pay attention to ideas of the
person and the body that underpin ways in which emotions are perceived and
handled. Since the human body is a common factor shared by all societies, there
are obviously commonalities that run across cultural differences. At the same
time, cultural attitudes and values have their own characteristics. Language
indexes both these commonalities and differences. The question of whether
there are universals of emotions can be answered differently depending on what
perspective we take.
Language itself enters right at the beginning of any investigation into “the
emotions” because the term already carries cultural connotations. Anna
Wierzbicka, whose deconstructive work on the domain of experience labeled
as “color” which we have already discussed, comments (1999) on the terms
“feelings” and “emotions” in the English language. English usage entails a
combination of reference in the term emotion to aspects of feeling, thinking, and
the body. The particular form of this combination in English is not necessarily
paralleled in other languages, Wierzbicka says. For example, in ordinary (non-
academic) German the term Gefühl makes no difference between mental and
physical feelings. The same is true in Samoan, where lagona simply means
feeling, without any distinction between the mental and the physical. In English,
giving way to the “emotions” is seen as a kind of breakdown of control. In many
other cultures such a notion would make no sense. (Indeed, it is an ideological
rather than an experiential component of discourse in English.) At the same
time, English usage also implies that “emotions” have a cognitive, or cultural,
component as in “shame” or sadness (p. 27). The idea that there is a limited
number of basic “emotions” that are cross-culturally shared parallels the idea
of basic color terms and is susceptible to the same pitfalls related to extending
English language terms across cultures. At the same time, language does not
exhaust the possibilities of experience. A given language (e.g., Tahitian) may not
have a term for sadness, but this does not mean that an individual Tahitian cannot
feel sad, in some senses at least of the term. Wierzbicka points out (p. 33) that we
need to distinguish between phenomena, concepts, and linguistic expressions,
but we are always stuck with using the linguistic expressions as our yardsticks,
and these are strongly culturally inflected. Wierzbicka sets up her own model
for examining universals by way of a semantic primitive “feel” (FEEL in her
scheme), and another “think” (THINK), and also “good” and “bad” (GOOD,
BAD). She further suggests that universal distinctions are made between FEEL
and THINK, although they are closely linked in experience. These guidelines
provide a basis for identifying patterns exhibited across different language and
culture areas.
For anthropologists, it is a useful exercise to concentrate on how such
universals are played out in specific ways. In a very thoughtful discussion,
James Russell (1991) pointed out that the term “emotion” is itself not a cross-
cultural universal (as with “color” again, we should note), and there is great
interest in understanding how phenomena that we label in English as though
they were universal are actually conceptualized in different cases. It is also quite
interesting that favorite examples have emerged in the literature, and these tend
to center on a few concepts, notably including the concept of “anger.” Russell
(p. 430) refers to the Ilongot concept of liget, which covers both anger and grief,
as expounded by Michelle Rosaldo and also by Renato Rosaldo (M. Rosaldo
1980; R. Rosaldo 1980). Liget leads to headhunting as a means of release, the
ethnographers say. In the Pacific region, Catherine Lutz’s work on Ifaluk is cited.
Song for the Ifaluk signals both anger and sadness. Lutz translates it as justifiable
anger. It can lead to inflicting violence either on others or on oneself by suicide

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

also imaged as being inside the person’s noman. Popokl calls for social processes
of mediation. If a person is popokl they may fall sick, or they may take revenge for
an action that has upset them. Counter-killings in warfare were always attributed
to popokl. (We have examined noman and popokl in a number of publications, as
well as in Chapter 3 of the present work.) Shame, by contrast, is often spoken of
as “being on the skin” of people, at the intersection between them and the world,
rather than in the noman. It is a reaction to the fear that other people might
ridicule one, point the finger at one, gossip about one, whether in relation to
something wrong one has actually done, or in relation simply to an accusation.
Shame (pipil), therefore, also operates between people, as does popokl, but it is
in some ways not so deep-seated. Popokl is thought to arise in people and to
demand and elicit action, and it is very deep-seated. But a sense of shame is also
very important. It is what spurs people to do well in ceremonial exchanges and
to keep their promises, otherwise they can be looked on as “liars” (kol rui is the
verb, contrasted with kopa ni, to say the truth).
These emotion concepts, then, are intricately linked to indigenous ideas of
embodied action, of personhood, agency, status, and morality. We can certainly
see some common cross-cultural elements in them. We can also see their
specificity in the Melpa context. It is the same with all categorizations of “the
world.” Languages classify the world, as we have said at the beginning of Chapter 5.
At the end of the present chapter, we can conclude not only that they do so in
variable and complex ways but also that they are a part of whole complexes of
social action that are triggered by processes of conflict and cooperation, and that
the “meanings” of “emotions” must always be sought in those social processes
of “worlding,” coming to grips with problems in the experience of relationships.
In the next chapter, we move to approaches that seek to explain cultural and
linguistic forms by means of cognitive science.
48
7
Cognitive Science and Language
Cognitive science has entered the sphere of anthropological theorizing in a

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

and further postulate a close relationship between language and cognition, we
can see why cognitive science approaches also aim to explain features of linguistic
identification and categorizations of experience, such as religion, sorcery,
and witchcraft, long stock-in-trades of cultural and social anthropological
descriptions.
There has been a particular effort in this regard to revisit the question of the
explanation of religion, and a string of thinkers and writers have contributed
to this enterprise, beginning with Dan Sperber (Sperber 1985) and continuing
with Pascal Boyer (e.g., Boyer 1990, 1994), Maurice Bloch (e.g., Bloch 2005),
Harvey Whitehouse (e.g., Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2007), and many others.
We have examined much of this material in an earlier publication (Stewart and
Strathern 2014, q.v. for details) but will explore relevant themes from the work of
these authors again here, focusing on their own starting points in their analyses,
such as ideas of rationality, intuition, and counter-intuition. One starting point
is provided by Boyer, who has argued that religion develops from minimally
counter-intuitive ideas, giving a twist to intuition and extending it, for example,
by imagining ghosts as beings like living persons but that can glide through
doors. Dan Sperber put the matter in a somewhat different way from Boyer, with
his idea of semi-propositional representations, statements that are not intended
to be absolutely correct but are like conjectures or suggestions of what might
be (thus, “maybe there are ghosts that can slide through doors”). Both Sperber
and Boyer are locating their arguments within a frame of rationality, in which
religion is seen as not rational but is not entirely irrational either, since it deals
with possible or imagined realms of reality. (See, for a general exploration of the
relationship between language and religion, Downes 2011.)
The “Theory of Mind” (ToM) provides an interesting take-off point for
much of this theorizing, as well as for the theory of language in general as a
communicative tool. This theory posits that humans operate with an assumption
that communication depends on recognizing the interplay of minds among
people. Cognitivists have developed a suite of such concepts, which for them
further explain phenomena, such as religion, “belief ” (itself a contested category,
see, for a thorough discussion, Vasquez 2011, deploying embodiment theory),
sorcery, and witchcraft. The theme of embodiment, especially in relation to
cognition, is carefully reviewed by Joseph (Joseph 2018) in the course of his
meticulous historical review of theories regarding language, mind, and body.
Joseph recapitulates the influential work of Lakoff and Johnson in this arena. He
points out the difficulties of specifying the cerebral locations in which meanings
Cognitive Science and Language 51
may become connected (2018: 199), and he adds that cognitive science theories
tend to privilege “nature” rather than “culture”. Joseph’s work can be read as a
subtle commentary on theories of mind and body in general, as expressed in
philosophical writings from ancient Greek times onward.
Religion may be explained by saying that humans tend cognitively to
anthropomorphize their perceptual experiences, so that they interpret shapes as
being human (the “faces in the cloud” approach, as explored by Guthrie 1993). Or
they argue that religious taboos and prohibitions derive from a “hazard avoidance
device” that cautions people against taking risks, stemming from early human
experience of the importance of looking out for and guarding against danger.
Or that fears of sorcery and witchcraft are a result of psychological projections.
Whitehouse has added an original point by suggesting that the facility to make
connections across sectors of the brain shows the human creative capacity in
cognitive powers, leading to the ability to think metaphorically, or “cross-domain
analogical thinking.” Language is in some sense thus seen as a secondary product
of such primary cognitive processes (however these are physically constituted
in the brain), but because of its capability for categorization and labeling it
becomes an instrument for the social power of such processes. In this model
theorists seek to relate cognitive theories to their putative realization in language
forms. The approach is comparable to the distinction between surface and deep
structure in Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar in language. A different way of
thinking about Whitehouse’s idea here would be to relate it to the insightful work
by Lakoff and Johnson on conceptual metaphor theory, in which they explore
how one conceptual domain can be mapped on another, see Lakoff and Johnson
(1980). Analogical thinking is also akin to the process of semiotic abduction, as
first developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, in which imagination is deployed to
elucidate a problem of interpretation, building out from standard procedures of
induction and deduction. We suggest that this can be compared to the logic of
magical spells in the Melpa language of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea,
in which abduction appears as a /to/ or “comparison” leading into an image
that presents an ideal situation of healing. Abduction can be further related to
Whitehouse’s concept of cross-domain analogical thinking. Another arena of
interest lies in language socialization studies in relation to cognitive theories.
Here, the argument would be that we can learn about the genesis of language in
general by looking at how children learn a specific language. However, in each
case the problem of extrapolation arises: what is general and what is culturally
particular, including about children, in a given study? The same theories and
methodological procedures always seem to be followed by cognitive theorists.
For example, Dimitris Xygalatas has made a detailed ethnographic study of the
Greek Anastenaria, fire-walking festival, taking up the question of why people
practice it (Xygalatas 2012). In answering to this question, Xygalatas turns to
the idea of obsessive-compulsive behavior and costly signaling theory. Both of
these approaches rely on a psychologistic stance to “explanation” and are not
geared to account for the obvious collective orientation of the rituals involved
and their social context understood in emic terms, that is, in the terms agreed
on by the actors themselves. Importing psychologistic and economistic models
into richly defined traditional scenes of action may not be the most effective way
of explaining what these ceremonies are about and thus actually studying them
objectively. (We do not maintain here that there is no merit in trying out these
approaches, only that committed exponents of them need to be able to show
how they are more powerful forms of explanation than others, or that they can
stand alone as forms of explanation without recourse to emic data. Of course,
emic [actors’] and etic [observers’] modalities of analysis can complement each
other in a broader view.)
Broadening these discussions further, we can safely stress the ideological
power of the linguistic process of emically labeling things in the world and
thus performatively creating them “as they are.” Institutions are full of labeling
categories in this way, for example, in the way they identify “Faculty” or “Staff ”
or the categories established in official websites as a means of producing
“Institutional Persons” who may function as avatars or advertisements for their
real-life equivalents. In medical anthropology, labeling theory has been applied
to categories, such as “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder” or Attention-deficit/
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD syndrome). Linguistic theory and medical
anthropology converge in this thematic arena. “Culture-bound syndromes” was
a useful term invented to interpret the emergence or maintenance of ways of
dealing with illness conditions that seemed to belong to particular cultures or
social groups.
This idea of the culture-bound syndrome is also analogous to the many
debates on linguistic relativity that stemmed in American cultural anthropology
from the work of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and latter-
day scholars, such as John Lucy. The cultural relativist stance adopted by
these scholars working in the Boasian traditions contrasts strongly with the
universalist imperatives in cognitive science, but this contrast is itself a product
of the choice of different levels of analysis. Any particularist description could
potentially be set into a universalist framework, and vice versa. However, the
cognitive scientists are at somewhat of a disadvantage because their reductionist
explanations lack the specificity and ethnographic depth of particularist

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

such as “noun,” “verb,” etc., that apply clearly to Indo-European languages, but
may not be adequate for other language classes in the world. (See Lucy 1992:
34–35 on this point, with exact references to and quotations from the original
sources in Whorf ’s work.) These observations are useful technical aids for the
cross-linguistic study of languages, whether we see language as determinative
of thought or otherwise. Whorf went further and questioned whether ideas of
space, time, and matter are presented very differently in different languages,
distinguishing between “concepts” and “percepts.” Percepts may be shared
across cultures, but a given language may order concepts distinctively in terms
of the contents of thought. At this point we come full circle back to labeling
theory mentioned above, because Whorf ’s best-known example came from his
experience as a fire inspector looking into the causes of a fire in a warehouse
where gasoline drums were stored. The drums were labeled “empty,” suggesting
they were innocuous, but they still contained fumes and when a cigarette was
lit in their vicinity, the fumes were ignited and caused the fire. As Whorf notes,
the response here was to a linguistic label and the interpretation of it by workers,
not just to something “out there” in the world. Language was the intervening
variable between perceiver and perceived, because conceptually empty was taken
to mean harmless. Here, then, a linguistic classification did influence thought,
but it did so via a cognitive mismatch that could have been avoided with more
cultural knowledge. Extra-linguistic knowledge is therefore important as well as
the apparent semantics of linguistic categories. (Some materials here are derived
from Lucy 1992: 1–48.)
Going back to Boas, it is important to realize the sophistication of his ideas
as well as his meticulous scholarship on Native American languages. He saw all
human societies as a part of human history and therefore calling for attention
and study. He declined to specify any of them as primitive or undeveloped.
He insisted that languages needed to be studied in their own right and their
grammars to be related to their life circumstances. He noted that what is
expressed in customary language does not limit the potential capacities of
people to express thought. Taking a favorite topic of evolutionists, he remarked
that some languages may have words for only one, two, and three, but this does
not indicate that the people are cognitively deficient, only that they do not have a
need in their life-world for higher numbers. If such a need were to emerge, they
could handle it by innovation or adoption of terms from elsewhere. A cowherd
may know all their animals by name and personality or appearance, and without
knowing how many they are can certainly tell if one goes missing, so that naming
functions as a form of counting (Leavitt 2010: 124–125). Analogously, in one

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

determine the way people think, but when they rethink a problem, they may
realize a different way of conceptualizing it. Edward Sapir himself provided a
vital clue here when he highlighted the importance of metaphor in thought,
because metaphor enables comparisons to be made among things not previously
brought together in people’s minds. Leavitt notes that Sapir spoke of language as
providing a road or groove in which thought could run, but a road or groove is
something that can be turned out from (p. 140) into a new pathway.
Leavitt’s discussion of the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf is also helpful. He
points out that Whorf, like Boas and Sapir, believed firmly in the idea that
humans share basic cognitive capacities. In this regard, these thinkers can be
placed alongside the cognitivists of today. However, Whorf ’s studies of the
grammatical structures of languages, especially the Hopi language, indicated
to him that there were some fundamentally different features of Hopi concepts
from those that are inscribed in English (or, as he put it more broadly, Standard
Average European). In particular, Hopi language deals with time distinctively,
not allowing it to be cut up and segmented like other entities that can be counted
in the abstract. As an example, you cannot say in Hopi “three days,” but only “on
the third day,” taking the situated self as the point of perspective. Hopi language
concepts reveal a particular cultural perspective engrained in the grammar. The
upshot here is that while the Hopi could possibly conceptualize time in any
number of ways, their language predisposes them to think of it in a particular
way. Whorf was dealing here with the predispositions of habitual usage, not with
absolutely determined patterns. As a general conclusion, then, it is clear that
Boas, Sapir, and Whorf were all both universalists and particularists in their
theoretical stances. They also wanted to impress in the minds of their readers
the importance of understanding that what is naturalized in a given language is
in fact a culturalized way of talking, and this can be revealed by linguistic study.
Guy Deutscher has written a study intended to discredit the entire idea
of “linguistic relativity,” arguing that differences in grammar merely reflect
different ways of saying the same thing and that human experience is essentially
the same everywhere (Deutscher 2010). He does not seem to recognize that
Boas, Sapir, and Whorf all themselves carefully note that human perceptions at a
general level may all be “the same,” but that apperceptions via language produce
differences. How much difference and how important it is can be argued about,
but Deutscher seems concerned mostly to imply that it is all nonsense. He does
score a telling blow when he notes that Whorf ’s claim that there is no Hopi
expression that refers directly to what we call time seems to be negated by the
extensive work of Malotki Ekkehart in the 1983 book Hopi Time (Deutscher 2010:
143). However, the experience of sequence is not the same as an abstract concept
of “time,” so the argument would need to be revisited on that basis. Deutscher
may be both right and wrong here: right in the sense that in practice the Hopi
work with practical notions about time that are widely shared, and wrong in
the sense that he denies any difference between Hopi ideas and those of others.
Deutscher also overstates his case when he says that linguistic relativity theories
portray language as a prison house of cognition, when in fact the theorists we
have discussed all recognize that the constraints of language are not absolute and
that they are identifying habitual rather than absolute cognitive patterns. Later
in his own discussion, Deutscher recognizes that this point was made by Boas
long ago, to effect that relativity is about what one language obliges speakers to
do, not what it allows them to do (p. 152). On the other side of the debate, he is
also forced to acknowledge that some languages dramatically impose difference,
citing the Matses people of Amazonia who have very elaborate obligatory
rules governing evidentiality (pp. 153–155). Finally, Deutscher himself turns
the whole argument around by citing examples where language obviously has
influenced thought, but via experience of the environment: and so, we are back
to the Eskimo and their expressions about “snow,” and Boas rises again!
Ritualized uses of language have frequently entered into our discussions so
far, and in the next chapter we will examine these further.
58
8
Language and Ritual: The Merina

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

people. South-East Asian societies with definite or relatively fixed patterns of
repeated marriages between groups or categories of people show this pattern
very well, with numerous ways of expressing the relations between wife-givers
and wife-receivers in terms of flows of valuables (see, for example, Strathern and
Stewart 2011a: 107–112).
Rituals, in these and other instances, have a special role to play in fixing
structures of social relationships through material practices. Another element
that is very important here is the element of display. Not only do rituals require
that people participate in them, but they also ensure that values are on display
and are therefore validated. Rituals confer legitimacy on transactions of this
kind, partly by invoking an aura of cosmic forces, partly by the unambiguous
forms (declarative forms) of the ritual itself.
Moreover, it is not only the primary actors or subjects of the ritual that carry
these values. Sometimes we speak of “spectators” of ritual performances; but,
as many scholars have pointed out, the spectators are actually participants
(see, for example, Schechner 1985). It is they who give the legitimacy to ritual
actions. They are significant witnesses to the actual event and will help to carry
the memory of it. Finally, spectators are not always an undifferentiated mass
of observers. For example, at the inauguration of a new chancellor as the ritual
head of a university structure, spectators wear academic regalia, are arranged
hierarchically, and together make a tableau of the whole university community
and its array of powers and privileges: a tradition related in essence to the
arrangements in a royal court.
A kind of parallel or symmetry exists between the linguistic and the non-
linguistic components of action in ceremonial contexts of this kind. The whole
assembled tableau is itself a ritual statement, conveying its meanings at the
immediate sensory level. This context provides a conditioning background
against which all of the verbal statements that are made stand out further as
constituting illocutionary remarks. In accordance with the ritual plan of the
event, these remarks all lead up to and then away from a central moment at which
there is a condensed affirmation of the new status the individual is entering into.
This would normally involve an investiture with some special piece of material
culture (such as an academic gown going with an honorary degree) and some
verbal statement. In a sense, the verbal statement shadows the material act, but
both elements are important and must go together: a good example of how
language and material actions work together in constituting reality. This helps
to explain why rituals are important, because they establish an isomorphism
Language and Ritual: The Merina and the Melpa 61
between language and reality in a way that does not apply in all contexts of
language use, where it is evident that there is no one-to-one correspondence
between these domains. Ritual (which includes here not simply the immediate
actions of the participants, but also their ritualized established identities)
establishes the truth-value of verbal statements, investing them with power. A
further point is that if the names of graduands are not read out properly as
required, this constitutes a serious ritual error and vitiates the legitimate efficacy
of the occasion.
These considerations can help us understand why language and ritual acts
come together in powerful ways when the commemorations of disasters are
made. In these acts of commemoration, we also see how repetitive elements of
performance are built up from rudimentary beginnings, and how each stage of
the ritual process over time is laden with emotions and the means of dealing
with these emotions. Disasters typically involve deaths, and death is always hard
to deal with because it cuts bonds of relationship that have then to be repaired,
and grief turned into commemoration. In our research on disasters, we have
mostly concentrated on events labeled as natural disasters, although this is in
some ways a misnomer, because human actions are always involved as causative
factors (see Stewart and Strathern 2015, 2018). Deaths in warfare are also often
seen as disasters, with the difference that they are in addition seen as acts of
sacrifice or heroism. In commemorative terms, grief is the shared factor on the
part of survivors and the community at large.
Verbal and non-verbal practices come into play in such performances of
commemoration. At the broadest political level, commemorations come to
represent the values of a whole nation, and they are one of the ways in which
nations are realized in embodied terms. A tableau in which survivors of a war
parade come out is combined with remembrance of those who died. A church
service may be held. Dignitaries lay wreaths at shrines to the dead, often at a
cenotaph, a tomb of the unknown soldiers whose bodies were not brought back
from the war zone. Most of the ritual acts are not accompanied by words, but
there is a time when words are added to the actions. Words clarify and focus
what the point of the whole exercise is, to honor and remember the dead and
the suffering of all those involved in the trauma that is the cause of grief. Words
bring about a phase of political consciousness that summates and lifts the non-
verbal actions into the realm of propositions, intentions, and specific references
to events and their place in space-time or history. The words themselves of
course are ritualized in their form, authorized, standardized, with recognizable
affect, intensely condensed and encompassing the widest levels of collective
experience. They are also spoken by persons of the highest level in the social
and ritual hierarchies, thus performatively instantiating the nation in doing so.
Rituals also have a history. This point was borne in on us in April 2015 in
New Zealand, when we were present at the elaborate rituals commemorating the
disastrous deaths of huge numbers of military servicemen from New Zealand
and Australia at the Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey during the First World War. In
recent years in New Zealand, these acts of commemoration have grown in scale
and younger people have been drawn into them at generational removes from
the event itself. The first bond established by this experience was between New
Zealand and Australia, since their soldiers fought together at Gallipoli, and the
New Zealanders in particular were under the direct command of the British
government, whose ministers saw Gallipoli as an occasion to break the Turks,
who were at that time in alliance with the Germans. Resentment against the
British decision to attack at Gallipoli has led over time to seeing the event as a
marker of the creation of a sense of nationality on the part of New Zealanders,
in opposition to the British. The Māori people were also involved, since some
of their kinsfolk were also enlisted and died in battle. The Māori now see the
rituals celebrating the heroism of those who died as validatory markers of their
own indigenous warriorhood traditions. A massive failure in the assault on
Gallipoli and the huge losses of life on both sides of the conflict have led to
New Zealanders now seeing the battle as the site where their sense of national
belonging was forged through shared suffering. From our observations, this
evolution of sentiment has not led to changes in the actual form of the rituals
or in the language of commemoration. However, it has led to pervasive media
commentaries in which the public were informed that this is now the meta-
pragmatic significance of Gallipoli; and, in accordance with this idea, the
popularity of celebrations on Anzac Day has markedly increased. Huge numbers
of people also went to Gallipoli itself for the ceremonies held on the spot there.
As with all rituals, multi-sensorial components are involved in war
commemorations. A ritual fixture comes at the end, when a professional
performer plays on the bugle The Last Post—in effect a farewell to the noble
dead that marks the closure of a phase of ritual activity. No words are spoken in
or around this act, but the music itself, with all its resonances, speaks eloquently
to the sense of sorrow and respect for those who died.
It is worth reiterating here this point about the multi-sensorial character of
ritual performances. Color, sounds, smells, patterns of movement, and fixity, all
combine to produce the aesthetic and emotive effects that the ritual achieves,
and these are the result of the non-verbal parts of the performance. Words
appeal to the ear only, but when the speaker is richly attired or decorated and is
surrounded by others similarly attired or stands in a special building, a whole
panoply of senses is energized. Words, then, translate this sensory experience
into a propositional form or they make explicit a mythological foundation
of the ritual, or they are important in focusing on the asserted efficacy of the
ritual. Clearly, all elements are in symbolic relationship, and yet the words
can operate in different material contexts, for example between different
Christian denominations. Catholic services are replete with material imagery.
Protestant ones rely more on the word itself as the source of experience. At the
end of a service, however, when the minister or priest blesses the congregation
just before they leave the church, the essential illocutionary form of the
pronouncement is the same no matter what the material setting is. (In a variant,
the congregation members present themselves carry out the blessing.) We use
the term “illocutionary” here, although this is an expansion of the narrower
sense of the term, in which the truth-value of the expression is isomorphic with
the expression itself. The famous obvious example is “I name this ship.” In the
minister’s closing words he or she makes a request rather than a statement: “May
the grace of God go with you and be with you.” Although this is a request, it
tends to have an illocutionary or a magical performative effect, as is the case
with all blessings. The speaker adopts, at this liminal moment, a sacred role,
assuring people of the benevolence and protection of the deity as they move
beyond the safety of the church itself into the world of danger outside. In the
ideological variant, the minister may invite the congregation to join together
and bless one another, thus creating a kind of egalitarian “communitas” rather
than a recognition of hierarchical power.
This mention of illocutionary effects leads us back to a major arena of
discussions regarding language and ritual, that is, the question of the power of
words or utterances (see also Chapter 3 in this book). Classic contributors to this
theme have been Stanley Tambiah, Maurice Bloch, and Roy Rappaport. Tambiah
took as his departure point a detailed examination of magical spells recorded by
Bronislaw Malinowski among the Trobrianders of Papua and dealing with magic
for canoes, for beauty and strength, and for garden fertility (Malinowski 1935;
Tambiah 1968). Malinowski himself long ago articulated a theory of meaning
in terms of the context of the situation in which verbal performances occur,
so a linguistic anthropology that proclaims this as a new approach to meaning
would certainly be reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Tambiah, however, was
interested in discerning the specific linguistic characteristics of such spells that
gave them their ritual significance. He found that they showed features which
anthropologists have attributed to ritual acts generally: redundancy, repetition,

condensation of meanings, and the like, often with complex orchestrations
of these values. He was exploring the rhetorical structure of the spells and
approaching an understanding of the logic of ideas on which they were based,
that is, why the Trobrianders would think them to be effective. The import of the
analysis is that what is at work is basically a metaphorical mode of thinking; or,
better, an imagistic mode, in which images are produced that are then treated as
realities. The canoe is depicted as capable of flying across the water, for example.
Relating this point to the minister’s benediction, we can see that the spells are
also a kind of illocutionary statement, or they are projected as such. This is why
they have a feature that we have identified in spells among the Melpa speakers
of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea (see Strathern and Stewart 2010: 58–64).
They are couched as simple locutionary statements; that is, they assert their
reality as already in existence, not as a wish, a prayer, or a command. This, then,
is how spells shortcut their way to a desired fulfillment. It would be interesting to
see if this mechanism, shared by the Melpa and the Trobrianders, is found more
generally. If so, it would indicate that spells tap into iconic imagery and translate
this into linguistic forms which then appear as “metaphors.” (See, for an overall
theoretical view, Mauss 2003, and on metaphor Ortony 1979.)
The general message of Tambiah’s work was that the imputed “magical”
power of words in spells lay in the characteristic forms of the words themselves.
Certainly, this makes sense in terms of what we know of spells generally, since
they are always found to employ special rhythmic, repetitive, and usually archaic
forms of expression. Poetry, song, magic, and power are all conventionally and
experientially interconnected. Tambiah’s analytical contribution was to pinpoint
more precisely the structuring of Trobriand spells, making comparisons with
other cases possible. At one level, we are dealing with form here, at another
with content. Form constrains content, and together they constitute the power
of the whole utterance. The form–content relationship is what Maurice Bloch
discussed in his exposition of the powers of oratory among the Merina people of
Madagascar (Bloch 1975).
Bloch argued that the form of ceremonial oratory was the source of its power
because it made denial, modification, or argument less viable. Narrow stylized
expressions with restricted semantic content, and delivered in a rhythmic
manner, both asserted authority and made it difficult to disagree with the
decisions expressed. Bloch’s original argument has been much discussed and
debated, especially with regard to general questions of formality and informality
(e.g., Irvine 2009). Judith Irvine pointed out that formality can mean different
things. It can mean formality of linguistic structure. It can also refer to the
character of the settings in which language is used. Often, but not always, these
two aspects are combined. In Bloch’s treatment the focus was on linguistic
structures or the mode of delivery of linguistic communications. However,
illocutionary force depends heavily on numbers of circumstantial social factors
being found together in combinations, and this must be true for all illocutionary
acts. This point reveals, as we have already discussed in Chapter 4, that authority
and power reside in words only if those who speak them are authorized to do so
and in doing so to give them illocutionary force.
Here we want to pick out a few observations from this debate that are relevant
to our theme of language and ritual. Bloch’s argument about formal speech
by Malagasy elders was essentially that such speech functioned as a quasi-
illocutionary category, one that would automatically bring into being compliance
with its statements. In this case, however, it becomes very clear that the efficacy of
the words does not depend simply on them being spoken. As with all efficacious
actions, words depend on the perceived power behind them, even if that power
is simply and tautologously defined as the power of tradition itself. It is not the
words only but the authority of the one who speaks them that is illocutionary. As
with magical spells, however, the relevant issue is the matching of the form of
speech and the function attributed to it: a function that is both aesthetic and
cognitive in its application to embodied practice. Speech is often considered in
the abstract as a faculty of “the mind,” but it is actually an embodied practice
involving co-ordination of many body parts for its efficacy: a point more easily
understood when we refer to music and song production.
The power of Merina elders in Madagascar, as studied by Bloch, was
underpinned by a specific cultural ideology about language categories (or a
language ideology and its concomitant meta-pragmatics, to couch this in the
current parlance of contemporary disciplinary terms). As Bloch explains, making
reference also to the work of Elinor Keenan in his edited volume (Keenan 1975),
formal oratory is described as kabary, and is the mark of a respected elder. At
birth, he writes, people are seen as composed of wet and impermanent elements
that are linked to individuality. As they grow older, this wet element is replaced
by a dryness which is associated with ancestrality. So kabary spoken by elders
automatically gains ancestral authority. The embodied aspect of this formula
is powerfully signaled here, and embodiment theory needs to be added to any
linguistic elements in this context, because embodiment theory holds the key
to understanding personhood, which some scholars see as involved in language
ideology. Moreover, kabary also means “blessing,” the granting of power to the
group to reproduce itself and flourish over time. Bloch goes on to note that the
authoritative speech of the ancestors needs to be given in a fixed form, so as
to convey a sense of the ancestors speaking through the voice of the current
speaker (Bloch 1998: 157). The important point here is that the aesthetic view of
the ancestors becomes reembodied by being represented in the body of the elder
who is speaking, and thus is informed by and informs the meaning of the body
itself. (On this theme, see Johnson 2008.)
Another feature of Bloch’s argument was that with formal illocutionary speech
there is a (deliberate) reduction of semantic content. Only very general semantic
content is displayed, and this is done to enhance the authority of the content that
is preserved as the most important part of the overall message. Truth-value is
connected to simplicity and authority. This last proposition, however, is one that
does not need to be applied universally. In the same volume where Bloch made
a pronouncement about linguistic forms of illocutionary statements, one of the
present authors (AJS) compared the Merina oratorical patterns with those from
the Melpa people of Mount Hagen in Papua New Guinea, using the example of
el ik, peacemaking speeches made on occasions of making amends for killings
in warfare by the payment of large amounts of wealth as compensation. The
relevant characteristics of el ik for our purposes here are as follows: the ability
to use el ik is an acquired skill that is highly admired. It is restricted to males,
and it is exercised most powerfully by men who are also established leaders. It
is rhythmic and each line of it ends with the vocables o-o-o or similar endings
of words. The speaker paces up and down, sometimes shouldering an ax or a
spear. The speaker commands, or seeks to command, the attention of a mass of
listeners, who are expected to sit (a sign of a peaceful demeanor—if some stand
up, it may be to express disagreement or instigate violence that can threaten
dissent and physical harm on these occasions). The speaker recites truncated
episodes of history between the groups involved, explaining that they have fought
or been at odds, but that now they want to make peace. The speaker also uses
specialized, “high” forms of expressions, metaphors, and embodied imagery, to
capture the attention of those listeners who understand this kind of elevated
speech. The overall purpose is to mark out the status relations involved, to offer
wealth, and to ask that it be considered sufficient for the purpose. A series of
orators, both senior and junior, take up these meanings, each one expressing
them in their own way but all holding strictly to the el ik form. A few men gain
extra praise for their skill at this art form and its effect on participants. After
the donor side make their speeches, a select few of the recipients make their
response, and the event ends with the recipients taking the wealth items (pigs
and/or money) away (Strathern 1975a; Strathern and Stewart 2000b). Needless
to say, the participants all have a high meta-pragmatic awareness of the import
of these ritualized sequences, which they enact, orchestrate, and energize with
their performances, and the category of el ik encapsulates the linguistic ideology
involved; that is, that this special category of speech action comes into play as
both a marker of and a creator of sociality.
What, if anything, is illocutionary in all this? In Melpa (Hagen) society all
events are contingent. No one can guarantee the outcome of an event. People
may take offense at some aspect of a speech or be unsatisfied with the amount
of wealth given. In that sense, el ik cannot be considered illocutionary in a
narrow sense. It has, however, numerous and intended perlocutionary effects.
The elevated mode of speaking, and the culminating point at which speakers
enter into it, clearly indicates that the intention is to seal the occasion with an
official version of the truth. El ik, therefore, seeks to be illocutionary. We can
either be satisfied with this conclusion, recognizing a conative strand within an
illocutionary phase, or stick to the position that el ik is richly perlocutionary in
its effects.
In either case, it is important to note that the code adopted in el ik is not
simply truncated in semantic terms. Of course, el ik does not go into every detail
of the past. It is concerned to place a restricted semantic form on reality. On the
other hand, it itself contains a great depth of experience and expressions about
the world, and its attraction to participants depends on this aspect as well as on
the displays of wealth. El ik speeches are compelling performances, and they are
expected to be mind-setters for the occasion; but nothing is guaranteed in this
volatile, competitive, and non-hierarchical society with patterns of long-term
achieved leadership by rival “big men,” as they have been dubbed.
Thus, the language used, and the language ideology and meta-pragmatics that
deeply inform it, marches in step with the speakers’ understandings of the issues
of power and leadership that influence how the occasion will pan out. Words
and the statements they create go with the material ritual actions involved, and
this whole complex determines their referentiality and the performativity that
constitutes this as reality. We cannot separate language from its material and
embodied aspects, but nor can we dissolve language into its contexts without
recognizing its special contribution to these contexts themselves.
Words and their meanings are clearly both products of ideology and
producers of it. This is true not only of the categories of analysis, such as
“language ideology” and “meta-pragmatics,” that we deploy as anthropologists
or linguists, but also of our own highly self-aware and competitive uses of these
terms in academic debate, including the question of how best to define the terms
themselves. Naming and labeling and delimiting are instruments of power in
discourse, and they make themselves available for eristic purposes. For example,
in disaster studies, the issue of whether disasters can be described as “natural” or
not has become a lightning rod for political attitudes. To take another context,
“kinship” has for long been both a central topic in anthropology and the site of
endless acrimonious argument about its definition. What is meant by the term
“performative” can also lead to confusion because it can refer either to what the
actors intend or to what the analyst considers to be the result of an action. And the
issue of “referentiality” is another hotbed of dispute. Whereas in non-academic
and popular usage, language may seem to be obviously referential, nowadays
the term may be used dismissively by some practitioners to signal outmoded or
discarded theories, that is, ones they do not like and are trying to obliterate and
replace, rhetorically invoking the latest fashionable and prestigious viewpoint as
they see it. Yet some element of referentiality must be allowed in any reasonable
viewpoint on how language works in context, provided we recognize that what
is referred to is a product of cognition and experience, and therefore meaning
has a phenomenological dimension. Linguists construct their own competing
ideologies about what language is and does in the world. Whether words convey
meanings or not depends on our own “linguistic ideology” about them, for
example, whether we think they encapsulate thought, and how in turn we define
thought, or how we can say we think thoughts without words.
A general conclusion in this chapter is that in ritual processes verbal and non-
verbal actions combine to produce ritual efficacy. The body is also involved in
both kinds of action, for example both in the phases of words and in the bodily
hexis of the speakers, as well as in their clothing and role-marking accoutrements.
It is in the assemblage of all the communicative elements at work that meaning
is located.
The next chapter considers the interrelations of language and ritual
further, with some reference to the work of Roy Rappaport and his ecological
interpretations of ritual along with the emic theme of divination and the search
for “truth,” and reference to studies of shamanic practices.
9
Language and Ritual: Maring and Melpa
The more hierarchical a social context is, the more speech patterns will converge
on the illocutionary. This point converges with some of Roy Rappaport’s work
on ritual and religion as summated in his 1998 book, Ritual and Religion in the
Making of Humanity. In this remarkable book, Rappaport built a theory of ritual
and religion as basic to the construction of humanity. Moreover, in his theory,
human language capacities lie at the heart of the construction of ritual processes.
Language, he points out, enables people to create worlds by the creation of
words and concepts. Reality is thus expanded, and the birth of religion is made
possible. However, along with language comes the possibility of telling lies, and
thus the problem of ascertaining and establishing truth. Ritual processes solve
this problem by establishing truth (e.g., via divination), and cosmology provides
liturgical canons by which sacred truths are established. Ritual thus becomes a
guarantee of truth in social relations, and its elaborate, prescribed forms mark
this out. Rappaport goes on to make a distinction between indexical or self-
referential ritual messages and canonical ones which underlie or guarantee the
veracity of particular performances. Indexical messages are about the state of
being of performers, and Rappaport here cites his well-known exposition of
ritual actions at the periodical kaiko festivals among the Maring Tsembaga group
in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Maring groups traditionally held these
kaiko at longish intervals of time when they were ready to kill pigs in sacrifices
and announce an intention to renew hostilities against neighboring groups in
order to take revenge for killings of their kinsfolk in earlier phases of fighting
brought to a halt by rituals of declaring peace or truce with enemies. Allies of
the group holding the kaiko come to dance and receive pork. Dancing in this
way is a promise to support the hosts in the anticipated next phase of fighting.
The dance is thus a ritual that communicates the truth of an intention to give
very practical political assistance. Apart from highly pragmatic considerations,
such dances are also thought of, we may suggest, as observed by the ancestors,
and if the promise is not kept, misfortunes will follow. Concerns of this kind
feed into what Rappaport identified as the canonical realm. Dancing also takes
the place of verbal statements, it seems; whereas in Mount Hagen speeches
invariably accompany political alignments. The ritual act of dancing itself takes
on the function of an illocutionary statement, and as a form of ritual it is in a
hierarchical relation with less significant ritual acts.
Rappaport’s other main argument, that language does not simply report on
realities, but is instrumental in creating them, is echoed by Thomas Dubois in
his valuable exposition of features of shamanic practice, devoting a chapter to
shamanic verbal acts (Dubois 2009). As he notes at the outset, language has a
creative as well as an expressive capacity: “Language not only records or expresses
a practitioner’s power, it also creates it” (p. 202). Shamans often have to spend a
long period of apprenticeship learning and memorizing narratives that show how
to communicate with spirits. Inspired performance of these narratives, spoken or
sung, could be an important indicator of power. Special archaic vocabulary had to
be learned. Such vocabulary may have been held to assist the shaman in gaining
influence over the spirits. Dubois moves from these reflections to a consideration
of shamanic chants as poems, and with this we enter into a discussion of poetic
sensibility and its connection to power. Drawing on Laurel Kendall’s work with
Korean shamans, he notes the category of muga songs performed in kut séances.
Muga can contain myths of origins of particular shamans, they are inherited within
shamanic families, and now muga are found in dreams. Dubois explicitly links this
category to the category of magical spells in general and notes that muga addressed
to deities had to be delivered in the proper way in order to show the authority
and skill of the practicing shaman: “both the authority and the verbal dexterity
of the shaman” (p. 207). Spells of this kind are often incorporated into epic songs
and poems, in which folk heroes acquire powers to negotiate with the spirit world
by transforming themselves into creatures. Such songs preserved indigenous
knowledge long after Christianity had supplanted shamanism itself (p. 212).
Dubois makes observations here that show the intricate relationships
between different kinds of verbal art: spells, poems, and heroic legends or myths,
revealed in oral traditions or worked into textual versions of these traditions.
Old shamanic motifs and themes are sometimes preserved in the texts of epic
poems or in folklore, with examples from numerous folk traditions. Throughout,
he emphasizes the basic theme that appeared in Stanley Tambiah’s work: the
magical power of words (Tambiah 1968; see also Chapters 3 and 8 in this book).
He concludes his chapter on this topic by writing about the power of verbal skill
to create images that transport the listeners in the same way as the spiritual flights
Language and Ritual: Maring and Melpa 71
the shaman is supposed to make: “Verbal art has the capacity to defy space and
time in a manner as mysterious and inspiring as spiritual flight itself ” (p. 217).
The link between language, ritual, and aesthetic genres also brings us back
to Maurice Bloch’s theory of the relationship between formality of language and
its compelling effects. Formality, of course, can mean different things, as the
critiques of Bloch’s proposition pointed out. In particular, formality may reside
either in the language itself or in the situation of communication, or in both.
In the case of aesthetic genres, such as the Melpa el ik, magical spells, or heroic
epics known as kang rom (Strathern and Stewart 2005a), all of these categories
show formality in language and are found in highly formalized situations.
Following the perspective of Dubois on verbal art, we can add an element to
Bloch’s argument. These kinds of genres of speech are not simply coercive, but
also persuasive, and they appeal to a variety of senses that induce co-ordination
of feelings and acceptance of the messages contained in the flow of speech. The
appeal here, depending on repetitions of sound and movements, visual stimuli
of decorations, and often hand movements or other bodily accompaniments,
is multi-sensorial and embodied. Malagasy elders’ rhetoric may rest largely on
their authority as representatives of the ancestors, but the aesthetic forms they
display can also be found in non-hierarchical contexts where they are brought
into play more freely as devices of persuasion that in turn rely on iconic patterns
of expression encapsulated in ritual sequences.
The argument, therefore, is as follows: we need to unpack the concept of
formality as Bloch and others have deployed it and see exactly how it functions
as a rhetorical device in communicative processes. The kinds of effects achieved
fall somewhere in between the categories of illocution and perlocution. There
is a compulsive, immediate effect, akin to illocution, with a broader fan of
further effects, such as the amelioration of conflict, the production of positive
alliances, and the reinforcement of gendered relationships in public contexts,
that accompany el ik speeches in Hagen.
Comparing the three genres we are considering here—el ik, spells (mön), and
ballads or epics (kang rom)—in terms of their effects, we find the following pattern:
Illocution Perlocution
El ik [Sealing of political alliance] Audience appreciation, prestige

of performer
Mön Healing, prosperity, fertility Reputation of the ritual expert
Kang Rom — Audience appreciation, prestige
of performer
All three genres are categories that only a few people specialize in. The mön
skills are specifically taught or transmitted by a specialist to an apprentice,
sometimes with a payment by the apprentice to the expert. El ik skills are learned
by observation and by trial and error, with commentary and advice by established
speakers. Kang Rom abilities are similarly learned by listening to performers
and imitating them, but not as a matter of training and teaching as for mön.
Performers of both these categories are informally ranked by their listeners
and the ones considered best are picked out and praised, but do not gain any
specific political power. Mön rituals, including their verbal component, are not
performed in public, but are either entirely private, with a patient or customer,
or part of a secret sequence in a spirit ritual as was in the past performed for the
all-powerful Female Spirit (Amb Kor) (Strathern and Stewart 1999b). The verbal
mön in fact is whispered over the patient in the case of a healing. The words are
there but are barely heard even by the patient. As our analytical scheme makes
clear, mön are the only category that are, in their intentions, fully illocutionary
and least perlocutionary. Kang Rom do not have illocutionary functions, but
they are strongly perlocutionary. El ik speeches are thought of as automatically
sealing alliances, but this effect is in actuality contingent. Sometimes orators can
be in the middle of making el ik, when a disturbance takes place and the event
breaks up in confusion. The perceived effects of a mön spell are also, of course,
contingent in practice, but the participants give the ritual an illocutionary force.
The genre (kang rom) that has the most explicit aim of entertaining the listeners
does not have an illocutionary function, but it is strongly perlocutionary in its
emphasis on audience satisfaction or appreciation.
Oral genres of expression represent an interplay between fixity and fluidity
of form. This complicates any analytical attempt to make generalizations about
them. What makes up the content of the Hagen kang rom genre or the Duna
pikono genre may vary between performances, places of performance, and
historical times (Stewart and Strathern 2005b, Strathern and Stewart 2005).
Kang rom generally expound a limited number of themes, corresponding to the
dangers of courtship and marriage involving the exploration of distant areas.
The melodic form of kang rom could be deployed with contemporary content,
but was not so in the instances we collected over many decades, with the very
first recordings made in 1964–1965. Ranges of pikono from different parts of the
Duna area that we have collected over many years also tend to revolve around
a limited set of themes of conflict between humans and cannibal giant beings
and help given to humans by a category of female spirits. However, they too are
porous and can take on features of reference to contemporary life, especially
when junior performers are experimenting with the genre. Whether such
observations make it possible to decide whether either genre is intrinsically
dialogic or monologic or not seems moot, because of the variations we have
noted here. What is perhaps more significant is an appreciation of the great
artistry and skill encapsulated in performances, meaning that the creativity of
such performances may outstrip ways in which we attempt to categorize them.
We give some examples of mön for healing purposes (Strathern and Stewart
2010). The first two are simple spells to achieve physical results. One is to
increase the size of a female pig:
At Ep,
At Ambra,
The hill stands out
Garden soil filled with soft roots
Springs up beneath the foot. (p. 63)
The spell, like almost all mön, draws upon and celebrates the characteristics of
the landscape. Ep and Ambra are the actual sites of hills, the latter projecting
from a swampy base with a hump-like appearance like a large pig (nowadays
covered in commercial plantings of coffee trees that obscure its striking profile),
the former a range of rounded hillslopes. Nearby are areas of fertile soil, where
plants grow well, and the earth is soft underfoot. The idea of the spell is that the
pig should grow up to stand out like these hills and its flesh should be full and
soft like fertile soil.
Another spell is designed to make the litters of a sow grow fast:
The amaranth seedlings multiply and grow.
The cucumber seedlings multiply and grow.
The gourd seedlings multiply and grow.
These are all plants that seed and grow fast in good soil and ripen in a few
weeks or months. The idea is that the piglets should grow as fast as these plants
do. General knowledge of plants and gardens is here drawn on to provide the
impetus for the spell.
Spell images, such as those here cited, show both the intimate connection
between the magical words and the landscape of human experience and
perception and, on the other hand, the creative semiotic connection linking
such perceptions to the growth of pigs.
Other spells engage with cosmology, morality, and illness. A persistent motif
is that if people do not fulfill obligations to sacrifice pigs to their ancestors, or if
they break certain moral rules, the ancestors withdraw their protective power and
allow wild spirits of nature, not related by kinship to humans, to “break through
the fence” and make them sick. The image of the fence here is drawn again from
the context of garden areas for planting rich ensembles of mixed vegetables and
surrounding these with wooden stakes, bound together by plant fibers, to keep
inquisitive pigs from breaking in and rooting for food. In a metathesis of this
image, the spells envisage that wild spirits enter into the lives of people (their
“food gardens”) and destroy their well-being by making them sick (“eating the
food”). Wild spirits can do this only if the dead kin of the living open the way
by allowing the fences of the gardens, that is, their protective powers, to be set
aside. In this interesting transformation of ideas about ancestors, the ancestors
do not themselves directly punish people, but simply withdraw their protection,
allowing intrinsically hostile spirits to ravage the bodies of the living in the
same way as feral pigs break into and ravage forest-edge gardens. The remedy
is universal: sacrifice of pigs to the ancestors, who then renew their protection
and the sick person gets better. In addition to the sacrifice, an expert can cast
spells to help drive away the wild spirit. These spells construct images of the wild
spirit itself and how to drive it away, telling it to go back to stony or scrub-laden
places where it naturally belongs instead of intruding into the space of humans.
The spirit is pictured in spells as using the junctures of river courses to make a
pathway to the sick person, and the expert seeks to banish it back to the more
distant big rivers in valley systems where it belongs. One spell mentions that
a sacrifice of a red and a black pig has already been made, so the spirit has no
reason to stay longer.
Commonly, ancestral spirits are also said directly to punish their living kin
for transgressions. Ien Courtens’s study of the Manes Kaya healing rite in west
Ayfat, Irian Jaya (West Papua), provides an excellent example of the alternation
between material ritual acts and special speech sequences. The main point that
emerges here is consonant with our general exposition. The linguistic and non-
linguistic acts dovetail together as integral parts of the ritual purpose. They go
together, and each sequence has its place in the overall ritual plan. The ritual,
in a case studied by Courtens, was triggered by an illness of a middle-aged man
that had proved resistant to herbal treatment. The sick man loses weight and
has a high fever. At length he remembers that he had done something wrong.
He had lent a sacred cloth belonging to his family to a relative for use in a ritual.
The cloth had been duly returned, but the sick man now recalled that he had
not informed his ancestors about the transaction, as he should have done by
holding a ritual occasion to mark his action. The implication is that these cloths
do not belong only to the living, but are held also in stewardship on behalf of the
ancestral kin as well as the living, and are not supposed to be alienated to others
once they come into the possession of a lineage.
The ill man, Agus Baru, in his late fifties, seeks treatment at a mission hospital,
but after three months he has still not recovered. He decides to ask help from his
sister Maria, who is an indigenous healer and combines Catholic symbols with
messages she receives in dreams from her dead parents. Maria now dreams of
sacred cloths and a dead pig and asks Agus about it. This is the moment when
Agus remembers that he had not kept the ancestors informed about the cloth
he lent out and received back without telling them. Hence, they must perform
a ritual to atone for this mistake which he thinks has prompted the ancestors to
make him ill and prevented biomedical treatment from working to cure him.
They make a site for the healing ritual in their food garden. They construct
two platforms from bamboo pieces (Courtens 2001: 55 ff). In late afternoon,
Maria brings a bag filled with the kain timur cloths and displays these on a
woven mat. Agus arranges the cloths on the mat for the ancestors to observe.
He explains (and this is interesting in terms of ritual speech) that they will have
to speak slowly and clearly to enable the ancestors to hear them. He explains to
the ancestors that they are preparing a feast for them, and Maria brings out a pig
for sacrifice.
Agus confesses publicly to the ancestors that he had done wrong. He assures
them that the cloths are all safe in family hands. He invites them to join in
the feast of pork and sago, and he asks them after this shared meal with their
descendants to return to their mountain home. Tellingly, Agus says to them not
to “eat” him but to eat the pork offered to them instead. He also takes blood from
the nose of the sacrificed pig and rubs it on his chest, as a protective marker of
proof that the sacrifice has been made.
When the pig and other food is butchered and cooked they offer its heart,
liver, and lungs to the ancestors. Agus and Maria and another close relative call
out to the ancestors, naming them one by one, to come and eat and then leave.
After the feast they close up the garden and do not use it for a while, to allow the
ancestors to eat quietly the remainder of food left in the garden for them.
The next morning Agus announces that he is better. His fever lessens, and he
regains his appetite. Soon he is strong and ready to go home.
For our purposes here, it is important to note the synergistic division of labor
between verbal and non-verbal ritual acts. The non-verbal acts are substantive—
making a platform, sacrificing a pig, preparing sago, showing cloths. They
are also emplaced, in the collective food garden. The verbal acts dovetail with
the non-verbal ones, adding a communicative dimension that is vital to the
whole transaction and central to its purpose. These verbal acts are also direct
locutionary and hortative statements, talking to the ancestors who are imputed
to be invisibly present in the garden area which belongs to them as much as to
the living. Land is ancestral, like the kain pusaka, the heirloom cloths. We can
compare these cloths to the sacred stones that are central to the former “nature
spirit” rituals in parts of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
In the Mount Hagen area, these stones were a central ritual focus in ritual
celebrations of the Amb Kor, the Female Spirit, who was thought to produce
the fertility and prosperity of the land (see Stewart and Strathern 2002). Special
stones were identified as houses of the Spirit or as a form of the Spirit herself. The
large-scale collective rituals that were dedicated to receiving a putative “arrival”
of the Spirit in a local clan area had as a central purpose, the establishment of
these stones in a secluded site on the clan land. Clansmen individually found
these stones and put them together in the ritual site. A leader in the ritual was
motivated by having personally found one of these stones on his own land and
having experienced dreams of the Spirit coming to him as a bride. The leader
could not conduct the ritual by himself. Special experts were hired in to teach
the clansman proper procedures and the songs that were to be sung at particular
times to honor the Spirit and to activate her power on behalf of the group. These
experts came from the area where the ritual was said to have originated, to the
south of the central Hagen area. They spoke a different dialect or language from
the central people, but they might be bilingual.
Within the ritual site, which was carefully fenced off and could be entered
only by the participants, four different language contexts operated:
1. The ritual expert (or experts) instructs the participants to speak of
objects and actions while in the ritual site in a special vocabulary, thus marking
everything off from the outside world. For example, the sacred stones are
referred to not as stones (ku in the Melpa language) but as the bones of the spirit
(kor ombil). Both stones and bones are emblematic of strength and continuity.
By talking of the stones as bones, however, the expert signals the concept that
the stones are repositories of life and enduring fertility. This kind of ritualized
usage corresponds to Rappaport’s dictum that language does not simply describe
the world, but creates it. If this is so, ritual contexts highlight this potentiality
most clearly. The stones are volcanic stones, heavy, dark, and rounded, found in
fields or rivers. In the ritual, they become the Spirit and the experts control the
linguistic shifts that mark this fact.
2. The expert also instructs the participants on all the correct ritual procedures
within the site. These involve actions, such as bringing in planks, marking the
numbers of pigs each man will sacrifice in the enclosure, preparing the earth
ovens, crawling into the ritual houses which they have specially constructed to
showcase the stones, ritually lighting fires in the cooking pits, paying for and
accepting the ritual medicines which the expert gives them to protect their
bodies against female powers, decorating for their final dance, practicing the
dance, and finally streaming out into the public arena in a dramatic display. Each
ritual act has to be performed in concert by sets of two men, one representing
the “men’s side” and the other the “women’s side” in the whole performance. The
ritual as a whole displays in a palpable, embodied way the principles of pairing,
collaboration, and alliance through marriage that underpin the society at large.
So it is the experts who direct the whole performance, piece by piece, using both
the special vocabulary and truncated orders accompanied by hand gestures.
3. The expert also performs some spells at crucial stages of the ritual. One
such is when the planks of firewood are brought in. The expert recites all the
different kinds of hardwoods that are brought in and the varieties of pigs to be
killed. The aim is to make the oven cooking rich and productive of “grease” to
enhance the fertility of the earth.
4. Finally, the expert trains the participants to join in a celebratory song
from within the site, lifting up their voices in praise and for the achievement of
readying everything for the final dance out of the enclosure. This concerted song
performance is classified as a mön, just like the solo performance by the expert
(3, above).
Performances of this kind could give opportunities to particular experts to
develop personal repertoires of knowledge. There were rivalries between experts
and each would have special mön or magical incantations that they could make.
One such expert was Ambra, of the Ulka group in the Nebilyer Valley south of
Mount Hagen town. In 1965 Ambra recited an example of a very dramatic mön
that he had chanted in connection with the ritual of lighting the fires in the
enclosure to initiate the earth-oven cooking of pork. (Incidentally, in the 1960s
these fires continued to be lit by friction from fire sticks instead of matches
which by then were readily available.)
Ambra’s mön gave a vivid picture of the pathways by which the Amb Kor
ritual had come from the south. His mön called out to pairs of mountains and
rivers along which the fires had been lit, at last reaching Ambra’s own clan area.
The basic principle of the importance of origins of power is exemplified in mön
of this kind, which relates the sacred pathways along the landscape that are the
vectors of ritual precedence. The ritual experts in turn were the vectors through
which this power of precedence was sung into being in the consciousness of
the participants. Ambra was acting here like an Australian Aboriginal ritual
specialist, singing the ancestral pathways of the Dreamtime.
In conclusion, in this chapter we have explored some of the characteristics
of language used in ritual practices, drawing our examples primarily from our
own field experience in Papua New Guinea. The features that stand out from
this exposition are (1) that ritual language mirrors the performative structure of
ritual acts in general; (2) that language used in ritual approaches illocutionary
significance, or at least has strong perlocutionary effects; (3) that linguistic
and non-linguistic acts in ritual sequences are processually linked; and (4) that
language in ritual contexts is instrumental not just in representing realities but
also in creating them. (For further comparison, see Csordas 1990.)
As a coda to this chapter, we want to note that we have avoided here the
false dichotomy between nature and culture as an organizing device, as we have
also avoided too much of a dichotomy between language and culture, following
the observations of Maurice Bloch on the cognitive challenge to anthropology
(Bloch 2012). Nature and culture are not opposed, they work together, often
united in ritual practices, such as we have been examining here.
Ritual practices are also often vehicles of the creation and exercise of power
in social life, so in the next chapter we examine topics in ways in which language
and power are interrelated.
10
Language and Power
Language use is always closely related to the exercise of power, whether

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

constitutes “the nation” in discussions about national identities. “The human”
and “the nation” may be symbolically equated, especially in contexts where there
is an ideological drive to set up hard boundaries between those who “belong”
and those who do not. Such a drive increases in intensity when there are fears of
terrorism, and religion is brought in as a putative factor in escalating violence.
Media are important here in the performative constitution of images implying
power and identity. We have found that a perfect potential site for this kind
of process by means of assigning degrees of affiliation and of exclusion is the
construction of categories in websites for academic departments in universities.
It may appear that there is a large conceptual difference between an apparently
innocuous context of defining who is who on an academic website and the
processes of inclusion and exclusion that go with violent political conflict. Our
point, however, is that pain and suffering can be inflicted in any social context
where identities are assigned to people. Two examples will suffice to illustrate
this argument. In a website for a department there may be an issue of whether
a subdiscipline should be recognized as a separate category or not. Resources,
prestige, courses, and student numbers depend on this matter. Analogously,
whether a particular person is given a faculty status or not determines many
likely structural outcomes of privilege, voting rights, and access to applying for
grants. A Webmaster person can exercise considerable control, to the severe
detriment of the individuals thus discriminated against. Websites can therefore
be sites for the exercise of discursive power, set into a context that appears
harmless, but in fact is committing categorical violence under cover of apparent
“objectivity” or “neutrality.” (On instituted meanings, see Shore 1996 for a
powerful exposition.)
A further important arena of study is the question of how language is used
in conflict situations, and how it can become a source either of mediating
and transcending conflict or of exacerbating it (partly discussed already in
Chapter 4). The category of “dangerous words” was made famous by Don
Brenneis (Brenneis and Myers 1991), pointing to Pacific Island practices of
using language to express hierarchy, consensus-seeking conduct, and ways of
avoiding words that are so harsh that they cannot be taken back or apologized
for. Another mechanism of softening conflict, through the use of concealed
speech or “veiled speech,” belongs to the traditions of Mount Hagen in Papua
New Guinea ( Strathern and Stewart 2000b; Strathern 1975a). Hagen practices
may in turn be usefully compared here with Hawaiian ones described by Boggs
and Chun (1990). In both cases, leadership is an essential component, but it is
Language and Power 81
exercised differently. In Hagen, traditional society was relatively egalitarian, at

least among men, and persuasion, backed up by offers of compensation, was the
only means of settling a conflict without violence. In Hawaii, leaders were chiefs,
seen as imbued with hereditary power or mana and protected by tapu rules
ensuring respect was paid to them. Their special status as mediators in disputes
was thus strongly buttressed by their hereditary rank. Nevertheless, important
similarities emerge. In both cases, settlement depended on full discussion and
on avoidance of overt insult or aggression that could inflame anger or induce
shame, and leaders guided the talk with this aim in mind (Strathern 1975b). Such
talk was simply called ik (speech) in Hagen. The Hawaiian term is ho’oponopono,
where pono, reduplicated for emphasis, refers to the ritual site where such talk
was enacted. A special feature of dispute talk in Hagen was (and still is) the
deployment of “concealed talk” (ik ek), practiced by leaders to move people’s
feelings toward settlement of a dispute through subtle metaphorical references
to history and present-day interrelations. Another category is el ik, “arrow talk,”
which elaborates ceremonial oratory clinching a peacemaking ritual exchange of
wealth as compensation for killings between groups (see Strathern and Stewart
1999c, 2000b, 2011b for full accounts of these practices).
Another category of speech acts that fits in here is the category of gossip and
rumor. We have explored this in an earlier publication (Stewart and Strathern
2004, compare also Besnier 2009). One main argument in that book was that
rumor and gossip are major informal means whereby power can be exercised
outside of formal or hierarchical contexts. Innuendo and slurs can play on
people’s fears and suspicions of one another, especially where mystical ideas of
magical aggression and hate or jealousy are in play, as in the case of communities
in Papua New Guinea where ideas of witchcraft and sorcery are strong. One
earlier theory of gossip emphasized its functions in relation to strengthening
in-group solidarity, but the corollary of this is that by the same token it must
produce hostility toward outsiders, and this works more easily if these outsiders
cannot refute the rumor because they do not even know that it is being initiated
until it has reached the status of an entrenched idea or they are confronted with a
physical threat emanating from it. Harmful gossip can also be used as a weapon
among equals vying for power in a political arena. To this category belongs the
phenomenon of “fake news,” which has achieved media prominence in recent
years, with endless recriminations and fact-finding checks instituted to negate
it. Fake news is a kind of literate version of malicious gossip in the oral sphere,
and it is harder to deal with because it is spread so widely in a literate frame that
suggests its authenticity. A literate source may appear authentic merely because it
is in a literate form, and this itself is a result of a cultural bias which is built in, for
example, in legal procedures, that only literate forms and documents have any
validity. A context in which gossip has reappeared in contemporary contexts in
Scotland is the use of postings on local Facebook pages that are avidly scanned on
an everyday basis and reenter the oral domain when people meet and share their
reactions to postings, positive or negative depending on the contents and intents
of the posting. Facebook can include negative postings about fellow-villagers as
well as neutral weather forecasts or news of bad weather or announcements of
upcoming events, such as church services. Unpopular persons can be criticized,
and in a manner reminiscent of the functions of gossip against putative witches
in the past, the criticism may attempt to uphold customs and to alert villagers to
potential conflicts.
The chief conclusions from our work on rumor and gossip were, then, that
they are often instrumental in generating conflict, and they are difficult to refute
and can therefore lead to serious conflict and violence. In relation to witchcraft
and sorcery accusations, we found that a processual approach, tracing the
genesis of accusations in small events and suggestions escalating over time by
iteration and magnification, could explain effectively how these accusations can
arise, and once they enter into a formal court system based on cosmological
ideas they can translate into severe punishments meted out on those accused
because of religious constructs of good and evil.
Ethnography, nevertheless, reveals to us that such extreme results of gossip
are not universal. One of the bestknown and foundational studies of witchcraft
was made by the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard among the Azande
people of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (as it then was) (Evans-Pritchard 1937).
Accusations of forms of witchcraft were a common occurrence when he was
doing his fieldwork there, and there was a mechanism for handling them. A
person who wanted to find out who had caused some trouble or sickness for
them could take a number of chickens into a secluded spot and administer to
them in turn a portion of benge, a type of poison, asking each one a question
about whose witchcraft was harming them. This chicken oracle would pinpoint
the source of the witchcraft by dying when the supposed responsible person’s
name was put to it. Then the consulter could take a wing of the chicken that
had died and present it to the person thus identified, asking them to blow out
water on the wing and so to cool their witchcraft. The accused person could
always say that they were unaware that they had any witchcraft in them, but they
were happy to neutralize it in the way requested, and so the matter would rest.
People acknowledged that this type of oracle could be unreliable, leaving room
for repeat consultations, or for recourse to another oracle belonging to the local
chief, which was said to be more powerful and reliable.
The earlier theories about gossip and its functions were not entirely wrong.
Gossiping can have positive and innocuous results. In local communities in
Scotland, and probably elsewhere also, certain social arenas are ones in which
gossiping takes place, and these function as places of information exchange like a
kind of local news service, supplementing or contradicting media sources, such
as radio, television, or Facebook. Places where such information exchange occurs
include the post office, the bank, or the hairdresser shop. When a community
loses such amenities through closures, there is understandable annoyance, both
at the loss of services and at the curtailment of sociality expressed in daily flows
of information via gossip.
Power in social life can of course be expressed, created, renewed, undermined,
or transformed in many different ways, either verbally or otherwise, for example
in material forms of architecture or objects, through sensory experience (e.g.,
Howes and Classen 2014), and through dance, song, or oratory, constituting
or concomitant with sensory experience in ritualized contexts. Such contexts
are very prominent in Pacific Island societies, and form focal aspects of culture,
aesthetics, performance, and politics in these societies (see, among numerous
examples, Ingjerd Hoëm 1995, on the Tokelau people and their collective
competitive dance performances known as fatele). In such Pacific Island contexts,
songs are politics, and this is true of the songs sung on occasions of moka
exchange in Mount Hagen when competitive claims to status and achievement
are made by displays of wealth in pigs given to exchange partners. The highly
elaborate genre of speeches known as el ik (“arrow talk”) exemplifies this order
of performance, as also do compensation speeches (tamba haka) among the
Duna people of Hela Province, Papua New Guinea (Stewart and Strathern 2000;
Strathern and Stewart 2000b, 2011b).
Other contexts also notably reveal themselves as generative of power, indeed
as Foucault pointed out in his theoretical construction of discourse, power can
be diffused through the networks that constitute it rather than being exclusively
centered on one actor or institution. Kinship groups exercise power over persons
who belong to them by various boundary rules in relation to resources, and one
of the traditional arenas of power is in the naming system geared in with the
kin relationships themselves. This relationship between kin ties and personal
naming practices is obscured by innovations in naming and a loss of significance
in intergenerational ties. However, in some Scottish families’ customs continuity
can be expressed by naming children after their grandparents. The grandparental
relationship is expected to be warm and indulgent, and there is a kind of classic

identification between grandparent and grandchild. Giving the grandchild the
grandparent’s name is a way of expressing all of this. Andrew Strathern’s first
name is derived from his maternal grandfather, Andrew Sharp, and his mother’s
sister’s son Andrew Fergusson and his mother’s brother’s son Andrew Sharp
were also named after the same grandfather, thus constituting a kind of informal
network of commemoration for the shared ancestor. The name has further
resonances also. It is the name of Scotland’s patron saint, St. Andrew. From its
Greek etymology, the name originally means “brave, manly.” These are all latent
resources that are available to be drawn upon in giving meaning to the name.
Surnames also have their provenance and meaning. Strathern, for example, is a
version of Strathearn, which is a locality name referring to an area in which the
“Earn” river widens out in a “Strath” in Perthshire, Scotland, thus “Strath-Earn.”
“Earn” is also a version of “Erin,” which refers back to Celtic origins in Ireland.
The name as a whole, therefore, has complex and deep identity associations with
Scotland.
An interesting case study on naming comes from the fieldwork of Caroline
Humphrey on Mongolia, including Inner Mongolia, which is an autonomous
region of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) (Humphrey 2006). Humphrey
explains at the outset that every person has a single name, carrying a message
about the desired character for the person in their life course, and bestowed on
them by a senior kinsperson, nowadays of the grandparental generation. The
name is intended to be a unique identifier, but in practice complications emerge
during the life cycle. If a child becomes sick the mother in particular is alarmed
and she may institute a consultation with a local shaman in order to change the
name of the child and so hide it from a hostile spirit that might be causing the
sickness. Very young children are those who are most vulnerable to such spirit
attacks, and indeed such children are often deliberately not given any name at
all for fear of drawing unfavorable spirit attention. Once the name is given, it is
supposed to be like the “destiny”(zayaa) of its bearer, but if the character or fate
does not seem to fit the person, it can also be changed. The name a person has
should always be respected, because the name and the person are equated. A
variant of this rule relates to the etgeed “strange” or “side” name given to small
children, such as “Terbish,” “not that one,” in order to fool the spirits. When
the child’s hair is first cut, it will be given a genuine name. In address, names
in practice are only used toward juniors, and senior persons are spoken to with
kinship terms, largely because it is tabooed to address them by name in any
case. Respect for names therefore seems mainly to consist in avoiding their
use, a rule that falls most heavily on daughters-in-law in relation to the family
they are married into. Respect, for a daughter-in-law, therefore carries a heavy
gendered load. Mongolian language ideology attributes great power to language,
and therefore linguistic practices are fraught with implications for events in the
world. Hence also, then, the meaning of names in relation to the life courses of
individuals.
The rule that a person has only one personal name and that this name is
supposed to be unique to the individual who has it makes these aspects of
Mongolian practices rather unusual, but other aspects carry familiar resonances,
for example, the avoidance of using the personal names of seniors, the prevalence
of nicknames, and the importance of affinal name avoidances. Affinal avoidances
are very commonly found around the world, notably in traditional practices of
Australian indigenous people, and especially falling on a son-in-law in regard
to his mother-in-law, whom he must rigorously avoid as a mark of respect and
indebtedness. In Mount Hagen, in Papua New Guinea, rules of avoidance are
not so severe, but name taboos are observed. The term for such taboos is mbi
mawa ndoromen. Not only must the mother-in-law’s name not be used, but
also, if her name is also the name of some real entity, the son-in-law has to find
another term for that entity in his regular usage. For example, if the mother-in-
law’s name is Kng or Kung, “pig” (a common enough name for a female), the
son-in-law must use the term Kanga whenever he refers to a pig. Requirements
of this kind lead to a whole series of alternate terms in the language known as
mbi rukrung, “inside names,” which affines use in order to fulfill rules of respect
incumbent on them. These inside names may also be used between friends as
nicknames, and there is actually a penchant for using these in preference for
the use of kin terms. Finally, here, there is a whole range of further usages that
give people the opportunity to establish a special relationship of friendship or
solidarity by sharing a piece of food, after which they engage in a ritual of name
change. First, they say “tikwakaka,” and then each declares that they are the other,
they exchange identities, and after that they must not use each other’s names but
address each other using the name of the food they have shared. If, for example,
they have shared a piece of pork, they call each other “Kngnui,” “pork eater.”
The food is usually a special one, and the usage reflects the cultural importance
of food sharing and its capacity for creating dyadic social relationships as an
act of choice in addition to the institutional bonds of kinship. The practice is
called nuip. Someone can refer to their partner in this relationship as nanga
nuip. The food name is obligatory and permanent. If either partner forgets and
fails to use it, they are supposed to pay a small fine for this infringement of
courtesy. Nuip ties express and create relations of cultural intimacy, but once
created these take on aspects of formality and obligation. Informality and
choice become formalized into formality and constraint. An initial intention
becomes transformed into a consequence, and this is an interesting aspect of
ideas of personhood. The Lutheran missionary Hermann Strauss, who learned
the Hagen language very well, contributed to this field of linguistic creativity
when he invented new names for persons baptized in the church by adapting
their existing names and giving them a semantic twist, for example, by changing
the name Kuri, meaning “white bird of paradise,” to Kuriti, meaning “one who
speaks of the truth” (of the Bible).
Alessandro Duranti (2015), who has carried out extensive fieldwork in Samoa,
has noted a tendency there for people to avoid enquiry or speculation regarding
the state of mind or intentions of individuals, and to concentrate instead on the
consequences of actions. We can say the same for the Hagen area in Papua New
Guinea. Intentions do not modify consequences, and consequences are what that
has to be dealt with in cases of error or wrongdoing. Investigators are concerned
with facts that are admitted or established by the actors, and truth thus becomes
what is established by communication. People accused of something may deny
it (namb roromen) and efforts are made to find out the truth, but such efforts
do not run through finding out about intentions. This is why court cases in the
introduced state-based legal system that rely on attempts to find out the state of
mind of an accused person (depending on the idea of mens rea or guilty mind)
are misconceived, based on a different concept of power and responsibility.
In considering how power and language are related it is crucial therefore to
understand ideas of personhood and also language ideology, or what language
actually does or is said to do.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that for Hageners the mind or
its state of being is unimportant. As we have earlier discussed in this book,
mind (noman) is an important guiding concept in relation to choices of action,
responsibility, health, and sickness. If the mind becomes filled with anger,
sickness will result. In turn, evidence of the presence of anger is shown by
its results in the actions of people, and by their bodily states. Noman, which
includes a presumption of intentions, is therefore a crucial component of the
moral human being. At the same time, there is a kind of fail-safe clause in the
system of interpretation: it is considered very difficult to know what actually
happens in people’s minds, and so concentration on actions is a necessary
recourse in deciding methods of dealing with disruption in social relations.
Thus, the Hagen system works on principles like those of the Samoans, but with a
different modality of concepts regarding the mind and the emotional wellsprings
of action. We may relate this difference to a difference in social structure. The
strongly hierarchical structure of Samoan society leaves all important talk in the
hands of the chiefly classes of people, who therefore handle disputes through
the exercise of their hereditary powers and do not need to consider individual
states of mind. Hagen society is more egalitarian, and ideas about people’s states
of mind become important in managing social relations, especially in the arena
of gender relations. Women are significant actors in exchange relations between
groups, and if they become angry unfavorable results are likely to ensue, so
that discovering anger is a crucial part of social relationships, and hence in the
maintenance or alteration of power relations expressed through verbal reference
to anger (popokl in the Melpa language of Hagen). Gender in general is always a
significant factor in power relations and gendered language is one medium for
the exercise of power. There is gender inequality in Hagen, but it is tempered
by the concept of anger and the need to avert sickness stemming from anger, so
here the language itself provides a kind of regulation of the effects of inequality.
The issue of power in language is exemplified in a heightened way in the
context of minority languages and their positionality in relation to oral and
literate contexts, so we turn finally to this topic, on which we have carried out
research in the UK (with emphasis on Scotland and Ireland) and the Pacific
Islands (with emphasis on Papua New Guinea).
88
11
Language, Literacy, and Change:

Scots and Tok Pisin
Languages are not static. Like other social phenomena, they change over time,
slowly, swiftly, or with punctuated leaps.
One of the biggest arenas in language change comes historically from the
emergence of literacy. Literacy itself can take many different forms, with different
implications for processes of labeling, power relations, language ideology, and
many other topics that have been broached in this book. An extensive critical
literature has emerged since the 1960s on this theme. The whole question of
translation has developed in literate contexts, for example, when the Christian
Bible is translated into languages that have existed previously only in oral form
(Duranti 2015, Handman 2014). Handman also deals in her work with conflicts
among denominations about the translation of particular concepts.
This chapter looks at some processes of change, partly to frame questions to
do with the impacts of different forms of literacy on language and culture, but
also to do with the development of lingua franca and minority language forms
that emerge in circumstances of change and are influenced by the juxtaposition
of literate and oral modes of expression. (See also, in this context, Goody 2010.)
Examples will be drawn from the history of the emergence of the Scots tongue
as distinct from English, and materials on the emergence of small special hybrid
language forms in the Pacific, with emphasis on the development of Tok Pisin
(aka pidgin English) since early colonial times in Papua New Guinea.
Many debates on language and culture issues have a long history, such as the
issue of literacy and its effects on language, cognition, and social relations, and
in general the use of language as an expression of power and the development
of hybrid vernacular forms. Cultural anthropology further concerns itself with
the broad sociocultural production of meanings in contexts of communication.
Within this broad field human creativity has been at work in a number of
domains. For example, there is the domain of code-switching phenomena and
their dynamics; with the conscious use of dialect forms in poetry and other
forms of creative writing; and with how aesthetic forms feed into the politics of
identities, especially minority identities as enclaves within larger social contexts,
such as minority languages in Europe (e.g., Catalonian, Gaelic, Lowland Scots,
Scots Doric, Ulster-Scots); and popular or folk language forms by contrast with
“educated” or literate forms, for example, Nynorsk and Bokmål in Norway, or
Dhimotiki versus Katharevousa forms of language in Greece before the 1990s.
Political issues are deeply involved in the histories of all these forms, as we have
ourselves experienced in work over the decades in the Republic of Ireland,
Northern Ireland, and Scotland.
It is vitally important to realize that matters of this kind form a site of
intense feelings of identity within interpersonal relations. During and after the
Referendum on Independence held in Scotland in 2014, issues of voice and
dialect came to the fore in step with a growing sense of polarization between
the English and Scottish identities. At the close of the events we heard that some
people declared that they could not bear to even listen to the BBC programs
spoken with English accents because these suggested an aura of partisan attitudes
and assumptions that had become evident in feelings carried over from the
aftermaths of history and were salient during the impassioned debates on both
sides of the border between England and Scotland. Such polarizations also take
place in wider contexts. When the Olympic Games were held in Brazil in 2016
there were complaints that BBC commentators concentrated unduly on English
athletes rather than Scottish ones, a perception that was undoubtedly colored by
the aftermaths of the events of 2014. Arguments of this kind wax and wane in
step with changing political events. In the World Cup soccer championship in
July 2018 antagonism between Scottish and English politicians, rooted in conflict
over the “Brexit” referendum vote to leave the European Union, spilled over into
a slogan “anyone but England.” Much earlier, when numbers of politicians with
Scottish accents and turns of expression increased in the UK London-based
Westminster Parliament, there had been a complaint about the rolled Scottish
“r” sounds, marking a difference from English accents. The salience of the
pronunciation of “r” is only one marker of a whole series of identity-making
language usages that have recently been studied for Scotland in a comprehensive
volume edited by Robert Lawson (2014). The resonance of language manifests
itself immediately when a person begins to speak with others in a way and to an
extent that is greater than when that person writes or reads a text, since the text
is usually in a standardized form inculcated in contexts of schooling and shared
widely across a nation or internationally. Spoken language, however, is learned
Language, Literacy, Change: Scots and Tok Pisin 91
in a holistic imitative way and conveys senses of identities in a rich and vivid
modality that may also comprise a number of levels corresponding to stages in
the speaker’s life experience. Speech, therefore, is a part of embodiment, that
is, the ways in which being in the world is directly communicated by bodily
means to others. Speech is also, by the same token, a part of the ecological
functioning of the person in social relations with others, and all its nuances of
tone, accompanying visual appearance, and kinetic gestures, add to the total
embodied effect that it has. Literate communication may attempt to replicate
the effects of speech by descriptive means and by writing in dialogue as the
nearest thing to embodied speech or by describing how a speaker looks or their
clothing and comportment. Representations of speech therefore enliven texts
with the feeling of the oral context that they stem from, and this is why segments
of speech are captured and brought into a literate frame.
These observations apply a fortiori to the situation regarding vernacular
and variant language forms enclaved within a culture that has extensive literate
traditions. Such traditions also encompass forms derivative from the oral
context, refashioning them or making them known in a wider context, so a
symbiotic relationship may emerge between oral and literate domains. For
example, a poem or essay may draw on dialect forms and preserve these as a
part of a wider reservoir of usages, contributing potentially to the continuity of
the oral traditions themselves. In Papua New Guinea in the 1980s, young adults
who had received formal levels of secondary and tertiary education were fond of
switching effortlessly between English and Tok Pisin, with occasional snatches
of their indigenous vernacular forms where these were mutually understood,
signifying a range of identities consciously brought into play, from the “modern”
to the “traditional.” Such an interplay between the oral and the literate domains of
language occurs only in societies with developed literacy and constant switches of
language from oral to literate contexts and vice versa. Multi-linguality or “multi-
dialectality” go with code-switching and playacting as ways of enacting different
identities belonging to or ascribed to particular persons. The human ability to
accurately reproduce sounds and attach meanings to these that they can share
in a communicative field entails the possibility of using more than one code to
achieve this. Local ways of speaking can be exclusive to local levels, or extended
situationally, with other ways of speaking kicking in at further levels, and at the
most formal or impersonal levels align with standard written usage. Inculcation
through schooling further influences linguistic choices. Pronunciation, spelling,
grammar, and vocabulary are all involved along a cline of differences. Teachers
in schools proverbially oppose the use of local forms of expression, and thus they
influence the transmission of knowledge and ability. Generalized schooling is

the enemy of linguistic diversity. A well-known witty song expresses this point,
while subverting the official viewpoint presented. This popular song is in Scots
language, telling a boy who is a pupil in a school to listen to the teacher and
not to say “dinnae” (“dinnae say ‘dinnae’”) (“Dinnae” is Scots for “Do not.”).
In successive lines, the song repeats this self-negating strategy, undermining
the alien language teaching instructions with the “cultural intimacy” of the
vernacular. When the boy begins to use the corrected forms of vocabulary at
home, he speaks to his father about a “mouse,” as the teacher has taught him to
say, but his father contradicts this and says it is not a “mouse,” because “Thon’s a
moose, ye daft wee gowk” (“that’s a ‘moose’, you silly little fool”). The whole song
is structured successively around this same point, meanwhile introducing the
listener to pieces of Scots vocabulary. The song perfectly expresses the tension
between vernacular and school English, the oral and the literate traditions, and
yet at the same time it is itself making its point in a rhyming literate form.
The song highlights a classic form of conflict between home culture and
school culture. We have been given many anecdotes in both Ireland and
Scotland of times when a teacher would use physical punishment to deter
students from speaking their native vernacular, such as Scots or Ulster-Scots
(the version of Scots developed by settlers in Ulster in northern parts of Ireland
from the seventeenth century onward) instead of English. This kind of problem
can be mediated only when political circumstances favor the encouragement
rather than oppression of local identities, and when such identities are not seen
as threatening to those in power. One of our interlocutors in County Donegal,
a part of Ulster, commented that it was ironic how the Ulster-Scots language
had been beaten out of him when he was a boy, whereas now there was a move
to beat it back in by carrying out policies backed by peace and reconciliation
committees sponsored by the European Union, in order to overcome sectarian
conflict between Catholics and Protestants, partly coinciding with the separate
traditions of Irish Gaelic speakers and speakers of Ulster-Scots. These policies
decreed that there should be equal parity of esteem between the Irish language
and the Scots language. Since English was accepted as the dominant hegemonic
language, these policies did not affect it or address any aspect of its functions
or roles. Similar processes took place in Scotland itself, although without such
a strongly politicized context and with a different constellation of relations
between Scots language and Scots Gaelic. Gaelic in Scotland is a nationally
recognized minority language with a dwindling base of everyday speakers but
a huge heritage in song and storytelling. Its heartlands are in the Western Isles.
Scots belongs to all parts of Scotland, but predominantly to the mainland and
especially to the Lowlands, broadly defined, by contrast with the Highlands,
hence one literary designation of it is “Lallans.” The Aberdeenshire variant
is often referred to as the “Doric,” this appellation derived from an implicit
parallel with dialects of ancient Greek, in which Doric, spoken in Sparta in the
Peloponnese, contrasts with Attic, spoken in Athens and surrounding areas. All
variants of Scots are still very much alive in popular contexts of use, and they are
distinctive enough to be identified as markers of regional or local identity. To
illustrate the point, as we write this we have just returned from a visit to a local
show in Ayrshire, Scotland, where old kinds of tractors were on display, and
one farmer had brought in a rare old Allis-Chalmers tractor in which we were
interested. We asked him how old it was, and as he began to reply we quickly
realized that he was from the Aberdeen area, far to the north of Ayrshire, and
was using the distinctive vowel sounds of his home dialect, while all around
Ayrshire vowels and turns of phrase filled the air. The tractor dated from 1938,
he said, which placed it among the early imports from Canada, where this type
of tractor was manufactured. The tractor owner’s words and attitudes sprang
vividly to life as he used his own dialect and described how the tractor had been
spray-painted to restore it to its original bright orange color, and they only had
to find a new steering wheel for it to make it usable.
The writer and broadcaster Billy Kay, who comes from a place called Newmilns
in Ayrshire, has provided an account of how the Scots language originated and
developed over time. Kay is an enthusiast who has done much to raise the
consciousness of his readers concerning the historical depth and complexity of
the traditions of Scots language usages, and he often breaks out into pieces of the
vernacular in the middle of his text written in standard English. He introduces
code-switching of this kind as a deliberate device to alert the reader to the
interchangeability of Scots and English as modalities of expression, while also
accentuating their difference. He also does so to make the point that Scots is
for him what it is in the title of his book, The Mither [mother] Tongue (2006),
so that he thinks first in Scots and then translates this into English. Thus, he is
bilingual as a native speaker of Scots and a speaker of English, no doubt through
schooling. It should also be noted here that even when the Scots is transmuted
into English and its written form becomes standardized, if Billy Kay himself or
any other speaker of Scots were to read it aloud it would become again a marker
of Scots identity merely from the pronunciation of vowels and consonants in
the Scottish manner. The vernacular is a robust medium that can be registered
in levels of modalities, ranging from Scottish English to “braid [broad] Scots,”
or, even more distinctly, the “Scots leid.” As soon as it morphs away from
standard English vocabulary, the signals of difference multiply, first perhaps
by introducing words that have become commonly shared, such as “wee” or
“bonny,” and later with more restricted dialect words, such as “shilpit” [“puny”]
or “trauchle” [“muddle”] or “moger” [“mess”] that require specific knowledge or
use of a dictionary to grasp. Literary revivals of Scots have also at times sought
to bring back old usages that have gone out of common use and reestablish them
as “thick” forms of vernacular entextualizing these in a contemporary textual
context. The well-known work of Hugh MacDiarmid exemplifies this trend in
addition to a rich panoply of devices dignifying literary Scots as a “high” form
of expression. His lengthy poem The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (Kay 2006:
145) embodies an ambitious aim to recreate a literary Scots out of many sources,
and exhibits great artistry and depth of knowledge in doing so, but perhaps it
is useful to observe that he is drawing on both literary sources and the great
reservoir of oral usages and their literate encompassment in dictionaries and
other written works, such as in the eighteenth century poems by Robert Burns
and his contemporaries in order to achieve his aims.
MacDiarmid sought to create an authentic Scots form in his work, expressing
this aim, as Kay notes, “tae be yersel’s and tae mak’ that worth bein” (Kay, p. 36)
[to be yourselves, and to make that worth being], and he goes on in the next
line to remark that there is no task harder than this to achieve. This, no
doubt, in the context would be because of the overwhelming dominance of
the English language. The Scots language, however, and its historical settings
provide a powerful “intertextual” set of sources for MacDiarmid’s enterprise.
Within language studies in general Richard Bauman has developed the concept
of intertextuality or the relationship of one text to another (Bauman 2004: 5),
stressing also that such relationships constitute the creation of a performance
or display of ability. Intertextuality is related to the concept of entextualization,
or how texts are created out of experience and other texts (on which, see
Silverstein and Urban eds. 1996). MacDiarmid’s work demonstrates this kind
of relationship to a high degree but in addition it is important to recognize the
continuing input of oral traditions and usages, so that we can acknowledge
“inter-orality” as well as “intertextuality,” unifying the arena that Jack Goody
called the “lecto-oral domain.” We think that this is important because the future
of Scots depends on its ongoing everyday oral presence as well as the recognition
and genius of its literary corpus. We can testify to that oral presence in the streets
of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, at farm events and meetings, in supermarkets, and
on buses and in backyards, in addition to the works of centuries of poets, singers,
and storytellers, from the Makars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to
contemporary scholars, such as Billy Kay and Derrick McClure (McClure 1988,
aptly titled “Why Scots Matters”), and writers in Scots, such as Sheena Blackhall
(Blackhall 2003).
No history of a language can be written outside of political history. Indeed,
this idea is installed in the old aphorism that a language is a dialect with an army.
The Scots language came into being and evolved in conjunction with patterns
of migration, politics, and border relations between England and Scotland. Billy
Kay remarks (op.cit., p. 43) that in the tenth century, five languages were spoken
in different regions of Scotland: Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, Welsh, and what was at
that time categorized as “Inglis,” spoken in the south-east. Gaelic was associated
with the Gaelic rulers in Scotland, who were absorbing or conquering or setting
up dynastic alliances with the Picts, so Gaelic first spread out, displacing the
Welsh of the Strathclyde region and the Inglis of southern Scotland and
Northumbria, although Inglis continued to be spoken in numbers of pockets,
including Kyle in Ayrshire. Inglis itself as a type of Old English had roots in the
Germanic language family, and this has two consequences. First, some sounds in
Scots, which developed out of Inglis, are shared with Germanic forms, notably
the characteristic /ch/ sound as in “och” or “ach” [oh], or “nocht” [nothing], or
“nicht” [night]. A sound that is also shared with Gaelic. Second, relatedly, Scots
maintains old expressions, such as “dicht” for “wipe” and “blate” for “diffident”
that were once used in English but have dropped out of use. Furthermore, the
systematic differences in spelling and pronunciation between Scots and English
also are a result of changes in the sounds of southern English, while Scots again
retains the older forms.
When the Normans conquered England after 1066, the Scottish kings invited
Norman leaders to settle north of the border, granting them lands in return
for military support. The Normans brought their words with them, but they
also took up the Inglis spoken by local populations around them. Over time
new migrant settlers came from Northumbria, bringing expressions derived
from Danish, and bequeathing another legacy for modern Scots, such as in
“kirk” [church], “lowp” [leap], “skirl” [shrill sound], or “flit” [shift house]. As
the border with England became marked by increasing hostility, and as further
migrants into Scotland from the Netherlands, Flanders, and France came as
economic migrants they enriched the language progressively. As well, a residue
of Gaelic found a place in this language mix. By 1424, Scots replaced Latin as the
official language of the Scottish Parliament (Kay, p. 50). Famous battles with the
English forces led to the creation of epics, such as John Barbour’s “The Bruce,”
celebrating the unexpected victory of the Scottish army against the English
on the battlefield of Bannockburn (see also Scott 2012). Bannockburn was
followed in 1320 by the Declaration of Arbroath, making the case for Scottish
Independence. Hostility had increased owing to the imperialistic efforts of King
Edward of England to subdue the Scots and their stubborn resistance to these
attempts. By the end of the fifteenth century, Kay notes (p. 53), the appellation
“Scottis” took the place of “Inglis” as the name of the language and its pathway
of separate development was well-established. The Makar poets, who flourished
in these times, enjoyed a milieu in which “Scottis” was spoken by all classes,
and were favored by the royal court. Interestingly, there was a further aspect of
their work that links them to traditions of the ancient Greek and Roman classics,
because they made translations and adaptations of Virgil and others, recreating
them in their own Scottish context and language. These poets included Robert
Henryson, Gavin Douglas, and William Dunbar all spanning the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, and all had knowledge of French and Latin, prestigious
cultural markers. Scots was thought of as less ornate and elegant than Latin, but
it was on the ascendant as the general language of the day. Scots words dating
from the early times resonate over the ages and into today, as for example, the
word “thole.” This means “to suffer,” endure, bear without complaint, with a
sense of persisting, showing a capacity to survive. “Ye maun thole it” [you must
endure it] is advice proverbially given by seniors to juniors chafing against some
rule or circumstance imposed upon them. The advice implies not only that the
imposition is inescapable, but also that some advantage will come from putting
up with it. An old Scots poem, “He that tholes owrecomes” [he who endures
overcomes] conveys this idea. The poem takes the form of an address by the poet
to the readers, saying that he and his wife have been together for many years and
have experienced conflicts and difficulties of poverty, but have come through it
all with gladness and now in their old age their daughters look after them, and
a “guid life maks a happy death, and he that tholes owrecomes” [Anonymous
ed. 1890, vol. 2: 236–237, poem by John Crawford]. A whole philosophy and
morality of life is thus encapsulated in this one word. The aphorism is also an
example of “a world of others’ words,” because the motif appears in an inscription
in gold outside a house in Edinburgh, where the Protestant reformer John Knox
is supposed to have lived, as follows: “HE.YT.THOLIS.OVERCUMMIS” (Kay,
p. 71).
John Knox was actually a part of the Protestant movement in Scotland that
gradually swung influence onto the side of the English language rather than
Scots. More books were printed in English than in Scots, indicating a beginning
of English as an international language and Scots as a national language. John

Wycliffe first translated the New Testament into English and it was printed in
England for distribution there and in Scotland. Kay goes out of his way to note
that Murdoch Nisbet of Ayrshire had made a translation of the New Testament
into Scots around 1528 (p. 77); however, it remained in manuscript form while
the English version was printed and became the accepted version for common
use, thus also influencing the process of Anglicization of written Scots. It
must always be kept in mind that written forms have a tendency to conform
to the contemporary orthodox norm or the most prestigious forms, whereas
spoken forms retain and develop far greater diversity. The “entextualization”
of written Scots at this time into an Anglicized version did not mean that all
oral forms followed suit. Elevation of a written version and its association with
seats of power, such as a royal court, does induce a kind of “diglossia,” or a split
between the oral and the literate forms. With English occupying the literate
sphere, Scots then tends to retreat into that reservoir of oral culture which
we have already remarked on as both a limitation and a strength. We will go
on later to point out that this process of confining Scots to the oral sphere is
partially negated, partly magnified, by the practices of writers putting prose
into English but rendering dialogue in Scots. When King James VI moved his
court from Edinburgh to London in 1603, he removed also the patronage of
the court for the Scottish language, and assisted in the ascendancy of English,
as testified also in the version of the Bible that he sponsored. Yet, again, this
process was counterbalanced in the development of the popular Border
Ballads, written and recited in Scots with English influences, and preserving
stories of wild conflicts and romantic entanglements, belonging to a world of
passion, honor, and revenge that escaped the influence of the Church and the
Bible.
The dominance of English was resisted primarily by poets writing self-
consciously in Scots or in a mixture of Scots and English, but with very different
feelings and orientations depending on which language was in play. Meanwhile,
the vigor of the Scots language rested with its quotidian forms as much as on
its literary use, and writers became bilingual, fluent in both Scots and English,
but not using them interchangeably, rather as alternative expressions of complex
identities and social relationships. In written form, orthographies represented
Scots words in ways that made them appear to be variants of English rather than
forms in themselves, and this reflected the difficulties of shaping a written Scots
in a milieu permeated by English. Scots also took in more Anglicisms and lost
some of its distinctive and unique forms that testified to its separate existence
and cultural heritage. In positive terms this led to mutual enrichment, but again
preservation of the Scots part of the heritage was left to the vagaries of history
and local oral culture. As Kay frequently remarks, the tension between Scots
and English continues today. He also notes, however, the resilience of Scots,
including in his own native place in the River Irvine Valley around Newmilns,
close to our own field areas, and explains that he is descended from miners of
Ayrshire and Fife who were monolingual speakers of Scots. He sometimes mixes
English and Scots phrases in his text, giving a sense of the vernacular breaking
into the facade of English. Much of his text goes over the recurrent problems
faced by Scots as a language threatened by the superior status of English, a fact
that goes a long way to explain the historical sense of inferiority of some Scots in
comparison to the English.
In these circumstances, it has fallen to the poets more than any others, apart
from contemporary scholars like Billy Kay and Derrick McClure, to keep the
recognition of Scots alive, starting far back in the eighteenth century with the
work of Allan Ramsay (1685–1758) and Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), and
many others. Christopher MacClachlan edited a collection of poems from the
eighteenth century authored by poets writing prior to the work of Robert Burns
(MacClachlan 2002). He noted that at this time poets were writing in a mixture of
Scots and English, and were comfortable enough doing so, but were at the same
time working to create a Scots national literature. As members of a small-scale
network of writers, they alluded freely to one another’s work and in addition
drew on a long tradition of folk poetry and songs, adapting and extending motifs
which later fed into Burns’s works. They were prime exponents, then, of Richard
Bauman’s “world of others’ words,” but were adapting and recreating traditions
as they went along (Bauman 2004). One type of verse passed on to Burns and
made famous by him was the type dubbed by Allan Ramsay “Standard Habby,”
a six-line stanza with rhyming scheme “a a a b a b” that was employed much
earlier by the poet Robert Sempill in an elegy for a piper from Kilbarchan called
Habbie Simpson (MacClachlan, p. x; Kay, p. 89). In general, poets addressed
each other and members of their social circle in their creations, and in particular,
MacClachlan notes, they drew on shared cultural themes expressed in the old
songs of Scotland (p. xi). Their world of others’ words became, then, the shared
currency of their own words. Songs figure prominently in Burns’s work, and
they are the medium of some of his most celebrated creations, for example,
“Auld Lang Syne,” sung around the world on the occasion of the New Year in the
Gregorian calendar. He spent time himself working on setting his poems to song
in his later years.
While the poets kept up pride in Scots, the language in general became
associated with usages of the lower classes. Thus, dialogue in novels would
appear in Scots if the speakers were of this order or spoke in an old-fashioned
way, whereas the main narrative would be in standard English. This is the
pattern we find in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The convention enables Scott to
get a great deal of the vernacular into his books, keeping alive a literary presence
for Scots language in grammar, tone, and vocabulary, and tying it back into
the world of orality, a world of enclaved class relations. Kay points out that this
enclavement also gave poets the opportunity to express the feelings of people,
such as himself, tenant farmers on big estates, or with ideas of opposition to
the pro-England views of the upper classes in Edinburgh and their forms of
conspicuous consumption. Burns railed against the “whunstane herts” [stony
hearts] of these gentry, saying that the amount of money they wasted on cards
would be sufficient to fill the larders of the poor ten times over. Use of the
vernacular was a medium for registering political opposition and reflecting on
the human conditions of suffering and sympathy for the oppressed. Burns also
expresses this sentiment in his “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” poem, in which he
likens the social rank of aristocrats to the surface stamp on guinea coins, adding
in his pithy way “the man’s the gowd for a’ that” [the man is the gold for all that].
This attitude comes through strongly in the poem and is echoed by Beethoven
in his “Alle Menschen werden Brüder” [all men shall be brothers], which is part
of the theme song for the European Union. Burns’s ending message is that “man
to man the world o’er/Shall brithers be for a’ that”.
The usual way to mediate the tensions between English and Scots language
forms in the eighteenth century was to deploy both, signaling bilinguality on
the part of the author and expecting it in the reader. English signaled Formality/
Distance and Scots signaled Informality/Proximity. Robert Fergusson’s poem
“The Daft Days” is mostly in Scots but incorporates English expressions and
has one stanza in standard English, containing the poem’s main message: a
celebration of mirth and unity, and “blithesome innocence” for New Year’s Day
(MacClachlan ed.: 222–223). It is well-known that Burns was able to combine
both speaking and writing in both Scots and English, deploying this dual
capacity to good effect in his verse and his interactions with his reading public
and his publishers. Early on in his life he had sufficient opportunity to encounter
works of literature, poetry, and history to feed his imagination and enabled him
as an adult and aspiring poet to mingle with society in Edinburgh and secure
some patronage for his works. (See the account in Gilfillan ed. vol. 1, 1856: v–vii.
This old source has good materials on the education of the poet-to-be, and it
shows he had quite a range of book-knowledge, a point that must modify Burns’s
playful account of himself in “The Brigs of Ayr” as “the simple bard, rough at
the rustic plough.”) The rural basis of his poetry is nevertheless found in the
innumerable passages where he shows knowledge of the creatures that inhabit
the fields, forests, and streams, and these creatures become the source of his
further reflections on life. (See, for a detailed and sympathetic set of examples,
Gemmill 1928. The author was a great-uncle of one of the present authors,
Andrew Strathern.) Burns’s well-known poem “To a Mouse” expresses sympathy
and concern for the mouse whose nest he has unwittingly cut through with his
coulter or plowshare. The first verse is in the vernacular Scots, with terms like
“bickering brattle” [the noise a startled mouse makes when it is disturbed] and
the description of the frightened creature itself, “Wee sleekit, cowran tim’rous
beastie” [the mouse is afraid, cowers down, and its body hairs lie sleek and flat on
its skin, a sign of its fear]. The second verse immediately proceeds with general
thoughts in English, apologizing to the mouse for the actions of humans in
destroying “nature’s social union.” It further acknowledges the shared mortality
between mice and humans, following this up near to the poem’s end with the
famous vernacular lines in which the mouse’s ruined nest becomes a marker
of uncertainty in life for all living things, and the best-laid plans, whether of
mice or men, “gang aft agley” [often go wrong]. Finally, the poet differentiates
himself from the mouse, suggesting that it is only concerned with the present,
whereas he, as a human, thinks of both the past and the future, remembering
hard times and fearing what the future might bring. His own history as a tenant
farmer on land in Ayrshire clearly informs his lines here, but his words also
reach toward a universal sentiment akin to that of the Latin poet Virgil in his line
“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” [“there are tears in things
and mortal matters touch the mind,” Virgil, Aeneid, Book 1, line 462].
This combination of the universal and the particular is a marker of how much
poetry works and makes its impact on the sensibility of readers. First, we are
given a very specific image, and then this is translated into a broader set of ideas
or reflections.
Scots language poetry often arrests attention from the very fact that it is
written in Scots and keeps its sense of being drawn from the oral sphere. This is
especially true when the vocabulary and sentiment directly represent the spoken
word, as in the poems of David Rorie in his collection “The Lum Hat Wantin’ the
Croon” [“The top hat without its crown”]. (Rorie 1965, first printed 1935.) Rorie
uses ballad and other narrative forms to take the reader directly into the world of
vernacular speech and ideas about the Devil and pacts unwisely made with him
that draw on myth and folklore traditions to make familiar moral points. When
he generalizes, the message is also clear and is the same as we saw in the poem
cited above, by John Crawford, extolling patience and endurance: “Bide, lippen,
thole” [“Wait, trust, endure”].
Another poet whose remarkable work belongs to this ethic of endurance and
also to the rich legacy of oral culture in Scots is William Soutar, who lived from
1898 to 1943. He had been active in sports and had attended Edinburgh University,
albeit rebelliously, but after military service in the First World War and possibly
as a result of food poisoning while he was away he suffered from a mysterious
form of spondylitis that left him bedridden from 1930 onward. His parents in
Perthshire were adherents of the “Auld Licht” or conservative Secession branch
of the Presbyterian Church, and they were both speakers of Scots. From them he
must have learned many of the rich and idiomatic words that fill his verse. Hugh
MacDiarmid wrote an appreciative Introduction to a volume of Soutar’s collected
verse published in 1948. Soutar wrote humorous riddles as well as serious verse.
Some of his work was in English as well as the bulk of it in Scots. Like Burns, he
often draws on symbols from nature to make comments on human relations or
simply to celebrate the activities of living creatures, such as a bumblebee. One
of his poems is to “yellow yorlins” [yellowhammer birds], expressing how he
has seen three of these bright glistening birds flitting down from an elder tree
nearby, and he adds that he feels sorry for the blind, who cannot see such a sight,
because a small sight like this is all that is needed for someone “to keep his hert
abüne its misery” (Soutar 1948: 24). His lyrical stance comes through insistently,
as in the poem “Hill Sang,” in which he invites a companion to come with him
to the hills at the time of Lammas (a traditional Scottish religious holiday time
in or around August, at the equinox between summer and autumn) where there
is a mossy “knowe” [hillock] below a stand of heather, with bluebells “dinnlin
wi’ nae sound” [rustling] soundlessly, “laverocks” [skylarks] singing, “whins”
[gorse] “waggan gowdan banners” [wagging golden banners], and a little stream
going on its way “chirlin owre the stanners” [murmuring over the shingles].
These are all classic themes, found as tropes in the work of other poets, such as
Robert Tannahill, but here expressed in broad Scots, with a balladic ring that is
distinctive of Soutar’s poetic voice. (On Tannahill, the “weaver poet,” who lived
1774–1810, see Robert Tannahill 1874.)
A contemporary poet who has followed the traditions of writing in Scots is Rab
Wilson, born in 1960, whose home place is New Cumnock in Ayrshire. He was
employed in the Ayrshire coal mines until the time of the Miners’ Strike in 1984,
after which he acquired a training to be a psychiatric nurse. He is a well-known
writer and is a member of the Scots Language Society’s National Committee. His
poems frequently discuss local individuals and their experiences in the mines
and the Strike. One such poem is titled “Helen Gray” and has the local place name
Cumnock also as an identifier of the subject’s home. The strikers’ wives managed
as best they could and would have “a greet and a sang tae cheer wirsels up” [a cry
and a song to cheer ourselves up], and they learned to distrust everything they
saw in the news media, and after the Strike “we kent whit wis whit” [we knew
what was what] (Wilson 2006: 70).Wilson also writes in English (e.g., 2006: 26,
Asylum Seekers), and has translated some of the Latin poet Horace’s satires
into lively Scots, as well as an earlier translation into Scots of “The Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam.” His poems in Scots teem with local references and praise of
local resources, such as the Ayrshire potatoes he celebrates in “At Tarelgin Fairm
Road” (p. 62), noting that the ones from Girvan become available earliest in the
season: “Girvan Tatties, here today!” As we write this in Scotland during the
month of July, the season for new potatoes in Ayrshire has come again, and we
recognize the enthusiasm with which Wilson greets them in his verse.
We have given only a small selection of a complex heritage of expression in
Scots literature. Earlier we have devoted a chapter to poems and landscapes in
our “Minorities and Memories” book (Stewart and Strathern n.d., forthcoming,
Strathern and Stewart 2001). This chapter has an appraisal of the poetic writings
in Scots of Violet Jacob, a poet of Angus County who belonged to a landowning
family but who learned to love the Scots language by talking with the gardeners
on the estate, and she expressed her deepest feelings of identification in her Scots
poems. It seems that in a diglossic situation it is often the minority language
that lends itself to such inner expression of self. Violet Jacob’s English language
poems by contrast seem less intense than her ones in Scots. Poetry and song are
in general apt media for the presentation of self. Jacob’s tone is complemented
by the work of Marion Angus (see Angus and Jacob 2006), who lived from 1865
to 1945, almost exactly paralleling Violet Jacob’s lifetime of 1863 to 1946. She
valued lyric poetry most keenly, and both her Scots and her English language
poems show her intense involvement with the landscape and her ability to depict
it. Both poets also show a strong involvement with ideas of spirits of the old folk
cultures concerning faeries, witches, and warlocks, and how these ideas were a
part of their total response to their surroundings (see, for example, her poem
“Patrick,” in Angus and Jacob 2006: 75).
We have been discussing the use of Scots in poetry mainly, but we will turn
now to a remarkable work that comprises a whole full-length historical work
written in a version of Scots cognate with the language of Rab Wilson’s works,
which we have already discussed. This is the book by James Andrew Begg (Begg
2013). Begg combines Scots and English, by starting with a prelude in English
belonging to the present and then shifting into Scots with a series of narratives
about events going back to the times of the Covenanters, religious dissenters of
the seventeenth century, whose experiences and sufferings are inscribed on the
landscapes of Ayrshire and Galloway Counties in the South-West of Scotland.
There are thirty historical chapters, each with a separate story, and stretching
in time from 1666 to 1894. The stories include accounts of the lives of miners,
farmers, landowners, shepherds, martyrs, and weavers, a huge cross section of
experiences and hardships, all set into the landscapes of Ayrshire around the
author’s own area of New Cumnock. He provides a glossary of Scots to assist
readers, and a set of genealogies of families whose lives enter into the narratives,
including a genealogy of the poet Robert Burns. His overall purpose is simply to
display the humanity of the characters in the book, and to stress the sentiment
from Burns that carries this message: The Man’s the Gowd for A’ That [The Man
Is the Gold for All That]. Chapter 8 in the book is set in 1768 and has as its
theme the Lowland Clearances, a topic that has come to the fore in recent years,
with the realization that the well-known Highlands Clearances of peasants from
their lands by the landlords in order to make space for herds of sheep kept in
enclosed field areas was paralleled from the mid-eighteenth century onward by
similar processes in the Lowlands of Scotland, including the island of Arran off
the Ayrshire coast. In poignant and straight-speaking Scots, sprinkled with bits
of English, and writing about one Adam Begg, no doubt a forerunner of himself,
James Andrew Begg describes a time when Adam’s tenant farmer father died, and
the family had been warned that their long-held tenancy of Netherwood farm
would not be renewed in another twelve months, by the new owner based in the
town of Ayr, a “writer” (lawyer). The story continues: “It was a bitter sair dunt
for twa auld men nearin the en o their warkin days, but they’d seen it comin.” [It
was a bitter and painful blow for two old men nearing the end of their working
days, but they had seen it coming.] The two men were of the Begg family and
had worked hard all their lives to wrest a living from the land. They saw that the
landlords were becoming more greedy and following an ostentatious lifestyle,
“an the puir tenants had tae pey for it” [and the poor tenants had to pay for
it]. A classic, archetypal story, and to understand the Scots language character
of it all, it needs to be pronounced aloud while reading; while to understand
the passion conveyed in the story, knowledge of the historical context is also
needed, within which the voices and embodied sufferings of the protagonists
reveal themselves and come through in what in Rab Wilson’s phrase constitutes
an “accent o’ the mind.” The effect for a local reader is increased by use of the
names of all the surrounding villages, such as Sorn, and their colloquial versions,
such as “Gawston” for Galston (compare “Cautrin” or “Cautern” for Catrine).
It is interesting to consider what might be meant by the term “speech
community” in relation to these materials. We need to recognize sliding scales
of meaning for this term, from high levels of “communicative competence,” in
Dell Hymes’s nomenclature, to lower levels, for both speaking (“speech”) and
the literate domain (“reading” and “writing”). Bilinguality or multi-dialectality
also comes into play, and to graph all these capacities and their interconnections
would be very complex, if even possible. For our treatment here, it is enough to
point to this complexity and conclude that the idea of a bounded and exclusive
speech community does not adequately grasp the empirical situation in which
people live and adjust their communicative practices.
The situation becomes more complicated again when we go on to consider
the variety of Scots that has developed in the region of Ulster in the six counties
of Ulster divided between what is Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
(See, in general, Stewart and Strathern 2005c.) This variety of Scots took shape
after the “Plantation of Ulster” onward from the early seventeenth century.
Scots settlers from the south-west of Scotland came in the train of landowning
families granted land by the Crown from 1603 onward. English settlers also
came, and occupied areas mostly separate from those of Scottish identity, so
that the Scots language was maintained, morphing into different forms of
pronunciation through influence, not from standard English, but from Irish and
Irish English ways of speaking. Vocabulary and grammatical forms could take
on an Irish inflection, but are noticeably derivable from Scots origins, with a
highly distinctive regional signature, such that this form of Ulster-Scots, as it is
known, stands out in its oral manifestation from the Scots forms historically and
currently present in Scotland itself. When in “lecto-form” (to coin this term) it
looks strongly like any kind of Scots.
The Plantation of Ulster came about as a deliberate act of occupation of lands
appropriated by the British Crown (in the person of King James VI from the
early seventeenth century), to take over control after the defeat and flight of the
indigenous Irish Earls in conflicts with the British military forces along with
the Ulster-Scots of the day. The situation laid down the preconditions for the
subsequent long drawn out struggles over power, land, and politics that continue
in the background or the foreground of public life in Northern Ireland and the
Republic today. Language issues also continue, entangled with the political
turns of events. A result of the 1998 Good Friday inter-government Agreement
was that vernacular languages, that is, Irish Gaelic and Ulster-Scots, should be
given parity of esteem in Northern Ireland. Following on this policy-creation,
an official body, the Ulster-Scots Agency, was set up in Belfast and embarked
on a program of cultural development in the language that was planned to be
an integral part. The main focus of the Agency has been on the sponsorship of
public events and celebrations of dress and dancing pertaining to the Scottish-
derived traditions of the Ulster-Scots as an aesthetic and cultural category in
their own right, with efforts to adjust their relationships with the Orange Order
institution, well-known for its Protestant sectarian and pro-UK tenets. The
effort has been to transform the Orange Order parades that commemorate
the victory of Protestant forces at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 over the
Catholic army of James II, into nonsectarian occasions of cultural celebration,
with some emphasis on the historically very strong Scottish connections.
Along with such initiatives there has been a parallel set of activities stemming
from European Union funds to promote cross-community and cross-border
activities conducive to peace and reconciliation between historically opposed
categories of people. In the middle of all this, the Ulster-Scots language occupies
an awkward existential space that is unique to itself and is different from the
situation of Scots language in Scotland itself. In Scotland, where the language is
still very strong in the oral sphere, its preservation and promotion is not a high
priority of the Scottish Government, while there is official support for Scottish
Gaelic. In the Republic of Ireland Irish Gaelic is an official national language
taught in schools, and in Northern Ireland, Gaelic has also received cultural
support. The Ulster-Scots Agency was entrusted with the task of sponsoring
projects that would enhance the standing of Ulster-Scots culture and give it a
legitimate identity in an Irish and English dominated milieu. The Ulster-Scots
Language Society and the Ulster-Scots Academy were also set up and have been
able to strengthen the main purposes of the Agency. A considerable amount of
scholarly work has underpinned these aims. Robert Gregg, in association with
Michael Montgomery, mapped out the geographical contours of the language
(see Montgomery and Gregg 1997, also Montgomery 1999 and 2003.) Major
work has been done by Philip Robinson with his grammatical study (Robinson
1997) and his translations from the New Testament and original prose writings.
John Hewitt (Hewitt 1974) definitively brought to attention the work of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Rhyming Weaver poets, who wrote verse
after the manner of their contemporary Robert Burns in the “Habby” format
(rhyming aaabab), and also the Scottish “weaver poet.” Robert Tannahill, while
also creatively and independently representing their own local areas in Ulster
(see, for example, poems by Hugh Porter 1992, James Orr 1992, and Samuel
Thomson 1992). Sarah Leech’s work contributes to this tradition from Raphoe in
County Donegal in the Republic (Leech 2006), with poems full of local references
composed in both Scots and English. Cecil Frances Alexander contributes to this
tradition uniquely with her full-length ballad “The Legend of Stumpie’s Brae,” set
on a hillside location near to St. Johnston, also in County Donegal (Alexander
2003). The well-known Ulster-Scot poet James Fenton has provided a dictionary
based on his acquaintance with the language in his native place, County Antrim,
in Northern Ireland (Fenton 1990). We can testify to the strength of attachment
to the language in Antrim, because once we were traveling through a rural area
there and we stopped at a farm to buy eggs. The girl we spoke to ran in to get
her father and he came out and after we had exchanged a few friendly words he
announced that “We here are not Irish, you know, we are Ulster-Scots.” Antrim
is certainly a stronghold of Ulster-Scots, and the accent with which people there
speak is close to the Scots spoken in South-West Scotland itself. A long-running
program on Radio Ulster and Radio Foyle, with the title “A Kist of Wurds” [A
Chest of Words] continuously presented memorable Scots and Ulster-Scots
oral readings for interested local readers, at the same time educating listeners if
need be on the language forms it featured. Ulster-Scots language is also known
as Ullans, on the model of Lallans, which has been used as a literary term to
identify Lowland Scots. (The “U” refers to Ulster in “Ullans,” and “Lallans” is
itself a vernacular rendering of Lowlands. Hence the title of the series of writings
put out as “A Blad O’ Ulster-Scotch frae Ullans” [some pieces in Ulster-Scots
from the Ullans magazine].)
Michael Montgomery (2003: 124) points out that Ulster-Scots is a spoken
language and its vital continuity depends on its maintenance in that form, an
observation that is also true of Scots in Scotland. Nevertheless, the creation and/
or preservation of literary forms is intertwined with the oral sphere. The Ulster-
Scots Agency has sponsored a whole series of books by local speakers of the
language, and when faced with the problem of an orthography they have simply
taken the spellings of authors themselves. One of these authors, John M’Gimpsey
Johnston, explains his own philosophy about this issue, as follows: “Wi nae ‘rules’
o spellin here, ye’ll can fin the real wye o taakin Ulstèr-Scotch the day, fur it is a
leevin language wi differin twusts tae it fae airt tae airt” (from the Foreword to his
book, Johnston 2005). [With no rules of spelling here, you can find the real way
of speaking Ulster-Scots today, for it is a living language with different twists to
it from area to area.] Frank Ferguson has edited a large collection of Ulster-Scots
writings, from 1603 onward, and he includes a poem by John Clifford, who lived
1900–1983, and wrote in the Scots of his native East Antrim in Northern Ireland
(Ferguson 2008). The poem gives a lively sketch of the Hiring Fair held each
year at Larne after the harvest had been secured, and how young people would
dress themselves up to go there and seek employment, but with an eye open also
for a likely marriage partner: “These sonsy, dacent, weel-wrought lasses, though
a wee bit blate, are no sich asses.” [These friendly, decent, well-built girls are a
little shy, but they’re not fools.] They are keen to find a good marriage partner
for themselves, as well as finding work at the hiring fair and negotiating the
“erles” (the old hiring payment or wage agreed on). Ferguson points out that
the Scots language terms in this poem derive directly from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. They could have been taken from the poems of Robert
Burns or the Rhyming Weaver poets and at the same time they belong to the
contemporary Antrim vernacular, as also to the Scots of today in Ayrshire or
Galloway in Scotland. “Blate” for “shy” is in common oral use; and “sonsy” for
“friendly” or “jolly” is a poetic term echoing Burns’s well-known “Address to a
Haggis” poem, in which he hails the haggis with its honest “sonsie” appearance.
Today, Ulster-Scots continues to be spoken in many parts of Northern Ireland
and in East Donegal in the Republic of Ireland around St. Johnston and Raphoe,
for example, but it is generally mixed a good deal with Irish English accents and
English vocabulary. This camouflaging or muffling effect on the language also
contributes to the opinions of some people that it does not really exist. Philip
Robinson, who from his home place in Greyabbey in County Down has done a
great deal to increase knowledge of Ulster-Scots, has provided a small test sheet
of some pieces of vocabulary that are diagnostic of Ulster-Scots language usages
by contrast with English or Ulster-English (Robinson 2003). First, Robinson
lucidly points out that Ulster-English dialect contains a series of words, such as
“wee” and “thon” [“small” and “that”], that are Scots-derived and because of the
interweaving of immigrant Scots in the Plantation of Ulster from the early 1600s
on, such words have found their way into general usage in Ulster. However,
there are whole further ranges of vocabulary that are not used other than in the
specific Ulster-Scots traditions, both oral and written. Robinson cites here “nicht”
[night], “cannae” [cannot], and “gye” [very]. Markers of this kind, we may note,
can appear in large numbers or in small within any utterance or text. From the
smallest to the largest set they equally signal a message of Scottish identity, but a
layering of identities can be communicated. The more Scots words and forms of
grammatical expressions there are that occur, the more culturally intimate and
culturally demanding the message is, and the closer the whole expression comes
to a self-indexicality or self-deictic character. Robinson continues with a list of
sixty-seven words in English and their equivalents in Ulster-English dialect and

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

interesting to consider what the aftermaths of the Brexit process in the UK may
continue to be. The recognition of Ulster-Scots as a category has been dependent
on peacemaking initiatives brokered between the European Union, the UK,
and the Republic of Ireland. With Brexit, what will happen to language policies
and the politics that shape their directions? In Scotland itself, what will Brexit
mean for the status of the Scots Language and the gathering of identities around
it? Answers to such questions will depend on the overall directions taken by
political events themselves.
There are some parallels and contrasts here with the development of pidgin
and creole language forms. These emerge in circumstances of intercultural
communication that call forth bridging language usages between a dominant
language and the language of the dominated. They issue, however, in a dynamic
set of creative changes in which a hybrid vernacular adopts vocabulary
from numbers of sources while shaping grammatical forms that relate to the
indigenous or dominated categories of speakers. Over time as the political and
cultural circumstances change further, the new vernacular form becomes a
vehicle for a wider spread of communication among ethnic groups, facilitated
by the easy assimilation of vocabulary from the dominant source coupled with
grammar that is shared among various previously dominant groups. Tok Pisin in
Papua New Guinea is a strong example of this kind of process.
“Pisin” is said to derive from the English word “business” reflecting its
beginnings in part as a trade language in coastal areas of northern New Guinea.
Arriving in the Highlands of New Guinea as “Pisin,” it was translated by speakers
of Melpa in Mount Hagen as Kὃi Ik, “bird talk,” since Pisin means “bird.” Its
origins go back further, to the nineteenth century in Queensland in Australia,
where Pacific Islanders were forcibly transported as laborers on sugarcane
plantations and interacted minimally with Australian plantation owners and
workers. This practice of labor conscription continued in modified forms over
time in coastal areas of New Guinea, turning into labor migration patterns, with
young people, mostly male, being recruited out of innumerable villages on the
coast and in the interior. Migrants came from different areas and learned to
speak with each other via the new medium of Pisin, enriching and stabilizing
it as it was passed down among those brought together on plantations of copra
and cocoa products. Up to 1918 in northern coastal parts, plantations were run
by German traders protected by German imperial governing institutions, and
fragments of the German language entered the new lingua franca. Testifying to
the German colonial domination of the time is the expression in Tok Pisin of
“raus” and the verb form “rausim” [“get out” and “to remove, expel, get rid of ”],
reflecting the separate life-worlds of the laborers and their masters, in which the
laborers were segregated from the colonial class of foreigners. Numbers of words
also entered from the Tolai and other coastal Austronesian languages where the
plantations and port towns were situated, for example, “kina” for pearl shell, a
type of valuable. Words entered with a characteristic Austronesian reduplication
as a way of expressing emphasis, for example, “hariap hariap” [very quickly].
Other words came from the work of Christian missions, for example, “marimari”
[sorry for, show compassion, a Christian virtue expressed in an Austronesian
vocabulary and reduplicated]. The grammar of Pisin developed by taking pieces
of English and repurposing them as parts of grammar, following emergent
usages in early colonial times. Thus, for example, the word “him” changed to
an enclitic “-im” and was used as a marker of a transitive verb usage. “Baimbai”
[by and by] was shortened to “bai” and became a general marker for the future
tense of a verb. “Pinis” [from “finish”] became a marker of a completed action,
for example, “Yu kam pinis, ah?” [so, you have arrived, eh?]. Word order in Pisin
remains different from English in certain respects, for example, “Yupela laik igo
wea nau?” [you (plural) want to go where now?]. The phonology and spelling
of words are more straightforward than in English or German, with five vowels,
a e i o u, all pronounced in a standard way. With a simplified and consistent
grammar and an ability to assimilate ranges of new vocabulary, Tok Pisin is
relatively easy to learn, and was rapidly spread across the whole of Papua New
Guinea, becoming accepted as a national language after Papua New Guinea was
granted political Independence from Australia in September 1975.
While Tok Pisin rapidly flourished in response to a changing ecology
of circumstances, an early version of it with German as a base vocabulary,
Unserdeutsch [“Our German”], and dating from the time of German rule
in northern New Guinea up to 1918, declined after the German colonial
presence went away. Unlike Tok Pisin (TP), Unserdeutsch (UD) was from the
beginning developed in a small-scale enclave environment. Children who were
the offspring of German men and indigenous women from various language
areas were brought into residence in a Catholic mission station where the
nuns spoke German. These children developed their own form of language,
drawing on grammatical forms that came from TP (and probably also from
some knowledge of indigenous languages), but using vocabulary from German,
creating a hybrid form special to their own tiny community that was not shared
by the missionary staff. This form must have continued to be passed down
to the descendants of this ancestral set of enclaved speakers for some time,
but many of its remaining speakers went to Australia after Papua New Guinea
became an independent nation in 1975. About a hundred speakers remain,
mostly bilingual in UD and one other language or multilingual and married in
to other groups, including presumably Australians through whom they could
obtain residence rights. The researchers who have tracked down this unique
language form (Craig Volker and Professor Peter Maitz of the University of
Augsburg in Germany, see Maitz and Volker 2017) were interested in it because
it began as a creole form, being the only language fully learned (in fact, created
by) the children originally involved. (See, for another study of pidgin German
forms, Mühlhӓusler 1984.)
TP itself has become a creole for some but not all of its speakers in the
complex contemporary society of Papua New Guinea (see Smith 2002, and
compare Mühlhӓusler 1985). It is a creole for numbers of people in areas where
it has effectively displaced former indigenous languages, especially in places
where the indigenous language may have had only a few hundred speakers
and labor migration caused many young men to move out from their villages,
later returning with news of the outside world and promoting TP as a means of
accessing that world (see the detailed study of one such place, Gapun village in
the Sepik area by Don Kulick 1992). TP also has a dictionary and grammar done
by Father Francis Mihalic (Mihalic 1971), has a newspaper, Wantok Niuspepa,
and in addition to translations of the New Testament used widely by churches,
it was the language into which a translation of a well-known ethnography by
Peter Lawrence was made by Bill Tomasetti. This book (Lawrence 1964) was a
famous study of “cargo cult” movements in Madang Province, and Tomasetti
aimed in his translation to show the potential for TP to become a literary as well
as an oral language form, using bits of TP in novel ways, such as “as-tinktink” for
fundamental ideas or theories (Tomasetti 1986).
Tomasetti’s work remains an isolated tour de force, while subsequently the
knowledge of English has become much more widespread among younger
generations and the need for this kind of development of TP is less great. On
a field visit to Mount Hagen from December 2017 to January 2018 we found
that there was a huge increase in English language knowledge, and that English
was displacing TP as a favored oral language, while TP remains popular as a
marker of vernacular identity, in a manner similar to the relationship between
Scots language and English language in Scotland, with the difference that Scots
does have a huge literary tradition of its own. Broad oral Scots can in some
ways be regarded as a creole form, balanced by almost universal bilinguality
with English. The prognosis for TP is that it will remain popular as a source
of vernacular identity and a code-switching resource for expressing cultural

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

depth is entailed between the generations, accompanied by the intrusion of
new concepts linked to politics, economics, and the contemporary world. For
ourselves as field workers, appreciation and comprehension of the subtleties
of cultural expression remain vital, and investigators who in the past worked
without such knowledge would have missed the underlying meanings of what
they heard and would be inclined to impose their own understandings in the
absence of grasping what their interlocutors were telling them.
114
12
Excursions, Translations, and Explorations
The relationship between language and culture is not fixed but dynamic.
In answer to the overall question that we broached at the beginning of this
book, there is no single algorithm or model that can yield a definitive or
fixed pattern of relationships between language and culture. We have instead
examined a more grounded set of issues, centering on cultural classifications,
cognition, ritual, cognitive science, expressions of power, and the significance
of minority languages and enclaved forms of expression in creolizing
languages contexts. Seeking a general way of expressing what we have found
throughout our explorations, we would like to draw, from the rich panoply
of expressions in the Melpa language of Papua New Guinea, the concept of
“pairing,” or “making twos,” “rakl.” “Pairing” in Melpa brings together both
opposites and equivalents. So, language and culture make a rakl, a relationship
that does not equate them or subsume them into each other but grants to them
a creative alliance, or dialogue, forming a kind of unity as well as difference
between them.
Languages are important markers of the continuity of cultural difference, and
this means that there are always problems of effective translation between them.
English itself is multicultural, but there are still many problems of translation
between English and other languages. Translation problems raise crucially the
question of incommensurability or commensurability between terms in different
languages. (See, in general George Steiner 1975.) There will always be aspects of
both commensurability and incommensurability because of the complexity of
meanings in any lexeme, so once again complexity wins out against simplicity,
the array of particulars against universal elements, even though we can recognize
the coexistence of both.
It is pertinent to note further here how issues that are classic in language
and culture studies, notably the arguments about universal versus particular
features, are today increasingly transposed into contexts of globalization, with
particular reference to the dominance of English as an international language.

As always, however, globalization is not a simple, but a layered and variable
phenomenon. The phenomenon itself is better described as glocalization, in line
with the current theoretical understandings in anthropology as a whole. Looking
at English as a globally diffused language, scholars sometimes refer to it as
Globish (and in line with our observations here this might better be described as
“glocalish”). Using the term “international English” signifies the fact that English
now belongs to many different regions of the world. Clearly, literate English is
likely to be less variable than oral English, as it already is in Britain or the UK
itself. It is within the oral realm that languages may suffer death, transformation,
or regenerative change, and this point shows again the importance of studying
language dynamics from the point of view of both orality and literacy, as well
as the interaction between other major languages and English (see for Japan
Mizumura 2015, trans. by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). More
than ever in the past, it is important to continue witnessing both to the ongoing
facts of cross-cultural variability and to the value of these patterns of difference
and variation in the production of humanity and of the ways that humans find
of coming to terms with and respecting one another. Our studies of the Scots
language and of Tok Pisin point in this direction.
The comprehensive work of David Crystal in the field of varieties of English
is exemplary in this regard (see, for example, Crystal 2007).
The global dominance of English, itself now challenged by the spread
of Chinese, does not, as we have noted, remove the long-term problems of
translation. Language appears in numbers of potential or actual forms and there
is an interesting exploration of how extreme problems of translation can emerge
over time in a short story by Ted Chiang entitled “Story of Your Life” (2010). In this
story the protagonist is a linguist who is called on to find a way to communicate
with a mysterious set of alien beings who have arrived in spacecrafts. The aliens’
intentions are unknown, and the US Army is engaged in trying to assess whether
they are a threat or not. Their mode of communication is opaque, and the
linguist is asked to cooperate with another investigator to unravel the problem
of understanding their language. The aliens display images on large mirror-like
screens which they manipulate and change in response to communications from
the linguist, and they do so by making sophisticated statements through these
images rather than with words. Studying these image variations, the linguist is
able to understand their messages and to communicate with them. The aliens
have seven symmetrical limbs and are thus called Heptapods by the humans.
The linguist determines that they have separate languages: Heptapod A (speech)
Excursions, Translations, and Explorations 117
and Heptapod B (writing). As she becomes fluent in these languages she finds
that Heptapod B has changed her mode of thought in relation to time, giving
her knowledge of the future, including her own future, which is predetermined.
This experience stays with her for her entire life. The aliens leave as mysteriously
as they had come, but the linguist is altered by her communications with them.
The whole study is an example of extreme difference in language forms and
extreme effects of a radically different language on the human mind. It is a
metaphor for all of the more ordinary problems of translation which occur
between human languages themselves, such as are explored, for example, by Dan
Everett and by Anna Wierzbicka in their writings that we have discussed in this
book. Translation can therefore be seen as an attempt to make commensurate
meanings that are in some ways incommensurate. At the least, this constitutes
a cross-cultural warning about assumptions of shared meanings or language
universals. This is a huge topic that has been pursued many times by linguists
and philosophers and is at the heart of contentions between universalists and
particularists in this field.
In whatever way the Heptapod languages were constructed, they obviously
reflected a very different spatio-temporal ecology from the human language
of the linguist investigating them. We may recall here Benjamin Lee Whorf ’s
suggestion that major grammatical differences between English and the Hopi
language revealed different ways of conceptualizing space and time. A feature
of Whorf ’s discussion was that because of these language differences the Hopi
ecological life-world would markedly differ from that of an English language
speaker. Beyond the problem of translation, then, there is the question of
how the use of language is a part of the ecological adaptation of people to
their varying environments. We can speak here of an “ecological turn” in the
study of language that has been called eco-linguistics. The approach enables
a new way of looking at language and culture through the lens of ecological
perceptions and experience of the world. Scholars who have developed this
branch of study include Peter Mühlhӓusler (2003), Alwin Fill (2006), and
Mark Garner (2004).
Studies of shamanistic practices and other religious practices generally from
around the world also point us to complex ecological perceptions that relate
space and time in highly varying ways. If we regard ecology as a construction
of the mind and its interactions with the world we find that visions, dreams,
and images of a spatio-temporal kind abound in ways that are unique to these
performative contexts. We can recognize that such images are a part of wider
eco-cosmologies that inform peoples’ living interactions with their worlds (see,
for example, Stewart, Strathern, Riboli, and Torri, n.d.). These interactions also
find expression in the forms of language that identify peoples’ relationship to
place in significant ways. We come here to the familiar arena of theory regarding
place, embodiment, and emplacement. Adding a specific concept of ecology to
this arena of interest enables us to look at emplacement in both cosmological
and environmental terms (Stewart and Strathern 2018). Recognition of this
point further allows us to look at the questions of sustainability of practices
over time in relation to the environment. Language is an immediate tool for
conceptualizing such ecological issues. We have only here to remember Franz
Boas’s disquisition on “Eskimo words for snow” to realize in general that ecology
is actually at the heart of semantics.
Another ecological feature here is how language acts a bridge between
perceived worlds, enabling communication with spirit entities in the wider
cosmos. Rituals of prayer, invocation, magical incantations, spells for inducing
fertility and averting disasters all belong to this genre (Stewart and Strathern
2014). In particular, the powers of song, percussive beating, and the sounds
of musical instruments enhance this projective capability of language, sending
notes into the environment to reach the awareness of spirit forces within a
landscape or along water courses or the air. Language is thus again an important
component of eco-cosmological relations. This process is interactive, since the
environment itself is always speaking, communicating, and transmitting forms
of information. Recognition of this point helps us to extend the parameters
of our understanding of language beyond the technicalities of semantics and
syntax and into the wider world of experience. This kind of comprehension
takes us also into the world of diversity in linguistic expressions that long ago
caught the attention of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1999, originally published
1836). We are taking this perspective further in a project with the title “How
the Planet Speaks: Ecology, Language, and Mind” (Stewart and Strathern n.d.),
with an echo in recognition of the work of Gregory Bateson (2000, originally
published in 1972).
Finally, here, ecology has generally been taken to refer to the material
environment in which we live, and this environment contains very notably all
the machines that humans have built and that subsequently act as agents in the
world themselves, especially in the Information Technology arena of computing,
robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, with all the developing language terms and
ritual procedures that populate this brave new world.
In this book we have traveled from the review of significant topics in the
analysis of natural languages, concentrating on spoken forms and how these
Excursions, Translations, and Explorations 119
have been influenced by the advent of literacy and its latter-day variant
manifestations. When language is distributed among a range of “actants,”
humans, and other agents of communication, we are peering toward the future
of humanity itself and of language too and ways of rethinking questions of
consciousness and identities, in which dynamically changing language usages
will continue to play a vital and endlessly fascinating part in an evolving global
ecosphere.
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Press.
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B. Thompson. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
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Gruyter.
Index
Allis-Chalmers 93 diglossia 97
Amb Kor 72, 76–7 disaster(s) 61, 68, 118
Anastenaria 52 divination 68–9
ancestral spirit(s) 13, 74 dream(s) 70, 75–6, 117
animal(s) 8, 33–4, 41, 54 Duna 24, 72, 83
Artificial Intelligence xii, 118
Auld Lang Syne 98 eco-linguistics 117
Austronesian 7, 33, 110 ecology 108, 110, 117–18
Ayrshire 93–5, 97–8, 100–3, 107 el ik 66–7, 71–2, 81, 83
embodied action(s) 19, 47, 59
ballad(s) 24, 71, 97, 100, 106 embodiment 15, 17–18, 46, 50, 91, 118
Begg, James Andrew 103 embodiment theory xii, 35, 50, 65
Brexit 90, 109 emotion(s) 18, 43–7, 61
Burns, Robert 94, 98–101, 103, 105, 107 English 4, 19, 21–2, 27, 29–30, 35, 39–40,
44–5, 53, 56, 89–112, 115–17
cassowaries 31–2, 35, 43 environment(s) xii, 4–5, 9, 11, 17,
Catrine 104 32, 38, 40–1, 43, 57, 108, 110,
cell phone 28 117–18
Chinese 38–9, 116 European Union 90, 92, 99, 105, 109
Christianity 27–8, 70 Extended Mind 49
churches 19
classification(s) xii, 6–7, 9, 13, 17, 30–6, facial decorations 43
43, 54, 115 fake news 81
code-switching 5, 89, 91, 93, 112 fear(s) 46–7, 51, 80–1, 84, 100
cognitive polyvalence 42 formality 64–5, 71, 86, 99
color(s) 32, 37–45, 62, 93
communicative competence 5, 104 Gaelic 90, 92, 95, 105
conceptual metaphor theory 51 gender(ed) 23, 32, 60, 71, 85, 87
conflict(s) 8, 19, 23, 44, 47, 55, 62, 71–2, German(ic) 22, 45, 95, 109–11
79–82, 89–90, 92, 96–7, 104 Gidjingali 46
consciousness 3, 13, 22, 26, 61, 77, 93, 119 gift(s) 16–17, 29, 31
cosmology 70, 73 gift-giving 16
creativity xi, 17–18, 73, 86, 89 globalization 4, 112, 115–16
creole 4, 109, 111–12 Globish 116
cross-domain analogical thinking 51 gossip(ing) 47, 81–3
cultural grammar xii, 4 grammatical classifiers 54
culture-bound syndrome 52
Hawaii(an) 80–1
dancing 69–70, 105 healing ix, 51, 71–5
dangerous words 80 Heptapod 116–17
dark matter xii, 1–6, 9, 30 history 24, 27–8, 54, 61–2, 66, 81, 89–90,
dialect(s) 4, 27, 76, 90–1, 93–5, 107, 108 95, 98–100, 108
132 Index
Hopi 56–7, 117 minority identities xii, 90

hunter-gatherer(s) 8–10 missionaries 27–8
missionary 27, 86, 110
Ifaluk 45–6 mön 71–3
ik ek 81, 112 Mount Hagen 3, 10, 16–18, 33, 42, 51, 64,
illocution 22, 29–30, 59, 71 66, 70, 76–7, 80, 83, 85, 109, 111
illocutionary force 65, 72 multi-sensorial components 62
illocutionary speech 66 myth(s) 13, 32, 41, 70, 101
Ilongot 45 mythology 10
Inner Mongolia x, 84
Innerpeffray 25 naming practices 83
Internet 26 narrative memory 9
intertextuality 94 New Cumnock 101, 103
Newmilns 93, 98
kabary 65 Nisbet, Murdoch 97
Kabyle 15, 17 noman 17–19, 46–7, 86
kang rom 71–2 Normans 95
Karam 31–3, 42 Nuaulu 35–6, 41
kin 6, 18–19, 28–9, 36, 74–5, 83, 85 Nukulaelae 26–9
kinship xii, 6, 9, 28, 40, 68, 74, 83–5
Knox, John 96 orality 22–3, 29–30, 94, 99, 116
Kwak’wala 55
pairing(s) 34–6, 42–3, 77, 115
labeling theory 52, 54 Pangia 4, 11, 31, 42, 55
landscape(s) 10, 40, 73, 77, 102–3, 112, Papua New Guinea 4–5, 15–18, 23–4,
118 31–2, 41–3, 51, 64, 66, 69, 76, 78, 80–1,
language ideology 5, 23, 59, 65, 67, 85–6, 83, 85–7, 89, 91, 109–12, 115
89 performance(s) 22, 24, 29, 59–63, 67,
language loss 112 69–70, 72–3, 77, 83, 94
Latin 30, 95–6, 100, 102 performances of commemoration 61
lecto-oral domain 22, 29, 94 performativity xii, 29, 67
letter writing 27–8 personhood 22–3, 47, 65, 86
literacy vii, xii, 5, 19, 23–30, 89, 91, 116, Perthshire 25, 84, 101
119 pikono 72
Piraha 3, 12
magical spells 15, 29, 51, 63, 65, 70–1 Plantation of Ulster 104, 107
making twos 115 poetry 64, 90, 98–100, 102
Malagasy 65, 71 popokl 17–19, 46–7, 87
Mandarin 38 potatoes 102
Manes Kaya 74 practice theory xii, 15–16, 19
Māori 62 prehension 34, 36, 113
Melpa vii, 3–4, 10–11, 13, 21, 32–47,
49–57, 59–64, 41–3, 46–7, 51, 55, 59, rakl 35, 115
64, 66–7, 69, 71, 76, 87, 109, 112, 115 Raphoe 106–7
Merina vii, 59, 64–6 Rarotonga 27
metaphor(s) 38, 51, 56, 64, 66 rationality 50
metaphoric significance 113 recursion 7, 10, 12
metapragmatics 22–3 referentiality 44, 67–8
migrant(s) 27–8, 95, 109 religion 24, 27, 36, 50–1, 69, 80
Index 133
revenge 18, 30, 47, 69, 97 taxonomy 34, 36

Rhyming Weaver poets 105, 107 Telefomin 32
rumor 81–2 Theory of Mind 50
Tok Pisin vii, 4–5, 33, 89, 91, 109–10, 116
St. Johnston 106–7 Trobrianders 15, 63–4
Samoa(n) 27, 45, 86–7 Tsembaga 69
Scotland 5, 25, 82–4, 87, 90, 92–3, 95–8,
102–7, 109, 111 Ulster-Scots 5, 90, 92, 104–9
Scots vii, 4–5, 89–90, 92–109, 111–12, 116 Ulster-Scots Agency 105, 108
semantic primes 37–8 universal grammar xii, 3, 7, 12, 21
semiotic abduction 51 Unserdeutsch 110
sensory experience 63, 83 utility 2, 12
shaman 70–1, 84
shamanic practices 68, 70, 117 Virgil 96, 100
shame 17, 45–7, 81
sickness 18, 82, 84, 86–7 Warlpiri 40–4
song(s) 24, 29, 45, 64–5, 70, 76–7, 83, 92, website(s) 52, 80
98–9, 102, 118 Wiru 4, 11, 42, 55
sorcery 50–1, 81–2 witchcraft 50–1, 81–2
speech community(ies) 4–5, 15, 104, 108 women 32, 77, 87, 110
Standard Habby 98
story-telling 10 Yucatec Maya 53
Strathearn 84
134
135
136
137
138

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Language and Culture

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Sharon K. Deckert

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, 2019

Cover design by Tjaša Krivec

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About the Authors viii

1 Language as Cultural Practice 1

as invited lecturers at a number of Chinese Universities: Peking University,

What is the relationship of language to culture? Answers to this classic question

in anthropology. The book reflects our own vision of anthropology in general

Language as Cultural Practice

This chapter begins to explore, in a preliminary way, aspects of meaning in

underpins language usages but is not necessarily directly expressed in linguistic

of communication” concept and the study of “communicative competence”

Meaning, in effect, is carried in many different domains of action, notably in the

Linguists and anthropologists have been interested in questions of origins. So,

Language also enables the creation of a kind of narrative memory distinct

process. Words by themselves are insufficient for language to be realized, so syntax

A systematic scheme of theorizing on the origins of language is provided

Language, Practice, and Embodiment

The study of language, as employed in practical speech contexts, meshes with

is to get better. The sick person is encouraged, therefore, in a special meeting of

Themes in Language Practice

Orality and literacy

Language began in human prehistory as speech. It is also marked by the initial

word containing a number of potential or actual characteristics: the ability to

Performativity and illocution

This observation applies further to the domain of performative uses of language,

another job, retrain, or take revenge on the employer (= perlocutionary effects).

Cognition and Categories:

Languages categorize the world. This might seem a straightforward statement,

based at least partly on a taxonomic model, always linked to observations of

example, in terms of classification of space with closeness or distance from the

Cognition and Categories:

anger. It can lead to inflicting violence either on others or on oneself by suicide

That is, it is generated out of interactions; it operates between people. But it is

Cognitive Science and Language

Cognitive science has entered the sphere of anthropological theorizing in a

If we now posit a close relationship also between “thought” and “cognition”

explanations lack the specificity and ethnographic depth of particularist

also warned against simplistic acceptance of the use of grammatical classifiers,

functions as a form of counting (Leavitt 2010: 124–125). Analogously, in one

malleable and can be used innovatively. Habitually, language can, in practice,

Language and Ritual: The Merina

complementarity, or gendered forms of marital alliance between categories of

anthropologists have attributed to ritual acts generally: redundancy, repetition,

Language and Ritual: Maring and Melpa

El ik [Sealing of political alliance] Audience appreciation, prestige

Language and Power

Language use is always closely related to the exercise of power, whether

language, power, and morality together, in a way paralleling discourse on what

exercised differently. In Hagen, traditional society was relatively egalitarian, at

relationship is expected to be warm and indulgent, and there is a kind of classic

Language, Literacy, and Change:

influence the transmission of knowledge and ability. Generalized schooling is

of English as an international language and Scots as a national language. John

sixty-seven words in English and their equivalents in Ulster-English dialect and

Language issues are often inextricably linked to politics. In this context, it is

of vernacular identity and a code-switching resource for expressing cultural

metaphoric significance of these indirect forms of expression. A loss of cultural

About the Authors viii

1 Language as Cultural Practice 1

El ik [Sealing of political alliance] Audience appreciation, prestige