Speaking as social action

people believe that men become red fish. Rather, the comparison is metaphorical and invokes a taboo to be followed by the people and not a transformation from the human to animal world (Tambiah [1968] 1985: 47):

It is a truer tribute to the savage mind to say that, rather than being confused by verbal fallacies or acting in defiance of known physical laws, it ingeniously conjoins the expressive and metaphorical properties of language with the operational and empirical properties of technical activity. (Tambiah [1968] 1985: 53)

Tambaiah’s criticism points to one of Malinowski’s main problems. Despite his grasp of the pragmatic dimensions of language use and the realization that magic spells were both special and yet related to ordinary language, Malinowski did not develop a conceptual framework for analyzing different functions of speech or different types of relations between utterances and social acts.

7.2Philosophical approaches to language as action

For an analytically more sophisticated theory of words as deeds, we must turn to two philosophers who were working in England at roughly the same time Malinowski was proposing his “speech in action” approach (see above): J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite their common commitment to what we might call now a pragmatic view of language (language is used for doing things), these two remarkable thinkers had quite diverse positions on a number of key points, including the nature and goals of philosophy and its relation to other sciences. Between the two, Austin is certainly the more popular among linguists, although not necessarily among linguistic anthropologists (see section 7.3). Austin’s popularity is partly due to the work of the American philosopher John Searle, who through his Speech Act Theory made Austin’s ideas accessible to a wider audience including literary critics and psychologists, and partly due to the content and style of Wittgenstein’s writings, which defy systematization and modeling.8 As I will show below, however, it is precisely Searle’s accentuation of certain features of Austin’s theory, such as sincerity and intentionality, that have prompted the harshest criticism of speech act theory by linguistic anthropologists. Wittgenstein’s ideas, on the other hand, are much closer in content and

8This characteristic of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings did not escape some of his interpreters, including the American philosopher Saul Kripke, who wrote: “I suspect ...

that to attempt to present Wittgenstein’s argument precisely is to some extent to falsify it” (1982: 5). And again: “[Wittgenstein’s] own stylistic preference obviously contributes to the difficulty of his work as well as to its beauty” (ibid., fn. 4). Similarly, Bloor (1983: 138) wrote: “... the present chapter will have a distinctly un-Wittgensteinean tone. Exposition is going to give way to development. Analysis will give way to synthesis and theoretical construction.”

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