7.3Speech act theory and linguistic anthropology

(9)A speaker can make an indirect request (or other directive) by either asking whether or stating that a preparatory condition concerning the hearer’s ability to do a certain action obtains.

This principle says that one can make a request for action by asking can you reach the salt? by virtue of the fact that the ability to reach the salt would be a necessary condition for the hearer to be able to satisfy the request for action.

7.3Speech act theory and linguistic anthropology

From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, these discussions about how and where to locate the knowledge that speakers and hearers have in producing and interpreting utterances are important and yet problematic for at least two reasons. First, they are done without apparent awareness that the phenomena and principles invoked by the analyst might be culture-specific. Whether or not they relied on English examples, the scholars involved in speech act analysis usually automatically assume that their intuitions and findings have a universal relevance. Second, speech act analysts – like most philosophers – believe that reasonable generalizations can be made by introspection, that is, by thinking out relevant examples and imagining possible situations, without having to actually observe and systematically collect data from real-life interactions. These assumptions about universality prompted strong criticism from ethnographers and linguistic anthropologists working in societies outside of Europe and the United States.

To do ethnography (chapter 4), we need to know whether a question counts as a greeting, a statement about the future as a promise, or a statement about the past as an accusation. Austin’s distinction between saying and doing (locutionary and illocutionary acts) and his discussion of felicity conditions becomes then a first step toward a discussion of contextualization, that is, the activity whereby acts (whether verbal or otherwise) are understood as connected to or embedded in other acts and, in the process, made sense of in culturally meaningful terms. It should not be surprising then that ethnographers interested in rituals were among the most eager to adopt or draw from speech act theory (Rappoport 1974; Tambaiah 1968, 1973), but, as pointed out by Du Bois (1993: 49), these early enthusiasts “either left the ... standard Searlean speech-act theory implicit in their application of it, or perfunctorily repeated those elements which they saw no reason not to endorse” (Du Bois 1993: 49).

In particular, cultural anthropologists did not immediately realize that whereas most of the examples discussed by Austin had to do with highly ritualistic and institutionally defined speech acts such as naming a ship or marrying people,

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Searle’s extension of Austin’s theory to a much wider range of acts constituted a more general theory of human communication and human psychology (Searle 1969, 1983). As pointed out by a number of linguistic and cultural anthropologists, such a theory seems at odds with an anthropological understanding of human action and its interpretation in context .16

I will hereafter concentrate on Michelle Rosaldo’s (1982) critique based on her fieldwork among the Ilongots, a group of about 3,500 hunters and horticulturalists living in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, Northern Luzon, in the Philippines (Rosaldo 1980).

In a posthumously published article,17 Rosaldo argued that people display through language use an understanding of their own peculiar ways of being in the world and that speakers’ use of language reproduces a particular social system – one for instance, in which men tend to make requests and women tend to be those who satisfy them. This means that any classification of speech acts in a society must see those acts as part of cultural practices through which a particular type of social order is at once represented and reproduced. In other words, any analysis of speech acts must rely on and, in turn, inform analysis of people’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about how the world is organized.

In an approach that is quite close to poststructuralist theories of social action (Ortner 1984), Rosaldo’s confrontation with speech act theory represented a confrontation between two radically different notions of meaning and hence two radically different notions of the goals of linguistic interpretation. For Searle and other speech act theorists, the goal is to produce a method for arriving at the necessary and sufficient conditions of human communication. This is what felicity and sincerity conditions are supposed to do, together with a number of inferential principles such as conversational postulates or Grice’s conversational implicatures (see below and Levinson 1983: chapter 3). For Rosaldo and other linguistic anthropologists, the goal is to understand how particular uses of language might sustain, reproduce, or challenge particular versions of the social order and the notion of person (or self) that is part of that order.18 Starting from this premise and relying on her fieldwork among the Ilongots, Rosaldo criticized the following features of speech act theory:

16For earlier criticism of the cultural assumptions found in speech act theory and related paradigms, see Keenan [Ochs] (1974), Silverstein (1977).

17Michelle Rosaldo fell off a cliff and died on October 11, 1981 while conducting fieldwork in the Philippines (R. Rosaldo 1989: 9).

18It should be pointed out that Rosaldo represents a fairly extreme relativist position on these issues, which is not necessarily shared by all sociocultural or linguistic anthropologists. See Hollan 1992 for a review of different theories.

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(i)its emphasis on truth and verification as exemplified by the sincerity conditions in both Austin’s and Searle’s model;

(ii)the centrality of intentions in its theory of interpretation;

(iii)its implicit theory of person (or “self”).

Let us examine each of these features a bit more closely.

7.3.1Truth

Austin (1962: 40) talks about the need to have the “requisite feelings” for certain kinds of acts such as congratulating or condoling; Searle (1969) also includes sincerity as one of the conditions for most of the speech acts he discusses. One of his preparatory conditions for an assertion, for instance, is that the speaker has evidence for the truth of the proposition that is being asserted and the sincerity condition is that the speaker believes the proposition asserted to be true. For a promise to be non-defective, the speaker must sincerely intend to do the act promised (Searle 1969: 60).

Rosaldo argued that such a concern for sincerity is not shared by Ilongots and therefore cannot be considered a universal strategy in verbal interaction.19 Thus, if we look at when assertive verbs corresponding to the English saying, speaking, giving news are used by Ilongots, we find them in oratorical formulas, especially at the beginning of encounters or during an oratorical debate. They seem to be more about “formulations of relationship and claims” (p. 213) than about reporting some experienced truth. Speakers’ concern in making assertions seems to be more with who can claim what than with the details of what is actually said.

... Ilongots use denial and assertion in discourse as a device for the establishment of interactional roles.

Thus, for example, I have known Ilongots to deny that they had taken heads of kin of interlocutors who in fact had been their victims in the past, and then, when challenged, to pronounce a readiness to undergo dangerous ordeals and oaths in order to test the mettle of accusers who appeared less certain, or more fearful, than they thought themselves. As always, what they claimed was “true” depended less on “what took place” than on the quality of

19Austin and Searle recognize that it is possible for an act to be successful even though the speaker is insincere. However, sincerity remains for both of them an essential quality of speaking. This feature of the theory is maintained in more recent developments: “An insincere speech act is defective but not necessarily unsuccessful. A lie, for ex., can be a successful assertion. Nevertheless, successful performances of illocutionary acts necessarily involve the expression of the psychological state specified by the sincerity conditions of that type of act” (Searle and Vanderveken 1985: 18).

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an interaction where what mattered most was who spoke out and claimed the privilege to reveal or hide a public secret hitherto clothed in silence. (Rosaldo 1982: 214)

Rosaldo also argues that Ilongots do not have in their conceptual repertoire the act of promising as discussed by Searle (1965, 1969). Promising in the western (read “English”) sense implies sincerity by the speaker. This, in turn, implies the notion of “meaning as a thing derived from inner life” (Rosaldo 1982: 211; see Du Bois 1993; Duranti 1988b; 1993a, 1993b). The criticism of the sincerity question is thus closely linked with the criticism of the centrality of intentions in interpreting social action (see section 7.3.2) and with the notion of person implicit in such centrality (see section 7.3.3).

More generally, even when recognized by members of the society, the act of promising, or whatever one might call a certain display of commitment to some future action, might be separated from the fulfillment of that act. This is a point made by Rappoport (1974) in discussing rituals. The Mareng dance together in a ritual called kaiko that is supposed to commit dancers to be fighting partners in the future, but there is no assurance that such commitment will be fulfilled. We might have to recognize that for a promise to correspond to some future action, there may have to be other acts, in the future, that need to be fulfilled. Some of these acts might be known in advance and hence can be listed as a set of felicity conditions, but other ones might not be foreseeable. Bourdieu’s (1977) discussion of exchange emphasizes the role of this element of the unknown in future action as the basis of what gives meaning to social interaction. Saying that an exchange means that if A gives to B, then B gives to A misses the temporal dimension in between the two acts, with its emotional and ethical aspects. Whether or not something counts as a promise – or a challenge, a gift, a retribution – is partly determined by what happens after the act. It depends on what others do to consolidate or undermine its force. The sincerity of a party’s feelings toward the other party might be (or be made) quite irrelevant.

As Moerman (1988: 108) wrote,

“Truth,” “accuracy,” and other mappings between what is said and what is referred to are locally occasioned. Even if we restrict our attention to talk about the world out there, truth and accuracy are not always the relevant or appropriate standards. Being amusing, touching, or polite sometimes counts too.

From an anthropological perspective, truth is sometimes an achievement as much as a precondition for a satisfactory transaction, communication included (Duranti 1993a).

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