Units of participation

concerned with the functions of speech as defined by Jakobson and more concerned instead with how different aspects of the interaction help define what is said and how it is said. Speech acts and speech events are thus units of participation for Hymes in at least two ways: (i) they are ways for people to belong to a community; (ii) they are ways of constituting a community. Community, in turn, can be understood at different levels. At the micro-interactional level, “community” refers to the small or large group of people organized around a common activity – this set includes a two-party conversation on the phone, a ceremony of initiation involving a few dozen participants, and a political rally with thousands of people. At the macro-interactional level, I understand “community” as meaning a typically larger, real or imaginary (cf. Anderson 1983), reference group, whose constituency exceeds the boundaries of the here-and-now of any given situation and is established on the basis of one or more of a number of criteria, including geo-political, kin, ethnic, professional, and linguistic affiliation.

9.2.1Ethnographic studies of speech events

Although Hymes’s SPEAKING model has been rarely used in its extended version,11 it has inspired a considerable number of ethnographic studies of linguistic communities from the point of view of speech events. Central to the organization of these studies is the relationship among components of the speech events, especially setting, participants, and genres.

Sherzer (1974, 1983), for instance, discusses much of social life among the Kuna of Panama from the point of view of the speech events taking place inside the “gathering house” (onmakket neka), where people chat, argue, plan about the future, and talk about the past. Sherzer shows that the different speech events inside the “gathering house” are largely defined by the genre used and by the type of participation required by the audience. Thus, whether or not a chief will “chant” (namakke) or “speak” (sunmakke) in part depends on the presence of another chief in the house who can respond (apinsue) using “chief language” (sakla kaya) (Sherzer 1983: 98). Furthermore, although all chanting is performed in “chief language,” participation formats are quite different from one type of event to another. During the konkreso “congress,” a type of event that occurs every other evening and includes both men and women, after some public discussion of community issues which might include economic matters and recent

11Given Hymes’s insistance on events as units of analysis, several authors, myself included, have in the past interpreted the components of the SPEAKING model as referring to features of events rather than speech acts (Duranti 1985; Saville-Troike 1989). Given the dynamic nature of any speech event, however, it makes more sense to think of those components as constitutive parts of speech acts, in the sense of speech act theory (see chapter 7).

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arguments between people, the chant will start in the form of a ritualized dialogue in which each of the chanting chief’s verses (ikar) is followed by the comment teki “indeed, it’s true” by the responding chief.

(1)(CC=chanting chief, RC=responding chief)

CC:we yalase papal anparmialimarye sokl ittole

“God sent us to this mountain say hear.” eka masmul akkwekarye oparwe.

“In order to care for banana roots for him utter.” RC: teki.

“Indeed.”

CC:ekal inso tarkawamul akkwekaryey sokel ittolete

“In order thus to care for taro roots for him say hear.” sunna ipiti oparwe.

“In truth utter.”

While the performance is taking place, local “policemen” patrol the house calling out kapita marye “don’t sleep!” and nue ittomarye! “listen well!” Audience involvement is further reinforced by the work of the arkar or chief’s interpreter, who must “translate” in more ordinary language what the chief has just chanted in the esoteric sakla kaya. This type of event is different from other kinds of exchanges with different kinds of audience participation. In the exchange of formal greetings (arkan kae, literally “handshake”) between a visiting chief and a host chief, for instance, there is no official audience. Some people might come inside the “gathering house,” sit down, and listen, but they might also talk to each other or with the entourage of the visiting chief, sometimes rather loudly. No “policeman” walks around ensuring proper attention and participation. When the exchange of greetings is over, there is no official translation. What accounts for the different forms of participation in the two events? In the chants performed during a konkreso the main goal of the performance seems to be the teaching of moral values. Thus, the popularity and success of a Kuna chief, according to Sherzer (1983: 90) “reside in his ability to develop moral positions, argue for modes of behavior, and espouse particular points of view through creative, innovative, and often indirect language.” This is also the time when novices are exposed to the esoteric language of the chants and have a chance to hear their interpretation by the official translator. The chanting in this case is thus framed and organized as an opportunity for the transmission of knowledge and the reproduction of collective memory (Severi 1989). The formal greetings

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instead are intended for the chiefs only and are framed as almost accidentally witnessed by the rest of the community. In yet another kind of speech event, the curing ritual, the larger audience is usually excluded. In this case, in addition to the “shaman” (Severi 1989) or, as Sherzer calls him, the “ikar knower,” the only other participants are the sick person and the “stick dolls” (suar nuchukana), which represent “the spirits of good, whose role it is to counter the evil spirits causing the disease” (Sherzer 1983: 111). What the typology of Kuna chants shows is that the higher the level of participation by the audience, the more creative is the performance. In the curing events, the performer is concerned with convincing the spirits of his knowledge of tradition; there is thus less room for individual creativity. In the chants performed at the konkreso, instead, the chiefs are trying to impress the audience with their ability to establish particular connections between the past and the present.

The most striking aspect of “gathering house” chanting as well as speaking is their focus on creative adaptation, on the ability of individuals – “chiefs” and followers, women and men, young and old – to perform verbally for long periods of time, on the spot, with no preparation, taking a theme, an idea, or a metaphor and developing it to make it fit the particular issue at hand. In curing and magical ikarkana, on the other hand, the texts appropriate for particular diseases or other purposes are putatively fixed, and the “ikar knowers” make changes, really choices, in these fixed texts only according to the origin of the disease or the particular goal of the ikar. (Sherzer 1983: 134–5)

It is the ability to move in and out of the same event and from one part of the event to another that has made ethnographers of speaking particularly aware of the dimension of performance to be understood as a dimension of linguistic production in which aesthetic canons provide both resources for and constraints on the use of language as a tool for public speaking (see section 1.4.1). Within the same community, speech events are often classified along a continuum, from ritualized or formalized to casual or informal speech (Bloch 1975; Irvine 1979; Keenan 1975; Kuipers 1990). Much of the discussion of speech events has thus tended to concentrate on the linguistic features of the speech genre used. Bloch (1975), for instance, argued that formalized language – a type of speech in which there are special restrictions of both form and content – coerces speakers and hearers into accepting the status quo. The predictability of much of traditional oratory is seen by Bloch as an instrument of power whereby both speakers and hearers are forced to follow a path that has been already decided. Another important dimension of speech genres is the extent to which they make refer-

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ence to or index the context of the performance as opposed to an apparently timeless voice that is detached from the here-and-now and carries the power of tradition (Bauman 1992a; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Duranti 1994a; Kuipers 1990). This is what Bakhtin (1981a: 13) characterized as the “world of epic”:

The world of epic is the national heroic past: it is a world of “beginnings” and “peak times” in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of “firsts” and “bests,” ...

The epic ... has been from the beginning a poem about the past, and

the authorial position immanent in the epic and constitutive for it ...

is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendent.

One of the consequences of speaking with the voice of the past is that what is being said is less vulnerable to the contingencies of the present. When the language that is being used is presented as the words of the ancestors, to challenge the content of someone’s speech means to challenge the foundations of the social order. For this reason, Bloch (1975: 26) argues, we often find that in political arenas speakers rely on two different genres or two different styles within the same genre (Comaroff 1975; Duranti 1984; Salmond 1975). One genre is used for speaking about the past and the other for the contingencies of the present. One is dedicated to the celebration of an eternal, immutable structure and the other for the discussion of temporary matters, including the actions of mortals.

In my own work (Duranti 1994), I have argued that, in fact, rather than two separate styles or genres, in Samoan political arenas we are more likely to find a mixing of forms and contents that illustrates what Bakhtin called “heteroglossia,” that is, the combination of features that represent “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth” (Bakhtin 1981a: 291). Such a coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions is found in the discussion part of the Samoan fono I studied, where I found the following heteroglot features:

(a)mixing of different speech registers or codes

(b)more pronounced display of affect

(c)invocation of personal identities

(d)use of quoted direct speech

(e)some dialogical, almost conversational exchanges

(f)logical argumentation (especially “if-then” propositions)

(g)complaints and accusations.

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