Units of participation

sustained by his actions: he has walked into the house carrying a dry kava root, a traditional offer for the assembly, but when he first speaks he does so in the “good speech” (tautala lelei), a phonological variety of Samoan that is common in church, school, and other western-inspired institutional settings but not in meetings of village-level kinship-based political units.27

The Samoan ceremonial greetings also speak to the question of differentiation and the constitution of hierarchy. Whether or not someone will be greeted depends on a number of factors that establish his entrance as worthy of public recognition. Participation in the exchange of greetings, a highly negotiated and negotiable activity, is also an important aspect of the reproduction of the social order. Its organization, with multiple speakers jointly and yet not simultaneously greeting the newcomer, allows for individual voices and specific epithets to be heard and be played against one another. What someone is called and how he or she reciprocates the greeting are important indexes of the social stature of the individuals and groups involved in the encounter. The extension of the same ritual from events based on kinship-based hierarchies such as the fono to events involving representatives of the local church or the government encourages a reading of such modern institutions in terms of traditional values and perpetrates the ideological fiction of a world that is made to appear the same while in fact changing.

9.6Conclusions

I started this chapter with the notion of activity and its importance in the study of philogenetic and ontogenetic development and I ended with an example of an analysis of greetings that relied on audio-visual documentation and ethnographic methods. How are these two domains of inquiry connected? The answer I propose is that they are connected through the notion of participation, that is, the idea that to study human behavior, including speech, means to engage in the detailed and systematic study of the semiotic and material resources that go into the constitution of usually multi-party joint activities. To make sense of what people do as members of particular groups – and to be members of such groups – means to understand not only what one person says to another, but how speaking and non-speaking participants coordinate their actions, including verbal acts, to constitute themselves and each other in particular spatio-temporally fluid but bounded units. Linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists have provided us over the last half a century with a number of units of analysis that try to capture the dynamic functional systems speech is part of. Jakobson’s speech event model

27For a discussion of the contextual distribution of the two phonological registers, “good speech” and “bad speech,” see Duranti (1981, 1990, 1994a), Duranti and Ochs (1986), Shore (1982)

328

9.6 Conclusions

owes a great deal to the European tradition of functional linguistics based on instrumental models of language (Bühler, the Prague School). His model reframes the referential function of language – the ability to talk about the world – as only one among a number of functions performed by speech in speaker-hearer interactions. Hymes’s SPEAKING model further extends Jakobson’s scheme adding a sensitivity to dimensions of speech and participation in speech events that makes the study of communicative events the starting point for the study of entire communities. The revolutionary idea in this case is the call for a social unit of analysis, the event, that is in turn defined by the speech that goes on in it. Hymes invited researchers to simultaneously take into account and study in some detail several dimensions of language use, including the setting, the genre, and the goals of the event.28 Out of the rich list of components of speech events proposed by Hymes, I decided to focus on “participants” for a number of reasons. First, by deconstructing the categories “speaker” and “hearer,” two cornerstones of contemporary work in linguistics, we can reframe the act of speaking as a joint and yet differentiated and differentiating activity where what appears as a message produced by one individual is in fact the achievement of a socially organized unit. Second, the subtle distinctions made by Goffman within each category allow us to think about the different ways in which one’s speech can simultaneously represent the voices and social personae of different individuals or institutional roles. This adds an analytical richness that is essential for the recognition of speaking as an activity with sociohistorical depth, where to establish, negotiate, and challenge who we are and what we are up to vis-à-vis a real or imaginary group. Third, by shifting away from individual utterances to participant frameworks, we are able to use some of the insights of the study of conversational interaction to investigate the consequences of different kinds of sequential organizations for the constitution of social roles and categories within specific social systems. Finally, the emphasis on participation reframes speech as only one of the semiotic resources used by social actors and leads us to take more seriously into consideration the material resources and the visual information available in any social encounter. The analysis of Samoan ceremonial greetings presented above was meant to provide an example of such a study, where information gathered through traditional ethnographic methods (e.g. participant-observation, interviews) is integrated with detailed, in some cases frame-by-frame analysis of audio-visual records of interactional exchanges. The interplay of verbal, corporeal, and visual resources found in the Samoan greetings should not be seen as unique, but as quite ordinary in any social encounters where participants have

28His model was put into operation by Sherzer and Darnell (1972) in a set of research questions for fieldworkers that covered such topics as linguistic varieties, attitudes, language acquisition, and typology.

329

Units of participation

access to both aural and visual information. It also shows that speech activities that we might otherwise analyze as bounded do in fact interact with other (prior or ensuing) activities in interesting ways. The result of these complex inter-lac- ing of semiotic layers and communicative channels is a kind of “multi-channel architecture” that greetings share with many other human social activities. The possibility of sequentially and sometimes simultaneously communicating through different resources (speech, body movements, interaction with and use of the material environment) can keep alive multiple versions of the on-going social scene as well as multiple identities of the participants. The ability to capture such qualities of an interaction is an important instrument for the study of the formation of social identity. By looking at greetings in the way I suggested, we can show that multiple channels and modes of interaction (voice, body, body/space) are used not only because they are available, but because they each offer different solutions to the problem of establishing and sustaining a particular version of the social world – with its assumptions about knowledge and power, access and denial, continuity and change – without denying the possibility of other versions, with their orders and power relations. In this way, the detailed micro-level analysis of speech in interaction proposed in the last few chapters can be shown to enter a realm of investigation that is much larger than the specific situation that is being studied and links the details of everyday encounters to the larger social organizations and institutional settings that give direction and meaning to the social life of any community.

330