Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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of variable complexity and length, in which people habitually engage, and which is accompanied by particular habitual actions. ‘Languagegame’ is an attempt to convey the embeddedness of speech-making in routine social relationships and behaviours, the formulaic way in which speech accompanies everyday social interaction and amounts to a whole ‘form of life’ (cf. Rapport 1987:170ff.). What the concepts of discourse and language-game share is their insistence on intrinsic ties between speech and behaviour, between the linguistic and the socio-cultural, and between individual speakers and social conventions.

Discourse analysis

The analysis of discourse has been undertaken in a number of different ways (cf. Brown and Yule 1983). Wittgenstein has already been mentioned, while Alfred Schuetz, influenced by the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl, influenced in his turn by the ethnomethodology of the likes of Harold Garfinkel. Garfinkel (1967) explored the ways in which everyday conversation was mediated by a set of common background expectancies which speakers shared; so that an engagement in habitual discourse maintained and reinforced a common world-view and a common set of social structures in whose terms speakers lived.

More strictly anthropological has been the work of Dell Hymes (1972), emphasizing both the regularity of ways of speaking which human beings practise in particular times and places, and the manner in which ways of speaking and, more generally, ways of behaving and interacting, are closely tied; language and society are perhaps indistinguishable. Hence, Hymes suggests the composite term ‘speech-community’ for those who share rules concerning the conduct and interpretation of speech: a speechcommunity will determine particular proper ways of speaking which its competent members will practise. These ways will involve ‘speech styles’ which are set in certain ‘speech-situations’ (ceremonies, fights, meals, hunts), making up particular ‘speech-events’, and comprised of individual ‘speech-acts’. In this fashion, Hymes prescribes a systemic analysis of discourse—the form, content, channels and setting of everyday speech, its addressers, addressees and audience, its goals and outcome, its history and development—and its systemic relating to the rest of the social structure of a group.

Another important anthropological approach to discourse has been the work of Robert Paine (and others) on political rhetoric. Paine distinguishes rhetoric as a particular kind of discourse, arguing that while most speech-acts concern ‘speech about something’, the kernel of

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rhetoric is that ‘saying is doing’ (1981:9). In this, rhetoric most resembles music or drama, for there too the doing and the effect are inseparable. The effect which rhetoric most often intends is persuasion, in particular the persuasion of an audience by a speaker—although a speaker might also be found to be persuaded by his own voicing of his words—and this is perhaps most clearly seen in the realm of politics. Rhetoric can be seen as an instrument by which a speaker gains or increases control over a political environment. And once this control becomes routinized, institutionalized, then control over language, over the right to speak, may be defined as an essential base of power and authority. So that those with power are those who control others, in part at least, via the medium of speech, and those in power are those with the right and duty to decide who speaks when and how (cf. Goldschlaeger 1985).

While it was in the eighteenth century that Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova first propounded a systematic link between the study of rhetoric and the study of cultural forms and effects, it is more recent thinkers such as philosopher J.L.Austin and critic Kenneth Burke who have inspired an anthropological focus on the power of speech to affect others. For Austin (1971, 1975), speech should be appreciated as having meaning, force and effect. In particular, an important range of speechacts, ‘performative utterances’, do not merely describe the social world (‘declarative’) but give it form and content too. Here is speech with the ‘illocutionary force’ to create social happenings, speech as an instrument of social action with significant social consequences. For Burke (1973), symbolically mediated and interactionally coordinated forms of behaviour (speech, gesture, dress) can be studied for the ways they are used artfully so as to influence others’ beliefs and attitudes. In particular, the effects of such successful rhetorical usage may be to cause an audience to achieve a state of ‘identification’ with a speaker, whereby aspects of the social identity or being of the people involved in the rhetorical encounter come more closely to approximate one another. Hence, Paine’s definition (1971) of a patron as someone whose power is to have values of his own express choosing affirmed by others—those who come to identify themselves as clients.

As a development of the above focus on speaking and power, perhaps the most popular approach to discourse in anthropology of late has been that influenced by the French philosopher of systems of thought, Michel Foucault (and other post-structuralist theorists). In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) Foucault set forth a programme for what he called ‘the pure description of discursive events’. This was important, he claimed, because there were inexorable links between forms of communication, knowledge and power. Discourse was a key determinant of social life

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and exchange, for particular cultural discourses maintained both conventional ways of knowing the world and a network of power relations among those who did the knowing. Discourse amounted to certain conditions and procedures regulating how people may communicate and what and how they may know.

Insofar as Foucauldian concerns have become anthropological ones, the key questions are whether it is true that formulaic limits to routine and conventional ways of speaking in a social milieu need be said similarly and necessarily to limit what is known (thought, experienced and imagined) by individual speakers, and the extent to which this formulaicism elicits hierarchies of power, knowledge and belonging which speakers can but barely escape (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990).

A Foucauldian anthropology of discourse

‘Discourse’ is perhaps Foucault‘s key conceptual term, but it also figures as part of a broader post-structuralist imaging of social life as the playing out of impersonal and largely unconscious systems of signification: anonymous, depersonalized networking of images (cf. Kearney 1988:13– 14). Here, collective discourses or forms of life are seen to cause to be true or ‘real’ certain constructions of the world and its components, as well as instituting a set of knowledge-practices with inevitable ties to a mastery of power. In other words, it is language which ‘discourses’, not individual speakers, and they only speak to the extent that they respond to (and correspond with) the conventional discursive forms of their language. In this anti-idealist and anti-humanist vision, linguistic expression is the fount of knowledge and of power (of ‘powerknowledge’) while its human speakers and their subjectivities, their selves and societies, are the ‘effects’ of expression. Individual speakers are not responsible for the expression and constitution of identities effected through their speaking; discourse deprives the human subject of any alleged status as ‘source and master of meaning’ (Culler 1981:33).

The wider intent is to displace (dissolve and decentre) the individual speaker from analysis so as to make room for the hierarchy of ‘subjectpositions’ which a particular discourse is seen to articulate. Here is an exploding of humanist notions of what it is to partake of speech— including subjective inwardness and originality, sequential development of topic, coherent expression of narrative. As Foucault sums up (1991:118): ‘In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject…of its role as originator, and of analysing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse’.To enter into discourse is seen perforce to comply, however artfully, with certain collective structures (hypograms, matrices,

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codes) of signification (cf. Riffaterre 1978:164–6). The symbolic process of linguistic expression and the social practice of speaking are both regarded as part-and-parcel of a conscience collective which classifies the world in terms of certain subject-positions and prescribes proper relations between them. Occupying particular subject-positions in particular discourses, human beings are said inevitably to find themselves viewing the world and being viewed by it in certain partisan, interested and power-laden ways.

At once verbal and behavioural, collective and coercive, discourses are seen as inhabiting the body and habituating the mind; so that it is in terms of particular discursive constructions of the world that individual human beings come to be socialized. Human beings are ‘bodies totally imprinted by history’ (Foucault 1977). The only partial transcendence involves the move from one discourse to another: subverting one power relationship by playing it off against others, as discourses develop and change, abutting against and jockeying with each other, through time. But this is no real escape, since it is still a matter of individuals’ coming to consciousness in terms of one particular system of discursive classification, one particular set of unequal power relations, or another. Thus do individuals find themselves ‘being spoken’ by unconscious, preconditioned linguistic codes and knowledge-practices. Far from speakers’ employing discursive measures for the effecting of original or even intentioned ends, here is ‘mimesis without origin or end’ (Kearney 1988:6). Indeed, were it not for the subject-positions which discourses offer, human consciousnesses would not exist as human as such. Discourses create our humanity.

An ethnographic example of a Foucauldian approach to discourse is provided by Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on Bedouin love poetry (1990a), specifically on a traditional genre of oral lyricism known as ghinnawa. Love poetry is a highly cherished and privileged art-form among the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin (of Egypt’s Western Desert) which is thought of as distinctly Bedouin and associated with a noble past of political autonomy, strength and independence, and Abu-Lughod explores its status as ‘social text’. Her particular intent is a critique of ‘mentalist models’ of individual thought and emotion—of individual consciousness as private—and she argues that it is discourse which informs individual experience and constitutes the realities and truths by which individuals live. Far from ghinnawa being an expressive stage for individual emotionality, and far from this representing an inner state, therefore, the conventional poetic form must needs be regarded as rhetorical usage which itself constructs emotions as legitimate social phenomena, as social facts. Emotionality is routine discursive practice. Moreover, it is of and

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about social-structural conditions that emotional expression, and poetry about emotion, speaks; formed in and by a certain social ecology and political economy, the emotion of ghinnawa necessarily reflects the form of society (the hierarchical Bedouin social structure, the relations of power) in which the genre lives, which gave rise to it and for which its expression has practical consequences.

‘Fathalla’, for instance, Abu-Lughod describes as a young Bedouin man whose plans to marry ‘his beloved’ are thwarted by her father, his uncle. In this situation, Fathalla resorts to expressing ‘his’ feelings of love and regret in ghinnawa. For while this poetic genre is very much part of daily life, and often interspersed in the middle of ordinary conversations with intimates, the sentiments which he may properly express in conversation and in ghinnawa are very different.Thus, it is legitimate for Fathalla to express a feeling of love (to feel love) in the poetry while continuing to express (and feel) very different emotions in the conversational discourse which precedes and follows it. For Fathalla, we are informed, appropriate emotionality and proper discursive practice are one and the same.

Ghinnawa is not resorted to by all of Bedouin society alike, furthermore; it is primarily associated with young men and women. For these latter are the disadvantaged dependants of the social structure, and the sentiment of love which ghinnawa constitutes represents a subversion of the sentiment of modesty and an adherence to the social-structural status quo. The ghinnawa is a conventional discourse of defiance to the authority of the elders. And yet, those, like Fathalla, who compose ghinnawa are not disapproved of, even by the elders themselves. In fact, cassette-tapes have been made of Fathalla reciting his poems in a ‘moving and pained’ voice, and it was on the car cassette-player of her (elder) host that Abu-Lughod was introduced to them. Elders ‘clearly admired this young man for his passion and for his ability to express it in poetry. They were moved by his poems and awed by the power of his words’ (1990a:36).

In people’s approval of ghinnawa, Abu-Lughod concludes, in their discomfort with its emotions in ordinary conversation and their glorification of them in conversation’s interstices, can be read a fundamental paradox in Bedouin life between the ideals of equality and the everyday practice of hierarchy.The fact that the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin may be frequently ‘moved’ by ghinnawa poetry pertains in no necessary way to individual qualities or subjective states, however. For, here are people far removed from Western habits of contemplation, interpretation, understanding, from what Foucault describes as the ‘psychologizing’ projects of the Western ‘individual’. Rather, ghinnawa

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emotionality concerns the public construction and exchange of cultural behaviours and concepts: the playing out of an emotional discourse and a discourse on emotion. It is this discourse, moreover, which is the proper object of anthropological enquiry, for its very playing out constitutes Fathalla and his audience as social actors, tells them what (and when and how) they can ‘think and feel’.

An anti-Foucauldian anthropology of discourse

Notwithstanding the modishness of Foucauldian approaches to discourse in anthropology, in particular for an uncovering of relations of power and their links to what is known and said, for some, Foucauldian imagings remain unhappy and unconvincing (cf. Sahlins 1996). This is not simply a signalling of the ‘antihumanism’ of the imaging, but an asserting that any such impersonal accounting for social life is unconvincing primarily because of its inaccuracy and unsubtlety: its distance from the details of the ongoing work of social interaction, work by individuals in conjunction, creating themselves and their social relationships.To miss reporting this individual work and to substitute the dead hand of determinism—to replace, as does the Foucauldian, individual mentalities by conventional and collective ‘governmentalities’—appears a travesty of both a political and an empirical kind. If there is to be found a discourse in shared cultural concepts in a social milieu, then there must also be an account of individual usage and interpretation. For, it is the agency of each individual which is ever responsible for animating discourse with significance (and so maintaining its role as the major synthesizing process of social life), without which discourse would simply remain inert cultural matter. To claim for discourse its own animating force is a hypostatization, with possibly dangerous (totalitarian) political consequences.

Two bases of the anti-Foucauldian argument, then, are that discourse is not the same as consciousness: that the form and the content of discursive expression must needs always be analytically distinguished, and that communication between people is, thus, never simply a matter of an exchange of conventional verbal or behavioural forms. Secondly, socialization within a set of discursive forms of expression and exchange is never ‘completed’ (Berger 1969:31), in the sense of those discourses being learned alike by different people, or those people becoming alike through an unconscious identification with the discourses.

As formulated by George Steiner (1975:170–3), discourse can be seen always to exhibit a dual phenomenology: a common surface of

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speech-forms and notations, of grammar and phonology, beneath which is to be found a concurrent flow of articulate consciousness.The conventional surface of collective public exchange thereby rests upon a base of possibly private meanings and associations, meanings which derive from the ‘irreducible singularity’ of personal consciousness and sub-consciousness, from the singular specificity of an individual’s somatic and psychological identity (cf. Rapport 1993a:161–77). As Steiner concludes (1975:46): ‘[t]he language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible, personal meanings’. While there may be discursive rules and routines (concerned, say, with the proprieties of the expression of emotion in public exchange), affected by, even effecting, differentials of power, it is surely impoverishing of description and analysis to suggest, then, that when people speak (when Fathalla persuasively recites his poetry) the playing out of a language-game is the only thing occurring. Public and socialstructurally situated discourses certainly afford links between the individual and the collective and effect avenues of social exchange, but it is surely unperceptive to claim that their enactment is all or most that their individual participants are or can be engaged with.

More broadly, engagement in a discourse need in no way translate as that discourse achieving agency, determining or causing meaning, eliminating the interpretive work of the individual speakers and hearers. Conventional discourses provide means of expression but they do not determine what is meant by them (cf. Knapp and Michaels 1982, 1988). Rather, it is the individual who animates discourses by the imparting to them of personal meaning; individuals personalize discourses within the context of their own discrete perspectives on life, using them to make and express a personal construction of the world, a possibly original language-world, a sense particular to them at a particular time.

Discursive exchange, moreover, is never unmediated by a creative individual improvisation of its conventions. Individuals at once partake of discourses’ rules and routines, take part in the continuing constitution of socio-cultural milieux which such exchange gives onto, and make these instruments of their own understanding and use. Indeed, it is individuals’ personalization of discursive structures that causes them to remain alive: here are structures granted contemporary relevance, validity and significance, by being imparted with personal meaning and intent. For this reason, too, there can be worlds of difference between shared grammatic-cum-paradigmatic competency on the one hand and shared cognition or mutual comprehension on the other. For individuals in interaction can be seen to be both

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assisting in a continuing collective performance and, at the same time, creating, extending and fulfilling ongoing agendas, identities and world-views of their own. The sense made of the discourse by its speakers and its hearers need not coincide, therefore, because each is responsible for instigating their own process of originating meaning, imparting a possibly uncommon order to the discourse’s common forms; the individual makes personal sense in interaction, alongside others doing similarly. Hence, even if the various senses made of the discourse are complementary—even possibly consensual—this is something achieved through individual interactants’ work (and by chance) rather than something carried in on the back of the discourse per se. To adapt Hymes (1973a:25–6), the ‘communicative event’ of the discourse becomes a question of its manifold construals.

One can say, in sum, that without a fund of discourses the individual would not have the means of making sense, but without this work of interpretation, this individual use, discourse would not achieve animation in public life. Indeed, for Searle (1977:202–8), the two necessarily presuppose each other; there is an infinitude of content possible within a finitude of linguistic expression because there is conventionally iterated verbal and syntactical form on the one hand and conscious, intentional individual activity on the other. Certainly, such duality should neither be sundered nor compounded in anthropological accounting.

In an eminently sensible counsel, Victor Turner eschewed all mystifications which would obscure the fact that human beings possess the consciousness and sophistication to transcend their own institutions (cited in Ashley 1990:xix). In an anthropological appreciation of discourse, it would appear a mystification not to see the individual speakers and hearers behind the conventional roles allotted them—the so-called ‘subject-positions’ or ‘discursive sites’. For here are persons who cannot help themselves from periodically standing back from the social routines in which they are engaged and reflecting on them ironically: making sense of them in ways which may subvert the totalizing effects of those routines and in ways which reveal those persons to be able to adopt cognitive positions beyond the domain and determinism of those routines.

Whatever the order and sense propounded by the logic of the routines as such, the persons taking part in those routines, animating them by their mental and bodily, verbal and behavioural, presence in those routines, are able to (are destined to) write their own sense.They compose their own personal narratives which include them saying: ‘Here I am partaking of a particular discourse, playing a languagegame’. Sometimes the game is played better than at other times,

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sometimes the playing is more trying than at other times, but there is surely no moment at which individuals do not experience the mixed emotions of both recognizing what the language-game expects of them and knowing precisely where they stood—emotionally, cognitively—in relation to it. It may not always be an easy matter determining how to reconcile these positions—what to say, how to act, how to seem—and it is always a far harder thing to know where one’s interlocutors stand vis-à-vis the discourse, but it is never difficult for the individual to see heror himself both present and absent: a conscious player in the game (however reluctant and formally disempowered) but never unconsciously played by it.

See also: Code, Common Sense, Ethnomethodology, Irony

ECRITURE FEMININE

Ecriture feminine, or ‘women’s writing’, is a term coined by Luce Irigaray (1985) to convey a notion of female symbolic expression which can overcome a hegemony in current linguistic structures which is not just masculine but positively phallocentric and patriarchal, and which renders specifically female expression silent. As employed by Irigaray, and by the likes of Hélène Cixous (1990) and Julia Kristeva (1984), the concept amounts to a heady concoction of linguistics and psychoanalysis.There is no overall agreement between the above on the extent of biological determinism or essentialism in female experience, but all draw upon its bodily nature: ‘[B]eyond the classic opposites of love and hate…lies this perpetually half-open threshold, consisting of lips that are strangers to dichotomy’ (Irigaray 1993).

Ecriture feminine draws on the works of Saussure, Freud, Lacan and Derrida, but owes its ethos, perhaps, to the writings of Nietzsche, and his attempts self-consciously to develop a philosophy based on irony, critique and revaluation. ‘Suppose Truth is a Woman’, Nietzsche advises, as part-strategy towards an ongoing ‘revaluation of all values’; écriture feminine takes this to heart (cf. Irigaray 1991).

Language and identity

Social inequalities between the sexes derive from deep ideological structures, it is argued, in particular the play of language upon the unconscious. These make ‘the subject’, the ego, whether in language

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or in the developments of science, religion or law, inevitably masculine; the truly feminine is erased in a network of lies. Women cannot know or love themselves, therefore, because language is foreign to them, rather than home to them, and merely mirrors their lack; women are in a state of ‘dereliction’, and hence commonly suffer psychosis (Irigaray 1993).

What is called for is to establish a presence in language which goes against and disrupts conventional norms and does not begin from the repressed, lacking and markedly ‘other’ nature which characterizes the feminine in contemporary structures and symbolizations.The feminine is more than simply a container of the masculine codes of everyday life, and yet the truly feminine represents something unnameable and inexpressible, at present.Women must speak like men and be attached to men in order to achieve a social status, to engage in social relations, and to acquire cultural capital.According to masculine parameters of identity, subjectivity, truth, meaning and value, women can only know themselves as inferior (castrated) versions of men.

The challenge is not to eschew language for, as poesis, this symbolization is a source of liberation, social, individual, spiritual and imaginative. However, to go beyond ‘the Name and the Law of the Father’, it is necessary to rewrite the woman beginning from that feminine fullness within the woman; not to mimic the male or seek to play a part in his social contracts (not to aim for a male-imitation identity, status or publicity) but to draw on feminine experiences which lie beyond and before conventional languages. Such a ‘feminine idiolect’ might emphasize, and give form to, multiplicity, fluidity, rhythm, difference and becoming, in place of the masculine verities of singularity, linearity and fixed (binary) oppositions. It is a matter of experimenting with poetic styles and achieving new discursive forms (cf. Irigaray 1991). For instance, maybe the rhythmical babblings of the child, before it learns linguistic structures could be adapted so as to write over and against language with voice, body and song. At present, these rhythms merely remain in language as echoes: as gaps, pauses and silences within the linear sequence.

A feminine God is yet to come—indeed, she would always be the God of becoming as such—but a specifically feminine language (also law and philosophy) can still be imagined. Above all, the writing of the feminine could entail an exploding of the definite singularities, distinctions and oppositions of Western thought: body/mind, subject/ object, affect/intellect, substance/form, nature/culture, alter/ego. For every one of these binarisms reduces to feminine versus masculine: Western civilization is built on patriarchalism. Instead, two (or more)

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