9.5 Participation in time and space

fono seem to be more interested in issues of responsibility and hence the social consequences of someone’s words rather than in issues of intentionality or speakers’ state of mind. Since then, I have become convinced that the focus on the speaker’s intentions is problematic not only because it uncritically assumes a shared understanding of the speaker’s state of mind, but because it leaves out of the communicative process the work done by other participants as well as by the full range of semiotic resources that enter any interpretive act. The focus on the speaker’s mental representation does not take into account the continuous interpenetration of codes and modes of speaking and acting that are at work during any speech event.

9.5 Participation in time and space: human bodies in the built environment

Before instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body. (Mauss [1935] 1979: 104)

Given the emphasis on the symbolic nature of linguistic systems, it is not surprising that most discussions of language structure and language use make no reference to the built environment, that is, the products of human building activity that surround and support human interaction (Lawrence and Low 1990).26

Words, morphemes, or even sentences are usually seen as representing ideas and as such inherently detached from the physical objects produced by human labor. Even the advent of speech act theory, with its emphasis on utterances as deeds (see chapter 7), has not increased the attention paid to the material world in which and through which social interaction, communication included, takes place. The only major exception in this domain is the study of deixis, that is, the property of those linguistic expressions, called indexes (see sections 1.4.2 and 6.8.2), that cannot be interpreted without reference to the nonlinguistic (or extralinguistic) context of their use (Anderson and Keenan 1985: 259; Levinson 1983: ch. 2; Lyons 1977).

An analysis of speech that starts from units of participation allows us to rethink deixis in new ways. As pointed out by Hanks (1990), given that the participation framework shifts continuously throughout an interaction or speech

26For Lawrence and Low (1990: 454 ), building environment refers “in the broadest sense to any physical alteration of the natural environment, from hearths to cities, through construction by humans ... it includes built forms ... spaces that are defined and bounded, but not necessarily enclosed, such as the uncovered areas in a compound, a plaza, or a street ... they might include landmarks or sites, such as shrines, which do not necessarily shelter or enclose activity ... specific elements of buildings (such as doors, windows, roofs, walls, floors, and chimneys) or to spatial subdivisions of buildings ... often referred to in terms of their plans.”

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Units of participation

event, participants need ways to signal to each other whose voice is speaking now and whose attention or point of view is being assumed or required. Hanks (1990) shows that Maya deictic terms can only be understood by taking into consideration the human bodies of the participants as well as the material world where they interact (see section 6.8.2). The work on deixis by Hanks highlights the need to understand the process whereby meaning is encoded and decoded as always embedded in a phenomenal field, that is, a field of acting and thinking that becomes relevant as participants move through it with their body and their senses. Hanks is the first linguist to attempt an integration of structuralist methods of analysis (see chapter 6) with phenomenological characterizations of the human body as a crucial mediator of our relation to the world of objects around us (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Schutz 1967). Deictic expressions enter this process by orienting utterances, glances, and movements in space and time, by relying on a set of already established conventions, and by setting up a conceptual world which is not detached from but based on our corporeal understanding of the phenomenal world. To say “I” or “you” or to use one type of locative expression over another means to evoke, establish, reassess corporeal fields, that is, units of participation that rely on sociocultural models and modes of corporeality (Hanks 1990: 262).

The human body and the built environment are crucial elements in the analysis of any interaction that involves movement through space and time. We often forget that the human body is the first instrument we experience. Our mouth, hands, eyes, feet, and other body parts are the first mediating elements in our interaction with the people and objects around us. But our body does not operate in an empty space. We move in a space that has been shaped by others before us, a space that has history, meaning, that is, a range of possibilities. As pointed out by Frake (1975: 37) in his analysis of how to enter a Yakan house,

... a house, even a one-roomed Yakan house, is not just a space. It is a structured sequence of settings where social events are differentiated not only by the position in which they occur but also by the positions the actors have moved through to get there and the manner in which they have made those moves.

Once we start taking seriously the importance of the spatio-temporal coordinates of human encounters, we realize that we need to enlarge the context of verbal exchanges beyond the study – no matter how careful and sophisticated – of what is said. We need a microhistory of human interaction that does not fall prey to ideological reconstructions and does not suffer from the usual limitations of mere observation. As stressed in chapter 3, what people do while talking is not something that can be just imagined or remembered. It must be seen, above all because

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9.5 Participation in time and space

sight is a fundamental domain of human experience and sighting is a fundamental dimension of any encounter. What participants see and when they see it is more than a background against which to make sense of what is said. Sight as an activity that occurs in a material world is itself social action, it is the instrument and product of an interpretive journey that can only be understood spatio-temporally. This is why, as human ethologists have argued for years, visual documentation of human encounters is so crucial for an analysis of what people do with, to, and through one another (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1968, 1974; Kendon 1967, 1977, 1990, 1992; Kendon and Ferber 1973). However, despite the availability of technologies that allow for the mechanical or electronic reproduction of an encounter and the preservation of some of its spatio-temporal features, much of the study of language use is exclusively based on audio recordings. Such studies do not necessarily produce inadequate analyses – there is certainly value in the careful examination of how talk itself is organized (see chapter 8) –, but they do tend to reproduce a skewed view of what matters to participants in an interaction. If we are serious about our commitment to the study of language as resource for and product of cultural practices, we cannot systematically isolate speech from the movement of the participants’ bodies through a symbolically and materially rich space.

Starting from these assumptions, in Duranti (1992) I provided an analysis of Samoan ceremonial greetings that emphasized how the performance and the interpretation of the words used in the greetings are contingent upon the temporal unfolding of the participants’ movements in the house during and after their arrival. The audio-visual data – Sound Super 8 film clips and video recordings collected over a period of several years in the same village – demonstrate that words used in the greetings are part of a sequence of acts which include bodily movements and cannot be fully understood without reference to such movements. An analysis focusing exclusively on the linguistic execution of the greetings would represent the exchange as a complex adjacency pair (see section 8.1.1), where a group of participants who are already in the house welcome a newcomer who, in turn, responds by addressing the welcoming party either as a group or as a number of individuals, typically identified through their titles or contextually made-relevant positional roles.

(16)Schematic representation of a Samoan ceremonial greeting Party A: {WELCOMING}

Party B: {RESPONSE}

As typical of adjacency pairs, once the first pair part is produced (by Party A), the second pair part is expected. However, what party A says counts as a first pair part only after Party B has positioned himself inside the house in a place that warrants the welcoming. This means that to understand this kind of interaction we must first of all take into consideration the local conceptualization of the space

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Units of participation

inside a house as a symbolic representation of the social organization relevant to the on-going or soon-to-be-started event. The distinction between “front” (luma) and “back” (tua) or between tala and the other two sides, for instance, establishes some general coordinates in terms of status and rank in any Samoan house: orators (and important guests) are expected to be seated in the “front,” high chiefs in either one of the two tala, and lower-ranking orators in the “back.” However, which person will choose to or be invited to occupy such positions is partly due to the specific type of event that is taking place inside the house – figure 9.5 shows how the different parts of the house are determined on the basis of an external coordinate such as a road (or sometimes the malae or ceremonial ground).

back

tala

tala

front

road

front

tala

tala

back

Figure 9.5 Local conceptualization of spaces in two Samoan houses facing the road (Duranti 1992)

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9.5 Participation in time and space

A			BODY		Newcomer sits in front region
B/A
			SPEECH		People inside welcome him
			SPEECH
B					Newcomer responds

Figure 9.6 Two interlocking interpretations of sequences of adjacency pairs in ceremonial greetings

This recognition of the role of the body of the newcomer in the interaction shifts the responsibility of the initiation of the greeting to the new arrivals who are in fact much more in control of whether or not they will be greeted than it might appear at first. But even this interpretation must be revised in some cases in light of other possible or actual moves by the people who are already seated in the house. The people in the house are not completely passive while the new party enters the common space. Whereas there are cases in which no doubts are displayed by either the newcomer or the parties already seated about where the former should sit, there are also times when a certain amount of negotiation takes place. It is not uncommon for the already seated participants to try to lead or invite the arriving party to a particular spot. Equally common is for the newcomer to resist the “offer” of a high status position. This is the case, for instance, in the following interaction, where chief Agaiataua is invited to sit in the tala, but manages to sit at the edge of it and with the highest-ranking orator in the house (and in the subvillage where the meeting was taking place), Leuta, on his left.

(17)(Fono in the subvillage of Sanonu; Chief Agaiataua arrives when the meeting has already started)

((Shot of chief Agaiataua walking by outside, past the front entrance towards back))

((Filming is interrupted for a few seconds and resumes with the chief already in the house walking with a kava root in his right hand and trying to get a spot

in the back row, among the orators))

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Units of participation

1	?:	–
		(afio fo`i `i o!)
		do go over there!
2	??:	– –
		`o iku la!
		that side!
3	Chief A.:	–
		ia` `o `i la!
		okay over there!
4		–
	Orator O.: ia` afio ifo `i o
		okay go down over there
		[
5	Chief A.:	–
		`o `i la
		over there
6	?:	(uh uh)
7	?:	uh::::
8	??:	–
		ia` (`ua makua a) ((Chief A. starts sitting down))

well (it’s really very)

9((Chief A. puts down kava root in front of him, to the right))

10	?:	( ?	?	?)
11	??:	hehe
		hehe
12	Chief A.:	((Sighs)) hahh!
13	?:	(ia` afio maia)
		well welcome
			[
14	`Auga:		ia` afio maia!
			well, welcome!
15	Chief A.:	ia`,
		well
16	?:	afio maia
		welcome
		[
17	?Leuta:	afio maialau afioga Aga(ia)taua!
		welcomeyour highness Agaiataua!
		[...]

Figure 9.7, based on the film of the interaction, traces chief Agaiataua’s route and his attempts to sit in the “back” region, with lower-ranking orators.

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9.5 Participation in time and space

entrance

- - -	--
-		-
		-
-				-
				-
-					-
					-					-
-					-
-						-			-
							-	- -	-
									-
-								- -
									- - - --
-
-
-		tala					kava bowl
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
	-
		-
		-
			-
				-
					-
					-
						- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

						-
- - -					-
			-
	- - --
back
	front
entrance
- - - - -			-

chief’s route	-- -
	-- --

- - - - - -

-

-

-

-

-

	-
-
--

main road

Leuta

tala

Figure 9.7 Route followed by chief Agaiataua when arriving at house full of orators from his subvillage (Duranti 1992)

The protracted resistance to accept a high-status position in this instance is not simply due to “politeness” (e.g. one party offers a higher position and the other takes a lower one) but to the fact that a higher-status location always carries political and economic implications (see Goody 1972; Irvine 1974, 1989). Because of the association between the seating position and the status and rank implied by it, chiefs who are not fully confident of their place in the local hierarchy and the associated socioeconomic system may try to resist what appears as a generous “offer” but can turn out to be a mixed blessing from a financial point of view (viz. those in higher-ranking places are expected to give more than those in lower-ranking spots). Ethnographic information reveals that Chief Agaiataua’s status in the community is rendered structurally ambiguous by a number of factors including the origin of his title which comes from another village – in most encounters he is in fact addressed with a local title which is not as high –, his living situation (he lives on the land of his father-in-law, an old and well-respected orator), and his occupation (schoolmaster), which gives him at least a partial identification with western values. Such ambiguity of status identity is further

327