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Conclusions

One of the challenges in writing any textbook – and this one is certainly no exception – is the need to build a continuous narrative out of what are often only fragments of stories, originally told to different audiences and for different purposes. Like any other search for thematic or theoretical continuity, the writing of a book on any field of inquiry entails an attempt to construct both an object of study and a method out of usually quite diverse traditions. If the work is done properly, readers should be able to see a synthesis or at least a common thread that ties together the different traditions and projects an image whose outline can be easily recognized, critically appraised, and remembered. If the work is done poorly, readers might see bits and pieces but be unable to make them into a whole. In this concluding chapter, I will take up the challenge of facing the question of the whole. I will do this by foregrounding some of the questions raised and some of the ones just implied throughout the previous chapters. I will not engage, however, in an attempt to summarize what I wrote in previous chapters. While looking back, I will try to give a sense of the future, a future that hopefully some of my readers will be involved in constructing.

10.1Language as the human condition

The central question of any anthropological inquiry has always been: what makes us human? The answers to this question have been as varied as the many brands of anthropology proposed since the beginning of the discipline, which is usually traced back to Edward B. Taylor’s Primitive culture (1871). One way of answering this question has been to look at the evolution of the human species; this is what biological anthropologists and paleoanthropologists do. Another way has been to look at the different ways in which humans change the environment, organize their lives, and represent them symbolically. This is what archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists do. A third way has been to examine what it means to be a species that has developed such a sophisticated system of communication, usually referred to as “language.” This is what linguistic anthropologists do. Or perhaps, I should say, this is what linguistic anthropologists are expected to do.

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Our colleagues in the other subfields often expect linguistic anthropologists to provide them with answers about the origins of language and the role of language in human evolution. To those colleagues, this book might have been a disappointment. For instance, very little can be found in this book on language evolution. This is not due to a bias against any discourse of origins. Nor is this part of a rejection of the question “what makes us human?” Rather, it is part of a concerted effort to rethink an object of study, language, that has often been uncritically adopted by most of those so far engaged in the study of language evolution or in the study of cultural phenomena where language must have had a role. My aim has been to offer more than a deconstruction of the notion of “language.” It represents an interdisciplinary effort to improve on the notions of linguistic communication currently used or implied in the social sciences and the humanities. The examination of different approaches and different “units of analysis” has two goals. One is an evaluation of the work done by the analysts themselves in producing objects of inquiry, including the cultural aspects of such a production. In this spirit, the emphasis on individual speech acts was presented as part of existing ideologies of person, human cognition, and society (chapter 7), whereas the work on conversation and participation was seen as originating from and inviting more dynamic and constructivist notions of authorship in communication (chapter 8). The other goal is to suggest how different perspectives of analysis can help us identify different aspects of that multifarious phenomenon we ordinarily call “language.” In other words, the recognition of the fact that units of analysis – just like transcripts (see chapter 5) – are artifacts, should by no means be interpreted as implying that they are “invented” or that they have no predictable relationships with “the real world.” They do have such relationships. In the following sections, I will try to direct the readers toward such relationships.

10.2To have a language

To have a culture means to have communication and to have communication means to have access to a language. But what does it mean “to have a language”? Perhaps we can start answering this question by thinking about some of the contradictions involved in the arguments over whether some individuals have a language.

When a child who enters a new school system is judged “not to have language” or “not to have enough language,” a heavy ball is chained to his feet. A discipline like linguistic anthropology gives us some important tools for empirically assessing the foundations of such evaluations. We can actually empirically test such an assessment by asking such specific questions as: Is the child able to produce meaningful sequences of sounds? Does he recognize differences in meaning? Can he use language while engaged in different activities (e.g. playing, arguing, working with tools, telling a joke)? Does he know how to participate in conver-

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10.2 To have a language

sation? What is the language variety that he is the most comfortable in? Once we engage in these evaluations with an open mind and a sound background in the study of linguistic practices as cultural phenomena, we might realize that children who are judged “not to have language,” may have plenty of it. The question then comes down to an issue that has important practical, political, and moral consequences, namely, “what is language?” I cannot think of a better example than the issue of the language of deaf children. We know now that when deaf children are raised with sign language, they definitely “have a language” and, in fact, a very complex and rich one, although manifestly different from the language used by their hearing peers. But in the high days of “oralism,” this was not a common assumption and deaf children were assumed to be “without a language” simply because they didn’t have the language of the hearing majority. In most cases, in fact, they were forbidden from using the language that was the most natural for them – sign language – and forced to conform to a language that was unnatural for people who cannot easily hear sound distinctions – spoken language – (Lane 1984; Monaghan 1996; Padden and Humphries 1988; Sacks 1989).

Despite Labov’s (1970) brilliant demonstration of the perfectly logical structure of non-standard English, similar conclusions are sometimes reached today by teachers and other school administrators who come in contact with children who speak a different linguistic variety or non-standard dialect and are used to different ways of speaking and behaving around adults.

It is in the context of such discussions that we realize how important it is to think of language broadly and to have a discipline that can speak to a variety of people who think of themselves as “language experts.” We must be able to help these experts to assess the implications of different ways of speaking and different ways of being together, with or without words. This is not the same as saying that school authorities should leave their job to linguistic anthropologists or that differences should be ignored and all children should be seen as linguistically equal. Such conclusions would be as misleading and damaging as the theories that see middle-class patterns of interaction as the “right” or “rational” ones and everyone else’s as deficient. Just like any form of universalism forgets the details out of which human life is built and ends up constructing a model of human existence that is, in the best cases, formally elegant but lifeless, any form of particularism, including extreme cultural relativism, risks denying the possibility of communion across races, ages, and genders. The contributions discussed in the previous chapters should be a good antidote for either one of such extreme positions. They should minimally force us to consider carefully certain generalizations while reminding us that the differences cannot be ignored, but must be compared, analyzed, reconsidered. If it is true, as structuralism taught us, that without differences there would be no meaning, it is also true that what counts as

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different today might be the norm tomorrow. If chaos and order are two parts of the same whole or two phases of the same cycle, as argued by eastern religions and modern physics, it should not matter too much whether we start from an assumption of diversity or one of universality. What counts is that we keep the other perspective in focus. Unfortunately, however, grammarians too often forget to remind themselves and others of the reasons for the study of language. The rules of language as a game of chess too often overshadow the rules of language as a game of life. The conventionality of linguistic systems and their arbitrary nature have often obfuscated their historicity, the experience that lives in them and through them. Even proper names, which used to be characterized as the most arbitrary type of linguistic sign, have been shown to have indexical relations to places, people, events, to be mini-narratives about the past or the future (Basso 1984; Rymes 1996). Having a language is like having access to a very large canvas and to hundreds or even thousands of colors. But the canvas and the colors come from the past. They are hand-me-downs. As we learn to use them, we find out that those around us have strong ideas about what can be drawn, in which proportions, in what combinations, and for what purposes. As any artist knows, there is an ethics of drawing and coloring as well as a market that will react sometimes capriciously, but many times quite predictably to any individual attempts to place a mark in the history of representation or simply readjust the proportions of certain spaces at the margins. This is the way I understand Rossi-Landi’s idea that language should be thought of as a market (see chapter 3). Just like artworks, our linguistic products are constantly evaluated, recycled or discarded. We as speakers are also approved, praised, followed or disapproved, scolded, avoided. Our professional fame might come in the number of speeches we give or the number of books we get to publish, but more commonly our standing in a community is measured through our everyday language use, in making a point, gaining a new friend, handling a criticism, comforting a lost soul. To have a language then means to be part of a community of people who engage in joint, common activities through the use of a largely, but never completely, shared range of communicative resources. In this sense, having a language also means being part of a tradition, sharing a history, and hence access to a collective memory, full of stories, innuendoes, opinions, recipes, and other things that make us human. Not having a language or having only a very limited set of its resources means to be denied such access.

10.3Public and private language

The communal, public, shared properties of language define another sense in which language can be seen as the human condition. Language as a shared practice is one of the great dilemmas of social life. If, in order to express ourselves

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and communicate our thoughts to others, we need to have access to such a public resource as we know language to be, how can we ensure that we can still control it, bend it to our needs, that we as individuals are not crushed under the weight of the socially shared code? How can words born and used in other times, by other people, in different contexts, still be relevant, appropriate, and meaningful for us? To what extent are our words ever really ours?

This is of course a topic that has fascinated and puzzled generations of scholars. It is, after all, at the heart of the problem of linguistic relativity (see chapter 3). Recent work within cultural and linguistic anthropology suggests, however, that these questions may assume a concept of person that does not correspond to what social actors experience. On the plane of concrete, sociohistorically constituted social life, the choice between being yourself and joining in with the group is only theoretically, but not practically available. One can be oneself only over against the background of identities, expectations, and practices sustained by the presence and by the actions of others, linguistic activities included. This tension is part of what Myers (1986) characterizes as the contrast between distinctiveness and relatedness and Urban (1991) sees as the tension between difference and sameness, a tension often acted out in the South American ritual encounters he analyzes (see also Graham 1993, 1995). The issue of linguistic autonomy or creativity is then part of a more general set of questions: how can individuals struggle to maintain autonomy while being part of a group? (Duranti 1994b, 1997) How can we be individuals while paying homage to tradition? How can we be free in our choices while being moral? These dilemmas are clearly evident in societies like the Australian Aboriginal ones where individuals are working hard at exhibiting their political independence from the group. But they also play a role in so-called ‘hierarchical’ societies, where people are expected to renounce their individual prerogatives and wants in order to be identified as part of larger political bodies or as subjects of powerful leaders. Self and other are thus two sides of the same coin and language clearly plays an important part in the constitution and reproduction of this necessary and still little understood dichotomy.

The variation found in linguistic performance and linguistic knowledge is but an effect of the tension between private and public, inner and outer, same and different. Such tension is constantly reproduced in our private thoughts. Linguistic practices help to sustain it. But such a tension is possible above all because of the basic indeterminacy of any linguistic characterization and categorization. Although words and sentences do a good job at describing reality for most purposes, they can never exhaust it. Any description is a categorization and any categorization is too large and too narrow. While giving generality to a unique experience, any linguistic expression leaves out details and nuances which might

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