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have been crucial for someone else. These issues used to be confined to the work of semanticists and ethnoscientists. We are now placing them in the empirical realm of face-to-face encounters. By so doing, we are learning that categorizations are not only done by minimal lexical oppositions (big vs. small, consanguineal vs. affine, people vs. animals). They are also done through indexical relations (see chapter 6), the sequential organization of speaking (see chapter 8), and participation frameworks (see section 9.3). We have learned that there are infinite interactional sources of categorization. In one society a sibling might be someone who can finish up a sentence and a friend someone who knows who you are talking about before you mention any names; in another society a distinction might need to be made between a brother’s brother and a brother’s sister. Ways of speaking or ways of avoiding speech enter in such distinctions. Linguistic anthropologists have shown that categorizations and generalizations are not only found in academic writing or scientific discussions, they are present during the telling of stories by all kinds of people. This is the sense in which narrative accounts are not too different from detective stories, whether at the dinner table (Ochs, Smith, and Taylor 1989) or in a judiciary or political arena (Duranti 1994a: 175). Through the temporality of speaking, details are slowly revealed one at the time, giving different participants a chance – although by no means assuming the same authority or linguistic ability – to affect the construction of a story and the moral identities of its characters (Jacquemet 1994). As we saw in chapter 9, the organization of the telling favors certain types of sequences and certain types of solutions (e.g. in conflict situations). Furthermore, as we saw in chapter 6, grammatical framing is not only a typological feature that gives us the range of case markings possible in a given language; it is also a constitutive feature of a point of view, of presenting events and participants in particular ways. Transitivity in discourse is part of the construction of agency. An anthropological theory of language cannot but be attentive to the details of morphological markings and other grammatical devices because it is also through such devices that intentionality and responsibility are defined and assessed.

10.4Language in culture

But any theory that presents language as an image-producing instrument risks assuming a separation between language and reality that linguistic anthropologists have long seen as problematic. To have a language is more than having at our disposal an infinite repository of metaphors through which we make sense of our experience. Language also entertains metonymic relations with our society and culture. As Harry Hoijer (1953) insisted, one should think of language in culture and not just of language and culture. The linguistic system interpenetrates all other systems within the culture. To expand this idea, we could say that

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language is in us as much as we are in language. By connecting people to their past, present and future, language becomes their past, present, and future. Language is not just a representation of an independently established world. Language is also that world. Not in the simplistic sense that all we have of our past is language but in the sense that our memories are inscribed in linguistic accounts, stories, anecdotes, and names just as much as they are contained in smells, sounds, and ways of holding our body. If language is action, as proposed by Malinowski, and the ways we speak provide us with ways of being in the world, as suggested by Sapir, Whorf, and many others, linguistic communication is part of the reality it is supposed to represent, interpret, and evoke. If a language is, in Wittgenstein’s words, “a form of life,” then to have a language not only means to have an instrument to represent events in particular ways, it also means to have the ability to interact with such events, affect them or be affected by them. Hence, for linguistic anthropologists the question of the nature of language cannot be separated from the question of the use of language by particular individuals at particular times. The study of language is inherently historical, that is, located in time. Temporality is thus one of its fundamental dimensions.

10.5Language in society

“To say language is to say society,” Lévi-Strauss once wrote. But what does this really mean? It means that it is through repetitive, recursively linked and yet not necessarily identical communicative acts that society is reconstituted. It means that government, workplaces, families and other institutions that make up societies rely on language to reproduce such institutions over time, across different territories, and despite the differences among the people who comprise them. It is inconceivable to think of any modern bureaucratic system without the specific ways of speaking, writing, and printing that guide people through its often forbidding principles and justify its existence. How could a bureaucracy exist without its language specialists, without its written forms or spoken questions through which individuals are catalogued and separated in groups, according to wealth, descent, race, and even dialect? Similarly, could we imagine a chiefdom (in Oceania, America, Africa, or any other part of the world) without the language that distinguishes a chief from the rest of the population, without honorific systems, without the mediation of those whose job is to represent the thoughts and wishes of the powerful? So much of social hierarchy is both represented by and instantiated through speech that the study of any social system would not be possible without an understanding of the language that supports and represents such a system. Even in those societies, misleadingly called “egalitarian,” where individuals are said to only represent themselves and where no (male) adult can really force another to do, think, or say what the other does not want to do, think

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or say, language is what ultimately keeps the balance, reasserts the individual rights, and sanctions anyone who thinks and acts differently (Brenneis and Myers 1984). Even before a physical fight is started, there are usually words to be said, heard, interpreted or misinterpreted. Afterwards, of course, there is room for even more linguistic activity, with the narrative celebration or condemnation of the physical confrontation, where points of view can be compared and understanding negotiated (Brenneis 1988; A. Grimshaw 1990; Watson-Gegeo and White 1990).

Having a language does not only allow us to make sense of what we see and hear out there. It also allows us to look inside of our mind and soul to ask such questions as: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? Language is there for questions to be formulated and for answers to be proposed. To be engaged in the analysis of the language of everyday interaction means to believe, first of all, that these questions are not just restricted to the great rituals of our religious or political life and that their possible answers are not just reserved for the skilled language professionals, that is, the great poets, novelists, and orators. As Edmund Leach and other sociocultural anthropologists of the old school have taught us, a great deal of what humans do is concerned with the issue of continuity, that is, with the finitude of our lives, with the material and symbolic reproduction of our own individuality as well as our own sociability. Such a concern, sometimes turned into a ritual obsession, is pervasive of all kinds of everyday interactions just as the language of every person – as Paul Friedrich’s (1986: 26) discussion of poetic indeterminacy reminds us – has moments of poetic salience, when the words used, the pace of their production, and the sound of their temporal unfolding have the richness and authoritative power of the poet’s, the novelist’s, or the great orator’s. This is not to say that every speaker is by definition an artist, but he or she is certainly an author and authors have good days and bad days.

10.6What kind of language?

In this book, I have tried to show that the concept of language emerging from the work of linguistic anthropologists over the last century has changed. From the view of language as a system of classification, a window on mental reality and hence an instrument for the study of culture as a system of knowledge, linguistic anthropologists have been moving toward a notion of language as an aggregate of features, tendencies, and acts that are sometimes the background and other times the foreground for the constitution of the social world in which we live. There is no question that such a theoretical turn has had its price. What used to be thought of as outside of language is now more and more often seen as part of language, constitutive of its organization and, hence, of its meaning. For some,

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this has meant that we have amplified the phenomenon “language” to such an extent that it seems increasingly difficult to identify what is not language. If language becomes synonymous with social interaction, as I have often stated in the previous chapters, how can we still distinguish between words and actions and, ultimately, between words and objects? How can we specify the boundaries of our observations?

The answer is that it is not up to a discipline or its practitioners to set the limits of their inquiry. It is up to others to show linguistic anthropologists that they have left too much behind or that they have stepped into a territory they have no resources to explore. Language as the human condition is too interesting to let it slip away. Linguistic anthropologists must thus face the risk of an object of inquiry that keeps expanding – just like the universe languages and speakers struggle to control.

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