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It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!” Even now I balk. Can no one help?

I truly cannot rate the word so high. I must translate otherwise.

I believe the Spirit has inspired me

and must write: “In the beginning there was Mind.” Think thoroughly on this first line,

hold back your pen from undue haste! Is it mind that stirs and makes all things?

The text should state: “In the beginning there was Power!” Yet while I am about to write this down,

something warns me I will not adhere to this. The Spirit’s on my side! The answer is at hand:

I write, assured, “In the beginning was the Deed.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust1

As in Faust’s reinterpretation of John’s Gospel, in this chapter, we will learn that words themselves can be seen as actions and that actions and activities should then be the units of analysis for the anthropological study of language use. In chapter six, we started to see that when we use language, we help constitute the reality we are trying to represent. This was made apparent in the discussion of indexical relations between linguistic expressions and features of the context in which they are used. Not only do certain expressions require an understanding of the surrounding world for their interpretation, they also actively shape such a surrounding world, especially in terms of social identities. The use of certain expressions provide more than the information necessary to identify the referent in discourse. They reveal the stance a speaker is taking vis-à-vis a given character in a story (see the discussion of Italian pronouns in section 6.7). The use of honorific morphemes and words entails a particular relation between speaker and hearer or between speaker and whom and what is talked about. All of these cases show that words can be not only symbols but also deeds.

1 Translation by Peter Salm, Faust, Part I, New York: Bantam Books, 1985, p. 77.

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In this chapter I will first discuss anthropologists’ discovery of the pragmatic force of words and Malinowski’s conceptual apparatus for dealing with this discovery. Then, I will introduce the basic concepts of speech act theory as developed by John Austin and John Searle. Some of those concepts will be critically assessed from an ethnographic and crosscultural perspective. Finally, I will introduce Wittgenstein’s notion of “language game” and suggest ways in which it can be a useful notion for linguistic anthropological research.

7.1Malinowski: language as action

The Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) was the first fieldworker who, in addition to combining all the methods previously used by other anthropologists (Sanjek 1990a: 210), learned the language of the people he was studying sufficiently well not only to ask questions but also to listen to everyday conversation and participate in it.2 Knowledge of the language became essential to accomplish what was for him the major goal of ethnography, namely, “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1922: 25). The two major concepts of Malinowski’s ethnographic theory of language are: (i) the notion of context of situation and (ii) the view of language as a mode of action.

Malinowski was very intrigued by problems of translation. He soon realized that traditional grammatical analysis was only of limited help in capturing the meaning of native utterances.3 He concluded that in several cases a word-by-

2British social anthropology placed a strong emphasis on the use of the native language for data collection. The sixth edition of Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for instance, contains a short but informative chapter (chapter IX, pp. 208–18) on language and a note on the importance of native texts: “The writing of texts, so valuable for obtaining linguistic material, gives important data, and cultural facts as well. Complete texts may be taken down from dictation by an informant who has been asked to relate some incident in his own daily life, some process in which he is interested, a story, myth, or event in family or tribal history. Such texts should be amplified by direct questioning; they then become valuable anthropological data. Further, texts should be made of everyday speech, of children’s talk, of talk between kinsfolk, fellow workers, etc. Unless the investigator has a very good knowledge of the language he should try to have every text translated at once” (pp. 49–5).

3Malinowski was not alien to some of the pitfalls of earlier anthropologists so harshly criticized by Boas. In particular, in addition to the repeated use of such words as “primitive” and “savage,” Malinowski occasionally slipped into the same type of preconception about “exotic” languages that had characterized earlier travelers who had no training in anthropological and linguistic analysis: “In a primitive tongue, the whole grammatical structure lacks the precision and definiteness of our own, though it is extremely telling in certain specific ways” (1923: 300).

Boas and others after him repeatedly demonstrated that what had often been called “primitive” in non-European languages was due not to any fault in their grammatical systems but to the descriptive and analytical limitations of the observers (cf. Boas 1911; Hill 1964).

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word gloss or literal translation of a linguistic expression did not reveal the way in which a native speaker would understand it. A listener would also need “to be informed about the situation in which [certain] words were spoken. He would need to have them placed in their proper setting of native culture” (1923: 301).

To deal with these cases, he devised the concept of context of situation “which indicates on the one hand that the conception of context has to be broadened and on the other that the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression” (Malinowski 1923: 306). This concept was just a corollary of a more general principle “namely, that the study of any language, spoken by a people who live under conditions different from our own and possess a different culture, must be carried out in conjunction with the study of their culture and of their environment” (ibid.). This meant that one cannot use the methods devised for the study of dead languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Latin) to approach living languages. One needs instead an ethnographic theory of language. To the development of such a theory, he dedicated the second volume of his Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), an ethnographic study of the rituals associated with the cultivation of yams, taro, palms, and bananas in the Trobriand Islands.4

By the time he wrote this book, Malinowski had reached the conclusion that “the main function of language is not to express thought, not to duplicate mental processes, but rather to play an active pragmatic part in human behaviour” ([1935] 1978, vol. 2: 7). This is a major change with respect to his earlier writings and especially with respect to what he had stated in “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (1923), where he introduced the notion of context of situation. There, he had drawn a sharp difference between “civilized” and “primitive” languages, with the former characterized as primarily devoted to communicating thoughts and the latter to getting things done.5 Instead, in Coral Gardens and Their Magic ([1935] 1978) the pragmatic use of utterances was recognized as typical of any language.6

4The second volume is entitled The Language of Magic and Gardening. It starts with “Part four”: “An ethnographic theory of language and some practical corollaries.”

5“... language in its primitive function and original form has an essential pragmatic character; ... it is a mode of behaviour, and indispensable element of concerted human action” (Malinowski 1923: 316).

“... in one of my previous writings, I opposed civilized and scientific to primitive speech, and argued as if the theoretical uses of words in modern philosophic and scientific writing were completely detached from their pragmatic sources. This was an error,

and a serious error at that” ([1935] 1978: 58).

6We find here also an early criticism of the “conduit metaphor” (cf. Reddy 1979): “The false conception of language as a means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener has, in my opinion, largely vitiated the philological approach to language” ([1935] 1978: 9). For a similar type of attack on the philological approach based on different theoretical premises, see Volosˇinov (1973).

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Malinowski’s writings on an ethnographic approach to language anticipate many of the ideas that later became the founding blocks of pragmatics as an interdisciplinary enterprise (Levinson 1983). Such ideas were in fact common in European intellectual circles of the time. Malinowski’s notion of “verbal act” ([1935] 1978, vol. 2: 9) is akin to Austin’s notion of “speech act,” which was developed around the same time; the emphasis on translation as involving “whole contexts’ is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s rethinking language in the 1930s and his emphasis on the interpretive method of embedding individual words within larger “language games” (see section 7.4). Even Malinowski’s strongly behavioristic tone,7 which seemed so anachronistic during the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s – when it became fashionable to speak of minds as if they were computers –, could now be recast in a new light. It could be seen as anticipating recent concerns with the place and function of the body in the constitution of linguistic practices (Johnson 1987; Goodwin 1981; Hanks 1990). If speaking is a mode of action and words must be understood in their context, the bodies of the speakers can be important semiotic resources for understanding how language is produced and processed in face-to-face communication (Kendon 1990; 1992). In the second volume of his Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Malinowski offered an example of the kind of work that an ethnographic theory of language should produce by analyzing Trobianders’ magic spells.

Malinowski’s actual practice of translation of magic spells and his theory of the magical power of words has been criticized by a number of authors, most prominently by Tambiah (1968, 1973, 1985), who argued that Malinowski’s extensive word-by-word translations of the Trobianders’ magic spells contradicted his contextual theory of language. Tambiah also noted that Malinowski’s view of the language of magic as consisting of untrue statements that are in direct opposition to reality (Malinowski [1935]1978, vol. 2: 239) missed the difference between statements that can be evaluated in terms of truth conditions and statements that must be evaluated in terms of their effects on the world. For Tambaiah, when Malinowski tries to assess how Trobianders could believe that what is said in magic will be realized, he is looking at the wrong types of effects. The issue is not whether a magic spell can make objects appear, transform plants, animals, and humans. Rather, magic formulas allow for the comparison of elements belonging to different realms (for instance, the natural world and the human body) and provide a guide for what the people themselves should expect or do under present circumstances. Thus, a magic formula that compares men (who have painted red designs on their body) to red fish does not mean that

7“Between the savage [sic] use of words and the most abstract and theoretical one there is only a difference of degree. Ultimately all the meaning of all words is derived from bodily experience” ([1935] 1978, vol. 2: 58).

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