Language in Society

GENERAL EDITOR

Peter Trudgill, Chair of English Linguistics, University of Fribourg

ADVISORY EDITORS

J. K. Chambers, Professor of Linguistics, University of Toronto Ralph Fasold, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University William La bov, Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania Lesley Milroy, Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I Language and Social Psychology, Edited by Howard Giles and Robert N St Clair

2 Language and Social Nerworks (Second Edition), Lesley Milroy

3 The Ethnography of Communication (Second Edition), Muriel Savil/e-Troike

4 Discourse Analysis, Miehael Stubbs

5 The Sociolinguistics of Society: Inrroduetion to Sociolinguisrics, Volume I, Ralph Faso/d

6 The Sociolinguistics of Language: Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Volume 11, Ralph Fasold

7 The Language of Children and Adolescenrs: The Acquisition of Comrnunicative Competence, Suzanne Romaine

8 Language, the Sexes and Society, Philip M. Smith

9 The Language of Advertising, Torben \lestergaard and Kim Sehroder

10 Dialeers in Contact, Peter Trudgil/

II Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Peter Mühlhöusler

12 Observing and Analysing Natural Language: A Critical Account of Sociolinguistic Method, Le,lq Milroy

13 Bilingualism (Second Edition), Suzanne Romaine

14 Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Dennis R. Preston

15 Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Constfuction of Social and Personal Idenrity, Peur Miihlhöusler and Rom Hard

16 Politically Speaking, John Wil,on

17 The Language of the News Media, Al/an Bel/

18 Language, Society and the Elderly: Discourse, Identity and Ageing, Nieholas Coupland, Ju,tine Coupland and Howard Giles

19 Linguistic Variation and Change, James Milroy

20 Principles of Linguistic Change, Wil/iam Labov

21 Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach, Ron Seol/on and Suzanne \Vong Seollon

22 Sociolinguistic Theoty: Language Variation and Irs Social Significance, f. K Chambers

23 Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language, and Culture, Miehael Stubb,

24 Anrhropological Linguistics, William A. Foley

25 Arnerican English: Dialeers and Variation, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Sehilling-Estes

26 African Arnerican Vernacular English: Features. Evolution, Educationallmplications, John R. Riekford

27 Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Idenrity in Belten High, Penelope Eekert

28 The English History of African Ametican English, Shana Poplaek

Anthropological Linguistics

An Introduction

William A. Foley University of Sydney

tIJ Blackwell Publishing

14

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of

Personhood

Linguistic Practices, Pcrson and Habitus

What is bchind these distinct uses of languagc among American, Australian Aboriginal, Hongot, and Wolof cultures? A c1ue is provided by an insightful Wolof proverb about greetings: "When two persons greet each other, one h<lS shame, the other has glory" (Irvine 1974: 175). Thus, the distinct lin­guistic practices associated with the interlocutors in a Wolof-greeting en­counter arc linked to the kinds of persons they arc; indeed, considering the way re1ative ranking can be manipulated during the encounter through the verbal strategies of self-lowcring and se1f-elevating, these linguistic behaviors arc wnstt'tutive of what kinds of persons they are. Their understanding of what kind of person thcy arc vis-à-vis the other interlocutor is embodied in their habitus. To the extent they rate of higher rank, the habitus will enact that proper demeanor in bodily and linguistic practices; so too, if of 10wer rank. The proper demeanor is embodied in the habitus through countless previous such rituals, the lived history of the individual's social structural coupling, in which he has been both higher and 10wer ranked. The man­dated behavior is thus inculcated in the habitus, which, in turn, reproduces it. Note importantly that this formulation is not deterministic; the habitus of the organism is the result of its history of structural coupling, but, cruci­ally, structural coupling is a relationship of an organism and its environ­ment, including other organisms. Duc to the great plasticity of the human nervous system, the human organism may react in an unspecifiable number of ways to a given environmental stimulus; this is what we recognize as free will and is as applicable to the strategies employed in the Wolof ritual greeting as to any other form of human behavior. The embodied practices of the habitus are, if you like, the more tacitly known ones (for further eIab­oration on free will or agency and a cline of awareness of social practices

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistie Construction of Personhood 261

from fully conscious to unconscious, see Giddens (1984)). Further, due to the unique ability to monitor and ultimate1y reflect on one's practices through the descriptions made available through language, humans are capabIe of constructing further descriptions or explanations of these practices, which commonly cohere into 10cal ideologies. In the current context, the claim is that the repertoire of linguistic practices in a culture, embodied in the hab­itus of that culture's members, are both indicative and constitutive of its conception or 10cal ideology of personhood - what is a person and what are the types of persons there can be? Thus, the differences we found above in American, Hongot, and Wolof understandings and uses of language are all emblematic of their local ideologies of personhood. Through competent lin­guistic usage in a range of contexts, the speaker comes to enact these local be1iefs and, in so doing, the linguistic practices are both significant and con­stituent ofthem (Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Giddens 1979, 1984). Thus, the dif­ferences in linguistic practices between the interlocutors in the Wolof greeting encounter do not simply signify rc1ative social inequality among persons, as per the local ideology; but by engaging in the linguistic practices available, for example, those of se1f-Iowering and sc1f-c1evating, the interlocutors actually create the terms out of which this local ideology can be constructed (this is at base Giddens's (1979, 1984) idea of the duality of structure, his concept of structuration, which is the mutual dependence of structure - in this case, inequality and the institutions which embody it - and agency).

The Construction of Personhood

Since the early 1980s or so a large amount of work in cultural anthropology has focused on crosscultural differences in the conception of the person (see Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985; Geertz 1973, 1983; Gergen 1991; Gergen and Davis 1985; Harris 1989; Kohut 1977; Kondo 1990; Marsella, DeVos, and Hsu 1985; Myers 1986; Read 1955; Rosaldo 1980a, 1984; Shweder and Bourne 1984; Spiro 1993; Taylor 1989; White and Kirkpatrick 1985; Wierzbicka 1993). Not surprisingly, given the volume of all this research, a complete consensus on the issues involved has not yet emerged, but some basic differences in various cultures' beliefs about personhood do seem apparent. The bedrock of these cultural differences seems to lie on how the seIf is "inscribed" in social re1ationships (see Gergen 1990). According to this view, the avenue to understanding the nature of the se1f is not through the individual or the contents of her mental states, i.e. beliefs, feelings, intentions, but rather through social collaborations or structural couplings in the social environment. Each person is dependent on others; their survival cannot be separated from their re1ationships with others, and,

262 The Ethnography of Speaking

in turn, relationships depend on the mutual coordination of actions among social actors. Gergen (1990) calls such a network of coordination a relational nucleus, "a self-sustaining system of coordinated actions in which two or more persons are engaged" (Gergen 1990:584-5). Such a notion is highly reminiscent of Maturana and Varela's (1987) biological notion of self­organizing systems engaged in structural coupling. How this relational nuc­leus is formed is largely through speech (Gergen 1990:584-5):

Thc individual's well-being cannot be extricated from the web of relation­ships in which helshe is engaged. The character of thc relationship depends, in turn, on the process of adjusting and readjusting actions. In effect, forms of relationship depend on the mutual coordination of actions ... Thus, for example, as we encounter each other from day to day, our actions tend to­ward coordination. The movements of the eyes, hands, and feet, for example, or the number of words we speak, their volume and speed, and so on, are all in the process of becoming mutually coordinated ... As this coordination takes place - taking turns in conversation, adjusting the tone of voice so that thc other may hear without discomf()rt, speaking in mutually acceptable pattcrns of words, walking together at similar speeds, and so on - we come to form a rcIational nucleus.

Note that this occurs through the coordination of our individual embodied habitus.

Given this view of social functioning, the person emerges simply as the point of intersection of multiple relational nuclei, a lived history of struc­tural couplings. Each of us carries within us in the habitus a great number of relational patterns devcloped through our history of structural couplings with others. When we and someone else meet, this interaction now becomes the meeting point of the various patterns of relationships within which we are and have been enmeshed. The unfolding pattern of our rclationship will be channcllcd to a large extent by the wider system of structural coupl­ings that cach of us brings to this meeting. The Wolof grccting encounter is an excellent example of this: how the status differcntial will emerge in the encounter is strongly conditioned by our own disccrnment of our social status as we have established it in previous encounters, both with the pre­sent interlocutor and innumerable others.

Self versus Person

Anthropologists, following Mauss (1985[1938]), commonly make a distinc­tion between the notion of self and that of person (Fitzgerald 1993; La Fontaine 1985). The self refers to a proposed universal human awareness

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction ofPersonhood 263

of one's own individual embodiment, while the person is a social concept made up of local notions of one's rights and obligations, and hence varies crossculturally. Harré and Mühlhäusler (1990) make a similar distinction, referring to the former as "numerical identity" and the latter as "qualitative identity." This is phrased in terms of their thesis of the Double Location of the self (Harré and Mühlhäusler 1990:88):

We come to appreciate that we have location as embodied beings amongst the material things of a temporally continuous physical environment [anthropo­logical notion of "self"]. But we also come to appreciate that we have, at any moment, a more or Icss well-defined location amongst other people in a social environment of rights and obligations, so acquiring for that moment a certain set of responsibilities [anthropological notion of "person"].

This thesis has a eorollary: that of the Double Indexicality of the pronoun "I." This pronoun indexes both notions of location, so that the speaker of an utterance presents herself as having a bounded location in time and spaee and also a certain set of social responsibilities. Stated in this bald form, the sharp contrast between self and person may be difficuIt to maintain. First, it is not clear how such putative charaeteristics of individual embodied selves, like kindness or cruelty, can be meaningfully talked about, except in terms of dyadie social relationships (see Gergen (1994)). Rosaldo (1984) argues that the Ilongot have no ideology of a sharp distinction between the private individual self and a publie social presentation of the person. She asserts that what Ilongot individuals think and feel is mainly the result of public social activities, realized through the dyadic interaction of persons, suggesting a blurring of the proposed universal contrast between individual self and social person. Ilongot claim that there is usually no gap between what one feels and what one does. As an egalitarian society, individuals do not have astrong experience of social constraint, which would reinforee a strong boundary between a private, bounded individual self and a soeial person of rights and responsibilities: "there is no soeial basis of a problem­atic that assumes needs for controls, nor do individuals experienee them­selves as having boundaries to proteet or as holding drives and lusts that must be held in check if they are to maintain their status or engage in everyday cooperation" (Rosaldo 1984: 148).

A further difficulty in maintaining a sharp distinction between self and person lies in the severe problems in getting a clear fix on this mental aware­ness of individual embodiment, which is the very basis of the notion of self. This awareness is a very peculiar one, for it is highly diffuse, neither bounded nor stabie. It seems largely a linguistie eonstruction: a localization in our bodies through the use of I of the interseetion of the various patterns of recurring structural coupling that we engage in, and further, a report through linguistic description of the enaction of these couplings (for related ideas see

264 The Ethnography of Speaking

Mead (1934». The self is that organism whose actions we report by using J. Recent work (Minsky 1986; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991) on the architecture of the mind has claimed that the mind consists of many litde "agents," each of which has only a small-scale domain of functions. These "agents" can be organized into larger systems for more incIusive tasks, and these, in turn, can be organized into stilliarger systems, and so on, all on an analog of social structure, hence the Society of Mind (Minsky 1986). What counts as a collection of agents at one level is simply one "agent" at a higher level. Minsky (1986) illustrates with the example of the "agent" which builds towers out of toy blocks - the Ruilder. But at a lower level, Builder is composed of other "sub-agents" Beginner, Adder, Finisher, etc., and these, in turn, require further "sub-agents," Finder, Lifter, Mover, etc. The point is this: where, if this indeed is the structure of the mind, eould the global, diffuse awareness of the self as individual embodiment be located? Only, as VarcIa, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) point out, in the series of mental events and formations, i.e. actions of "agents" and "sub-agents," that have coherenee and integrity over time. Our understanding of this eoherence and integrity is, of course, our memory, or espeeially what Becker (1971:77-9) ealls our "inner-newsrecl," what we constandy review in our mind's eye as our life experience, particularly those experiences that givc us seU:'esteem, make us fcel good and positive about ourselves (in other words, a seleetive replay ofour history of structural coupling). But, of course, these lifc experi­ences, both positive and negative, mainly occur in dyadic interaetions, joint configurations of persons, again forcing us to the conclusion that a sharp contrast between individual sclf and social person is just untenable. (But see Cohen (1994) for a contrary argument. He argues that accounts like Rosaldo's of the Hongot simply are not tenable. Like Harré and Mühlhäusler, he asscrts that individual sclf:'consciousness as a bounded embodied being is a universal property of humans, to argue otherwise is to exoticize the other and deny them desirabie traits we claim for oursclves. He notes that in any shared soeial event like a ritual, each participant has different understandings and interpretations of the event, and this demonstrates the consciousness of a sclf. Individual experience of any public event is undoubtedly true; to deny it would be to negate the centrality of the human organism and her great plasticity of the nervous system in any instance of structural coupling. Indi­vidual experience, however, does not a self make, for there is no evidence for any universal-bounding properties underpinning this experience.)

Local Conceptions of Personhood

Having sketched some of the boundaries of the concept of the person, let me now turn to some of the crosscultural differences in its articulation, the

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood 265

local ideologies of personhood. Let me start with one familiar to most readers - the Western European concept of person. The local ideology may be summarized in one word, individualism, which perhaps reaches its great­est emphasis in American culture. The basic premise of this ideology is egocentric personal autonomy, summarized weIl in a classic definition by Geertz (1983: 59):

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or Icss integrated motivational cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgcment, aml action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background ...

In this egocentrie individualist ideology of the person, society becomes subordinated to the individual; in a fashion not unrclated to the ideas of philosophers like Hobbes and I_oeke, society is imagined to have been created via a "social contract" to protect the interests of idealized autono­rnous individuals, independent of society, yet living within it. These indi­viduals are themselves more important than any constituent grouping. Indicative of this is the importance Western cultures place on privacy and private property; this asserts the eentrality of the individual and his wants and needs.

What is the nature of these individuals? Freedom from constraint and autonomy in action seems to be criterial for our ideology of person as individual. Note that the eatehery of the feminist movement, "a person in her own right" implicidy assoeiates personhood with individual rights to action and freedom from constraints. Each person is viewed as having in­alienable rights to these individualist claims of autonomy. Each individual is unique, but all, ideologieally at least, have equal claims to these rights; a eommon ethical system governs all our social rclations, undoubtedly aresuIt of the universalist morality in the Christian base of Western culture, for, according to Christian teaching, the spiritual component in all persons con­fers upon them an immeasurable value which must be recognized before all humanly or soeially created values. This leads us properly to view a person as an individual, an embodiment of absolute value in her own right, and not simply in terms of her position in any social pattern. Actual inequality among persons is ideologically interpreted as the result of free competition for status rewards among theoretically equal individuals, safeguarded through the rule of law as set out in the "social contract." Rut the ideas of the unequal status differentials and the equal opportunities of individuals are sharply distinguished. This is the principle behind our current pervasive systems of bureaucratie organization, as so insightfully pointed out by Max Weber (1968[19221) long ago. The defining characteristic of bureaucracies

266 The Ethnography ofSpeaking

is a distinction between office and office holder or unequal social role and equal individual. The allocation of these offices to particular persons is determined, ideologically at least, by their individual capabilities, not their social connections. Thus, inequality and hierarchy are features of society; persons are free and equal individuals.

The egocentric individualist concept of the person in Western culture is in marked contrast to that of many traditional cultures. These cultures have a sociocentric, context dependent conception of personhood (Shweder and Bourne 1984). In these cultures the individual and his autonomy are not singled out as the local understanding of person, rather his embeddedness in the social context is the stuff of his definition as a person. Personhood is, thus, defined in sociocentric terms, according to the social position a par­ticular human being occupies. The sociocentric conception of personhood regards the good of the social grouping as fundamental and subordinates individual wants and needs to the collective good. (Note the point here is not to argue that these sociocentric cultures have explicit articulated ideo­logies of personhood parallel to the ideology of individualism of the West (though whether all members of Western societies arc explicitly aware of a coherent ideology made up of the principle of individualism notcd ahove is itself open to serious debate); rather , the daim is that their understand­ing of personhood, whether tacit or not, is enacted in, indecd, constructed through, linguistic and other cultural practices and thereby, incukated in the habitus. Certainly with one's beliefs thrown into rclief through culture contact, they may becomc articulated: as one of my Balinese students said aftcr two years residence in Australia, trying to articulate his Native under­standing, "We (i.e. the Balinese) have a communal culture.") Such alocal conception of the person is widely held, for exampIc by such otherwise highly divergent cultures as that of Bali and the Gahuku of highlands Ncw Guinea:

Bali (Geertz 1983:62):

a persistent and systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expres­sion to the point where anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is physically, psycho!ogically or biographically, is muted in favor of his assigned place in the continuing, and, su it is thought, never-changing pageant that is Balinese Iife. It is dramatis personac, not actors, that endure; indeed it is dramatis personac, not actors, that in the proper sense really exist. Physically men come and go - mere incidents in a happen-stance history of no genuine importance, even to them­selves. But the masks they wear, the stage they occupy, the parts they play, and most important, the spectacle they mount remain and constitute not thc facade but the substance of things, not least the sclf.

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood 267

Gahuku (Read 1955:276):

To the Gahuku-Gama, the palpable differences between people, the idiosyn­cratic variations in their natures, arc like a shimmer which overlies their social identity. They arc not unaware of these variations: they do not ignore them; but they do not distinguish, as cIearly as wc are accustomed to, between the individual and the status which he occupies. They tend, in other words, to categorize, to sec men largely in terms of their position in a system of social rights and obligations ... the more uutstanding a man is the more he is held in, and the more pronounced his own csteem the more c10sely he identifics himsclf with his status. Individual identity and social identity are two sides of the same coin. Wc oursc\ves arc accustomed to distinguish between them ...

Because of this radically different understanding of personhood, mem­bers of such cultures do not typically talk of other human beings in terms of individual characters or personality traits like kindness or humility as we do, but rather talk about typical actions of people in particular social con­texts. Read (1955:2556) is quite explicit about this in the case of the Gahuku: "people do not normally appeal to abstract principles but rather emphasize the practical consequences of moral deviation. Instead of saying it is 'good' or 'right' to help others, they state quite simply that 'if you don't help others, others won't help you.'" Shweder and Bourne (1984) point out systematic differences in the language of deseription for moral and social behavior between American English and Oriya of India. Whereas Amer­icans arc likely to say of someone in abstract terms of individual character that "she is friendly" or "he is hostile and aggressive," Oriyas in similar situations are likely to report them as context dependent actions like "she brings cakes to my family on festival days," or "he shouts curses at his neighbors." Americans deseribe personality by individual traits, but Oriyas do so by reference to social actions, a "cases and contexts" approach (Shweder and Bourne 1984: 188). Americans describe what is truc of a perscm's behavior (friendly, hostiIc, etc.) but overlook the dyadic social interactional contexts in which these are played out (sec earlier discussion of Gergen (1990», while Oriyas focus their attention on the particular social contexts in which the behavior occurred, and do not provide abstract general labels for indi­vidual character traits or the inner feelings and intentions of the actor. Shweder and Hourne link these differences to the contrastive American egocentric versus Oriya sociocentric understandings of personhood: in American culture a person is a unique individual transcending any par­ticular social interaction, while the Oriya ideology holds that the person is a point in a network of social patterns of hierarchy and exchange, the sum­mation of social roles.

Sociocentric conceptions of personhood do not preclude astrong sense of

268 The Ethnography of Speaking

one's own individuality (not equivalent to individualism), a feature of Gahuku culture emphasized by Read (1955). Rosaldo (1984) makes a telling point of the necessarily different articulations of sociocentric ideologies in hierarch­ical versus egalitarian societies. In societies where social statuses and, hence, persons are unequal and ascribed through caste, as in India or Bali, con­straint on individual action is the order of the day, in order to ensure the inhcritance of the traditions' order of ascribed social privileges. This entails proscriptions on individuals' social actions, tying them closely to what is emblematic of their social position and, thus, curtailing much of their indi­vidual expression. Bali, as described in Geertz (1973, 1983) is a good cxam­ple of such a culture; sec thc earlier quote from Geertz (1983:62-4) on page 266. The Balinese have a large inventory of labels for describing persons in tcrms of their position in the hierarchical castc-based social structure: birth order names (first-born, second-born, etc.), kinship tcrms and names based on these (mother of X, sister of Y), caste ti tics, and so on. These ascriptions when applied to somcone define him in tcrms of thc fixcd pattcrn of Balinese social life and prescribe the proper social bchavior between him and you. This fact finds perhaps its most striking articulation in the complex rules of linguistic etiquette, for which Bali and its neighbor Java are justly famous: given a particular status differential between interlocutors only certain forms of language arc acccptablc and others strictly proscribed, as will be dis­cussed in detail in chapter 16.

Such extensive and rigid prescription of appropriatc behavior is quite alicn to Gahuku culture, a culture with an aggressivcly egalitarian ideology, if ever there was one. Thcre are no inhcritcd societal offices which confer authority, such as chiefdoms clscwhere in Melanesia. Authority is earned, through physical and economic power. In such a flexiblc egalitarian society, it is not surprising that the local ideology of personhood, whilc sociocen­tric, cmphasizes the transient physical incarnation of persons as embodiments. It is through the physical powers of the body that one achieves authority, power and estcem, be it thc male power of aggression and dominance or thc fcmalc power of procreation. Hencc, Gahuku are keenly aware of them­selves as embodied individuals and lavish attention on their bodies, espc­cially their skin, a key term in the local ideology of person (Read 1955:266). All of this is in kceping with thc open egalitarian nature of Gahuku society which does not prescribe different social behavior among social unequals, as in Bali, and therefore encourages the play of individual differences in reaping social rewards: "thc majority of social rcwards go to thc physic­ally strong and self-assertivc; to the proud and the flamboyant and to the extroverted warrior who demands, and usually obtains the submission of his fellows" (Read 1955:254). The concept of the person, however, is still sociocentric; it derives its meaning from the complex of social obligations one has (Read 1955:276):

Politeness, Faa, and the Linguisti{ Construaion of Personhood 269

There is no real dichotomy between man and society, no essential separation of the individual from the social pattern. Of course it does not follow that idiosyncratic differences are unimportant. Age-mates, for example, are ex­pccted to be the closest of friends, but although the formalities of friendship are generally maintained with all of them, it is clear that men have a greater affection for and feel a closer bond with some than others. People are prob­ably very weil aware of this, but it is only to an outsider, such as the anthro­pologist, that they can express their personal preferences. The same could be said for most other relationships, but even when we have made every allow­ance for thc manner in which differences in temperament and character may modify a formal bond, the fact remains that, to his fellows, status - his position in the system of social rights and obligations - is a basic and insepar­able constituent ofcach man's identity. Indeed, it is possible to conclude that for most purposes and in most situations social idcntity is more important than idiosyncratic individuality.

The kind of pcrson someone is and thc rights and obligations one has toward them is still, as in Bali, a function of the social position occupied: a mothcr's brother is a different kind of person than a brother-in-Iaw; a kinsman, different from an enemy; and a big man different from a poor man. Gahuku individuality is not individualism of the Western kind. People arc persons of a type or non-persons bccause of their social position, not because of an inalienablc and intrinsic value. Thc ideology of personhood in Gahuku like Bali is sociocentric, thc palpablc differences result from it being an egalitarian society with largcly open competition to win positions of social status, in contrast to the rclativcly closed caste system of Bali in which positions of social status are largely ascribcd through inheritance, and so competition for these positions is more muted and effaced. In both soci­eties thc persons arc largc1y understood to he their social positions, while in Western societies thc social position is just that, an office that the person as an autonomous individual occupies.

The Linguistic Construction of Personhood and the Concept of Face

How are these differing local ideologies of pcrsonhood Icarned and enacted? How do they become ~mbodied in the habitus? Largely, as Gergen (1990:585) so clearly points out, through the use of language (sce the quote on page 262). As we converse in a dyadic relationship, thereby forging a structural coupling, our verbal actions become coordinated as communicative prac­tices in sustaining the structural coupling. It is through this coordination that particular structural couplings are fashioned, and it is the summed lived history of these which constitute the person. Maturana and Varela

270 The Ethnography of Speaking

(1987) highlight the central role that talking plays in our social structural coupling by terming it "Iinguallaxis," a kind of linguistic trophallaxis, the biological term for the structural correlation that takes pIace between or­ganisms through exchanges of food or chemical secretions, as when the organization of a beehive is determined by a particular balance of hormonal secretions. The idea of linguistic practices as linguallaxis is supported by Aiello and Dunbar's (1993) claim for the evolution of language essentially as a kind of social glue, supplementing grooming as human bands increased in size: bodily practices as communicative in social coupling (trophallaxis: grooming) are supplemented by linguistic practices (linguallaxis), which gradually supplant the former during the course of human evolution. For a beehive, alter the hormonal balance and you alter the organization of the hive; for a human social grouping, a change in patterns of verbal behavior (linguallaxis) can have equally dramatic cfJects on social positioning; just consider the case of the Wolof greeting encounter. Further, as Shweder and Bourne (19X4) point out, the local ideology of personhood is constituted by what people say while talking, tor in a profoundly Whorfian way, the meta­phors speakers use to describe persons and their behavior are both derived from and constructive of their local understanding of personhood.

Goffman (1967, 1971) takes a more fine grained look at how the coor­dination of linguistic behavior in a dyadic relationship enacts our particular cultural understandings of personhood. I Ie points out that it is the goal of interactants in a social encounter to proteet the fragile sclf-esteem they have of themsclves; at the very least, to minimize damage to this esteem, at best, to increase it. This sclf-esteem is termed face by Goffman (1967), defined as "the public sclf-image that every member wants to claim for himsclf" (Brown and Levinson 1987:61). Face is largcly enacted linguistically be­tween interactants (although other modalities arc also possible; sec Goffman (1956) for a classic exposition). Through the words we and others choose and use, our face and those of the other interactants in the social interaction are subject to modification and possible undermining. Face is linguistically constructed, and the ability to use verbal skilIs with facility is how wc can manipulate a social encounter to maximize our face gains and minimize our losses; again, the Wolof greeting encounter is a paradigm exemplar of this facto

Politeness, and Positive and Negative Face

Brown and Levinson (19X7), in a now classic monograph, develop a rich theory of linguistic politeness or linguistic etiquette around Goffman's con­cept of face. Politeness is, of course, a battery of social skilIs whose goal is to ensure everyone feels affirmed in a social interaction, so its link to a

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood 271

theory of face is transparent (for other views on linguistic politeness, see Lakoff (1973, 1977) and Leech (1983». Brown and Levinson (1987) break Goffman's concept of face into two aspects, positive and negative face. Positive face is what we typically understand by the concept of face and that which was highlighted by Goffman: one's positive self-esteem, "the positive consistent self-image or 'personality' (crucially including the desire that this sclf-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants" (Brown and Levinson 1987:61). Negative face is one's freedom to act, "the basic claim to territorics, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction - i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition" (Brown and Levinson 1987:61). Brown and Levinson see the two aspects offace as the basic wants of any individual in a social interaction- to be affirmed in her positive self­esteem by at least some others and to be unimpeded in her action. Social interaction is viewed as cooperative activity (see Grice 1975), in which inter­actants work to maintain each other's face. However, it is inevitable in the course of human social interaction that certain acts need to be done which threaten others' face. Some verbal acts like promises or orders threaten one's negative face by interfCring with one's unimpeded freedom of action: an order certainly curtails this. Others, like apologies or disagreements threaten positive face; disagreeing with somcone's view suggests there is something wrong with that view and, potentially, themsclves, a clear chal­lenge to their sclf-esteem or positive face. Speech acts like orders or warn­ings, which threaten a person's sense of face, both positive and negative, arc called face-threatening acts or FTAs for short.

l.inguistic politeness is basically the redressing of the affronts to face posed by face-threatening acts to addressees. Connected to the two aspects of face, we find both positive and negative politeness. Positive politeness, as expected, seeks to redress the affront to the hearer's positive tàce. The speaker (S) indicates his recognition that the hearer (H) wishes to have his positive-tàce wants honored; typically Sasserts that he wants at least some of H's wants. Positive politeness strategies include statements of friend­ship, solidarity, compliments. Examples of utterances employing positive politeness strategies include (for full details, see Brown and Levinson (1987: 101-29»:

Attend to H's interests, needs, wants You look sado Can I do anything?

2 Use solidary in-group identity markers Heh, mate, can you lend me a dollar?

3 Be optimistic I'll just come along, ifyou don 't mind.

4 Include both S and H in activity If we help each other, I guess, we 'll both sink or swim in this course.

272 The Ethnography ofSpeaking

5 Offer or promise Ifyolt wash the dishes, I'1l vacuum the floor.

6 Exaggerate interest in Hand his interests That's a nice haircut you got; where did you get it?

7 Avoid disagreement Yes, it '5 rather long; not short certainly.

8 Joke Wow, that's a whopper!

Note all of these strategies arc to make H feel good about himself, his interests or possessions. Negative politeness is oriented to H's negative face, his desire for autonomy. Typically, negative politeness strategies emphasize avoidance of imposition and so S maintains she will only minimally inter­fere with H. They inc1ude apologies or other distancing styles. Examples of utterances employing negative politeness strategies include (Brown and Levinson 1987:129-211):

Be indirect Would yolt know where Ox/ord Street is?

2 Use hedges or questions Perhaps, he might have taken it, maybe. Coltld you please pass the ria?

3 Be pessimistic You (()uldn 't find your way to lending me a thousand do/lars, (ould you?

4 Minimize the imposition It '5 not too much out ofyour may, just a couple ofblocks.

5 Use obviating structures, like nominalizations, passives or statements of general rules I hope ofJènse lViII not be taken. Visitors sign the ledger. Spitting mill not he tolerated.

6 Apologize l'm sorry; it's a lot to ask, but can you lend me a thousand dollars?

7 Use plural pronouns We regret to injiJrm you.

All of these strategies have the effect of trying to gloss over or minimize the imposition on H.

Finally, an S may consider the potential affront of an FTA to be potenti­ally so serious that he regards neither positive or negative politeness as suf­ficient redress. In this case, he may do the FTA "off the record" with a hint (it's cold in here, as a request to close the window) or some other indirect strategy, such as irony (Harry's 50 successful in his intimate relationships!!) or

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construct ion ofPersonhood 273

14.1 Circumstances determining choice of strategy:

Lesser 1. without redressive aetion, baldlv ~ . .~ on record

~] <Do the FTA< <with . <2. positive politeness

o t: rcdrcsslvc 'i'J <.:! 4. off record aetion .§ '0 S. Don't do the FTA 1 negative po!tteness

~

Greater

vagueness (Perhaps, someone went to the casino last night). Brown and Levinson (1987:60) show the available range of verbal behaviors to redress loss of face (14.1), the greater potential for loss of face requiring greater redressive action of the FTA, culminating in the extreme case to avoidance of the FTA completely.

Crosscultural Diffcrcnecs in Politeness and Face

Brown and Levinson present this model with its concept of the dual aspects of face and associated strategies of politeness as a universal one, and their monograph provides copious evidence and examples drawn from three widely disparate languages, English, Tzcltal, and Tamil. They use it to develop a typology of cultures according to the types of politeness dominant and their distribution across social groupings. In egalitarian societies in which social distance, and status and power differentials between interactants are min­imal, like the Ilongot, positive politeness strategies will be favored, whereas in hierarchical status-conscious societies, like Bali, negative politeness strat­egies will be much in evidence. Thus, in Bali a low caste rice farmer sup­plicating to a high government official will use extensive strategies of negative politeness, but be addressed baldly with no politeness redressing. Brown and Levinson conjecture that in hierarchical societies powerful high status groups have negative poIiteness cultures (recognizing such groups have power, i.e. freedom to act as they will, and redressing the imposition on this freedom), while dominated groups have positive politeness cultures (recognizing the need to assert solidarity and mutual regard for positive self-esteem in view ofthe obvious restrictions on power; see chapter 16). These differences indic­ate and inform a view of the person in such groups as autonomous, free, and powerful or dependent, bound, and weak respectively. Given these correla­tions, it is not surprising to find in gender studies that female speech is said to be characterized by more positive politeness, and male by negative polite­ness (sec also chapter IS).

274 The Ethnography of Speaking

In a similar vein, in a comparative study of politeness in England and Greece, Sifianou (1992) notes a difference between those two cultures in the significance accorded to the two aspects of face. The English place a higher value on privacy and individuality (negative face), whilc the Greeks empha­size group involvement and ingroup relationships (positive face). The limits to personal territory among Greeks include all those who belong to the same ingroup, oefined as someone concernco with one's welfare. Positive face extends to cover these, so that there is astrong oesire that one's companions arc also liked ano approveo. Positive face is, thus, oefineo over the group of ingroup associates, not on isolated indiviouals, as is largely the case in Eng­lano. Membcrs of an ingroup will employ positive politeness or no politeness amongst each other ano restrict negative politeness to outsioers. lt is the outy of each ingroup member to help all others, so members sec no neeo for thanking or apologizing (negative politeness) for services requesteo or ren­oereo. Hencc, requests ano wishes arc expresseo much more baloly, without reoressive action, than in English. In English culture a much more oistant ano inoirect form of behavior is norrnative, where aio is seen as oepenoing on an inoivioual's oiscretion. Thank yous ano apologies arc requireo for even relatively minor impositions, even with an ingroup, reflccting the more inoi­vioualist ethos associateo with face (prominence of negative face).

A more serious objection to Brown ano Levinson's formulation is pre­senteo in Matsumoto (1988) ano Gu (1990), oealing with East Asian cul­tures, japanese ano Chinese respectively. They argue that Brown ano l_evinson's oivision of face int<> positive ano negative face is untenablc f(lr these cultures, ano particularly that the weight given to negative face, free­oom to act, ano negative politeness, avoioance of imposition on the freeoom to act, oerives from the importance given to inoivioualism in the Western European concept of the person. Matsumoto (1988) points out that what is most important to a japanese person is not her right to act freely, but her position in a group in relationship to all others, her acceptance by these others and the duties it entails. This, of course, is transparently a differ­ence between an egocentric inoivioualistic conception of personhooo ano a sociocentric, context bound one. Face as positive self-esteem (positive face) is inoeeo operative in japancse culture, but again must be unoerstooo in sociocentric, rather than the inoivioualistic terms in which 13rown and Levinson frame it: "ajapanese generally must unoerstand where s/he stands in relation to other members of the group or society, and must acknowlcdge his/her oepcnoencc on others. Acknowlcdgment ano maintenance of the re.lative position of others, rather than preservation of an individual's proper territory, governs all social interaction." (Matsumoto 1988:4(5).

This view of face and consequently personhood has clear linguistic mani­festations. japanese is a language typified by expressions of oefcrencc, for example, honorifics (see chapter 16). An English deferential expression would

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood 275

be Excuse me, sir, could you please close the window. Deference in English is associated with the avoidance or downplaying of an imposition; the more we feel we might be imposing, the more deferential we might beo It is clearly a strategy for negative politeness, redressing a threat to negative face. In keeping with her contention of the lack of a relevant idea of negative face in japancse culture, Matsumoto (1988) argues that oeference in japanese culture does not function to minimize imposition (negative politeness), but rather to represent a positive rc1ationship between the interlocutors (posit­ive politeness). A good example (Matsumoto 1988:4(9) is:

Doozo yorosiku onegaisimasu "1 ask you to please treat me well"

An expression like this is employeo when someone is introouceo to someone ano expresses a wish that the relationship will be a beneficial one. Formally, as a speech act, it is an imposition, ano through its expression, the speaker places himself in a lower recipient position ano is clearly oeferential. But just as dearly it acknowlcoges interoepenoence, a virtue in japanese culture. It is an honor in this society to be askeo to take care of someone, and this conf"crs status on the person being so askeo. It enhances the addressee's positive face, but by using this expression ano putting himself in a posit­ively valueo rc1ationship of interoepenoence, the speaker has also enhanced his own positive face. 11 is not negative versus positive face which is relevant in japancse culture, but just face, vieweo as positive seU:'esteem. Linguistic acts enhance it or threaten it; one can "lose face" in the sensc that one's positive seU:'esteem as a valued member of a group with assigned rights and outics has been oiminisheo. The oifferences between the japanese and Western European concepts arc inoicative ano constitutive of their respect­ively socioccntric versus inoivioualist conceptions of personhooo.

While giving oue to such crosscultural variations, Brown ano Levinson emphasize the universal bases of the mooel ano the constraints it imposes; they note, for example, in "no society will members use positive politeness for big FTAs and negative politeness for small ones, or positive politeness only to superiors and negative politeness only to inferiors." (Brown and Levinson 1987:253). Both of these unattesteo patterns will be in contraven­tion of the model.

The Cooperativc Principle and its Conversational Maxims

Crucial to Brown and Levinson's model of politeness is a principle of coopera­tion among interlocutors in the mutual maintenance of face in conversation;

The Ethnography of Speaking276

ideally speakers perform various types of speech acts more or less politely to preserve each other's face. An important linguistic analog of this (and a basic inspiration for Brown and Levinson) is found in the work of the philosopher, Grice (1975; 1989). Grice attempts to unravel the logic or basis for rational behavior behind human linguistic interactions in conversations. The fundamental principle involved here is called by Grice the Cooperative Principle, which means that people engaged in a particular linguistic inter­action will say things appropriate at every point in the interaction. For example, ifl come running down the street to you, yelling "Help! My house is on fire" and you respond "OK, don't panie. 1'11 call the Fire Brigade," this is an appropriate response and obeys the Cooperative Principle. If, on the other hand, you respond "Do you think my lawn needs cutting?", we have a clear violation of the Cooperative Principle, and this would get me to try to figure out the cause of your lack of cooperation. The Cooperat­ive Principle reflects a rational plan to coordinate our contributions during conversations, a cultural game plan for our mutual structural coupling in linguallaxis. Grice (1975:45) describes the Cooperative Principle as "mak­ing your conversational contribution such as is required, at the state at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged." This is quite vague and leaves open the possib­ility for a significant deal of crosscultural variation: tor example, what type of intormation and how much is required, who or what determines the talk's purpose and direction, ete. As we shall see, the possibilities of varia­tion are indeed attested in various cultures.

To flesh out the vagueness in his Cooperative Principle, Grice (1975:45-­6), further proposes a number of conversational maxims which guide com­municative interaction in conversations. There are four of these:

The Maxim of Q!1antity - don't give too much or too little information tor the current purposes of the interaction. If I ask you how your son is doing and you answer, "Fine, he's in University now and doing weil," the information provided is about right and reflects an appropriate use of the Maxim of Q!1antity. lf, however, you answer "Alive," this is a clear violation of the Maxim by providing too little information, or if you answer "Fine, he's in University now, got a new boyfriend and a great new haircut, bought a couple of new CDs yesterday, a new bed last week, and is planning a trip to Canberra next week,' this too is a clear violation of the Maxim by providing too much information.

2, The Maxim of Quality - don't say things you believe to be false or tor which you lack adequate evidence. Telling the truth is mandated by this Maxim, and lies are clear violations. This Maxim reflects the speaker's sincerity and responsibility not to mislead others.

3 The Maxim of Relevance - don't say things which are not germane

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistie Construction ofPersonhood 277

to the topic under discussion. This Maxim ensures that the conversa­tion be coherent. The earlier example of response to my cries for help because my house is on fire reflects its operation weil. A response like "Okay, don't panic, 1'11 call the Fire Brigade" is appropriate, but "Do you think the grass needs cutting?" is a clear violation.

4 The Maxim of Manner - don't be ambiguous or obscure, long-winded, or incoherent. This Maxim refers to the form of the contribution to the conversation: it should be brief and clear in expressing one's ideas. If in writing a review of a performance of Shakespeare's Maebeth, I write "Ms X provides a less than inspired characterization of Lady Macbeth" I have obeyed the Maxim of Manner. If, on the other hand, I write "Ms X enunciated fairly distinctly the lines written by Shakespeare for his character Lady Macbeth," I have violated the Maxim.

In ongoing conversational interactions, speakers violate or Hout Grice's tour Maxims regularly. They do this for a particular purpose; the hearer, assuming the operation ofthe Cooperative Principle, tries to reason why the speaker has flouted a particular Maxim, what she is implying by doing so, and so comes to a conclusion about her intentions, an implicature. Thus, in the immediately preceding example of the overly long and obscure review, the reader is asked to infer why the Maxim of Manner has been violated; the implicature is, of course, a negative review of Ms X's performance. In the case of the flouting of the Maxim of Relevance by responding "Do you think the grass needs cutting?" to my cries of help because my house is on fire, the most obvious implicature is that the neighbor does not want to help me, either because he is a nasty selfish person or I have offended him grievously in the past, or perhaps because he is mentally ill.

Flouting Grice's Maxims is a very common way of politcly performing face-threatening acts "off the record" (Brown and Levinson 1987:214). Hints, for example, flout the Maxim of Relevance. So a very polite request to close the window through "Gee, don't you find it's a bit cold and drafty in here?" accomplishes its purpose by generating an implicature through violating the Maxim of Relevance. If the answer is a simple "yes" with no redressive action, the hearer has not realized that the Maxim has been flouted and generation of the implicature will have failed. If, on the other hand, the hearer does realize the Maxim has been flouted and asks why, then he will probably conclude that the speaker wants some action taken to redress the situation of the cold room and will rise and close the window; the implicature was successfully generated. Understatement as a way of being polite is a flouting of the Maxim of ~antity: too little information has been provided, thus generating implicatures in the hearer as to why the flouting has occurred. A good example might be a statement by a house guest to a host, "Oh, the house needs just a little bit of work, doesn't it?",

278 279 The Ethnography of Speaking

when, in fact, it is so badly ridden by termites that it is under imminent threat of coUapse or condemnation by the local council. FinaUy, floutings of the Maxim of Manner also very effectively perform polite "off record" face­threatening acts. Vagueness or ambiguity of expression, both of which are direct violations of the Maxim, are especiaUy common when making par­ticular face-threatening acts like requests or accusations, for example, "Looks like someone partied a bit too much last night," said to a partner suffer­ing a severe morning hangover. The obscurity of the expression flouts the Maxim of Manner and causes us to ask why. The implicature generated, of course, is criticism of the partner's behavior last night, but, as this is a partieularly potent FTA against one's positive face, the criticism is muted and stated indirectly through flouting of the Maxim.

Crosscultural Variation of the Cooperative Principle: The Malagasy Case

As mentioned above, Griee's articulation of the Cooperative Principle was vague enough to aUow for significant crosscultural variation. The four Maxims were an attempt to set down more explicit sub-principles, but evidenee from other cultures tentatively suggests that these retlect more an ethno­graphie description of eonversational behavior in Western European derived cultures than absolute universal constraints. Thc crosscultural variation is so significant and generaUy so unrecognized in discussion of Grice's Maxims that H ymes (1986:78) has been led to criticize their "ethnocentric enormity." As noted above, areas where crosscultural variation might be expected include the nature and amount of information expected in conver­sations in particular cultures and who or what determines the conversation's purpose and direction. The kind and amount of information expected in conversations is regulated by the Maxim of Quantity; in short, be properly informative. But what counts as properly informative is c1early culturaUy determined, as Keenan (1976) briUiantly demonstrated by a study of con­versational practices among Malagasy peasants. Malagasy peasants, especi­aUy men, are typicaUy much less informative in their information exchanges than are Americans or Australians. They see information as a valuable com­modity, something which confers prestige within the context of the largely egalitarian viUage, and so they are reluctant to share it freely. In smaU c1ose-knit viUages like this, where everyone is related to everyone else, where little contact with the outside world is possible, where there are few secrets and Iess privacy, information that is not publicly available is highly prized for the temporary status it confers. Hence, when someone is asked a question, it is unlikely that the information required by the questioner wiU be immediately and fuUy provided; rather vague, partial answers are the

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction ofPersonhood

norm. So if someone is asked where they are going, they are not likely to respond, "to the store to buy some beer; we're planning a party this evening." A more typieal Malagasy answer would be "oh, maybe, just a little to the north," hardly an informative response, as the questioner can c1early work out for himself the direction of the person's walk.

Another, and maybe even more significant factor affecting the operation of the Maxim of Quantity in Malagasy conversations is acultural reticence to commit oneself publicly to any particular claim, for fear of damage to one's face if the claim should turn out false or fail to eventuate. Malagasy want to avoid taking responsibility for information communicated, so the information provided is kept to a minimum and often presented in a round­about or obscure fashion, at least to our ears (a violation of the Maxim of Manner). So, people avoid committing themselves to some tuture event, in case it should fail to occur. If asked when a festival wiU occur, proper responses wiU be uninformative or vague, like "I'm not sure" or "around June," even if the respondent is fuUy cognizant of the exact date which has been set. The same potential loss of face causes people to be extremely careful when giving advice or warnings, so as to leave open the other pos­sibilities that could occur. Asked when a particular Mr X might be home, a typical response would be, "WeU, if you don't come after sunset, then you won't see him." This seems curiously roundabout and uninformative to our ears, but given Malagasy cultural values, it is a perfect way to provide some information in reply, but avoid a commitment to a future event.

Vagueness and lack of informativeness are also typical of the expressions used to refer to people. People avoid identifying particular individuals in their utterances, as this may expose the person to retribution. It is also in keeping with the sociocentric, context dependent understanding of persons in this culture, in contrast to the individualist West. Consequently, indi­vidual persons are referred to by expressions that note their position in the social coUective. Often aU traces of individuality are effaeed, so that viU­agers may refer to each other as olona "person," zazalahy "boy," or ray aman-dreny "elder." Thus, a woman might say "Is the person (oiona) stiU sleeping?" to her son, when the "person" referred to is her husband (Keenan 1976:73). Note in our usage and in accordance with Grice's (1975) Maxims, such a usage of "person" would only be appropriate when the speaker was unaware ofthe sleeper's identity. In Malagasy, one could even appropriately say "someone is looking tor you" when that someone is your brother (Keenan and Ochs 1979:153).

Given Malagasy cultural belief,>, one area that presents especial problems in verbal interactions are speech acts of requests or orders, not so much because, as in Brown and Levinson (1987) they impose on one's freedom to act or negative face, but because they threaten Malagasy positive face values of equality and non-confrontation, and also, if accepted, commit the addressee

280 The Ethnography of Speaking

explicitly to some future event. The former explanation is reasonable in an egocentric, individualist culture like those of the West, but is largely inappropriate for a sociocentric culture like Malagasy (as argued also by Matsumoto (1988) for ]apanese). Requests arc typically presented indirectly in the form of hints. Further, people will not proceed directly to the hint in a social encounter, even if the main purpose of the interaction from their point of view is to make a request. Keenan and Ochs (1979: 154) provide the following striking example to illustrate this point. One day, a group of boys arrived at their house for an unannounced visit. After some twenty minutes or so of small talk, the topic of cut feet was introduced, a common injury in the volcanic country in which this village is situated. Some time after this, one of the boys in the back of the group showcd Keenan and Ochs a badly cut foot, which needed immediate attention. It would he hard to imagine a more indirect, open-ended and vague way of performing requests than this!

The Cooperativc Principle and the Determination of Meaning

Another area in which there appears to be significant differences across cultures in the interpretation of the Cooperative Principle and the associ­ated Maxims concerns who or what determines the conversation's purpose or direction at any point, or more preciscly, who assigns interpretations to speaker's utterances during an ongoing speech event. The normal Western understanding, following Searle's (1969) path-hreaking work on speech acts, is that this is done by the speaker himsclf. This rcflccts an encoding or mapping conception of language: the speaker has particular intentions in his mind and by choosing his words and a particular speech act conveys these intentions to his hearers. The meaning of the speech act is the speaker's intentions; it is he as an individual who properly assigns interpretations to his utterances; the audience is merely a passive spectator who guesses at these intentions, either rightly or wrongly.

Again recent work (Duranti 1988b; Rosaldo 1982) suggests that this con­ception of meaning and interpretation implicitly reflects the West's indi­vidualist ideology of personhood and does not generalize straightforwardly to cultures whose ideologies arc of a more sociocentric bent. Duranti (1988b) argues that in Samoan culture, the meaning of utterances, at least in formaI speech events involving political and judicial oratory called fono, are con­sLructively arrived at by the participants, a task viewed by all as a cooperat­ive one, albeit hierarchically structured along the lines of the society generally: "Rather than taking words as representations of privately owned meanings [as in Searle's analysis of speech acts], Samoans practice interpretation as a way of publicly controlling social relationships rather than as a way of

Politeness, Face, and the Llnguistic Construction of Personhood 281

figuring out what a given person 'meant to say' " (Duranti 1988b: IS). Mean­ings are thus dialogically constructed in the ongoing speech event and do not reside in any person's intentions or psychological states. Reflecting this, Samoans do not say, "you mean x?", but "is the meaning of your words x?", focusing on a view of meaning as interpretations arrived at in context, rather than the intentions of the speaker. Further, in afono speech event the meanings of utterances are debated by the orators, who both cooperatively and competitively work toward a public interpretation of statements and events. In a jona opinions are often phrased by orators as if being delivered for a group, rather than just an individual, such as the chief, for whom the orator is speaking. Therefore, speakers often shift between the singular pronoun "I" or the plural exclusive "wc" (tor a similar phenomenon of "segmentary person" in highlands Ncw Guinea languages, see Rumsey (1989)). The speech acts, then, arc not of the individual, but the group and, hencc, the entire group can he seen as sharing responsihility for the impli­cations of thc uttcrance. This again reflects a sociocentric ideology in which the values of a person is understood in terms of his position in the group.

A similar story is presented in Rosaldo's (1982) account of speech acts among the more egalitarian 'Ilongot of the Philippincs. Rosaldo argues that the Ilongot do not regard speech acts as the achievement of individualist sclves coding their intentions in linguistic expressions, but most promin­ently as ways of invoking cooperative honds among people, and cooperation is fundamental to social interactions in this egalitarian society. It is the social cooperative honds and the interactive meanings created through these which are paramount to the Ilongot, not the intentions within an indivi­dual's mind, which, indeed, hold little interest for them (they say "we can never really know what is in a man's heart"). Rosaldo demonstrates her point hy an analysis of the directive speech acts or tuydek, which are scen by Ilongot as the exemplary acts of speech. Directives are used by adults to children or by a man to a woman. They arc significant to the Ilongot because they arc seen as a way to instruct others in their proper cooperative and complementary social roles and in this function are seen as paradig­matic for language generally. Rosaldo (1982:379) states this clearly:

TU}ldek, then, were seen as the exemplary act of speech. As significant in ordering domestic life as in the socialization of the young, directive utter­ances were, for my Hongot friends, the very stuff of language: knowing how to speak itself was virtually identical to knowing how and when to act.

Further, directives are not Seen as a threat to the overall egalitarian ethos of the culture. They value sameness, but do not disregard differences, assigning them merely to their proper social places. If men especially failed to use directives, then Ilongot society would fall apart for lack of vitality

282 The Ethnography of Speaking

and direction. Directives are commonly issued baldly without any redres­sive action, but Ilongot do not regard these as an affront to their equality and dignity, because, as Rosaldo points out, they are viewed as expressing reasonable social expectations, relationships nurtured in continuing social interactions, rather than impositions of the other's prerogatives of action. Again, Rosaldo's (1982) data suggest along with Matsumoto (1988) a revi­sion of the claims by Hrown and Levinson (1987) on the universal import­

ance of negative face.

J>ocal Constructions of Pcrsonhood and J.inguistic Rdativity

The Boasian traditioll with its Principle of Linguistic Relativity, as dis­cussed in Part IV, links crosscult ural differcnces in filrmal linguistic sys­tems to diflerences in habitual thought pattcrns, so the above crosscultural diflerences in the pragmatics of linguistic usage pose an obvious question: can these \00 be linked to a Principle of Linguistic Relativity? In other words, do crosscultural variatiolls in the pragmatic conventions for speaking Ianguages lead to different meaninf.{s and interpretations beinf.{ exchanged in the communities that speak the lanf.{uages and ultimately, in the perspective being proposed here, in different understandings of personhood being con­structed and inculcated linguistically in the habitus? Recent work (Gumperz 1982, 1993; Ochs 1990) indicates that this may very weil be the case. The crucial notion here is context and the various indexical linguistic elements (Silverstein 1976, 1979). As pointed out in chapter I, a given context not only regulates the meaningful interpretation of indexical elements, but equally important is the crucial fact that indexical elements themselves actually creatively shape the meaningful background of the context. Ochs (1990) notes, for example, that the affective dimension or background feeling tone of a context can he carefully crafted by the use of particular indexical ele­ments, and these in turn can forge particular types of social identities or understandings of personhood in the culture. Shc provides a japanese ex­ample; this language has a number of sentence final particles ze, zo or [J)a to signal the speaker's affective disposition. Ze and zo indicate a coarse and intense style of speaking, while ma indicates softness, and a delicate and hesitant presentation. She claims that these are the primary meanings of these indexical elements; however, it is necessary to know that ze and zo

are mainly associated with male speakers, and wa, with female speakers. The use of these sentence final particles both indicate and constitute local understandings of engendered persons in japanese culture: men are forceful while women are soft and hesitant. Thus, Ochs argues, the direct indexing

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction ofPersonhood 283

of affect via these particles indirectly indexes gender, and competence in their use constitutes a framework for an enaction of the local ideology of engendered personhood (see also chapter 15). There may be universal prin­ciples at work here in the linking of affect to gender (for example, the opposite linking, forcefulness to female and softness and hesitancy to male, is probably much rarer crossculturally), but the basic point is a wholly relativistic one: the meaning of particular forms, i.e. indexical elements, depends on who says them in what context (e.g. a japancse woman could use zo to signal aspecific meaning in some context, perhaps she is angry with her son). The interpretation of indexicals depends upon particular conventions of language use in a given culture. This, then, is a second Principle of Linguistic Relativity: if the pragmatic conventions of linguistie usage filr two languages difkr, this may entail differences in the interpreta­tion of indexical c1ements, and hence, the meanings of utterances (Silverstein 1976, 1979).

The work of Gumperz (1982, 1993) since 1980 or so has been an attempt to articulate this type of linguistic relativity. The basis of his idea is the concept of a "contextualization cue," a particular type of indexical, which in combination with other cues and structural features of the utterance leads to a particular interpretation of the utterance in the f.{iven context. Examples of partieular contextualization cues might be high-falling pitch, as in i, didn 'I do It, pauses, low volume, ete. Contextualization cues will differ according to the conventions for languaf.{e usage, leading to relativities in the interpre­tation of utterances. Even if speakers speak prima facie the same language, the rules for its usaf.{e may differ aceording to age, gender, ethnicity, class, etc., predisposing each to diffcring interpretations of utterances. Gumperz (1993) presents a case study of how differences in the usage and under­standing of contextualization cues between a native speaker of British Eng­lish and a lIuent English speaker ofIndian backf.{round combine with differing cultural expectations to cause a serious breakdown in understanding between the Înterlocutors. For example, the speaker of Indian English f()regrounds constituents by speaking with high pitch or loudness over the entire con­stituent, whi1c the British English speakers do so with only a syllab1c receiv­ing high-falling pitch. This causes confusion in the informat ion structure for the interlocutors: what is important to the speaker? Further, the British English speaker sees the social encounter as an interview to screen qualifica­tions or establish rights, in keeping with her individualist view of person­hood, while the Indian English speaker, true to a sociocentric conception of personhood, views the interaction more as a petition to someone who is in a posilion to grant his request.

These differences in interpretation can accumulate in a conversation, ultimately 1cading to a breakdown in communication, as eventuated in the interaction mentioned above. Gumperz (1993) claims that the knowledge of

284 The Ethnography of Speaking

contextualization cues is distributed unevenly across a culture reflecting the density of networks of social relationships. The speaker of Indian English in the above example, although a fluent English speaker, has not mastered the contextualization cues proper to British English because his ethnicity denies him full immersion in the middle-class white culture in which these cues are culturally transmitted. Gumperz emphasizes that economic and political forces are barriers to the easy transmission of the knowledge of context­ualization cues, as with other types of cultural knowiedge, and, further, that linguistic relativity of the type exemplified here is in fact an outgrowth of complex social stratification and its associated differences in language uses (see chapter 16).

In many ways Gumperz's position reiterates that of Gergen (1990): effect­ive meaning is created in the mutual coordination of action among social actors. Gumperz's work tries to uncover the linguistic barriers to this ef­fective coordination (tor a summary of such work, see Scollon and Scollon (1995)). Remember that Gergen (1990:585) too emphasizes speech as the primary way in which this coordination is achieved (see also Maturana and Varc1a's (1987) notion oflinguallaxis). As all societies, no matter how simple and egalitarian, contain people ofobvious differences, even if only in age and sex, the patterns of mutual coordination among social actors, which defme social rclationships, will also necessarily differ somewhat across the society: that the way a typical American male interacts with other males is different from the way he interacts with femalcs is clear for all to see. Hecause speech is the primary way that mutual coordination with others is achieved, we would therefore expect to find linguistic differences corrclated to social ones, along the lines of sex, status, ethnicity, age, etc. This is indeed the case, and such differences will occupy us tor most of the remaining chapters of this Part.

Summary

The understanding we have of ourselves and others as persons is largely constructed through the diverse linguistic practices we engage in. Through social couplings sustained by ongoing linguistic practices we enact and construct the terms in which the concept of person is conceived, the local ideology. These terms are not cverywhere the same; a basic dichotomy of local beliefs about personhood is between egocentric, which emphasizes the individual and her autonomous rights and perogatives of action, and sociocentric, which highlights the embeddedness of the individual in the wider social collective and ascribes value to her in terms of her position in this collective. This contrast in local ideologies of personhood is clearly enacted in the linguistic practices of different cultures. The concept of face

Politeness, Face, and the Linguistic Construction of Personhood 285

has been proposed as a useful concept to understand human social interac­tion, the goal of whi.ch is to enhance or at least minimize loss to the sense of face. Face has been divided into two types: positive, one's self-esteem, and negative, freedom from imposition or constraint. Diverse linguistic practices, combined under the rubric of politeness, are employed to min­imize threats to both types, but it has been claimed that this analysis is at least partly ethnocentric; in sociocentric societies like Japan, the concept of negative face, individual autonomy of action, is marginal. Other proposed crosscultural principles of linguistic interaction, like the Cooperative Prin­ciple, the idea that people will say appropriate things at each point in an interaction, and its associated four Maxims of Conversation, are subject to significant variation. While c1early important in constructing meaningful conversations in American or Australian English, their importance and func­tion is much less obvious in others, for example Malagasy society, which contrarily emphasize indirectness and vagueness. Similarly in individualist societies, the meaning of an utterance is usually taken to be what the speaker intends, but in sociocentric ones, meaning is constructed by participants and often reflects the contributions of varying participants depending on their social position. All these different conventions for linguistic practices across cultures suggest that actually different meanings are exchanged in these communities, another type of linguistic relativity, and that access to these meanings will be differentially distributed according to social positions.

Further Reading

PCrSI)fi and self arc currcntly hot topics in anthropo1ogy and the Iiterature is volu­minous, but sec Carrithers, Collins and Lukcs (1985), Cohen (1994), Gccrtz (1973, 1983), Gcrgcn and Davis (1985), Myers (1986), Poole (1994), Rosaldo (l980a), Rosenberger (1992), Shwcder (1991), and Tay10r (1989). Brown and Levinson (1987) prcsent thcir thcory of fàcc work and po1itcncss, based on carlier work by Goflinan (1956, 1967, 1971) and Gricc (1975, 1989). Matsumoto (1988) is a Japanese-inspired criticism of Brown and Levinson's proposals. Gumperz's path­breaking approach is summarized in Gumperz (1982).