Serious Play: Verbal Art and Performance

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SERIOUS PLAY: VERBAL ART AND PERFORMANCE

David J. Minderhout

Ebron, Paulla A. Performing Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.2002. xviiiþ 244 pp.

Sherzer, Joel. Speech Play and Verbal Art. Austin: University of Texas Press.2002. ixþ 186 pp.

Stern, Josef. Metaphor in Context. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2000. xviiþ 385 pp.

Language speaker-listeners do not merely mouth sounds or put togethersyntax; they perform to affect an audience. Anthropologists since Boas’stime have written extensively about how speaker-listeners use languageto amuse, amaze, persuade, and seduce. Joel Sherzer catalogs puns,jokes, word games, and poetry using examples from several languages.Josef Stern argues that the ability to understand metaphor is a rule-ordered part of language competence, rather than extra-linguistic idio-syncratic. Paulla A. Ebron looks at the ways Africans present themselvesas verbal performers in various settings, focusing on Gambian jailmusicians.

Keywords: Ethnography of communication, metaphor, performance, wordplay

There is a tendency in the study of human language to view languageas if it adhered strictly to the confines of the standard model of

DAVID J. MINDERHOUT is Professor of Anthropology at Bloomsburg University. He has pub-

lished on creole languages in the Caribbean, ethnopharmacology, and teaching anthropology. His

most recent publication is a review of More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa by Susan

Greenbaum in American Anthropologist. In April 2006 he presented ‘‘Invisible Indians: Native

Americans in Pennsylvania,’’ at the Society for Applied Anthropology meeting in Vancouver, BC,

Canada. He is currently working on obtaining legal recognition for Native Americans in Pennsylvania.

Address correspondence to David Minderhout, Department of Anthropology, Bloomsburg

University, 400 E. 2nd Street, Bloomsburg, PA 17815, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Reviews in Anthropology, 35: 253–266, 2006

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online

DOI: 10.1080/00938150600867899

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communication, that is, as if language were nothing more than atransmitter, a code, a channel, and a receiver. In one sense, this obvi-ous oversimplification is reasonable. Language is such a complexphenomenon that any one aspect of it can absorb an academic career.Understanding the variation in vowels in American English, or syn-tax in the Slavic languages, or intonation in West African languagescan be a daunting task. Indeed, language experts often marvel in printat how quickly children pick up the subtleties of morphology andsyntax, which professionals can take a lifetime to describe and com-prehend. As a result, linguistics courses are seldom about language aswe know it in everyday life; they tend to start with the InternationalPhonetic Alphabet and work out from there. After all, NoamChomsky (1965:3) wrote that the goal of the linguist is to describethe competence of an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homo-geneous speech community.

Chomsky, of course, sought a formalistic view of language inwhich the rules of grammar functioned like mathematical equa-tions. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and people gener-ally understand that while simple communication is a goal (‘‘Bobgave the paycheck to Mary.’’), it is not the only goal, or eventhe primary goal of language, for example, ‘‘‘My take-home paywon’t even take me home,’ Bob said wryly.’’ In his classic 1959work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffmanwrote the following:

The expressiveness of the individual (and therefore his capacity togive impressions) appears to involve two radically different kinds of

sign activity: the expression that he gives and the expression that he

gives off. The first involves verbal symbols or their substitutes which

he uses admittedly and solely to convey the information that he and

the others are known to attach to these symbols.. . .The second

involves a wide range of action that others can treat as symptomatic

of the actor, the expectation being that the action was performed

for reasons other than the information conveyed in this way. [1959:2]

As Goffman notes, we know in real life that speakers are not justforming consonants and vowels: they are performing. In anthro-pology, Dell Hymes (1972b) is generally credited with creating away of looking at performance in communications: the ethnographyof communication. Hymes tried to give some of the same kind ofrule-driven rigor Chomsky was advocating for linguistics to the studyof performance by specifying a series of categories that were coded by

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the mnemonic device SPEAKING (setting-participants-ends-actsequence-key-instrumentalities-norms-genres).

Before Hymes, significant figures in anthropology wrote aboutlinguistic performance as art (see Boas 1911; Sapir 1915a, 1915b);after 1972, a variety of books in anthropology were dedicated tothe topic (Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Hymes 1972a; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976; Bauman 1977; see Lakoff 1990) and the ethnographyof communication became a standard, though usually back chapter,inclusion in anthropologists’ efforts to describe language (Macauley1994; Part V in Foley 1997; see chapter 10 in Bonvillain 2003). Thejournalist Peter Farb in his 1974 book, Word Play: What HappensWhen People Talk, summed up the increasing focus on performancethis way:

Beginning about 1960, and at an accelerating pace since then, a scien-

tific approach has replaced common sense in interpreting the way

human beings use their various tongues. Some linguists, intrigued

by the social and psychological environments in which peoplemanipulate language, have begun to look upon speech behavior as

an interaction, a game in which both speakers and listeners unconsci-

ously know the rules of their speech communities and the strategies

they employ . . . Recent as this perspective is, it has already gone far

toward revealing the remarkable ability of human beings to play upon

one another with their speech. [1974:3–4]

The three works reviewed in this essay all demonstrate the com-plexity of speech performance, though in strikingly different ways.In Speech Play and Verbal Art Joel Sherzer (2002) looks at jokes,puns, figures of speech, and poetry as ways people affect an audience,whether it is causing that audience to laugh or shed a tear. Sherzerdraws on hundreds of examples from a variety of languages to showhow widespread these performance arts are. In Metaphor in Context,the philosopher Josef Stern (2000) looks at language performancein a very different way, arguing that the ability to use and, moreimportantly, understand metaphor is built into human linguisticcompetence. This book, written primarily for an audience of philoso-phers, emphasizes points that anthropologists and linguists havetaken for granted for some time. The third book, Performing Africaby Paulla Ebron (2002), illustrates in ethnographic particulars thepoints raised more generally by Sherzer and Stern. This wide-rangingbook raises many questions, for example, how Africans ‘‘play thegame’’ set by the international community to tap into economic

Serious Play: Verbal Art and Performance 255

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development funds; how Gambian traditional performers, known asjali, are changing their music to reach a wider audience; how Africansplay to African-Americans coming to Africa as tourists, and so on.Ebron is less interested in language performance as a human traitthan in how Africans present themselves to the world through per-formance. All three books demonstrate the creativity and skill neces-sary for successful lay, metaphorical usage, and the art of persuasion.All three illustrate how humans rapidly and easily see the implica-tions that lie beneath a simile in a poem, a performance by a musicalartist, or a double entendre.

SCHERZER’S SPEECH PLAY AND VERBAL ART

The first of these books, Speech Play and Verbal Art, by Joel Sherzer(2002), is dedicated to a thorough cataloguing of speech play as it isfound in a variety of the world’s languages. By speech play, Sherzermeans combining or manipulating one or all of the constituent com-ponents of linguistic competence—phonology, morphology, syntax,and semantics—to produce a humorous effect on an audience. Whilethe form may be fun, speech play often involves serious intent; it maybe used to sort out status differences (e.g., Zinacanteco joking strate-gies), practicing rhetorical skills for political roles later in life (e.g.,Chamula verbal dueling), or earning an income (e.g., calypso perfor-mances in Trinidad). The book sorts out word play by categories—jokes, proverbs, puns, riddles, figures of speech, poetry, and soon—and shows through multiple examples how these various formsare found in different languages, including English, French, Spanish,Italian, Balinese, and Kuna. The examples given in this book bythemselves make it worth owning. There are dozens of gems thatcan enliven a conversation or a class period. In the final chapters,Sherzer explains the different social contexts in which speech playis found, with special attention given to France, Latin America,and Bali.

In his opening chapter, Sherzer argues that speech play needs to betaken more seriously by anthropologists. Labeling anything in thesocial sciences as play more or less relegates it to the disciplinaryfringes. Serious social scientists do not ordinarily study (or engagein) playful behavior. I am guilty of this myself in the sense that I leavethe topic of speech play to the end of my Language & Culture course,despite having done linguistic research in the Caribbean, wherespeech play can be found in many forms and where it often servesserious purposes. Sherzer nonetheless makes the argument thatspeech play can be the perfect illustration for any aspect of linguistic


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analysis. Speech play not only depends on the manipulation ofsounds or syntax, but it also can serve as metacommunication onthe nature or grammaticality of language itself. Consider WinstonChurchill’s famous response to criticism for ending a sentence witha preposition: ‘‘That is something up with which I will not put.’’Sherzer develops this argument by noting how speech play followsthe rules of grammar while it highlights structural features found inall languages, such as reduplication.

This is a point that could have been developed further—and, infact, it was in 1972 in an introduction written by Sherzer and BarbaraKirshenblatt-Gimblett for Kirshenblatt-Glimblett’s edited workSpeech Play: Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Crea-tivity. I have found that there is hardly an area of language study thatcannot be illustrated through speech play. Hockett’s famous designfeatures of language, duality of patterning, productivity, displace-ment and traditional transmission (1960), can all be neatly demon-strated by speech play examples. That children play with words asthey acquire their language is a well documented aspect of languagelearning studies (see Moskowitz 1994:93; Bonvillain 2003:252).Sherzer devotes a whole section of his book to code-switching andthe many ways speech play can be integrated into multilingual settings;in fact, it is often a key feature of hybrid forms such as Spanglish.Regional, class, ethnic, gender, occupational, and age differences inword play can all be found and are often mined for humorous effect.

Speech play and language performance were topics for anthropo-logical interest long before Sherzer’s text. Most of the great figuresof American anthropology wrote about speech play or verbal art,especially in the form of ceremonial languages. Boas (1911:59)describes how a Chinook myth depends on a play of Chinook wordsfor dancing and catches with a net. Sapir (1915a, 1915b) wrote aboutspecial ritual languages in Nootka and Salish. Kroeber (in Hymes1964:696) wrote about the importance of speech play in Mohavetales. Radin (1956) wrote about the trickster’s clever play on wordsin Winnebago myth. Mead notes how she was criticized by the peopleof Manus for not recording all of the repetitious phraseology of cer-emonial myth telling in their folklore traditions (in Fortune 1935);Sherzer says in his section on repetition and parallelism that verbalart routinely repeats important phrases for a variety of purposes.In the venerable volume, Language in Culture and Society (Hymes1964), 21 of the 69 articles included deal with verbal art or speechplay in some form. It is surprising, therefore, that speech play doesnot find a more central role in anthropological analyses of language.After all, anthropologists themselves enjoy engaging in speech play;


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some of the most popular columns in the American AnthropologicalAssociation’s newsletter have dealt with anthropological limericks(Buckser and Buckser 2002, 2003). Sherzer’s book will help in thisregard by showing the variety, breadth and universality of speechplay and verbal arts.

STERN’S METAPHOR IN CONTEXT

A point that Sherzer makes in his book is that a fine line existsbetween speech play and verbal art. The metaphors employed in po-etry and other literate discourse are often exquisite examples ofspeech play. Sherzer points to several puns found in Shakespeare’splays, notably Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet, as exam-ples of a great writer having fun with words. The second book dis-cussed in this review, Metaphor in Context by the philosopher JosefStern (2000), begins with a metaphorical example from Romeo andJuliet, Romeo’s statement that ‘‘Juliet is the sun.’’ This example isrepeated throughout the book as Stern argues his main point, whichis that the interpretation of metaphor falls within the realm of seman-tics rather than within pragmatics, as previous scholars havesuggested. The philosopher’s distinction between pragmatics andsemantics is not one with which many anthropologists are familiar.Semantics refers to a rule-ordered world of meaning contained withina speaker-hearer’s linguistic competence. By pragmatics, philoso-phers mean the actual use of language in real life. That is, the distinc-tion between semantics and pragmatics is roughly Noam Chomsky’s(1965) distinction between competence and performance. Philoso-phers commonly approach semantics as an effort to create formalmathematical models for generating meaning. By contrast, pragma-tics is a messier business, defined as it is by social context and aspeaker’s intent.

In placing metaphor within the realm of pragmatics, many philo-sophers have argued either that metaphor is so idiosyncratic and cre-ative that it lies outside rule-ordered linguistic competence or that it isan extra-linguistic phenomenon. Metaphor is seen as extra-linguisticeither in the sense that it is shaped by a speaker-hearer’s beliefs andvalues (echoing Chomsky’s belief that linguistic rules and generalknowledge=culture are unconnected cognitively) or it is part of ourpsychological make-up—the ability to recognize similarity or differ-ence, for example—which is seen as innate and part of a universalmental structure by most philosophers.

Stern actually agrees that the interpretation of metaphor requiresextra-linguistic information. In his chapter 8, he draws a distinction


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between metaphorical and literal meaning on the grounds thatmetaphor is context-dependent and literal meaning is supposedlycontext-independent. However, Stern believes that other philosophersof languages have focused overly much on the creativity involvedin metaphor. The more important point, he argues, is that speaker-listeners easily interpret most metaphors, no matter how creative theymight be. This suggests to him that there exists within a speaker-listener’s competence a rule-ordered ability to interpret metaphor.More succinctly, Stern believes that semantic rules constrain theinterpretations possible to assign to a metaphor. If constraints exist,then that implies that semantic rules take precedence over extra-linguistic context.

Sherzer’s and Stern’s books reflect a significant disciplinary differ-ence in point of view. As I read these books, I could not help butreflect on the 13 years I was housed in the philosophy departmentat my university—a matter of administrative convenience at the time.I found the philosophy faculty to be congenial colleagues, more tol-erant of my rude empiricism than I was of their insistence on the logi-cal precision of language. We talked past each other, though we hadmany areas of study in common, because of a fundamental differencein point of view. I insisted that behavior had meaning only within asocial context, while they were convinced that behavior could beexamined independent of context. Cross-cultural differences in beliefsand values were a novel concept to them, and one I think they did notreally accept. I was also reminded of the two-semester sequence insemantics I took in graduate school from a philosophy professor.This scholar was determined to make human language logicallycoherent, and he was frustrated in the extreme by the variation anddisorder in actual speech.

Also, as I was preparing this review, I became acquainted with thework of the 17th century English natural philosopher, John Wilkins,Bishop of Chester, who attempted to create a universal philosophicallanguage (see Shapiro 1969). He did this by grouping all of the Eng-lish words that referred to a general concept, such as crimes or seafar-ing, into a category that was then assigned a numerical symbol. Thephilosophical language was designed to promote universal and logi-cally coherent communication. Instead of using particular words,the philosopher could write a string of numbers. A reader familiarwith the notational system would then presumably know what wasbeing referred to easily and without connotation and ambiguity.Needless to say, the idea did not win many adherents.

The point here is that anthropologists and philosophers see theworld of behavior in fundamentally different ways. The Swiss linguist


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Ferdinand de Saussure said that ‘‘It would seem that it is theviewpoint that creates the object; besides, nothing tells us in advancethat one way of considering the fact in question takes precedence overthe others or is in any way superior to them’’ (1959:8). His wordsresounded in my mind as I read these two books. Take, for example,Stern’s idea that the literal meaning of a word is not context depen-dent; it is unambiguous and constantly clear in its reference.

Anthropologists, who are familiar with cross-cultural differences,the astounding degree of variation that exists even within the sameculture, and the arbitrariness of symbols, would find it hard to acceptthat any symbol is truly free of context. An anthropologist wouldprobably say that if a difference exists between literal and metaphor-ical meaning then it at best falls along a continuum of less to more.But Stern insists that such a continuum is logically meaningless sinceas he writes, ‘‘it is never made clear by proponents of this view whatthe continuum measures or that what it measures can be quantified asthe picture assumes’’ (2000:316).

Similarly, most anthropologists would have a hard time seeingmetaphor or perhaps any verbal performance within the realm of amathematically ordered semantic competence. Certainly metaphorand verbal performance are rule ordered, but to an anthropologist,it is easier to see them constrained within a speaker-hearer’s com-municative competence—similar to what philosophers call prag-matics. Gregory Bateson argued in 1972 that messages of any sortare contained within frames, a metacommunicative device that cueslisteners in, so that they can understand the context of the messageswithin that frame. Such frames are culturally defined and are typi-cally associated with either stock verbal phrases (‘‘Did you hear theone about. . .?’’ ‘‘Now let us pray. . .’’) or kinesic clues (a wink, asmile, the positioning of the head, etc.), or both (see also Goffman1974; Bauman 1977). Most of the time an anthropologist would becontent with knowing a comprehensive set of such frames as theyare understood within a particular culture; cross-cultural comparisoncould then reveal which frames are commonly used throughouthumanity.

EBRON’S PERFORMING AFRICA

Shakespeare also wrote ‘‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men andwomen merely players’’ (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII). This isa suitable introduction to the third book considered in this review,Performing Africa, by Stanford University anthropologist Paulla A.


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Ebron (2002). This is a multilayered book built around the concept ofperformance. In Verbal Art as Performance, Richard Bauman wrote:

Fundamentally, performance as a mode of spoken verbal communi-

cation consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience

for a display of communicative competence. . .Performance involves

on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an

audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above

and beyond its referential context. [1977:11]

Ebron sees performance in another way, that is, as a device to shapethe audience’s perception of the performer. The two views of per-formance are not mutually exclusive, of course. The performer, bymeeting (or shaping) the audience’s expectations, is also creating apositive image of the profession of the performer and of the culturalcontext from which the profession is drawn. Ebron’s point is that theperformer can manipulate words or context to create a mindset forthe audience, as well as conform to one.

Ebron shows performance operating on many levels in The Gambia,the West African country in which she conducted her research. At itscore, the book is about the jali, a traditional Mandinka performerwhose responsibility it was to retain the history of his region and hispeople and to perform parts of that history, accompanied by music.Talented jali operated under the patronage of traditional nobility,but because of their knowledge of history or genealogy, the jali was afigure of authority himself. Nobility sought out important jali for theiradvice. In this sense, the jali was a combination of a performer, an oralhistorian, and a commentator on the contemporary scene.

When The Gambia gained its independence from British colonial-ism in 1965, there were doubts that the new country would survive.Tiny, surrounded by French-speaking Senegal, and without a coher-ent cultural history, The Gambia was an anomaly of colonialism.British merchants and slavers had penetrated up the Gambia Riverin the 17th century in search of trade. When French merchantsassumed control of Senegal, conflict occurred between the colonialpowers over trade rights. The Peace of Versailles in 1783 gave theBritish possession of The Gambia, and British claims to the area werereaffirmed by the Conference of Berlin in 1884–1885. Nevertheless,this sliver of a country seemed an unlikely survivor in the era ofAfrican independence.

The leaders of a newly independent Gambia knew they needed tocreate a sense of national identity if they were to survive. To achieve


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this, they created OHAD, the Oral History and Antiquities Division,as well as a National Archive. OHAD collected written and oral his-torical documents to create a sense of history and common culturefor the people within the new nation’s borders. Key to this effortwas enlisting the aid of the jali. The jali brought together their tra-ditional histories and performance styles; they also went out intothe countryside to perform and to make people aware of their distinc-tive heritage. Many other new countries in the 1960s attempted simi-lar schemes to create a national identity. The Caribbean island onwhich I worked in the 1970s, Tobago, attempted this through a BestVillage Competition in which communities were judged on how wellthey could perform traditional dramas and music. What many ofthese countries lacked, however, were figures of such traditional pres-tige as the Gambian jali. Through performance, the jali shaped asense of being Gambian.

The performance motif pervades the rest of the book as well.Ebron notes that in order to get world attention and economic devel-opment support, Africans have to present an image of themselves andtheir continent that is consistent with what the industrialized nationsthink Africa is. Africans may resent being looked at as inhabitants ofan HIV-ravaged, impoverished continent, but to put it bluntly, that iswhere the money is. Westerners are sometimes surprised to find thatthere are Africans who are well-fed, happy, and content with theirlives. Africans would like to perform that image more often, but itis probably not in their best economic interests. Also, the WorldBank, the IMF, and other dispensers of aid are reassured to see Afri-can leaders who wear Western suits and speak European languageswell, so African leaders give them that. In this situation, the perfor-mers—the African dignitaries—do not get to define the audience’sperceptions. They are closer to Bauman’s idea of performance.

Ebron sees the modern jali as the perfect representative and per-former of Africa. Jali have become accepted into the world musicscene, some of them prominently so. In this arena, they get to per-form before non-African audiences in affluent nations. Wearing tra-ditional dress and using traditional instruments, the jali can shape theaudience’s perceptions of Africa so that people see more than civilwar and starvation coming out of the continent. The jali are alsoadapting their performances to accommodate international tastes.Some women have become jali, something unimaginable in tra-ditional society. In general, the jali make Africa look accessible andless bleak for non-Africans.

In chapters six and seven, Ebron turns to another aspect ofperformance and perception. chapter six, ‘‘Travel Stories,’’ looks at


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European women as tourists in The Gambia. In chapter seven,‘‘Tourists as Pilgrims,’’ Ebron accompanies a group of 89 African-Americans as they tour The Gambia as part of a McDonald’s-sponsored ‘‘homeland’’ tour. In both chapters, the prior judgmentof Africa made by the tourists—Africa as a sexual holiday for theEuropean women=Africa as a fabled homeland for the African-Americans—are matched by the performances presented by Africans.The response to European women tourists is complex: the moralistswho lead The Gambia’s government see it as a crisis to be averted;older men seem to see it as exploitation by affluent Northern women;and young men see it as an opportunity. Perhaps an engaging youngman can find a patron=lover who will take him to a better life else-where. Ebron examines these interactions within the context offeminist theory and previous studies of north-south, male-femaleencounters.

The trip for the African-Americans brought two global forces to-gether. On the one hand, there was McDonald’s using the trip andthe promotions associated with it to increase marketing opportunitiesamong African-Americans. On the other hand, there were the Afri-cans who saw an opportunity to bring more tourists—and touristdollars—to Africa. The strategy employed by the Africans was tomarket the trip as a homecoming—or a pilgrimage, as the travelerswere constantly told. Tour sites—a slave holding station, an orphan-age, et cetera—were selected to reinforce this sense of belonging andresponsibility to Africa. ‘‘My brother, my sister’’ was the constantrefrain from tour guides, street vendors, and hoteliers. The touristsfound themselves alternating between uplift and annoyance:‘‘moments of high emotion were tempered by opportunities to shopfor souvenirs’’ (Ebron 2002:206). Here were two forces intensely per-forming to help shape the perceptions of their audience, but in theend, it was just another tourist experience for the African-Americanparticipants.

This may seem like a great deal of material to be presented withinone 244 page book, but the material is tied together through the cen-tral metaphor of performance. Ebron is very careful to let her readersknow where she wishes to take them. Large segments of the introduc-tion explain the structure and message of the following chapters, andthroughout the book the author points out where she intends to gonext. In each chapter, the information is explained within the contextof modern social and economic theory, and the bibliography is exten-sive. Relatively little attention is paid to older works. Bateson’s(1972) work on frames would have worked as well for the materialin this book as it would have for Stern’s (2000) discussion of


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metaphors, in my opinion. The book is, however, an excellentexample of modern anthropological writing, and it reinforcesthroughout Sherzer’s (2002) point that the verbal arts need to betaken more seriously by anthropologists.

CONCLUSION

As can be seen, the three books reviewed in this essay present threedifferent aspects of speech play, the use of metaphor, and culturalperformance. Sherzer’s work demonstrates the many different formsthat speech play and verbal art can take. Stern’s book raises questionsfor both philosophers and anthropologists about the perception ofmetaphor and its place in linguistic theory making. In PerformingAfrica, Ebron integrates modern social theory and the many waysin which Africans present themselves to the world through perform-ance. All show the enormous complexity and multilayered nature ofhuman language. As Stephen Anderson writes in Doctor Dolittle’sDelusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language,

Surely our language is an enormously meaningful development in the

history of our species. Because we can talk about what we have done,

or might do, or what others have done, we can learn from experience,plan, and accumulate the intellectual and technological capital we

have. Without language, whatever other intellectual advantages we

might have would not be communicable to others, and the under-

standing and achievement of each individual human being would die

with that person. We do not run the world because of our ability to

dominate other species physically. It is the possession of language that

has given humankind a huge advantage in evolutionary competition

for dominion over the earth. [2004:318–319]

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Documents

Serious Play: Verbal Art and Performance