By the 1970s, ideas from British and American philosophers of language working within the analytic tradition—especially Austin (Reference Austin1962), Searle (Reference Searle1969), and Grice (Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975)—were appearing in work across the disciplines of sociolinguistics and the anthropology of language. Linguistic anthropologists, however, worried that what Duranti calls ‘the Standard Theory’ in the analytic philosophy of language, in spite of its claims to characterize universal properties of linguistic meaning, often seemed to be primarily an account of specifically Oxonian (with a branch office in Berkeley) ideologies about communication, elucidated with entirely invented examples that glossed over the many complications and subtleties that must have been present even in the academic seminars from which the work emerged. Linguistic anthropologists initiated a critique focused especially on ‘a largely shared view of intentions among many formal linguists, analytic philosophers, and cognitive scientists’ (p. 11): the emphasis on intention, meaning, and action as products of propositional and attitudinal states internal to autonomous selves. This critical work included examples of forms of meaning grounded in inextricably public and social tensions and responsibilities among actors (e.g. Rosaldo Reference Rosaldo1982). Other types of examples from the field showed a preference in societies under study for inattention to inner states and the absence of speech act types, such as promising, that seemed to require such attention (e.g. Ochs Reference Ochs1982; Duranti Reference Duranti1983, Reference Duranti, Hill and Irvine1993).
Duranti's book takes up these questions anew. While continuing to support the ‘anti-personalist’ or ‘anti-intentionalist’ critique, he finds that the work from the 1980s, his own and that of others, failed to move beyond pointing out problems with the treatment of intention in the analytic philosophy of language toward a conceptualization that would be useful for anthropology. The book aims to move forward with this project, to reach a definition of ‘intentions’ that can appropriately constrain and direct ethnographic and linguistic investigation and theoretical reflection. One of the most useful dimensions of the book is Duranti's exceptionally clear review of major philosophical traditions in the study of intention, including the analytic philosophers (to whom he gives patient and serious attention), and the European continental tradition. Duranti finds his inspiration in the latter, especially in Edmund Husserl's conception of intention as ‘directedness’, as ‘the aboutness of our interpretive acts, that is, the property that they all share of being about something, whether visible or invisible, hearable or silent, external or internal, physical or psychological’ (p. 26). Duranti's discussions throughout the volume depend on this very general definition, and especially on the idea that such ‘aboutness’ is constitutive (or, in Husserl's terms, a ‘modification’ of the ‘intentional object’). One of his criticisms of the analytic philosophers of language is what he sees as their tendency, while recognizing this phenomenological definition (as in Searle's ‘Intention’ with capital ‘I’), to constantly slip back into a ‘folk-psychological’ approach where ‘intention’ is largely restricted to relatively conscious directedness such as planning, properly constituting, or imposing some ‘force’ of a speech act. Duranti's decision that the ‘broad’ definition is the most useful one for anthropology yields some problems; The anthropology of intentions sometimes reads like a ‘grand theory of everything’, or at least everything about the human capacity for meaning-making. While this ambition makes the book difficult to review, it is consistent with Duranti's larger body of work, where he has always insisted on a deeply multi-dimensional, densely contextualized, and highly socialized understanding of meaning and action. This breadth of perspective is evident in the volume in his choice of examples, such as the emergence of ‘flow’ in a successful jazz performance, and in the acquisition of a sort of preconscious sociality among players in jazz ensembles, along with more conventional analyses of verbal interaction in the Samoan fono and a congressional campaign in California.
Along with a wide range of examples from documented interactions, Duranti makes an interesting etymological argument for his ‘broad’ conceptualization of ‘intention’, showing that verbs that have to do with this idea in different languages—in familiar ones like Latin, as well as in less familiar ones like Samoan—often pick out a much broader range of dimensions, including those of embodiment and intrinsically social orientation, than does English ‘intend’. One very interesting chapter analyzes the reshaping of the Samoan vocabulary of speech acts under the influence of Christian missionaries in the ninteenth century, for which Duranti draws on several generations of dictionaries and texts. He argues that in spite of well-established biblical usages, especially in the New Testament, the Samoan verb that is closest to English ‘promise’, folafola, still has not fully converged with the English range of meanings. Duranti suggests that diverse codes and genres provide diverse ‘affordances’ for coming up with particular accounts. A revealing example appears in a chapter consisting of an exchange of long e-mail messages several years ago between Duranti and Teun van Dijk (with an intervention by Duranti's colleague Jason Throop). I found it fascinating to read van Dijk as he struggled with the affordances of English in an effort to understand Duranti's position on ‘cognition’. Insisting on the necessity of recognizing individuals as the foundational source of meaning, van Dijk writes: ‘basically [interlocutors] want to know what THIS speaker is NOW trying to say—as many conventional expressions show: ‘What do you mean?’ ‘What are you saying?’, etc. In sum, much (though not all) of discourse understanding involves making hypotheses about the meaning (= intention) assigned to the utterance by the speaker’ (p. 155). Duranti's program, of course, would require precisely the unpacking of the dense interactional field that must be constituted before van Dijk's imaginary speaker of English could possibly utter these ‘conventional expressions’. Reflecting on what ‘mean’ means, I would argue that such utterances are nearly always shot through with power, even in the seminar context where they may be frequently heard, and often constitute an aggressive challenge. Another example appeared in my morning paper. Martin Shkreli, a former pharmaceutical executive, after appearing before a congressional committee investigating drug prices (where he ‘took the Fifth’ and refused to answer questions on the grounds that he might incriminate himself), tweeted that the investigators were ‘imbeciles’—an insult that might bring a citation for ‘contempt of Congress’. His attorney hastened to issue a statement in which he said that Mr. Shkreli ‘meant no disrespect’. This is an entirely ritual use of ‘mean’, untraceable to any intentional source. Thus, even in English, considerable work of a fundamentally social type is required to restrict ‘mean’ to the narrow semantic zone, focused on an individual emitter, as suggested by van Dijk.
The anthropology of intentions is organized into eleven chapters (some of these are revisions of previously published essays). A few major themes run through all—or most—of them. Already mentioned is the question of how ‘intention’ should be defined. A second is the problem of attention to other minds, which has been shown to be variable among human societies. Duranti aims here to move away from homogeneous characterizations of whole cultures as inattentive or attentive to mens rea toward richer and more deeply contextualized accounts of exactly when, by whom, and how such attention is given or withheld. A related theme is the public and social dimension of meaning, and the inability of ‘principals’, to use Goffman's (Reference Goffman1981) term for the actor upon whom action is morally grounded, to control it. This theme shifts the problem of attention or inattention to inner states away from the domain of folk psychology to suggest an anthropology of ways in which ‘the world of others’ bears on understandings of meanings in different societies. Duranti insists that such an anthropology does not abandon ‘subjectivity’, but ‘simply recognizes that any individual act exists over against an intersubjective horizon’ (p. 238), already present and constitutive long before a child begins to speak. Duranti's synthetic solution to these issues is to propose that the solution for anthropology is an ‘intentional continuum’: ‘a range of graded ways of being disposed or mentally (and sensorially) connected with some entity in the world’ (p. 239), rather than a set of dichotomies, such as the broad vs. narrow definition of ‘I/intention’ or Searle's ‘I-intentions’ and ‘we-intentions’, or perception and interpretation.
The anthropology of intentions is a very welcome and important work. For those unfamiliar with the debate over personalism and intentionalism, the book can function as a useful primer, especially (at least for this philosophically illiterate anthropologist) for its lucid accounts of the positions of various philosophical traditions on these questions. But it is also a remarkably rich source of ideas, not only on the largest scale, such as the proposal of the ‘intentional continuum’, but in the innumerable stimulating mini-proposals, nuggets of insights, and questions that should stimulate new work. While Duranti himself is agnostic about the possibility for genuinely interdisciplinary work on intentions (he deplores the existence of disciplinary silos within which only certain kinds of work can be read and cited), his work goes a good distance toward clarifying the differences, and thereby opening new opportunities for collaboration, between more interpretively oriented anthropologists and their more cognitively grounded colleagues in linguistics and the cognitive sciences.
