Exchanging words is based on linguistic anthropologist Christopher Ball's fieldwork with the Wauja people, an indigenous group living in the upper Xingu National Park in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The book theorizes Wauja social relations across various sites and scales, giving particular attention to the dialectic production of identity within the tribe, as well as between tribe members, other local indigenous groups, and nonindigenous actors in contexts outside the park.
Part 1 focuses on the forms of ritualized language through which the Wauja people make and remake their relations with tribe members, visitors, and spirits. Ball shows how kinship is established through the grammatical construction of ‘Chief's speech’, which is spoken by community leaders when welcoming visitors. He also shows how linguistic practices, such as ‘scolding’, reported speech, and forms of address help to constitute the group as a collective by indexically signaling interlocutors’ social roles. This social signaling is achieved through pronoun usage, spatial and temporal deixis, as well as nonlinguistic practices such as smoking, dancing, and performing music. In curing ceremonies, for example, individuals heal the person who is ill by ‘bringing spirits’, a ritual whose performative effect is materialized relative to a semiotic ideology that construes individuals’ speech as voicing spirits.
In Part 2, Ball discusses how the Wauja people relate to other surrounding tribes, focusing on the role of intergroup rivalry in constructing Wauja identity. According to Ball, Wauja identity is produced largely through the negation and othering of proximate indigenous groups. In a particularly compelling chapter, he tells of a tapir attack, in which a Wauja person was brutally wounded. Ball argues that in the ensuing debate over whether the tapir was an animal or a spirit-monster, the person and tapir's identities were encoded in Wauja grammar as ‘inalienable possessions’, or objects that retain their identity across events of exchange. The grammatical forms, which indexed the tapir's identity as a nonhuman, spirit-monster sent by a local tribe, were regarded as emblems of Wauja identity.
Finally, in Part 3, Ball takes us ‘out of the park’—that is, outside the Xingu region's geographic boundary—to examine how Wauja relationality is constituted through engagement with NGOs, land developers, and other international groups. He shows that in discussions of indigenous land rights, the language of developers has mediated development projects in the Xingu National Park and, in its poetic structuring, diminished the effectiveness of indigenous land claims. Ball suggests that Wauja perspectives have been further suppressed by NGO discourse, which frames the Wauja people's assertion of additional demands as uncooperative. In the final chapter, Ball travels to a conference in France where Wauja members perform their sacred rituals on the stage for international audiences. These performances have led to debates about the ritual's effectiveness, which, Ball shows, reflect intergenerational differences in belief about the appropriateness of decontextualizing Wauja rituals and whether or not those rituals remain effective in their new contexts.
Exchanging words is an insightful contribution to scholarship on language, indigeneity, and development politics.
