INTRODUCTION
In one of my first conversations in the Yopno Valley of Papua New Guinea, a young man recounted a conversation he had had with the head of an American-based conservation NGO. He told me that he had expressed to her his desire to see the United States and he seemed confident that, as a result of this expression of interest, she would find a way for him to travel to the American zoo where the NGO was based.
Having myself been the recipient—or rather, the recipient-manqué—of a number of well disguised requests along these lines during my time in Papua New Guinea, I offered the young man a bit of advice: he should speak more directly to the NGO workers, asking explicitly how he could get involved in the conservation work and possibly even travel to the United States someday. In response, he simply pointed out that the NGO director is human and is capable of understanding (Tok Pisin: em man ya, em i gat save ‘she's a person, she can understand’).
With his pithy rejoinder, he summed up a perspective on agency, communication, and its efficacy that I explore in more detail here. In short, in this view recipients of messages are agentive actors in communicative encounters, construing the meaning and force of speech and playing an important role in determining the outcome of speech events. From this perspective, it was not this young man's responsibility to ‘speak up’, as I suggested that he do; it was his addressee's responsibility to ‘listen up’ and it was up to her to determine the outcome of this encounter.
This article is concerned, then, with a cultural conception of what J. L. Austin (Reference Austin1962) termed perlocutions. My contention here is that this listener- or recipient-centered view of perlocutions is linked to values and practices central to Yopno village politics. In Austin's influential dissection of speech acts into locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, the perlocutionary facet of speech acts concerns speech as an activity that gives rise to consequences. This contrasts with speech considered as propositionally meaningful (a locutionary act) or as a means of performing conventional social acts (an illocutionary act).Footnote 1 While the illocutionary facet of speech acts has been the subject of extensive theorization, speech act theorists have devoted little attention to the perlocutionary—an unruly, highly contingent domain that is not susceptible to analysis through the use of intuition and considerably decontextualized examples.Footnote 2 When receiving a simple greeting can give rise to joy, wariness, disgust, and seemingly anything else, it proves challenging to isolate necessary or conventional connections between a bit of speech and the effects it brings about.
While speech act theorists have largely disregarded perlocutions, there is no lack of folk theorizing about the ways in which speech affects others. We need only look in the self-help aisle of the local bookstore to find theories of How to win friends and influence people, of how Power questions will allow readers to Build relationships, win new business, influence others, and so on. As with communicative ideologies more generally, such perlocutionary models are about more than just language (Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity Reference Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998; Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity2000b). This is nowhere more evident than in the long history of discussions of ‘rhetoric’, a prime locus of theorizing ‘persuasion’ and perlocutions more generally in the European philosophical tradition, and one that is interwoven with cultural views of morality, politics, religion, and human nature (Shuger Reference Shuger1988; Gustafson Reference Gustafson1992; Skinner Reference Skinner1996; Fontana, Nederman, & Remer Reference Fontana, Nederman and Remer2004; Konstan Reference Konstan2006; Garsten Reference Garsten2009). Liberal concerns about self-determination, freedom, rationality, and self-authorizing judgment suffuse the early modern revolt against rhetoric, echoing in Immanuel Kant's view that rhetoric ‘insofar as by that is understood the art of persuasion, i.e. of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion… is a dialectic, which borrows from the art of poetry only as much as is necessary to win minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of their freedom’ (Reference Kant and Guyer2000:204). Kant moves seamlessly from an account of how rhetorical speech (‘beautiful illusions’) affects its audience (‘deceiving’ and ‘winning minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge’) to ethical and political concerns about the use of rhetoric to influence persons understood to have the capacity for rational judgment and, therefore, the right and obligation to judge for themselves. In other words, persuasion is viewed here through the prism of a liberal political ethics, in which winning over minds before they can judge is an illegitimate perlocutionary act that robs people of their freedom.Footnote 3
It is the contention of this article that cultural conceptions of perlocutions provide a rich source of insight into matters of morality, politics, and personhood, and, in turn, folk models of perlocutions are inflected by their cultural and political milieu. Much as Rosaldo's discussion of illocutionary acts among the Ilongot showed that ‘ways of thinking about language and about human agency and personhood are intimately linked’ (Reference Rosaldo1982:203), I argue here that conceptions of perlocutions prominent in the Yopno Valley are linked to political values and practices that stress the willfulness, self-determination, and equality of Yopno village residents. I detail a conception of perlocutions in which hearers, or communicative recipients as I term them here, play a key role in mediating between speech and its consequences. In this recipient-centered model of linguistic efficacy, communicative recipients are understood as agentive actors, not merely passive recipients of messages; their agentive ‘work’ on the speech of others is viewed as the fulcrum between speech and its outcome. This conception of recipient agency and recipients' role in mediating between speech and its consequences is, I show, interwoven with political concerns about equality and self-determination, and ritual practices that work to constitute the Yopno village as a polity composed of willful, self-determining people.
As with other cultural conceptions of perlocutions—for instance, Islamic ‘rhetoric’ and its emphasis on ethical practices of listening (Hirschkind Reference Hirschkind2006) or Aristotle's division of rhetoric into three species (deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative) according to the three classes of hearers (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2006)—the one I discuss here attends closely to the role of recipients in communicative events. Careful analyses of their role in communicative interactions has provided a salutary reminder that recipients play a significant role in communication.Footnote 4 But Yopno conceptions of the ‘work’ of recipients in communicative events is not presented here as a corrective to speaker-centered models of meaning and communicative action. Rather, I am interested in how the role of communicative recipients is inflected by political values and practices, giving rise to variation in what it is hearers/recipients are seen to do and expected to do in different speech communities (Philips Reference Philips1976; Brenneis Reference Brenneis1987; see also Kapchan Reference Kapchan2008 on musical audition) as well as variation among different types of listening/receiving in a single speech community (Marsilli-Vargas Reference Marsilli-Vargas2014).
The pivotal role of recipients in communicative events is a recurring theme in ethnographies of communication in Oceania. For people in Gapun, Don Kulick has discussed the responsibility and power vested in the receiver of messages to construe their meaning and force, ‘the village understanding that the discovery and comprehension of the meaning of speech is the responsibility of the listener’ (1992:135). For the Urapmin, ‘listeners are responsible for creating the meaning of what they hear’, leaving speakers to ‘run-it-up-the-flagpole-and-see-who-salutes’ (Robbins Reference Robbins2001:906). Duranti has drawn on his research in Samoa (Reference Duranti, Hill and Irvine1992) to show how the more relational and recipient-oriented ethnotheories of communication found there challenge the focus on speakers and their intentions in a number of influential Western models of meaning and speech acts. In the Yopno Valley itself, Jürg Wassmann reports that to ‘listen attentively to others and thereby become “knowing human beings”’ is a valued personal trait (Reference Wassmann1994:655).
Drawing on eighteen months of linguistic and ethnographic research in the Yopno Valley, I elaborate here on what it means to ‘listen attentively’ by looking at the way speech is talked about in the course of everyday language use, and especially the perlocutionary expressions people use to discuss speech and its consequences in the course of what may be termed political events. I focus on several common ways of talking about speech—‘fashions of speaking’ about speech, to use Benjamin Lee Whorf's expression (Reference Whorf and Carroll1956)—that impute agency to the recipient in communicative events to affect the outcome of speech events. These fashions of speaking provide one source of evidence for—and serve as one semiotic locus of—the cultural conception of perlocutions I discuss here.
A second locus I discuss is an institutionalized ritual of village politics, ‘discussions’ (Yopno: yaŋ nanda-) among community members in which they collaboratively make decisions about collective projects and concerns. As an activity in which communication itself is a focal point of concern, discussion is a highly visible, public ritual, in which participants act as agentive recipients of each others’ talk, standing between each other's talk and the concerted action of the community. Moreover, discussion is a site where the political valences of the perlocutionary become apparent. In discussion, participants demonstrate their self-determination and equality by acting as agentive recipients in the process of forging a common will.
A YOPNO PERLOCUTIONARY EXPRESSION AND ITS ENGLISH COUNTERPARTS IN SPEECH ACT THEORY
Located in the Finisterre Mountains on the border of Morobe and Madang provinces, the Yopno Valley is home to some 8,000 people living in twenty-five villages. Most people in the valley speak Yopno, a Papuan language, and most men and many women under sixty are also able to speak Tok Pisin, an English-based creole used in much of Papua New Guinea and a language of schooling in the Yopno Valley since the 1970s. Most everyone in the valley is a subsistence horticulturalist, supplying their own food, shelter, and firewood from land they own as members of a clan.
Almost every village in the valley is composed of multiple clans—generally, four or more—and ownership of the land around a village is divided among them. Prior to pacification by the Australian colonial administration and the Lutheran mission, people did not live in concentrated villages, but built their houses in small clusters on their clan land (Wassmann Reference Wassmann1993), gathering together for the purpose of warfare and education. Historically, each village was home to several men's houses, in which young men were prepared for adulthood and which served as hubs for religious activities. Warfare between villages is said to have been a particularly potent institution that unified villagers in a common cause.
Following pacification and the end of the men's house regime, Lutheran churches, government and church schools, and ceremonial events have become the prime collective concerns of those who live together in a village. In November of 2008 the village of Nian was preparing to host a large celebration in honor of the tenth anniversary of the construction of a Lutheran church in their village, one built with sawn timber, tin roofing, and concrete that community members had carried up from the seacoast to Nian (elevation 7,000 feet). In the months leading up to the celebration, members of the community worked to gather the food, firewood, and other items necessary to host visitors from throughout the Valley and from urban areas of Papua New Guinea. As the day of the celebration approached, the organizing committee found that they did not have the pigs needed as gifts for guests invited from other villages. A number of the church's pigs had been borrowed by community members and either not repaid or repaid with pigs too young to be used as gifts. Emergency meetings were called and the leading men of the community gathered to figure out how the pigs would be procured. If the visitors came and provided entertainment, support, and gifts, and Nian could not offer them hospitality and gifts in return, this would be a tremendous embarrassment. Much of the discussion in these meetings centered on how to convince community members to donate their pigs for use in the upcoming celebration. Numerous speakers offered ideas, including a church leader, who suggested that they explain to community members that giving pigs as offerings for church events is a way to secure blessings for themselves.
(1) Translated from YopnoFootnote 5
In the meeting and outside as well we should mention [that giving pigs for the celebration is a way to secure blessings] to those friends who have these kinds of problems. Let's go speak out about it to them.
gentai-naŋ oni ya-ŋba ko-sot
talk good-s.obj here speak-2/3.p.ds 3s.obj.see-1s.pres
‘I see this is good talk they've made,
so it would be good that I do this [i.e. give pigs]. Afterwards my life will improve.’
yaŋ un don i nanda-ŋ sɨlɨp ekai donwudeŋonda
thus that later self hear/think-ss evaluate do.ss.dandlater in.this.way
ap-gut amɨn un tai
come-2/3p.nfuttop that good
They themselves will evaluate it like that and they will come [bringing pigs] in that way. That would be good.
This stretch of speech contains a perlocutionary expression commonly heard in meetings of this sort, where the leading men of the community strategize about how to influence others in the community. In the prospective communicative event depicted here, both a speech event (‘we should mention [that giving pigs is a way to secure blessings]’) and its perlocutionary effect (‘they will come [bringing pigs]’) are discussed. Interposed between speech and its effect is an act of reception in which the recipient of the leaders’ proposed speech ‘evaluates’ that speech (nandaŋ sɨlɨp a- ‘hearing/thinking and sorting out, evaluating’; this expression along with others is discussed in more detail in the next section). The recipient judges that ‘this is good talk’ before the desired outcome (i.e. bringing pigs) is reached. In this perlocutionary expression, an act of reception in which the recipient evaluates what they have heard stands between the locutionary act and the perlocutionary outcome.
This Yopno perlocutionary expression differs subtly, but significantly, from the perlocutionary expressions of English that Austin and others have considered in their discussions of speech acts. To summarize briefly, Austin (Reference Austin1962) distinguishes three acts that occur together in a speech event. The locutionary act, ‘roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference’ (1962:108), concerns the representational capacity of speech and its use to refer to things and predicate attributes of them. In contrast, the illocutionary act encompasses the conventional social activities performed in the act of speaking (other than referring and predicating). The perlocutionary act covers speech as an activity that gives rise to effects. By saying ‘Don't climb in the washing machine’, I am referring to and predicating about ‘washing machines’ and your relationship to them (a locutionary act); I may be ‘warning’ you about or ‘prohibiting’ you from having such relations with the referred-to washing machine (an illocutionary act); and at the same time, by means of this speech, I may get you to stay out of the washing machine, I may upset you, I may make you lose all respect for me, and so on (a perlocutionary act).
Each of these three acts identified by Austin has a set of English verbs and expressions associated with it. Austin provides his own illustrative examples, showing how the same speech event can be reported in English in ways that highlight variously the locutionary, illocutionary, or perlocutionary facet of the speech act. For instance, a speech event in which a man says ‘Shoot her!’ can be reported variously as follows (from Austin Reference Austin1962:101–102):
Locutionary He said to me, ‘Shoot her!’
Illocutionary He urged me to shoot her.
Perlocutionary He persuaded me to shoot her.
The perlocutionary verbs identified by Austin—persuade, convince, deter—share a common grammatical property that differentiates them from the illocutionary and locutionary verbs he discusses: they are lexical causative verbs, evident in the way they are periphrastically defined (e.g. from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition: persuade, (i) cause (someone) to do something through reasoning or argument, (ii) cause (someone) to believe something; see also Katz Reference Katz1977:163–66). A number of distributional similarities between perlocutionary verbs and analytic causatives in English also distinguish them from the locutionary and illocutionary verbs Austin discusses.Footnote 6Persuade along with Austin's other perlocutionary verbs are lexical causative verbs that take human direct objects and for which speech is a stereotypical means of causation.
Austin identifies the perlocutionary act using not only this set of English perlocutionary verbs, but also a periphrastic construction that contains all of the same essential elements. A variety of causative verbs can indicate the effects of a speech act when an adverb of means containing a verb of speaking is included in the sentence (specifically, one whose subject is co-referential with the subject of the causative):
By saying it, I convinced him, or surprised him, or got him to stop. (Austin Reference Austin1962:109)
In the relevant respects, this periphrastic construction contains all of the elements of a perlocutionary verb like persuade (i.e. a causative whose stereotypical means of causation is speech).
As Michael Silverstein has argued (1979:208–16), Austin's identification of perlocutionary acts as a component of speech events is rooted in the grammatical distinctions and possibilities found in descriptions of speech events in English. English happens to contain causative lexemes and constructions that characterize speech as a cause that brings about effects of various sorts. In contrast, the Yopno perlocutionary expression introduced above encodes a very different relationship between speech and the consequences that it gives rise to. Causation, an important element of the English fashion of speaking, is not present. Further, in the perlocutionary expressions considered by Austin the communicative recipient—appearing as the direct object of a (lexical) causative (‘I persuaded him to leave’)—is depicted as a party affected by speech, a causee; the perlocutionary act, according to John Searle, concerns ‘the consequences or effects such acts have on the actions, thoughts, beliefs, etc. of hearers’ (Reference Searle1969:25). In the Yopno expression I am considering here, the hearer appears as the subject of a verb, and as I discuss further in the next section, they are depicted as an agentive actor in the communicative encounter, not a causee.
When viewed in contrast to other ways of talking about speech and its consequences, Austin's perlocutionary verbs and expressions appear to be what Whorf termed a ‘fashion of speaking’: ‘ways of analyzing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the language… and which cut across the typical grammatical classifications, so that such a ‘fashion’ may include lexical, morphological, syntactic and otherwise systemically diverse means’ (Reference Whorf and Carroll1956:158). Fashions of speaking are language particular ‘ways of putting things’, combining lexical and grammatical elements in a way that reflects not reality itself, but a linguistically mediated perspective on reality. To take a simple example, the expression ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ is a fashion of speaking, a way of putting things that attributes certain characteristics to nature: as the subject of the verb abhor, nature is presented as something that is sentient (cf. Whorf Reference Whorf and Carroll1956:222). In the words of Robert Boyle, proponent of the mechanical philosophy that opposed such a view of nature, this was ‘looking on things merely corporeal, and oftentimes inanimate things, as if they were endowed with life, sense, and understanding’ (quoted in Shapin Reference Shapin1996:151). The conception of nature implicit in the fashion of speaking about nature is rendered explicitly in Boyle's commentary.
In much the same way, Austin's perlocutionary act is an explicit rendering of fashions of speaking about speech in English that lexically and morphosyntactically join causation with speech: speech is depicted as a means of bringing about effects. In Whorfian fashion, the categories latent in this fashion of speaking serve as a guide to the reality of speech acts in Austin's account (see Whorf Reference Whorf and Carroll1956:80–81). Austin makes explicit, provides a label for, and projects onto reality the covert grammatical and semantic categories of English present in a fashion of speaking about speech.
The Yopno expression, considered as a fashion of speaking, joins rather different elements: the communicative recipient is depicted as an agentive actor whose evaluation of speech stands between talk and its outcome. In a strict sense, then, the Yopno perlocutionary expression discussed here does not fit Austin's English-based model of perlocutions. But the contrast of Austin's perlocutionary expressions and the Yopno one points to the fact that there is more than one way to talk about the relation of speech to its consequences. In recognizing the English-based parochialism of Austin's account of perlocutions, we open the way to linguistic and ethnographic investigation of other fashions of speaking about speech and its consequences, other metalanguages about communication that emphasize alternative perspectives on the perlocutionary.Footnote 7 As I discuss further in the next section, a number of prominent, commonly used Yopno fashions of speaking about speech bespeak a recipient-centered model of linguistic efficacy, in which not only speech itself, but recipients' uptake of speech is seen to play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of speech acts.
FASHIONS OF SPEAKING ABOUT COMMUNICATIVE RECIPIENTS IN YOPNO
Yopno fashions of speaking that frame communicative recipients as agentive actors turn up frequently and prominently in Yopno political discourse. The harangues of community leaders trying to motivate community members to act, the frequent discussions among community members about collective affairs, the criticisms people level at each other for failing to participate in community life—all of these varieties of political discourse are peppered with ways of talking about speech that emphasize the agency of recipients. Before turning to the use of these expressions in the practice of Yopno village politics, I look more closely here at the way these ways of talking about talk depict acts of reception in communicative encounters. Routine fashions of speaking about speech such as those discussed here are a semiotic ‘site’ of language ideologies (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998; Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity and Kroskrity2000a; Philips Reference Philips2000) that provide a valuable source of insight into cultural understandings of language and communication. In other words, they manifest cultural conceptions of what language is and how communication works in a perceptible form embedded in social life.
Compared to the extensive inventory of metalinguistic verbs in English—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary—the set of metalinguistic verbs in Yopno appears somewhat scanty (a feature of other Papuan languages as well, e.g. Goldman Reference Goldman1983; Merlan & Rumsey Reference Merlan and Rumsey1991). The most commonly used is an ambitransitive verb of speaking, which also serves as the verb that describes the crow of the rooster, the ringing of a bell, and the sounding of thunder: ya- ‘sound, utter, say, speak, vocalize’.
(2)
a. gen yo-sot
sound sound-1s.pres
‘I am speaking, I am vocalizing’
b. pup gen yo-sok
chicken sound sound-3s.pres
‘The rooster is crowing’
‘Generic verbs’ with a wide semantic range such as ya- are common in Papuan languages (Pawley Reference Pawley and Foley1993,Reference Pawley, Cliff and Wierzbicka1994; see also Foley Reference Foley1986:Ch. 5). Their meaning is made more specific through a variety of means, including (i) the use of serial verb constructions, in which multiple verbs combine to form an expression with a more specific meaning, and (ii) the use of nominal complements and adjuncts, such as gen ‘vocalization, sound, talk, mouth’ in (2) above.Footnote 8 Though gen is itself a fairly generic noun of speaking—or better, a generic noun of sounding—there are nouns with a more specific meaning that may be substituted for it.
(3) gen yo-sot ‘I speak, I vocalize’
kap yo-sot ‘I sing’
bɨsɨt yo-sot ‘I pray, I appeal for’
These nouns occur as arguments of a variety of types of verbs, the combination of a noun of speaking with different verbs furnishing a rich source of metalinguistic expressions.
The fashions of speaking about speech that I focus on here all include a noun of speaking or other metalinguistic expression occurring as the object of a number of verbs, none of which are specifically associated with the domain of speech.Footnote 9 Example (4) is one way that the failure to heed instructions, advice, and other talk is discussed.
(4) yaŋ ɨdɨn da-i-ŋ-ɨ pɨ-kɨ pa-ga jipgwan
thus here 2p.obj-tell-2/3p.npast-top down-go.ssp.obj-go.ss where
yo-pm-ek ekw-aŋ
3p.obj-put-ss.d be-2/3p.pres
‘What they told you, you took them and left them where?’
In this way of talking about the failure to heed speech, talk (‘what they told you’) is spoken of as something ‘taken’ and ‘left’ somewhere, in the same way one talks about moving and placing a physical object. The ‘logic’ behind what may appear to be a ‘highly idiomatic’ fashion of speaking (Whorf Reference Whorf and Carroll1956:222), though, becomes clearer when we set it next to other ways in which speech is said to be handled by recipients. In contrast to speech being left somewhere, speech may be ‘held onto, kept’ (ab ɨ da-).
(5) gen tɨm yi-pma-k-naŋ pakyaŋ-si abɨdo-ni
talk portion 3s.obj-put-3s.npast-s.obj carefully-emph hold-2/3p.fut
‘you all hold on well to the talk he presented’
To ‘hold onto’ speech is to bear it in mind and act in accordance with it. These are two fashions of speaking that coalesce around the sense that people ‘handle’ and ‘retain’ speech, which can influence their thoughts and actions only if it is handled properly. In much the same way, talk may be ‘protected, looked after’ (kutna-), like a prize possession or a person in one's care, as shown in (6).
(6) gen madep abu-k un un-jok-naŋ abɨdo-neŋ yaŋ to
talk big come-3s.npast that that-dimin-s.obj hold-1p.fut thusdat
gen tai-si
talk good-emph
u-naŋ kutno-no nandak nandak-nin teban to-ni
that-s.obj look.after-1p.ds thought-1p.poss strong be-2/3p.fut
‘Let's hold on to this good talk that has been spoken. In that way, we look after it and our thinking will be strong.’
In these three related fashions of speaking, talk is something that the recipient maintains in proximity to themselves or not. Further, the recipient is represented as a relatively agentive actor in the communicative event—one who is a willful, controlling, and instigating participant (Van Valin Reference Van Valin2005). That these expressions impute agency to the actor can be seen, for one, in the fact that they can be and often are used in directives, occurring with second person subjects and near future-imperative inflection (gen taisi abɨda! ‘Hold on to this good talk!’). In contrast to predicates with relatively agentive subject arguments, predicates with nonagentive subject arguments sound strange when used in a directive: kawmɨ nanda! ‘Feel cold!’, which is awkward in English as well. The awkwardness of this expression arises from the contradictory attributes it imputes to the subject argument. While a directive presupposes that the second person subject argument has a degree of volition and control in instigating an activity, the predicate-argument combination kawmɨ nanda- presupposes that the subject argument is not a willful, controlling instigator of this state. The common use of predicate-argument combinations such as ‘hold on to talk’ in directives, in contrast, indicates that the fashions of speaking I discuss here do impute a degree of agency to their subject argument, the recipient of talk. Additionally, the fashions of speaking I have been discussing may and occasionally do include the adverb of manner pakyaŋ ‘carefully’, indicating that the activity described is one that the subject argument is capable of controlling. This adverb does not occur with a verb like kɨmak- ‘die’ (*pakyaŋgok kɨmakgɨt ‘he died carefully’), in which control is not a property imputed to the subject argument.Footnote 10
The representation of recipients as agentive actors in communicative events is found in a variety of other fashions of speaking as well. These include a set of ways of talking about the evaluation of speech, which will be important in the discussion in the next section. Talk is spoken of as something that is ‘broken up, split’ (puda-) by the recipient, as in (7).
(7) gen un aŋ-puda-ŋ sɨlɨp ek pakyaŋ-si sɨlɨpek
talk that s.obj-break-ss evaluate do.ss.d carefully-emph evaluatedo.ss.d
ko-neŋ.
3s.obj.see-1p.fut
‘We will break up that talk and evaluate it, evaluate it carefully and see.’
In the same way one speaks of breaking up firewood, talk can be split. The logic behind this way of putting things can be clarified by noting the common use of the verb phrase sɨlɨp a- ‘group, sort, distribute, organize’ in collocation with puda-. Sɨlɨp a- on its own can be used to describe how a woman distributes food from a pot to individual plates, how a person arranges vendibles at market, or how items are organized and distributed at an exchange ceremony. When I asked people about the meaning of the expression gen sɨlɨp a- ‘sort out, weigh, evaluate talk’, they would often say something like: “you sort out talk, this part of the talk is good, this isn't” or “this part is true, this isn't”. This explanation was often accompanied by gestures that mimicked distributing food from a pot onto plates—taking talk from the pot and putting it on one plate (‘good talk’) and then taking other talk and putting it on another plate (‘bad talk’).
‘Breaking up’ talk then is the first step in ‘sorting out’ talk. And ‘sorting out’ talk is an all purpose way of talking about evaluating talk—determining what is good and bad, true and false, in it—but also what its hidden meanings and implications are (see (1) for another use of this verb phrase, there in a serial verb construction with nanda- ‘to hear, to think’). Similarly, the roughly synonymous verb phrase kokwin a- ‘evaluate, sort, distribute’ is also used as a way of talking about the work of recipients in examining and evaluating talk, as shown in (8).
(8) gen kokwina-ni nandak nandak pi yo-m-ni.
talk evaluate do-2/3p.fut thought work 3p.obj-give-2/3p.fut
‘Think over this talk. Give your brain some work.’
In these related fashions of speaking, the recipient works over the talk of someone else, ‘breaking it up’ and ‘sorting it out’ to determine what is being said and whether that talk is good or bad, true or false.
All of these ways of talking about talk taken together present the recipient in a communicative event as relatively agentive, handling the talk of others in a variety of ways. Related to them are a number of ways of talking about the act of speaking itself. Verbs like -pma- ‘leave, put, place’ and ɨkak- ‘push, move’ combined with a noun of speaking are used to characterize the sending of messages.
(9)
a. -pma- ‘leave, put, place’
gen asi-naŋ yi-pma-k to taiyaŋgok un abɨd-ek
talk true-s.obj 3s.obj-put-3s.npast so wellthat hold-ss.d
‘This is important talk he has presented so hold onto it well.’
b. ɨkak- ‘push, move’
gen dɨ un dakwon tɨmɨk-gaŋ kaŋ tai-si mutmut-da
talk some that gen hold-3p.pres then good-emph meeting-subj
dabɨlɨ-kwan
middle-loc
ɨkak-ba a-ban ya-ŋ nanda-t-nin dɨ ek
push-2/3p.ds come-3 s.ds say-ss hear/think-nom-1p.poss some do.ss.d
‘If you've got something to say about that, good. Push it to the middle of the meeting and we will discuss.’
The use of ‘push, move’ or ‘leave, put’ to describe the act of speaking further emphasizes the work of recipients in communicative events. Talk, in these cases, is portrayed as something moved into the vicinity of the recipient (‘pushed’ or ‘left’ there), leaving it up to recipients to pick it up: examine it, hold onto it, discuss it or not. In effect, these fashions of speaking detailed here depict communication as a variety of ‘offering up’ or ‘making available’ talk, in which the recipient is left to agentively ‘take’ the object, as in Robbins’ characterization of the Urapmin ‘run-it-up-the-flagpole-and-see-who-salutes’ view of communication (2001:906).
I do not mean to imply through my presentation of several common Yopno fashions of speaking about speech that these are the only ways of talking about talk in common use in Yopno communities or that they indicate a single, coherent, and shared ideology of communication held by all.Footnote 11 As much recent research on language ideologies has stressed, tension and contestation among multiple ideologies of communication in a speech community is common (Briggs Reference Briggs1992; Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity Reference Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998:Part 3). It is imperative, then, to locate ideologies in the institutions and practices where they are anchored in social life. In the next section, I situate these fashions of speaking in some of the discursive arenas where they are commonly used, paying particular attention to their use in political discourse. Contextualizing these fashions of speaking will provide a lens on how a conception of recipients as agentive actors is bound up with perlocutions and politics.
Among the varieties of political discourse I touch on, I focus on a ritualized communicative practice termed discussion (yaŋ nanda- ‘talking hearing/thinking’). Not only is discussion a site where fashions of speaking about agentive recipients are commonly found, discussion is itself a ritualized practice that emphasizes the agency of recipients.Footnote 12 In discussion, the self-determination and equality of people in a Yopno village are exhibited in their agentive reception of the speech of others and in their respect for others’ agentive reception of their own speech. Discussion then is a second site—one of ritualized practice (Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998)—where an ideology of recipient agency materializes in social life.
As Whorf noted, fashions of speaking ‘grow up’ together with cultural norms and practices, ‘constantly influencing each other’ (Reference Whorf and Carroll1956:156). In discussion, we find an interesting locus of this dialectic, where communicative practice and fashions of speaking about communicative practice mirror one another, mutually reinforcing each other. How people talk about talk—their metadiscourses about talk—as well as the way they talk—their communicative practice—materialize a common ideology of perlocutions in which recipients’ handling of speech stands between speech and its outcome. In turning to the domain of communicative practice, we see how multiple sites of ideology, including both fashions of speaking and communicative rituals, operate in tandem to reinforce an ideology of communication. More than that, we situate this ideology in the practice of Yopno village politics, where we can more clearly see how the perlocutionary is political.
DISCUSSION: SELF-DETERMINATION AND AGENTIVE RECEPTION IN POLITICAL PRACTICE
Yopno villages are fragile polities (see Stasch Reference Stasch2009 and Handman Reference Handman2015 for discussion of the fragility of villages elsewhere in Melanesia). Given the degree to which families and clans are economically self-sufficient and the degree to which people—and adult men especially—prize their equality and self-determination, it requires constant effort to bring people together to participate in the collective activities of the community. Though people value schools, churches, ceremonial events, and other products of the concerted efforts of villages, they often are said to follow their own desires rather than think of their community. When dissatisfied or disinterested with life in a village, people go to live with relations in other villages or retreat to their forest houses, where they can live on their own land far from others. Or, they simply ignore community affairs and tend to their own.
Though every village has people who are recognized as community leaders—the heads of clans, school board members, and people who hold positions in the Lutheran Church—these people, almost all men, have relatively little power over community members. Read's (Reference Read1959:431) description of the Gahuku-Gama applies well to political relations in Yopno villages: ‘No individual commands instrumentalities which might enable him to dictate the course of action which a gathering must follow’. My first months in the field, I routinely followed the publicly announced instructions of community leaders, appearing at the school for cleaning and maintenance work, attending church gatherings, and showing up for community meetings to find only a small portion of community assembled. After several hours, when it became clear that most of the community was not going to show up, we would disband and more announcements would follow the next day in an effort to ensure that the community en masse would participate next time.
Projects and activities announced by leaders are often met with complaints from community members that they have not been consulted, that leaders were treating them like their ‘laborers’ (oman amɨn) or, in the Biblical idiom, their ‘slaves’ (slev). When a person feels they have not been included in the decision-making process or they are dissatisfied with a plan of action announced by community leaders, they simply do not participate.
Decision-making in Yopno villages, where community leaders cannot simply dictate a course of action to others, often takes the form of discussion. Most weeks at least one discussion takes place in a Yopno village involving some portion of the community, each discussion part of an often long series. On most matters of public import, a select group of men gather to discuss what is to be done and how to go about doing it. They set an agenda and strategize about how to influence others to follow the route they have decided on. After this, they hold large public meetings, which are open to all of the men and women of the community and which follow the agenda and strategies set out in the earlier closed meeting. These meetings are often followed by smaller meetings in which members of a clan, a patriline, or family gather to further discuss the issues raised in the earlier meeting. The community or community leaders meet again and so on. This round of discussions can continue for months.
The basic discursive activity of Yopno discussions consists of participants offering up their suggestions and concerns about community issues, and commenting on the suggestions and concerns of others. In the following example drawn from the same discussion introduced previously (see example (1)), leaders in Nian village are developing a strategy to elicit pigs from community members for an upcoming church celebration. After some discussion, the community's church worker (known as an evangelist) suggests that they buy some pigs with the church's money. The following is extracted from a discussion that ran for over an hour.
(10) Evangelist: Something [i.e. the pigs] given [to the church] for an offering, you [community members] have taken as your own. There are none that are ready now [i.e. big enough to be used]. You see some big ones, let's use those. Whatever we see, get them and let's do it, let's use them.
Another possibility is those congregants who don't feel able [to give a pig], they can get together and gather money and we buy another. Tomorrow [at a meeting of the wider community], let's speak out about all of this.
[This is followed by another man's speech, omitted here]
Tim:O Chairman! You can't go right to the option of money, forget it. We must gather the congregation and let them speak out from their heart [i.e. about what they are willing to do to provide pigs]. We can go with the money option but if we talk right away about money then the Congregation will go stand apart from us and say: “you yourselves do it with money!” Forget about the money option and inspire the Congregation. Afterwards, you'll see them bring what they've taken that belongs to the community and after that you can go with the money option. You go with money, you prevent them from returning pigs. They'll say: “They will do something for me with money” and will take the pig that belongs to the community and put it in their area.
to yaŋ yum gen-aŋ yo-sot to ai-si
so thus just talk-s.obj say-1s.pres so and-2p.poss
sɨlɨpa-kto
evaluatedo-imm
This is just what I have to say, so you all evaluate it.
Throughout his speech, Tim does a couple of things that characterize discussion in meetings: he verbally ‘evaluates’ the talk of the evangelist and he offers up his own suggestions which, as he says, are to be ‘evaluated’ by others in turn.
Discussion, then, is composed of a great deal of talk about talk; communication itself is the crux of this ritual. It is common at the beginning of a turn at talk in discussion to explicitly link one's contribution to earlier talk, emphasizing that one is performing a variety of actions on another's talk.
(11)
a. tai-si, kɨlɨ gen yo-sok dawar-ɨ saŋpik ai siŋgɨn
good-emphdisc talk say-3s.pres part-poss join.ss.d and still
yo-kta-sat…
say-imm-1s.pres
‘good, I want to add to something that he said…’
b. gen kɨla, on gen-tɨm-jok abisok-gok yo-sol un…
talk leader this talk-portion-dimin now-dimin say-2s.pres that
‘Chairman, this thing you say just now, it's…’
c. moneŋ un yip dakwon amɨn ya-ŋ un
money that put.nom gen thing say-2/3p.npast that
‘what you have said about putting money, it's…’
Following these opening phrases, participants ‘break up’, ‘evaluate’, ‘add to’, ‘strengthen’, and otherwise work over the talk that has preceded their own. In other words, they play the role of agentive recipients of others’ talk in a verbal and public way. The ‘active reception of other speakers’ speech’ (Vološinov Reference Vološinov1986:117) is made palpable as an agentive activity in the very practice of talk.
In asserting themselves as agentive actors in this communicative ritual, participants assert their self-determination and equality, their capacity to work on the talk of others and not simply be passive recipients of another's dictates. Discussion continues as long as participants have more to say. If agreement cannot be reached, the discussion is taken up again at a later time or simply dropped. It concludes when, after much examination, a plan of action is collectively approved by participants, who respond o ‘yes’ when asked if they are ‘of one mind’ or ‘of one will’ (but esal a-). In effect, this agreed-upon course of action is the collective ‘talk’ (gen) of all of those at the meeting. From self-determining participants each speaking and evaluating the speech of others emerges a consensus, a common word and a common will.Footnote 13
At the same time as participants display their self-determination and equality by agentively receiving, evaluating, and holding onto others’ talk, they display their respect for others’ self-determination and equality in offering up suggestions for others to evaluate and discuss. The point is brought home in a standard formula used to wrap up a turn of talk in these meetings (for another example, see the last line of Tim's speech in (10)).
(12) to un poin bɨroŋ ya-t-paŋ sɨlɨp a-ŋ pand-ek
so that point two say-1s.npast-p.obj evaluatedo-ss3p.obj.see-ss.d
paŋ-teban a-bɨt
p.obj-strong do-2p.nfut
‘so those two points I've said, you examine them and strengthen them’
The formula, which includes the fashion of speaking involving sɨlɨp a- (‘group, sort out, distribute, evaluate’; see the discussion around (7)), describes the activity that is going on here: the sender is ‘offering up’ talk and recipients are publicly ‘evaluating it’. The fashion of speaking is an explicit metadiscursive representation of discussion, which manifests implicitly in interactional practice the agentive recipient depicted in the fashion of speaking. Not only does this metadiscursive characterization represent what is going on in discussion, it is also a constitutive part of this communicative ritual: through the use of the fashion of speaking (with first and second person subjects), participants recognize the agency of those receiving their talk and their status as self-determining participants in village affairs.
Discussion is a communicative practice in which people work to constitute the Yopno village as a polity composed of self-determining equals sharing a collective will. In the way people communicate with each other and the way they talk about how they communicate with each other, discussion forms a microcosmic realization in the medium of talk of a more general ideal of political relations; in talking about each others’ talk, people act as self-determining agents with respect to others and display their equality and respect for others’ self-determination. Moreover, as a mode of talk that ideally leads to the concerted action of a community, discussion provides a conspicuous model of talk as a perlocutionary act: between talk and the collective efforts of the community lies the agentive reception of talk by other community members.
This communicative practice extends out from any particular discussion to encompass other members of the community through the circulation of talk across multiple events of discussion. After community leaders have discussed a matter and have reached a consensus, that collective word then circulates to other members of the community for them to discuss, evaluate, and make suggestions of their own. After telling community members of the consensus reached by the village's leading men, one leader put it this way.
(13) un yaŋ ya-apbo but-ji pɨsa-akwa
that thus speak-1s.ds.d heart-2p.poss open-2/3p.ds.d
‘I am telling you [what the leaders have said] and it is clear to you.
kɨlɨ u-donda disi nand-ek gen dɨ yo-ni
disc that-abl 2p.emph hear/think-ss.d talk some speak-2/3p.fut
You think this over and talk about it.
kɨlɨtek un yipmaŋ-kamaŋ kaŋ-bataia-sakbo niaŋ
discneck that put-1p.pres3s.obj.see-2/3p.ds good do-3s.pres or like.what
The talk we [leaders] are putting forward, you see if it is good or not.
un un kɨlɨ disi gen sɨlɨp ek yo-ŋ
that that disc 2p.emph talk evaluate do.ss.d speak-2/3p.pres
You all evaluate it and talk.’
The leading men of the community formulate a plan through discussion, bring it to the community for further discussion, after which the leaders may meet again to revise the talk, perhaps each holds meetings with their own clan, and so on and so forth. Through the round of discussions, participants work to constitute a polity of equal, self-determining persons that encompasses the entire community, or at least its adult men.
Even as this political practice emphasizes the equality and self-determination of participants, there is a marked inequality in the way talk circulates. The leading men of the community go first—they work over the ‘talk’ first, taking a leading role in evaluating it. There are other inequalities too—the general lack of female participation is notable—and we may certainly question whether all involved are equally self-determining even when they do participate. The description of discussion I have offered here highlights political sensibilities that inform the practice of discussion, even as discussions often fall short of meeting them. Indeed, even after round and round of discussion, many people will remain dissatisfied and aloof from community affairs. People simply avoid meetings if they feel excluded, chastised, or pressed to do things they would rather not. In the discussion concerning pigs for the church celebration in Nian, leading men of one lineage were notably absent, an absence chalked up to their fear that discussion would turn to the pigs that they had borrowed from the congregation and that they had not repaid.
Where discussion is a mode of forging a polity of self-determining men through mutual respect for and exercise of communicative agency, the recurring failure of discussion and the speeches of leaders to result in collective action is a constant reminder of the dark side of self-determination. Talk about such failures presents them as resulting from villagers’ willfulness, which is regarded both as a threat to the community and its projects and as an attribute fundamental to villagers’ nature. People are said to follow their desires (but yol-) instead of following talk (gen yol-), identifying willfulness as a problem of talk and its reception. Leaders and community members alike harangue those who do not heed instructions, employing fashions of speaking that emphasize the act of reception and the work of recipients, the weak link standing between talk and the success of collective endeavors. Example (4), for instance, was uttered by a woman as a small group sat around waiting in vain for community members to show up for a meeting to plan some construction work on the local school. She criticizes community members for their failure to receive speech in the proper way, to keep in mind the instructions of the teachers, who had long ago requested that this work be done. In using a fashion of speaking that emphasizes recipient agency, she presents the perlocutionary outcome—the failure to do the construction work on the school—as the product of the recipients’ agentive (mis)handling of the teachers’ instructions.
Not only the exemplary back and forth of discussion, then, but recurring failures of collective action featured in harangues are a constant reminder of the critical role of recipients in determining the outcome of speech events. The important role of recipients is also evident in the strategic efforts of speakers to tune their speech carefully to their recipients (see example (1)) in order to secure their support for a desired course of action. Leaders encourage recipients to exercise their agency in particular ways, peppering their speeches with directives about how the audience should receive speech.
(14) gen u-naŋ kokwin-ek abɨdo-sol
talk that-s.obj examine-ss.d hold-2s.pres
‘Think about that talk and hold onto it’
The attention speakers give to the reception of their speech indicates again the critical role recipients are seen to play in shaping the outcome of speech events in a political environment in which people are regarded as willful, self-determining actors.
In relatively acephalous Yopno villages, where residents value their self-determination and have the means to exercise it, the recipient and their agency are a focal point of attention. The recurring failure of villagers to heed talk and the ever-present possibility of such failure spotlights the role of the recipient, the willful, self-determining fulcrum lying between speech and its outcome. Those who would lead the community strategize about ways of speaking that will elicit their addressees’ willing involvement in collective activities. And in discussion, participants work to forge a common will through the verbal and public ‘reception’ of one another's speech.
In all of these ways, village politics, with its emphasis on villagers’ willfulness and self-determination, fosters a conception of perlocutions in which agentive recipients play a prime role in shaping the outcome of speech events. Discussion puts on display the long process of examining, adding to, strengthening, and otherwise working over the talk of others through which self-determining participants align their wills. Here is the perlocutionary writ large, in a highly visible, public ritual that is centered on speech itself and the work of recipients, whose evaluation of others’ speech stands between talk and collective action. And when talk fails to produce a desired outcome, this failure is often presented as a failure of reception, once again highlighting the role of the willful, self-determining recipient as a mediator between speech and its outcome. Mingling politics and perlocutionary models, discussion, harangues, and the oratory of community leaders are key sites where a political sensibility that recognizes and even values villagers' self-determination is knit together with a model of perlocutions—a model in which the communicative recipient is the fulcrum lying between speech and collective action.
CONCLUSION: THE POLITICAL IS PERLOCUTIONARY
I have sought to detail here a recipient-centered model of linguistic efficacy embodied in the ritual practice of discussion as well as in a set of Yopno fashions of speaking about speech. As discursive embodiments of language ideologies, these fashions of speaking are ‘sited’ in social contexts of use—in institutions, rituals, and activities where they are prominent and routine—and they are shaped by nonlinguistic concerns that animate these activities. Here I have shown how a model that emphasizes the role of recipients in shaping the outcome of speech events is molded by a political ethos that stresses self-determination and equality, and political practices through which participants work to constitute the Yopno village as a polity composed of self-determining men. In this respect, the perlocutionary is political; political sensibilities and practices form a prism through which the causal nexus of speech and its outcome is apprehended.
But viewed another way, the political is perlocutionary. The relatively acephalous political organization of Yopno villages is reinforced by conceptions and practices that stress the agentive role of recipients in swaying the outcome of communicative events. A would-be leader's word is nobody's command; the success of efforts to direct community members is understood to be contingent on the way directions are ‘handled’ by their recipients. Speakers frame their contributions with an eye toward their addresses’ uptake, submitting their speech to the receptive activity of others. While some may have the verbal skill to reliably stir their addresses to act, their influence remains precarious—they exercise verbal power at the pleasure of the communicative recipient.
In closing, it is worth considering briefly how perlocutionary conceptions shed light on the kinds of speech—the verbal ‘techniques of power’—sanctioned and used in political discourse. Political oratory has long been a prime domain in which scholars and other commentators have approached speech as a mode of consequential action, ‘[a]s speech to a listening collectivity that is understood to have potentially powerful consequences by dint of the speech's own qualities’ (Stasch Reference Stasch2011:160). How then do cultural understandings of the causal nexus of speech and its effects shape the kinds of speech deemed potent in political oratory?
Looking back to example (1), we can see the interplay of perlocutionary model and political oratory at work. In this example, the speaker situates the speech he would present to community members (‘giving pigs is a way to secure blessings’) in relation to the ‘evaluation’ of that speech by the prospective recipient and the outcome of that evaluation. What the speaker presents to this prospective recipient is a representation of the nature of reality—what Searle terms a ‘representative’ speech act (Reference Searle1976)—which is keyed to a recipient who is expected to evaluate speech for themselves, determining whether it is true or false, good or bad. In crafting ‘persuasive’ oratory in strategy sessions such as this one, speakers anticipate the activity of recipients ‘breaking up’, ‘evaluating’, and ‘holding onto’ speech and shape their speech accordingly. And indeed, much political discourse in the Yopno Valley takes the form of representative statements (Slotta Reference Slotta2014), which are oriented to the particular sorts of agentive actions that recipients are understood and expected to perform on such speech. In a political environment in which actors are presumed to be willful and self-determining, representations of reality and how to act effectively in it are presented in an effort to channel others’ willfulness. In instructing others in the nature and workings of the world, knowledgeable authorities such as the church leader in (1) offer up knowledge that may inform others’ decision-making and influence their actions, if they listen and accept it.
Different perlocutionary sensibilities motivate different verbal techniques of power. Deliberative democratic models of public sphere discourse, for instance, privilege argumentation, not instruction, as a particularly legitimate and effective means of influence (Benhabib Reference Benhabib1994). The legitimacy and effectiveness of argumentation is grounded in a perlocutionary conception in which rational judgment, seen as a fundamental human capacity shared equally by almost all, mediates between speech and its outcome. In argumentation, in the words of Habermas, ‘[t]he taking of yes/no positions is motivated solely by the unforced force of the better argument’ (Reference Habermas1996:306). Recalling Kant's unease with rhetoric as a mode of exerting influence that robs listeners of their freedom, contemporary discussions of deliberative democracy put forward argumentation and deliberation as particularly legitimate forms of verbal power that uphold the freedom of listeners by allowing them autonomous use of their rational judgment (Garsten Reference Garsten2011). While the focus on argumentation in deliberative democratic theory has been much criticized, both for its exclusion of other modes of discourse and its lack of correspondence to the practice of politics in ‘actually existing democracy’ (Fraser Reference Fraser1990), it is motivated by a liberal perlocutionary sensibility that views reason as the legitimate arbiter of speech, as a human capacity that should determine the outcome of speech events. Modes of exerting influence, the techniques of power routinized and sanctioned in a polity, then, take shape in relation to varied conceptions of the causal nexus of speech and its outcome, and their legitimacy.
The linguistic and ethnographic investigation of fashions of speaking, political rituals, and verbal techniques of power I have presented here points up a dialectic in which political sensibilities and practices shape cultural models of perlocutions and such models give shape to politics, political oratory, and conceptions of power. As Tambiah (Reference Tambiah1977: 91) says in a different context, ‘the cultural model and the pragmatic parameters are in concordance and buttress one another’. That is, of course, not to say that there is a single cultural model of perlocutions or a single set of shared political values and practices operative in Yopno villages. Nor is it to say that practices and ideologies, perlocutions and politics never come into conflict with each other, though that has not been my focus here. Rather, the intertwining of the perlocutionary and the political points up the way in which practice bears on ideology and ideology on practice in particular sites—fashions of speaking, political rituals, styles of oratory—where the one molds the other, where political practices and cultural models of perlocutions, political sensibilities and linguistic practices have ‘grown up together, constantly influencing each other’.
