A departure

In August 2004, a research paper published by linguist Peter Gordon in Science, caught the imaginations of both the academic community and the popular press. Based on fieldwork within the communities of the Pirahã of western Amazonia (pronounced Pee-da-HAN), a hunter-gatherer society of some 300 people, Gordon's research sought to answer the question: ‘is it possible that there are some concepts that we cannot entertain because of the language that we speak?’Footnote ¹ Furthermore, Gordon provocatively asked whether languages can be incommensurate to the point that they can neither be translated into another language, nor have their concepts understood by speakers whose own thought processes are encoded in the words or grammar of another language?Footnote ²

Having had their first contact with Europeans in 1744 and having been involved in trading relationships ever since, the Pirahã people had remained monolingual demonstrating a complete disinterest in the Portuguese language and outside culture, save for very basic material goods.Footnote ³ While this cultural resistance is itself quite fascinating given the demographic devastation suffered by the Pirahã beginning with the first European encounters, it was the actual contours of Pirahã culture and grammar that were considered to be totally distinctive. From information gathered through the pioneering work of Daniel and Keren Everett, who had spent time living with and learning from the Pirahã, the following characteristics of everyday Pirahã life were highlighted in the academic and popular literature:

• • the absence of creation myths and fiction in Pirahã society;

• • a kinship system that does not extend beyond siblings and parents;

• • the absence of distinct terms for colour;

• • a communication system that is restricted to non-abstract subjects that fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors;

• • the Pirahã language is world's most phonemically limited with only 10 consonants and vowels in total;

• • pronouns which are believed to have been borrowed from another community are used very rarely as compared to any other known language;

• • the absence of any individual or collective memory beyond two generations past;

• • the absence of writing, drawing, or art;

• • an ontology that recognises spirits and possession;

• • the practice of sleeping for no more than two hours at any time, day or night;

• • frequent foregoing of food even when it is in abundance;

• • one of the least materialist cultures found in anthropological study.Footnote ⁴

Most significantly though, for linguists and anthropologists, is that the Pirahã language has no concept of numbers, no means by which to count, and no terms for quantification. For example, there are no equivalents to terms such as all, each, every, most, or some. Instead, it is argued that the Pirahã linguistically distinguish quantities based on three words: one that translates roughly into ‘small size or amount’ (hói), one word that is used to designate a ‘somewhat larger size or amount’ (hoí), and one series of words that can be loosely understood as ‘many’ (bá a gi so).Footnote ⁵ Despite these terms, Everett has highlighted, for example, the difficulty of determining when the Pirahã use the term hói to describe fish, whether they mean a single fish, a small fish, or one or two fish.

Given that Pirahã society relies on trade with outsiders, not having basic numerical skills could serve as a disadvantage in negotiating exchanges. This was even recognised by the Pirahã who in 1980, asked the Everetts to teach them how to count, in order to ensure that they could not be taken advantage of by traders who visited their settlements on riverboats.Footnote ⁶ After eight months of enthusiastic participation, the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of understanding basic math and numerical skills and abandoned their learning efforts. Everett noted that over the time period, not one student was able to learn to count to 10 and no one could perform simple arithmetic – including calculating 1+1 – with a level of consistency that could not be attributed to random guessing.

It was this apparent inability to conceptualise numbers and math passed on anecdotally by the Everetts to Gordon that caught his attention. Thus, he systematically decided to investigate the extent to which the Pirahã were able to deal with mathematical concepts that have no representational form in their own language. In a series of tests of Pirahã men, Gordon found that they were generally unable to perform what we might consider to be standard tasks. These exercises included duplicating a row of up to 10 batteries placed on a table (performance generally started to decline after two batteries), matching boxes with pictures of several fish to obtain a reward, or retaining the memory of numbers.

The results were considered to be extraordinary given that linguistics has largely operated under the assumption that human beings possess an innate number sense. And thus began a politics of interpretation around how these results should be understood. From orthodox perspectives, Gordon's research findings were dangerous as they had the potential to undermine nearly forty years of universal theorising that had dominated the discipline.Footnote ⁷ Even asking whether it becomes difficult to articulate concepts in the absence of language that represents these was potentially quaint thanks to the disciplinary hegemony of Charles Hockett's ‘Design Features of Human Language’, Steven Pinker's ‘Universal Language Instinct’ and Noam Chomsky's theory of ‘Universal Grammar’. All of these theories rooted the capacity to think and speak about particular ideas to a shared, cross-cultural human nature.Footnote ⁸ Thus, from perspectives grounded in universalism, there were two tactical responses. The first was to brand the work of Everett and Gordon as lazy. The problem was not that the Pirahã did not share the same numerical understanding as other groups, but that researchers had yet to find where these understandings were located and to discern how these were communicated. The second was to attribute limited capacity to the Pirahã themselves.

Thus, rather than seeing the particularities of this culture as evidence of the sophistication and richness of Pirahã life, orthodox apologists returned to ‘bad old days’ of anthropology based on technological fetishism, positioning difference as exotic, and the deployment of problematic conceptions of ‘primitivism’ which historically had made both the dehumanisation of indigenous peoples and assorted forms of violence against them possible. Drawing upon comparisons to infants and animals intimated in Gordon's own research on numerical skills, revived cultural chauvinists speculated that the Pirahã kinship system led to inbreeding which in turn created an entire population of intellectually challenged people.Footnote ⁹ Others turned the tables and accused Everett himself of being racist because his research findings denied that the Pirahã possess what the field of linguistics considers to be a universal human attribute.Footnote ¹⁰

Gordon's own argument was that the findings clearly gave credence to the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose theories incorporated both linguistic determinism and relativism to argue that ‘language can determine the nature and content of thought’.Footnote ¹¹ The implication of Whorf's theory was that language moulds thought patterns rather than reflecting them. However, the relationship he posed was causal rather than constitutive, leading to restrictions in how one could perceive of the nexus formed by language, thought, and culture. As Everett has argued, the implications of the Whorfian view make the process of language and thought unidirectional with language determining thought patterns with no consideration of what makes language and different linguistic structures possible. Thus, in its attempt to combat an innate universality, the Whorfian hypothesis ultimately eliminates the reverse interaction, that is the interplay of thought as mediated through culture and language.

The (international) politics of silence

The case of the Pirahã involves a fascinating set of questions, power-relations, and political positions. Yet, what is the link to international studies and to one particular representation of an Ashley? Harkening back to earlier articulations of ‘dissidence’, it is these kinds of stories on the so-called margins of international studies that are often the most powerful in that:

The issues of language, culture, and adaptive transformation raised by the Pirahã have considerable implications for global politics. Primarily, one is struck by how the findings of Gordon's study reflect what has become a guiding assumption for much of the critical scholarship undertaken in international studies: that culture, discourse, and language have a fundamental influence over what can be thought, what can be understood, the construction of meaning, and what can be considered possible, which all in turn shape practice. And these are of course questions that have figured prominently in Ashley's own analyses of the cultures of power politics.Footnote ¹³

In navigating the case of the Pirahã, it is disheartening to find that linguistics also shares much of the same extreme behaviouralist baggage as international studies, as well as the same type of incitement to discourse, that is a disciplinary policing tactic whose purposes are to render anything that challenges the foundations of orthodoxy as an outlier to be kept at a distance so that just enough is known without actually having to know what is being kept there.Footnote ¹⁴ The Pirahã and the potential insights that they bring to linguistic theory and perhaps more importantly to discussions of the diversity of the human condition are significant; they cannot and should not be ignored just because they ‘do not fit’ into what has been ontologically positioned as a shared (and more assertively as an innate) characteristic of humanity.

Thus, the research, interpretations, and understandings of the Pirahã that have been brought forward are political for identity claims are being made. Moreover, the politics is imbricated in how the Pirahã are positioned through these representational practices in international studies, but more importantly, in how our own cultures position themselves. As Karena Shaw has argued, ‘our modes of understanding, practices of knowing and acting, structures of social and political organisation, and so on, establish and reflect political possibilities, and […] these spaces are always both enabling and constraining for indigenous peoples (as well as many other ‘marginal’ peoples)’.Footnote ¹⁵

While it is not immediately apparent what exact political possibilities become thinkable or unthinkable in this case, these yet unknown possibilities are initially provocative in an abstract sense: principally, what if our languages, discourses, and cultures (general, disciplinary, sub-disciplinary, political) are so closed as to prohibit the articulation of radical alternatives in a way that can be understood and ultimately configured into practice? Ashley in a searing critique of the predominance of statist economism noted that:

Ashley's argument on taboo therefore sheds light on one part of the constriction equation. But what of the imagined inhabitants of the space beyond taboo, that is the terms, concepts, discourses, and modes of thought that might be able to completely transgress the limits of international studies, but which are completely beyond articulation or even conceptualisation within the limits of our contemporary cultural structures, discursive formations, understandings, and ideational norms? In other words, rather than reading the case of the Pirahã as a means by which to take a swipe at a transposed statist-economism, how might this case give purchase on the political subjectivities of those who would position themselves at the ‘margins’, as ‘dissidents’, as ‘exiles’, by standing defiant against the ravages of a renewed economism (of risk) and the continuing depoliticisation of the political through the deployment of technical rationalisms?

It is productive to interpret the Pirahã case as reflective of issues within international studies, primarily the roles of silence as both a noun and a verb in mapping out political possibilities. Thus, this rendition of the Pirahã as read through an Ashley provides an opportunity for further reflection on how to promote progressive political practice that can transcend disciplinary limits and the pitfalls of past attempts at emancipation. It also echoes a previous call to ‘resist knowledgeable practices of power that would impose […] a set of limitations on what can be done […]’.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, reflecting an ethos of previous dissident works within which one can catch glimpses of an Ashley, the implications of this reading ‘help to accentuate a disciplinary crisis whose single most pronounced symptom is that the very idea of “the discipline” enters thought as a question, a problem, a matter of uncertainty’.Footnote ¹⁸ But, the point of departure is the ‘discipline’ in question. The discursive formation for analysis ought to be critical scholarship itself within international studies. What do we remain silent on?

Within the academy we are taught in one sense to look for silence – in terms of as a noun. As post-graduate students we are counselled to find gaps in the literature or empirical case studies that have yet to be researched in order to bring our own voice to the issues that they raise. In theory, it is this kind of innovative research that is supposed to bring a volume to our voice that demands attention, respect, and a reputation that garners one employment and professional kudos. But as many find out first hand, there is a tension with the other face of silence when it assumes the form of a verb.

We are often reminded that international studies as a discipline has been largely predicated upon a series of unreflexive assumptions about what the field comprises, legitimate concerns within these domains, and the properly rigorous methods to analyse them.Footnote ¹⁹ The propositional has then become concretised, with dialogue routed to produce and secure a dominant consensus.Footnote ²⁰ And as an Ashley has argued, the membership of the dominant consensus leaves fields of inquiry in international studies that are ‘unable to know their own consensual basis or to reflect critically on the correlation, if any, between their own deep presuppositions and the dominant structures of world society’.Footnote ²¹

To maintain a consensus, consensus-makers have deployed various strategies and technologies to silence alternative perspectives on any of its foundational assumptions.Footnote ²² One of the most effective has been to attempt to not think about or discuss them by making them either taboo or sacred. In instances where cultural norms of conformity fail, there are a host of mechanisms to ensure that there are ways of casting off those things, people, and ideas that challenge dominant modes of thinking. These range from sophisticated strategies such as reversing the burden of proof, ontological sleights of hand, and re-deploying mysticism, to the sophomoric – but no less effective – such as bullying, belittlement, and ostracism. These tactics produce the all too familiar jocular narrative of international studies where from the dawn of time to the end of time, man – it is only men who seem to matter in this story – is doomed to be invariably locked into the intrigues of the high politics of international affairs. Somewhere in between, the orthodoxy of international studies has demonstrated an unintentional mastery of its deployment of the Derridean double-bind.

To not engage in these acts of (petty) criticism, to not ‘circle the wagons’, to not condemn others for failures to meet standards that the critics themselves fall far short of, would potentially spoil the stories that are told to explain why things happen in particular ways, that is the common sense of international studies, and the practices that these make possible. Silencing, as an Ashley has revealed, is an active pursuit undertaken by self-defined guardians of orthodoxy to preserve the integrity of a particular meta-theoretical position that benefits the hegemonic aspirations of the most powerful in global politics.Footnote ²³

In part then, silence and silencing have been an integral motivator for the entire spectrum of ‘critical’ literature within international studies, not only to show what cannot be spoken or thought about with international studies but how this can be a deliberate political practice.Footnote ²⁴ At the same time, critical scholarship has drawn attention to the even more insidious problem of circumstances in which silence and silencing are outcomes that are neither intentionally pursued or easily perceived because of the attractiveness of the political project in which they become manifest. Thus, there is a long-standing ‘tradition’ in critical scholarship to investigate outside the borders and on the margins, as well as a growing body of work on what cannot be spoken, thought, or understood in international studies. In particular, the feminisms of international studies have been at fore-front of exploring the political implications of silence as demonstrated in Jan Jindy Pettman's research on the absence of the body in IR scholarship,Footnote ²⁵ Carol Cohen's work on defence intellectuals,Footnote ²⁶ Cynthia Enloe's work on the silences both within emancipatory politics and in the (re)production of war,Footnote ²⁷ and Lene Hansen's analysis of the political and cultural constraints which shape who is able to voice concerns that may lead to securitisation or desecuritisation.Footnote ²⁸

But in reflecting upon the political praxis that has flowed from critical scholarship, both comforts and concerns can be found. In one sense, much of this literature shares a glimmer of hope that ‘the political’ can be revived. The implication for political agency is that the discursive conditions that give rise to problematic practices and structures are not permanent: the ‘right’ words, a radical way of re-thinking, a means of overcoming the most egregious forms of silencing exists – perhaps outside of the specific domain of international studies and its discursive forms – but ultimately a way around the impasse can be found – though this will not be easy. As Lene Hansen has outlined, the transformative task is always very difficult given that one must operate within dominant discourses to be understood even while trying at the same time to reveal their contingent character.Footnote ²⁹ However, there is still an optimism that this can occur; undecidability can become praxis and the topography of contemporary onto-politics re-landscaped.Footnote ³⁰

As such, there is still hope. The hope is that the catalyst for transformation – not merely change – is within that which we already know and that which we already have the ability to articulate or to speak. But ought these assumptions be taken for granted? It is at this precise point where the concerns of an Ashley can combine with the conceptual provocations of the Pirahã case to generate some uncertainty about the revelations that ‘critical’ scholarship often wants to provide.

The first is with respect to hegemony. For example, Craig N. Murphy has explored the nexus of ‘critical IR’, hegemony, and silence particularly in terms of whose voices get heard.Footnote ³¹ But there is another dimension of silence that must be engaged regarding the claims of difference in counter-hegemonic proposals: whatever their form, how different are they in terms of the teleology of governance? This is not a question that should be disregarded, particularly with the experiences of the past decades where we can see the contours of hegemonic power politics being reproduced in post-colonial moments as the discourses and practices of Western governmentality and biopolitics are re-claimed as indigenous forms. For example, we are witnessing this process to potentially cataclysmic results in Burma, China, and Zimbabwe.Footnote ³² And despite promises of progressive politics in other sites through ‘new labour’, ‘compassionate conservatism’, the ‘responsibility to protect’, UN Resolution 1325, ‘human security’, ‘human development’, ‘sustainable development’, and a ‘new world order’, biopolitics, a renewed economism of insurance, proliferates in ostensibly producing ‘life that is worthy of living’.Footnote ³³

For example, while Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri may draw attention to specific systems of accumulation and property, rights and responsibilities, political and social organisation and biology and technology, that are said to embody contemporary life, our gaze must also turn to the knowledge, the beliefs, the profane, and the holy that are all reflective of a cosmological orientation which is constitutive of particular relations of power.Footnote ³⁴ It is this shared cosmology that necessarily bounds ontological possibility; there may be a competition between different ontological systems, but the competition is limited to a particular ontological set within a shared cosmological orbit.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, there is a danger that any struggle for transformation will be no more than the continuation of an ongoing sectarian conflict over the ultimate control of global biopower.

This is certainly not a good prognosis. But by turning to the example of the Pirahã we may be able to identify potential avenues to extricate ourselves out of this quagmire without succumbing to Pandora's boxes of our own design. It is in remaining healthily sceptical of the avenues for transformation that can potentially keep critical scholarship from becoming complicit in problematic reconfigurations of intellectual and practical hegemony.

However, in this on-going struggle to problematise the problematic, there has been a lot of posturing and boundary building of late. Manifestos of perceived inclusion and exclusion have been written and nailed to metaphoric church doors sparking heated debates.Footnote ³⁶ Increasingly, those on the frontier appear to be colonising territory, potentially restricting entry through practices of definition.Footnote ³⁷ It is also evident that there is an increasing intolerance of intellectual difference at the margins.Footnote ³⁸ As such, critical scholarship itself has sometimes shown a darker understanding of the theory/practice nexus around silence.

This has been compounded by a crucial strategy that appears to have largely gone un-deployed. Both the case of the Pirahã and a reading of the discipline of international studies brought forward by an Ashley emphasise the safety in remaining ‘unknown’ to the eyes of power to as great an extent as practical. Much like in contemporary calculations of risk central to security management, the most subversive and unsettling phenomenon is that which cannot be known by the actuary – one which is accompanied by a lack of readily digestible information so that normal means of determining probabilities cannot be utilised. Why then has there been a rush in some quarters to make it easy for critical positions to be known at ‘arms length’ by mainstreamers without really having to be known?Footnote ³⁹ Once probabilities are calculated, once mainstreamers believe that they have figured out a critical position, it becomes far easier to become coopted (even against one's will), ignored, or otherwise marginalised. To avoid this kind of marginalisation, keeping a step ahead, always transforming, always rethinking, always reformulating, always re-problematising, and re-examining the foundations of one's contradictions, are a probably a good start.

But reflexivity is not necessarily sufficient in making our own facile gestures difficult. And the difficulty arises precisely at that moment when articulation escapes us, when we are at a loss for words, when we cannot think beyond concepts that arise from within contemporary life, whether these are transformative, reactionary, or apathetic.

This is really just a starting point; there can be concern not only with what we are not capable of articulating in promoting new forms of political and social (dis)organisation in global politics – depending on preference – but also with what we as subjects might be incapable of comprehending. What can we not even think because of our cosmological backdrop? Of course the answer is we do not really know. We may have inklings about what is difficult to conceptualise, but, riffing on a contemporary philosopher of note, Donald Rumsfeld, how can we expect to know the breadth and depth of what we cannot know? In this sense, the Pirahã actually have a leg up on the rest of us. They have partially figured this out, tried to address it, and found ways to cope that retain their distinctiveness. Moreover, they have done so in a way that has caused no violence to any other community.

Therefore, the Pirahã also point to where we perhaps might want to begin to learn what we do not know we do not know: the so-called outliers: people who have resisted the dominant cosmology and teleology of contemporary life; those who in being marginalised have made the privileged (political) condition of the ‘critical’ academic possible.Footnote ⁴⁰ Reaching out will likely involve a humbleness that has been lacking in previous attempts in navigating ‘Otherness’; it also pushes beyond the deployment of (critical) ethnographic methods as the sole means of communication.Footnote ⁴¹ Although reflexive ethnographies open the possibility to listen and to struggle to understand other perspectives from as far within them as one can get, the ethnographic encounter is, in part like any other method of data collection or research interaction, made possible and defined by the spores of deeply embedded relations of power.Footnote ⁴² Therefore, rather than the sole means of understanding, it might be better viewed as but one step of a more complex process.

Conversely, it is also important not to discount the relations of power engendered by international studies and the phenomena it seeks to understand that are constitutive of the everyday. What elements then of the everyday shape the ways in which people understand the limits of the political, politics, and the possibilities for transformation? In other words, as illustrated by numerous studies that are concerned with these issues, there is also value in locating international studies beyond the confines of elite statecraft or formal institutions.Footnote ⁴³ In doing so, it becomes possible to render the normal abnormal and the familiar strange.

Perhaps the biggest challenge then is not only that which arises from an Ashley and other early dissidents, that is, to make mainstreamers feel uncomfortable about particular forms of enquiry and therefore themselves, but to really embrace one's own discomfort. This would be a call to go beyond the realisation that our narratives are always bounded, that any knowledge is always partial or that any discourse is infused with relations of power. It is also a call to go beyond what an Ashley counselled as ‘reflecting critically on the correlation, if any, between [… our] own deep presuppositions and the dominant structures of world society’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is a call to get into a conceptual headspace that is completely alien to the point of provoking the question known in cyber-speak as ‘WTF?’ in order to identify any potential forms of political practice, resistance, defiance, and transformation that are currently unknown – at least to critical scholarship in IR – or overlooked.

There must however be cautiousness towards the ways in which difference is evoked and invoked in order to ensure that it does not become an excuse to mystify, mistreat and/or fear. Moreover, there must be a wariness to guard against difference being discursive deployed for the sake of reactionary politics by tapping into culturally chauvinistic representational practices.Footnote ⁴⁵

This is always an ongoing concern though even more so in instances like that of the Pirahã when the red flag of incommensurability is raised. As Everett has shown with his fieldwork, there always exists at least the possibility of partial translation that can perhaps be the beginning of a fuller understanding to be reached in the future.

Yet translation itself is not politically neutral. As Talal Asad has argued:

Echoing this sentiment, Susan Buck-Morss has argued that in the exercise of translation, ‘promise lies in […] apparent incommensurabilities, because the attempt fosters each language to extend itself creatively, becoming more than it was, producing an open space in which a new politics might take root […]’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ultimately then, ‘a successful translation […] leaves neither the original nor the receiving language unchanged’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ethics of translation then is not only how to best voice the ideas and spirit of the words of the original speaker, but also how tolerant is one's own language in ‘assuming unaccustomed forms’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Again this is likely easier said then done. While Buck-Morss’ sentiment is laudable, it still is vulnerable to promoting the universal at the expense of the particular. Specifically, the focal point of this conception of translation is implicitly tied to a left Hegelian dialectic that assumes out of the interaction of two particulars, a new emancipatory universal will arise. Thus, Buck-Morss is a little too willing to ignore the power/relations that any claim to universalism embodies as well as the political struggle that is inherent in defining emancipation.

Therefore, claims of incommensurability must be negotiated to ensure that this does not become a justification for not putting in the effort to learn, to expand the channels of inter-subjective communication, cultural understanding and sensitivity. There is also the danger recognised by an Ashley that ‘the act of translation can become a kind of reductio ad absurdum that transmits […] new interests and insights […] only to the extent that they reinforce, and do not call into question [… a] dominant consensus’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Again, this encourages the analyst to be prepared to feel uncomfortable, to move beyond her referents, in a sense to gain freedom through a lack of certainty. This space for reflection, both metaphorical and physical, becomes possible because of the initial work that was undertaken by Ashley and the other earlier dissidents who opened international studies to ‘listen[ing] attentively to the “muffled cries” of dissidence that are already everywhere to be heard’.Footnote ⁵¹

Departures

With respect to the Pirahã, Everett has argued:

Counter-intuitively, the Pirahã case has a potential twist that points to the value of destabilising the liberal tendency to see silence as inherently a bad thing; silence can have a resonance and dignity more powerful than the words that fill its vacuum. As Slavoj Žižek has noted, ‘those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence […]’.Footnote ⁵³ Silence, making the conscious choice not to engage in the terms defined by an asymmetrical power relation, can therefore be utilised as a deliberate strategy of resistance and defiance. From this perspective, silence has been used by the Pirahã as a strategy for survival. One wonders if an Ashley reveals that this might be useful for resisting the various hegemonies within the disciplines of international studies? If so, where would one end up? Would one want to actually be there? Answers are not clear. However, I do take some comfort in knowing that the answer has not yet been decided.