Invité à l'EHESS dans le cadre du PRI Anthropologie et Linguistique
animé par Michel de Fornel et Francis Zimmermann

MICHAEL  P.  LEMPERT
University of Michigan

donnera quatre conférences en anglais auxquelles vous serez toutes et tous les bienvenus.
Le programme, le calendrier et les résumés sont présentés ci-dessous.

Michael Lempert est anthropologue-linguiste et tibétologue. Quelques articles qui l'ont fait connaître et des chapitres du manuscrit de son prochain livre dont il sera question le 18 mai sont accessibles à titre privé, tant dans la bibliothèque d'Anthropologie linguistique que dans la bibliothèque des Angles de l'Asie:

http://ehess.anthropologielinguistique.fr/library/129/

http://ehess.anglesdelasie.fr/bibliotheque/78/

Dès que les abonnés à l'une ou l'autre de ces bibliothèques se seront identifiés, les liens de téléchargement s'afficheront au bas de l'une ou l'autre de ces deux pages. Nous abonnerons avec plaisir les enseignants, chercheurs et étudiants de l'EHESS qui le demanderont par mail à Michel de Fornel ou Francis Zimmermann.

 

1 / Mercredi 5 mai, 11h-13h, 105 bd Raspail salle 2 (Séminaire de Michel de Fornel)

Poetics in Face-to-Face Interaction

In this talk I consider how “poetic” structure in discourse (e.g. lexicosyntactic repetition and parallelism) can serve as a principle for the construal of action. Focusing on the dynamics of stance-taking in two forms of debate — Tibetan Buddhist debate among monks in India and televised presidential debates in U.S. electoral politics —, I first show how poetic structure can help map sentence-level propositional stance into cross-turn interactional stance. By scanning utterances for their fractional congruence (degree of likeness-unlikeness), we can reconstruct how interactants move from orientations toward their talk to orientations toward each other. As I discuss the value of this “pragmatic-poetic turn” (Silverstein 2004)* for the study of interaction, I highlight key differences between these cases that reveal limitations with transcript-centered research on poetics in fields like sociolinguistics. I close by turning to one of the most vital sites for the poetic function: “ritualized” face-to-face encounters, where dense, cross-modal poetic structures figurate pictorially what they aspire to effectuate pragmatically.

*silverstein_cultural_concepts.pdf — Michael Siverstein, “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 5, December 2004: 621-645. (Bibliothèque numérique du PRI, dossier Silverstein.)

 

2 / Mardi 18 mai, 11h-13h, 105 bd Raspail salle 8 (séminaire collectif Les Angles de l'Asie)

Sur un thème que l'on peut formuler en français sous la forme:

La fabrication d'un moine bouddhiste:
Débat, réprimande et punition au sein de la diaspora bouddhiste tibétaine

Michael Lempert présentera en anglais son livre à paraître sous le titre:

Debate and Discipline.
The Language of Incivility in Modern Tibetan Buddhism

This research traces the career of the modern liberal subject in the Tibetan diaspora in India. Focusing on incivility in courtyard debate (rtsod pa), public reprimand (tshogs gtam), and corporeal punishment at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India, I show how received forms of monastic pedagogy and discipline have come to trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity.

Following his dramatic flight to India in 1959, the Dalai Lama began to fashion Tibetan Buddhism into a ‘modern’ world religion, stressing its commitment to rational inquiry and compatibility with empirical science (Lopez 1998, 2008)**. Above all, he declared non-violence and “universal compassion” to be Buddhism’s essence, a declaration that coincided with a political appeal: that the People’s Republic of China respect human rights in Tibet, that it turn back its policies of ethnic and cultural repression so that Tibet might enjoy, if not independence, at least a “meaningful autonomy.” As Adams (1998)* has suggested, the exiled Tibetan embrace of metropole human-rights discourse has obliged Tibetans to take seriously certain liberal-humanist ideals, including belief in the individual, autonomous, rights-bearing subject. These ideals, together with the liberal post-Enlightenment ideals of clarity, sincerity, and civility in speech—ideals that have entered Tibetan diasporic communities along several routes and whose genealogy stems to at least 17th-century England—often clash with Tibetan cultural sensibilities about how young monks should be socialized into their vocation. For debate, what should be done with the challengers’ histrionic anger when he hurls invectives at the seated defendant and uses blistering hand-claps that explode inches from the defendant’s nose? What of the practice’s unequal ‘rights’ of participation, like the fact that it’s the challenger who regulates topic flow and gets to ask the questions? What of reprimand and corporeal punishment, monastic practices that figurate hierarchical relations between interactants and thus also shape moral dispositions in seemingly nonliberal ways?

To draw out these tensions, I examine the semiotics of incivility at two ideologically opposed sites in the field of Tibetan religious education: (a) the conservative Sera Monastery in Byllakupe, south India, a bastion of traditionalism populated by several thousand monks, and (b) the smaller, self-consciously modernized “Institute of Buddhist Dialectics” in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and epicenter of Tibetan Buddhist modernism in India. This project draws on over 2.5 years of contact with Tibetans in South Asia that stretch back over two decades, with the core of the fieldwork being carried out in 1998 and 2000-2001. This project, based in linguistic and sociocultural anthropology, argues that globalizing modernity cannot simply be studied as a set of circulating ideals and institutions but is played out in struggles over what these larger scale ideals and institutions materially look like in routinized events of face-to-face interaction.

*Adams, Vincanne. 1998. Suffering the Winds of Lhasa: Politicized Bodies, Human Rights, Cultural Difference, and Humanism in Tibet. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12 (1):74-102.

**Lopez, Donald S. 1998. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2008. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

 

3 / Jeudi 20 mai, 11h-13h, 105 bd Raspail salle 8 (Séminaire de Francis Zimmermann)

Scholarly Disputes as Verbal Art among Tibetan Monks

Tibetan Buddhist debate is unapologetically histrionic, a form of verbal art self-conscious of its own dramaturgy. Rather than soberly link premises to a conclusion, the monk challenger in debate shouts, stamps his feet, hurls taunts, and punctuates his points with loud open-palmed hand claps aimed at the seated defendant’s face. As the challenger does this, he tries to rend the inter-textual coherence of Buddhist doctrine, prying apart the authoritative propositions that monks memorize and uphold with such care in non-debate contexts. The defendant is the challenger’s mirror image, for he is to remain poised and unflappable and is tasked with maintaining the semblance of doctrinal coherence. In this talk I walk through the intricate ritual emplotment and cross-modal aesthetics of one debate I videorecorded at Sera Mey monastic-college in south India. I illustrate how debate cannot be reduced to some species of ethno-logic, where one privileges normative standards of denotational textuality. In this case, forms of intellectual demeanor and style contribute to the practice’s ideological force as a rite of institution.

 

4 / Mardi 25 mai, 15h-17h, 105 bd Raspail salle 11 (Séminaire de Michel de Fornel)

Addressivity

“Recipient design,” that is, the “multitude of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974:727; cf. Goffman 1978; Bell 1984), has traditionally been scaled as “micro,” where the conversation is the here-and-now speech event, and where co-participants are flesh-and-blood people in earshot. In this talk I stretch this envelope to encompass interdiscursive forms of addressivity. I recuperate Bakhtin’s (1986:95) expansive (if conceptually unwieldy) notion of “addressivity,” an utterance’s “quality of being directed to someone” as he sweepingly put it, and survey some of the semiotic methods by which addressivity effects are created in discourse. Addressivity can be signaled perhaps most obviously by resources like participant deixis and address terms, yet it is more frequently motivated through denotationally implicit means. In the poetics of stance, for instance, cross-turn lexicosyntactic parallelism can invite readings that the second stance is oriented to the first because it is felt to resemble it. Second pair parts in adjacency pairs are by default oriented to their first pair parts by virtue of norms of sequentiality. Gaze direction, bodily orientation, and “deictic” gestures are equally familiar ways to select addressees and establish vectors of address. I illustrate how resources can be combined to create textually complex—and sometimes purposively confusing—addressivity effects (e.g. restricted gaze direction toward someone but the utterance is too loud, as if the utterance were designed for an overhearer). Of special interest are cases in which speakers seem to tailor their speech to non-copresent others, whether “real,” biographically definable people or incorporeal agents like spirits or political constituencies.