|
Conférences de John B. HAVILAND professeur invité à l'EHESS Dans le cadre du PRI Anthropologie et Linguistique animé par Michel de Fornel et Francis Zimmermann, John B. Haviland, Professeur au Département d'Anthropologie de l'Université de Californie à San Diego, donnera quatre conférences réparties sur nos deux séminaires de recherche, le Mercredi de 11h à 13h en salle 2 (Michel de Fornel) et le Jeudi de 11h à 13h en salle 8 (Francis Zimmermann). Nous accueillons ensemble à chaque fois notre invité et nous espérons que, dans la mesure de leur disponibilité, nos auditoires respectifs se réuniront pour cette occasion. Page web personnelle à UCSD: Page Haviland sur le site Classiques et liste des PDFs de ses publications 1 Mercredi 18 mars 2009 au séminaire de Michel de Fornel “We want to borrow your mouth”—master speakers and (real) linguistic competence In the historical progression from langue to competence, there have been a series of partly constructive but largely subtractive moves to delimit the subject matter of linguistic enquiry, stripping away first history, then society, and finally actual behavior in the retreat to modules of the mind, commonalities of the species, and abstract analytical capacities. The notion of what it means to know, that is, to be “competent” in a language or languages has correspondingly shrunken, giving a kind of analytical equality to all (idealized) speakers of an (idealized) language, and, indeed, casting suspicion on the differences between speakers by reducing them either to ideological—perhaps prescriptive—constructions overlaid on mere language “use,” or to “local” perturbations in the language variety itself. I would like to consider inequality with regard to resources of language, discourses, styles and genres as a direct challenge to such an impoverished, shrunken view of language. In a tiny Tzotzil-speaking hamlet tucked into the mountains of highland Chiapas, Mexico, lives my compadre and teacher Don Mariano. Now a nearly deaf and blind octogenarian, Mariano was one of the community’s “holy elders” and also a totil-me`il “father-mother” or ritual adviser, a specialist in ritual procedures, etiquette, and above all, words. He counts as one of his few skills in the world the ability to talk well, knowledge of the mot juste, the convincing turn of phrase, the elegant and courteous formula for lubricating an encounter, the quip or story to spark a laugh, the admonition to shame or silence an opponent. He is, indeed, not merely a particular instantiation of the “ideal speaker-hearer” in Tzotzil but instead a true master speaker—master, that is, of the linguistic skills that allow him to manage an interaction, to help solve (or occasionally to create) a problem, and in general to navigate a complex social world. In this paper I consider the micro-ethnography of linguistic value: using Don Mariano and his discourses as my foil, I consider how one becomes a master-speaker, what constitutes such mastery of Tzotzil (and its neighboring linguistic varieties), and how this expanded notion of linguistic competence fares, both in the evolving sociolinguistic spaces of modern Chiapas and in the analytical spaces of modern sociolinguistics.
2 Jeudi 26 mars 2009 au séminaire de Francis Zimmermann Virtuoso verbal vending and magical merolico marketing in Mexico City's Alameda In Mexico, many an urban streetcorner or rural marketplace will sport a merolico, a vendor who hawks varied wares—from blankets to snake oil, from food to magical talismans—to the accompaniment of a torrent of speech, sometimes electrically amplified, sometimes shouted in virtuoso, fluent spiels. Over the course of several years, I have collected specimens of performances by these home grown modern business specialists, trying to understand both the discursive structure and the peculiarly compelling commercial and cultural force of this characteristic form of verbal vending. In this study I examine how merolicos package several different kinds of goods for sale, physically, socially, and verbally. I analyze the inherent structure of the merolico’s act against a theory of the requisites for any commercial transaction. I consider not only the content of the running, interactive dialogue, in which the merolico imputes virtues to the wares on offer, but also its poetic form, enhancing the values of both product and performance, and its indexical grounding in the environment. I place the merolico against the surrounding cultural context, to highlight the special role that words play in transforming the interaction into something more than mere mundane exchange. I also try to locate expert merolicos ethnographically, in particular the accomplished troops of performers who work the highly demanding public stage of La Alameda in the center of Mexico City. In particular, in the central fragments to be analyzed, I consider first how a comic merolico assembles a crowd of onlookers, seemingly out of nowhere from the passing throng; and thereafter how a specialist merolico “sells with fear”: how he imbues both his product and his person with a powerful magical aura that virtually compels his audience first to enter into the interaction, and ultimately to part with a potentially enormous amount of money. Since the entire transaction is managed discursively, it is through a detailed analysis of the interactive properties of the verbal performance—including word, gesture, and spatial manipulation—that we may discover the loci of power in the merolico’s performance.
3 Jeudi 2 avril 2009 au séminaire de Francis Zimmermann Musical spaces In this comparative look at some contrasting kinds of musical performance, I try to present a widened theoretical paradigm for dealing with talk exchanges. The paper presents various threads of an investigation in progress, on musical performances, but also on mastery and expertise, and on “entertainments” in general and the interactive structuring of space. I concentrate on how the spaces in which musicians play—the layout of the room or playing area, its physical characteristics and those of the instruments, and the bodies of the musicians themselves—structure (musical and para-musical) communication and interaction. My material is drawn first from two “master classes” in a university setting, one with a string quartet and the other with a jazz combo, and it takes a further comparative look at traditional ritual music in a Mayan Indian community. The structuring of the performance spaces is first linked to certain formal properties of the music itself: its relationship to a composer, score, or other fixed structure. (Consider here, by comparison, the formal linguistic structure of spoken utterances.) I then analyze problems of sequence and coordination in musical performance, on an analogue with similar interactional dilemmas in spoken conversation (issues such as openings, closings, overlaps, transitions, and even ‘pre’ sequences) and proposed mechanisms for resolving them with a combination of cueing devices involving everything from words to postures. Pushing the analogy between musical performance and conversation still further, I consider various layers or orders of musical performance (from rehearsal and explicit teaching to ‘real playing’), and also a kind of musical intertextuality (in which, for example, a composer or a “standard” can act as context for a specific “re-textualization” in the moment). Finally, I consider some interactive virtues of performers’ bodies and of the musical instruments themselves in coordinating musical performances, trying again to draw out the parallels with ordinary talk, whose performance characteristics are thus underlined.
4 Mercredi 8 avril 2009 au séminaire de Michel de Fornel Portable signs: context (in)dependence and a cline of indexicality Some of the most important linguistics of the past few decades has traced the seemingly spontaneous emergence and rapid evolution of manual sign languages. Though the process has clearly been repeated over and over throughout human history, in a wide range of sociocultural contexts, the creation of manual communication systems and their gradual systematization have only been carefully studied (and relatively recently at that) in institutional contexts: the deaf schools that led to the regimented sign languages of Europe (including ASL, and Mexican sign language) and most recently the emergent sign language of Nicaragua that developed in a Sandinista school. A related phenomenon—the nonce home sign systems invented by isolated deaf children in hearing environments—has also received considerable attention, although the organization of modern society, especially in the first world, nearly guarantees that such homesigners (sooner or later) come into contact with established alternative communicative systems, so that their idiosyncratically invented manual languages are evanescent or simply vanish along with their inventors. Finally, there has been recent systematic attention to so-called “village sign languages”—notably in Yucatán, Bali, Ghana, and Bedouin Israel—where genetic factors and marriage patterns have produced multi-generational communities of deaf and hearing people who develop a common manual modality that usually exists side-by-side with a spoken language or languages. Some such communities have a long history—several hundred years, perhaps, in the Balinese case—and others seem to have existed for just a few generations—three in the 70 year history of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language; all have had varied sorts of contact with and borrowing from surrounding established languages (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, and Israeli Sign Language in the latter case). This paper presents preliminary results from a fairly unique different sort of case—hardly unique in the history of mankind, that is, but unusual under present global circumstances: a first generation (and hopefully 1.5th generation) “village,” or better “family” sign language developing in a single family from a Tzotzil(Mayan)-speaking village in highland Chiapas, Mexico. The family includes hearing parents, siblings, nieces, and the first child of three profoundly deaf individuals who have never met other deaf people, never been exposed to another sign language, never been to school, and, indeed, virtually never had contact with speakers of any language other than Tzotzil. The deaf individuals range between about 18 and 28 years of age, and there is one intermediate hearing sibling and hearing niece who have grown up using and contributing to a shared manual communicative system. Finally, the oldest deaf individual now has a child, currently about 18 months old, who is simultaneously acquiring his mother and uncles’ homesign and spoken Tzotzil. The paper concentrates on a central issue in the emergence of linguistic signs: the interplay between iconic, indexical, and symbolic semiotic modalities. Previous research on manual gesture in Tzotzil (as well as its grammatical and conceptual structure) allows direct attention to putative morpho-phonological sources for this homesign, as well as potential conceptual commonalities between the matrix Mayan language and the emerging sign language. In particular this paper will discuss experimental results about emerging color discriminations, referential symbols, and the nature of “portable” lexicalized signs which can be emancipated from the immediate context of speaking.
|
