Ritual Communication W ENNER -G REN I NTERNAT I ONAL S YMPO si UM S ER I E S . Series Editor: Leslie C. Aiello, President, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York. ISSN: 1475-536X Previous titles in this series: Anthropology Beyond Culture Edited by Richard G. Fox & Barbara J. King, 2002 Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy Edited by Katherine Verdery & Caroline Humphrey, 2004 Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity Edited by Veit Erlmann, 2004 Embedding Ethics Edited by Lynn Meskell & Peter Pels, 2005 World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power Edited by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, 2006 Sensible Objects: Colonialisms, Museums and Material Culture Edited by Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips, 2006 Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction Edited by N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson, 2006 Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered Edited by Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, 2007 Anthropology Put to Work Edited by Les W. Field and Richard G. Fox, 2007 Indigenous Experience Today Edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn Since its inception in 1941, the Wenner-Gren Foundation has convened more than 125 international symposia on pressing issues in anthro pology. These symposia affirm the worth of anthropology and its capacity to address the nature of humankind from a wide variety of perspectives. Each symposium brings together participants from around the world, representing different theoretical disciplines and traditions, for a week-long engagement on a specific issue. The Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series was initiated in 2000 to ensure the publication and distribution of the results of the foundation’s International Symposium Program. Prior to this series, some landmark Wenner-Gren volumes include: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), ed. William L. Thomas; Man the Hunter (1968), eds Irv DeVore and Richard B. Lee; Cloth and Human Experience (1989), eds Jane Schneider and Annette Weiner; and Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (1993), eds Kathleen Gibson and Tim Ingold. Reports on recent symposia and further information can be found on the foundation’s website at www.wennergren.org. Ritual Communication Edited by GUNTER SENFT AND ELLEN B. BAssO Oxford • New York English edition First published in 2009 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Wenner Gren Foundation 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84788 296 7 (Cloth) 978 1 84788 295 0 (Paper) Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group www.bergpublishers.com Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix List of Contributors xi Introduction Ellen B. Basso and Gunter Senft 1 1 Little Rituals John B. Haviland 21 2 Everyday Ritual in the Residential World N. J. Enfield 51 3 Trobriand Islanders’ Forms of Ritual Communication Gunter Senft 81 4 “Like a Crab Teaching Its Young to Walk Straight”: Proverbiality, Semantics, and Indexicality in English and Malay Cliff Goddard 103 5 Access Rituals in West African Communities: An Ethnopragmatic Perspective Felix K. Ameka 127 6 Ritual and the Circulation of Experience: Negotiating Community in the Twentieth-Century Amazon Suzanne Oakdale 153 v vi Contents 7 Communicative Resonance across Settings: Marriage Arrangement, Initiation, and Political Meetings in Kenya Corinne A. Kratz 171 8 Ritualized Performances as Total Social Facts: The House of Multiple Spirits in Tokelau Ingjerd Hoëm 203 9 Unjuk Rasa (“Expression of Feeling”) in Sumba: Bloody Thursday in Its Cultural and Historical Context Joel C. Kuipers 223 10 Civility and Deception in Two Kalapalo Ritual Forms Ellen B. Basso 243 11 Private Ritual Encounters, Public Ritual Indexes Michael Silverstein 271 12 “While I Sing I Am Sitting in a Real Airplane”: Innovative Contents in Shuar and Achuar Ritual Communication Maurizio Gnerre 293 13 Interior Dialogues: The Co-Voicing of Ritual in Solitude John W. Du Bois 317 References 341 Index 373 Figures 1.1 Cargoholders greet each other at the doorway of a house 31 1.2 The godfather at a wedding, with elders and newlyweds 33 1.3 A tipsy uncle harangues his niece 34 1.4 Harangued niece reluctantly bows to admonishing uncle 35 1.5 The ritual adviser takes leave of the old man 41 1.6 The ritual adviser offers a ceremonial drink to the old man 44 1.7 The old man drinks three times 46 2.1 Two Kri families relaxing at home 52 2.2 Plan of a typical Kri house 59 2.3 Elevation of a Kri house 60 2.4 Father’s house (top) and son’s house 62 2.5 The usual referent of tuup ‘field hut’ 63 2.6 A menstruating woman is not allowed to ascend the house 65 2.7 A man contaminated by having assisted during a childbirth 66 2.8 Kri speakers eating around a kamààng ‘tray table’ 67 2.9 Layout of four tray tables across the house 69 2.10 Tray tables laid out for ritual eating 70 2.11 Views from the rồồng (upper-outer corner) during a ceremony 74 2.12 Example of sanction during ritual ceremony 75 4.1 Structure of semantic template for proverb text meanings 107 9.1 A Sumbanese “angry man” 226 9.2 A Sumbanese ritual speaker 228 9.3 A traditional Sumbanese village 228 9.4 Students occupying Parliament building, Jakarta, May 1998 231 9.5 Protesters in West Sumba, 1998 233 9.6 An anti-George W. Bush rally, Indonesia, 2006 239 13.1 Co-voicing the ritual stance 334 vii Acknowledgments This book is the result of a symposium on ritual communication spon s- ored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. In 1999, meeting for the first time in Mainz, Germany, we began to explore ritual communication as a topic for extensive discussion that might interest an international group of linguistic anthropologists. We thank Richard Fox, former director of the foundation, and Leslie Aiello, its current director, for their interest and encouragement, which led to the acceptance of our proposal. The conference was eventually held in a most beautiful setting, the Hotel Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal, on March 16–23, 2007. The planning work by the foundation’s conference program associate, Laurie Obbink, on behalf of all participants was exceptional, and we thank her again for making the meeting special indeed. Leslie Aiello and Victoria Malkin, the foundation’s anthropologist, not only contributed to the discussions during the meeting but also performed important work as liaisons with the publishers. We are grateful to our three conference discussants, Richard Bauman, John Lucy, and Charles Briggs, whose lively remarks greatly enhanced the discussion during our Sintra stay. Richard Bauman also provided us with extensive written comments, some of which we used in prepar- ing our introduction. We also gratefully acknowledge the participation of our symposium monitor, Antonio Jose B. da Silva, then a graduate student at the University of Arizona. During the production of the book, the efficient and professional contributions of Victoria Malkin at Wenner-Gren and Anna Wright at Berg were invaluable. Thanks also to Jane Kepp for her help with preparation of the manuscript. Above all, we thank our Jaffrey and Senft families for their unstinting patience and loving support during the preparation of this volume. Ellen B. Basso Gunter Senft ix Contributors Felix K. Ameka, Leiden University Ellen B. Basso, University of Arizona (emerita) John W. Du Bois, University of California, Santa Barbara N. J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Maurizio Gnerre, University of Naples Cliff Goddard, University of New England (Australia) John B. Haviland, University of California, San Diego Ingjerd Hoëm, Kon-Tiki Museum and University of Oslo Corinne A. Kratz, Emory University Joel C. Kuipers, George Washington University Suzanne Oakdale, University of New Mexico Gunter Senft, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago xi Introduction Ellen B. Basso and Gunter Senft itual communication is an undertaking or enterprise involving a Rmaking of cultural knowledge within locally variant practices of speech-centered human interaction. The position adopted in this book is that ritual communication is artful, performed semiosis, predominantly but not only involving speech, that is formulaic and repetitive and therefore anticipated within particular contexts of social interaction. Ritual communication thus has anticipated (but not always achieved) consequences. As performance, it is subject to evaluation by participants according to standards defined in part by language ideologies, local aesthetics, contexts of use, and, especially, relations of power among participants. In this poetic-pragmatic view of ritual language or ritual communica- tion, “meaningfulness” is both a retrospective and a prospective process. Participants use local, inherited understandings and experiences, both collective and personal, to create new events and prospective selves and to project these forward into an anticipation of the future. In all places and times, people appear to describe types of talk, which persons use them, how their use is experienced, their effects and relations to each other, and what happens when they are misused. Although some claim that the actual relationships between rules and consequences are often unclear—uncertain even to the speakers themselves—in fact many resources are available to local speakers for use in new contexts of ritualization.