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In the Name of the Father-In-Law: Pastoralism, Patriarchy and the Sociolinguistic Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa

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In the Name of the Father-In-Law: Pastoralism, Patriarchy and the Sociolinguistic Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Article In the name of the father-in-law: Pastoralism, patriarchy and the sociolinguistic prehistory of eastern and southern Africa Luke Fleming, Alice Mitchell and Isabelle Ribot Abstract In a range of eastern and southern African language communities, stretching from Ethiopia to the Cape, married women are enjoined to avoid the names of members of their husband’s family as well as (near-)homophones of those names, and to replace tabooed vocabulary with substitute words. Although in-law name avoidance is a global phenomenon, the daughter-in-law speech registers thus constituted are unusual in their linguistic elaboration: they involve avoidance not only of names and true homophones of names but also an array of words whose only relation to tabooed names is phonological similarity. We provide an overview of the distribution and convergent social and linguistic characteristics of these registers and then examine one register more closely, namely, that of Datooga of Tanzania. To tease apart the layers of causality that converge upon this particular sociolinguistic pattern, we consider archaeological, ethnological, sociolinguistic and genetic lines of evidence. We propose that any partial diffusion of in-law avoidance practices has been complemented by a complex of sociocultural factors motivating the emergence of this pattern at different times and places across the African continent. These factors include pastoralism, patrilineal descent ideologies and norms of patrilocal post- marital residence paired with cattle-based bridewealth exchange. KEYWORDS: DAUGHTER-IN-LAW REGISTERS, NAME TABOOS, SOCIOLINGUISTIC PREHISTORY, HLONIPHA, KINSHIP, SOCIAL PRAGMATICS Affiliation Université de Montréal, Canada email: [email protected] Universität zu Köln, Germany email: [email protected] Université de Montréal, Canada email: [email protected] SOLS VOL 13.2-4 2019 171–192 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.37860 © 2020, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 172 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 1 Introduction In-law avoidance is a widespread practice cross-culturally, often associated with avoidance of physical contact, eye-contact or the direct transfer of possessions. It also commonly has sociolinguistic correlates. The most conspicuous and widespread of these is name avoidance and taboo. In this paper we look at the distribution, in eastern and southern Africa, of linguistic registers built up around such practices of name taboo. In language communities throughout this region, daughters-in-law are proscribed against uttering the names of their fathers-in-law. Furthermore, this name taboo often conditions avoidance of lexical forms iconic of the name of the father-in-law and other senior kin of the husband. These daughter-in-law registers are found across a wide geographic expanse from Ethiopia to the Cape, in languages representing all three of the largest African language families – Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo and Afroasiatic. In an important article on the Kambaata daughter-in-law ballishsha register, Treis (2005) underlined the striking parallels between the Eastern Cushitic and Southern Bantu daughter-in-law registers: Why is such a similar type of ‘respect through avoidance’ (Herbert, 1990:455) practiced by women geographically so far apart? Kambaata society is patrilineal and strongly patriarchal, marriage is virilocal and forbidden among members of the same clan, and a married woman and her in-laws live in close proximity – i.e., there are major similarities [between Kambaata and] Nguni society. But these social similarities surely cannot be considered a sufficient reason for the parallels […]; otherwise, one would expect this special type of word taboo to be attested in many more languages and societies. (Treis, 2005:317–318) The similarities between Eastern Cushitic and Southern Bantu daughter-in-law registers could be understood in at least three ways: (1) as surface similarities attributable to divergent sociocultural, demic, ecological, etc. causes; (2) as convergent (or ‘analogous’) sociolinguistic forms arising from homologous nonlinguistic factors; (3) as ‘derived’ sociolinguistic patterns resulting from horizontal cultural transmission. In this paper we seek answers to Treis’ question by drawing on data from all four anthropological subdisciplines. By using archaeological, ethnological, sociolinguistic and genetic lines of evidence we begin to tease apart the layers of causality that converge upon this particular sociolinguistic pattern. Though this article is question-driven, we also hope to make a methodological contribution: our exposition illustrates that sociolinguistic registers can be used to reconstruct information about social organization and migrations in the past, suggesting that sociolinguistic reconstruction should be IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER-IN-LAW 173 integrated into the toolbox of linguistic evidence like cultural vocabularies, language family relationships and linguistic substrates that archaeologists employ to reason about prehistory. The article begins with an overview of registers built out of name and homophone avoidance in the African context. It then presents a case-study of the Datooga daughter-in-law register, based on field research by Mitchell, to exemplify name and homophone avoidance as a contextualized social practice. Finally, it seeks to probe diffusionary and convergent sources of similarities in sociolinguistic patterning by drawing on archaeological and genetic evidence concerning human migrations and cultural diffusion in eastern and southern African prehistory. 2 Name taboos and in-law avoidance registers In-law avoidance is practiced all over the world, and in many places is associated with linguistic markers. In some languages an alternation between honorific and non-honorific pronouns is keyed to particular affinal relationships. For instance, in Djaru (Pama-Nyungan) the plural functions as an honorific in 2nd and 3rd person pronominals, but its use is restricted to avoided in-laws classified as majili (‘mothers-in-law and their siblings’) (Tsunoda, 1981). In many Australian com- munities, large lexical repertoires (so-called ‘mother-in-law languages’) substitute for everyday words proscribed in referring to, addressing or while co-present with, certain categories of affines (Dixon, 1990; Haviland, 1979). But the most common sociolinguistic marker of in-law avoidance relationships cross-culturally is name avoidance. Name avoidance, like the avoidance of touch or mutual eye- gaze – two other classic nonverbal emblems of in-law respect relationships – seems often to be experienced as an avoidance of direct contact with the taboo relation, as Stasch (2003) argues for Korowai (Papuan) mother-in-law name taboos. Name-use and -avoidance are often enregistered as an honorific distinction indexing deference-entitlements of the name-referent relative to the speaker. Cross-linguistically, junior kin are often enjoined to address seniors with kin terms, eschewing personal names (Fleming and Slotta, 2018). What makes in-law name taboo distinctive with respect to widespread practices of respect-based name avoidance is that it is not restricted to person reference. In languages across the world, in-law name avoidance is linked to word tabooing that extends beyond names to affect nouns, verbs and adjectives whose only relation to the name is their similar phonological shape. Most famous from the African continent are the hlonipha registers of southern Africa (Zulu [Luthuli, 2007]; Xhosa [Herbert, 174 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 1990; Finlayson, 1995]; Ndebele [Davies and Quinche, 1933]). In these languages, in-marrying women avoid the names of ascending generation agnatic kin of their husband, as well as a large repertoire of words similar in sound to those names. Teferra’s (1987) description of the Sidamo in-law avoidance register, part of the Eastern Cushitic ballishsha-register complex, exemplifies how the pragmatics of name and homophone registers exceed the bounds of person reference (see Table 1). Table 1. Degrees of linguistic avoidance in Sidamo (source: Teferra, 1987:53–55).1 Origo – Target homophones tokens of the pronominal of the avoidance index of the name name reference ♀ – husband’s father * * V ♀ – husband’s mother; ♀ – husband’s elder sibling - * V ♀ – husband - * T ♀ – husband’s younger sibl. - - T Different in-law relationships condition different degrees of linguistic avoidance: a wife is not expected to avoid her husband’s younger siblings’ names, but she does avoid her husband’s name. Importantly, this avoidance is not limited to those speech acts where she refers to her husband. Teferra provides the following example: My father’s name is Teferra and I have a friend who is named Teferra Eshete, who was a student in the University. Whenever my step-mother wanted to refer to my friend, she spoke of him as ‘Eshete’s son who is in the University’. This is because she did not want to mention a name identical to that of her husband. (Teferra, 1987:58) We can properly call this a name taboo, since the name is avoided in all contexts regardless of its discourse reference. What is the proper characterization of the social pragmatics of names in cases like these? In some dialects of American English, license to employ a first name indexes the speaker’s intimate relationship to the name’s referent. In Sidamo, however, the person honoured through name avoidance needn’t be the referent or the addressee, or even a bystander, but rather a nonparticipant
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