Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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This has found perhaps most formal expression in the work of Gumperz and Hymes (e.g. 1972). Social groups, they begin, amount to ‘speech communities’ which share a repertoire of regular ways or ‘fashions of speaking’ (Whorf); any focus on the regularity and diversity of ways in which human beings codify the world and communicate their codifications, therefore, should centre on ‘a community sharing rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech, and rules for the interpretation of at least one linguistic variety’ (Hymes 1972:54). As Gumperz continues (1972), a social group may be wider than a speech-community (one social group may consist of more than one speech-community), but within each such community, members will have shared knowledge of communicative options and constraints, and will share the rules governing conventional communicative strategies in a significant number of social situations. This will include the proper encoding and decoding of social meanings in symbolic forms—knowledge which derives from members’ social networks and their frequency, longevity and intensity of contact. To the extent that group members of different status or age or gender or wealth or occupation or recreation come into more or less contact with one another, a variety of different speech-communities may develop.

However large or open a speech-community, certain choices will be made concerning appropriate codification and limits set on the conventional repertoire. More precisely, as a discrete social grouping, a speech-community will be responsible for coordinating the appropriateness of different members’ ‘speech styles’ with different ‘speech situations’. There will be many conventional speech situations recognized by the group (such as ceremonials, fights, hunts, meals, lovemakings) and in each rules of speaking will be part-and-parcel of the setting. Indeed, competency in knowing appropriate styles of speaking may represent one of the primary determinants by a community of its full members. Making up different speech situations will be ‘speech events’—the different parts of the different role-players—and constitutive of speech-events will be individual ‘speech-acts’.These latter too will be formalized within the group context so that form and content will gel with setting and scene, speaker and addresser, addressee and audience, purpose and goal, ‘key’ (tone, manner or spirit) ‘channel’ (oral or written) and genre (prayer, say, poem or lecture). In this way, even individual speech-acts may be given general, causal explanations (related to the social structure as such) and treated not only in terms of the conditions of their origin but also their maintenance, development and change. ‘[W]e are never not in a situation’, in the words of literary critic Stanley Fish (1972:250), never outwith a situational frame or

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structure of expression and interpretation by which meaning, symbol and setting are socially conjoined; hence, ‘a set of interpretive assumptions is always in force’ (1972:257).

Leavening the collectivist tenor of the above analysis, Gumperz and Hymes have also attempted to introduce the strategic individual speaker—hearer of code. While an individuals choice is subject to grammatical restraints (whereby only some codifications are intelligible to fellow users) and social restraints (whereby only some codifications are considered pukka), still there will likely be a range of possible, acceptable formulations within a speech-community, each with a subtly different effect.Thus the individual’s selection from the repertoire is akin to a choice of weapon from an arsenal (Gumperz 1970). It is important, moreover, not to underestimate the extent to which individual speaker—hearers can strategically deploy their competencies, switching between repertoires, grammars and speech-communities, creating anew, and having their innate differences of voice socially celebrated, exaggerated or ignored (Hymes 1979). In short, it is important not to over-emphasize the homogeneity of a speech-community or the uniformity of its ideal speaker—hearers.

Leavening the functionalism of the work of Gumperz and Hymes still further have been studies which examined the development and exchange of codes between socio-cultural groups. Werbner (1989), for example, argues against the one-to-one matching of code and community and uses African ethnography to show people happily using several at once. Of these, the analyst might describe one as a ‘source code’ and others as ‘pidgins’ or ‘creoles’ which have developed from it. Locals might class one as their ‘traditional’ indigenous code, one as that of strangers which they have nonetheless imported, and one as ‘universal’ which pertains to all social groups in the region. To switch between such codes is, then, an opportunity for speaker—hearers to meta-communicate that their identity transcends any one group; to import strange codes is to meta-communicate that the speaker-hearers have privileged access to exogenous sources of power.

Finally, leavening the formalism in Gumperz and Hymes are approaches which emphasize the inevitable loss of meaning in processes of codification (cf. Rapport 1993a). As Bateson argued, between the external world and its symbolization, and between the senders and receivers of symbolic communication, there is an inevitable process of ‘entropy’ or disordering. In other words, any attempt to say the same thing in a different way (to symbolize the world, or have two people share the same symbol) can be seen ultimately to amount to saying a different thing (cf. Hough 1969:4). And it is for this reason, as Leach

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observed (1977:11), that when one appreciates what people actually do as opposed to what they are supposed to do (how they actually speak, say, rather than how the social group would have them speak), most neat categorial distinctions (such as ‘speech-communities’) leading to an orderly framework for our social thinking, whether as group members or as analysts, disappear.

Put more sociolinguistically, the concept of a normal or standard idiom of encoding or decoding must be treated as an analytical and social fiction, because each speaker—hearer possesses a ‘personal lexicon’ (Steiner 1975:46). No ‘language system’ is a ‘singular entity’ since ‘it exists only as individual language systems in individual brains; and these systems and these brains are all in some ways different’ (Martin 1983:428). More precisely (Steiner again (1975:46)): ‘the language of a community, however uniform its social contour, is an inexhaustibly multiple aggregate of speech-atoms, of finally irreducible personal meanings’. In using a code, therefore, we find speaker—hearers drawing upon a more or less common vulgate and also upon a more or less private thesaurus, an idiolect, making contingent connections in unpredictable ways. Individual experiences and intentions and social contexts and conventions mix in irreducibly specific ways.

As Fillmore elaborates (1979), individual differences in codification point to both different competencies—different internalizations of grammar—and different performative practices—different strategies of use which individuals prefer to employ. Even if they were to try to be ideally representative speaker—hearers, sharing both competencies of use and performances with fellow members of social groups, individuals’ different personalities, memories, skills and experiences— in a word, their different consciousnesses—would make them codify differently. If different patterns and styles of codification exist in different situations, therefore, then this is as likely to be a matter of individual interpretation of context than it is of social definition, perhaps more so. Individuals, as Leach reminds us (1977:9), will cross social boundaries (and socio-linguistic systems of codification), and thereby make cultural distinctions fuzzy, no matter the conventions and laws instituted to stop them.

Codes and communication

Much anthropological work has gone into identifying particular types of code and charting their use. Most famously, perhaps, Bernstein, as part of a wider exploration of how speech may be regarded as ‘the major means through which the social structure becomes part of individual

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experience’ (1964:258), identified two different ideal-types of codification in everyday use. One is a highly coded form of language, impersonal and ritualistic, and suited to an explicitly authoritarian and reactionary social structure; the other is a more open and fluid ‘nowcoding’ language suited to the ongoing realization of personal identities. The former Bernstein called ‘public language’ or ‘restricted code’, and the latter ‘formal language’ or ‘elaborated code’ (1964, 1972).

More precisely, in elaborated code language is specifically and newly formed to fit a particular referent (situation and speaker), to serve as an individuating factor in experience and to describe individual experience; language is used explicitly to clarify meanings, and acts as a mediation of complex personal sensation and cognition. It exemplifies analytical thought processes, and fine gradations of measured cogitation and subjective sensitivity. Elaborate code accords, in sum, with ‘organic solidarity’ (Durkheim): with differentiation and ambiguity surrounding the changing relations between a diversity of creative individuals and their perceptions.

In restricted code, a referent is designated using ready-made terms and phrases from a common repertoire, put together quickly and automatically in a well-organized sequence. Syntax is rigid, grammar simple and sentences predictable; likewise the type of content, if not the specifics of what the sentences contain. Meaning is implicit, largely impersonal, and ritualistic, even tautological. The effect is the symbolizing, establishing and reinforcing of the normative arrangements and relations of a social group; it is social not individual symbols that are expressed and exchanged. In short, restricted code expresses concrete thought processes and a high degree of affect concerning a restricted range of significant subjects and assumptions held in common by the group. It accords with ‘mechanical solidarity’ (Durkheim): with loyalty, passivity and dependency in a social group characterized by inclusive homogeneous relations.

While emphasizing that these were ideal types, and that individuals moved between codes according to social context, nevertheless, Bernstein further argued that particular social contexts could be seen to be dominated by one or other of these codes.Their usage was a function of subculture and of particular forms of social relationship (rather than individual psychology). Hence, restricted code pertained to ‘positionoriented’ social milieux and relations—armies, prisons, age-grades, longestablished friendships and marriages—while elaborated code pertained to ‘person-oriented’ ones. In particular, the two codificatory usages differentiated the working class from the middle class; the ‘genes’ of working-class sociality and solidarity were transmitted by restricted code,

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while the genes of middle-class sociality and individuality were transmitted by elaborated code.

Bernstein’s differentiation between restricted and elaborated code has been highly influential, and anthropologists have gone on to identify versions of it, even if they have sought too to loosen ‘the straitjacket of ideal dichotomous propositions’ and speak of restricted or elaborated ‘situations’ rather than social groups (Paine 1976:74). Fillmore, for instance, describes how ‘an enormously large part of natural language is formulaic, automatic and rehearsed, rather than prepositional, creative, or freely generated’ (1976:9).A large part of an individual’s ability to get on with any social system of codification will depend on his or her mastery of and facility with such formulaic expressions as clichés, bromides, proverbs, politeness-formulae and leave-takings (cf. Goody 1978). Individuals will learn and memorize these in close association with the often very specific situations in which their use is called for. Cultures and social groups will vary, however, according to the situations for which the formulaic is especially required. In the USA, for example, funerals represent a routine social context (a speech-situation) in which exchange is most fluent when it is most formulaic; beyond formulae people find themselves tongue-tied even when they desire to give comfort (Fillmore 1979).

For Bloch (1975), meanwhile, political oratory among the Merina of Madagascar takes place in a restricted code in which the vocabulary, syntax and style, intonation, loudness, sequencing and illustrations of the speaker are institutionalized. Such oratory may be said to lie at the end of a spectrum of Merina codifications, between the formal or polite and the informal or everyday. Nevertheless, power resides in the use of this formal language, and it conveys the traditional authority of those with the status to use it. For the hearers’ response is equally institutionalized and polite; to employ such oratory is to coerce an audience whose only alternative is to revolt against the code altogether. Hence, Merina oratory may be described as a form of social control, and an expression of a hierarchical relationship. At the same time it is a highly ambiguous and impersonal codification of expression. Since they are known in advance, utterances in this code cannot be tailored to particular cases or relationships or policies or personalities; conventional order and role are emphasized above all.Thus the skilful politician combines more and less formal codes in the exertion of his personal power.

Paine (1976) begins with Bernstein’s assumption that codes control ‘both the creation and organization of specific meanings and the conditions for their transmission and reception’, but seeks to combine this with a more individually strategic approach to linguistic transaction.

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