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

DISCOURSE

of variable complexity and length, in which people habitually engage, and which is accompanied by particular habitual actions. ‘Languagegame’ is an attempt to convey the embeddedness of speech-making in routine social relationships and behaviours, the formulaic way in which speech accompanies everyday social interaction and amounts to a whole ‘form of life’ (cf. Rapport 1987:170ff.). What the concepts of discourse and language-game share is their insistence on intrinsic ties between speech and behaviour, between the linguistic and the socio-cultural, and between individual speakers and social conventions.

Discourse analysis

The analysis of discourse has been undertaken in a number of different ways (cf. Brown and Yule 1983). Wittgenstein has already been mentioned, while Alfred Schuetz, influenced by the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl, influenced in his turn by the ethnomethodology of the likes of Harold Garfinkel. Garfinkel (1967) explored the ways in which everyday conversation was mediated by a set of common background expectancies which speakers shared; so that an engagement in habitual discourse maintained and reinforced a common world-view and a common set of social structures in whose terms speakers lived.

More strictly anthropological has been the work of Dell Hymes (1972), emphasizing both the regularity of ways of speaking which human beings practise in particular times and places, and the manner in which ways of speaking and, more generally, ways of behaving and interacting, are closely tied; language and society are perhaps indistinguishable. Hence, Hymes suggests the composite term ‘speech-community’ for those who share rules concerning the conduct and interpretation of speech: a speechcommunity will determine particular proper ways of speaking which its competent members will practise. These ways will involve ‘speech styles’ which are set in certain ‘speech-situations’ (ceremonies, fights, meals, hunts), making up particular ‘speech-events’, and comprised of individual ‘speech-acts’. In this fashion, Hymes prescribes a systemic analysis of discourse—the form, content, channels and setting of everyday speech, its addressers, addressees and audience, its goals and outcome, its history and development—and its systemic relating to the rest of the social structure of a group.

Another important anthropological approach to discourse has been the work of Robert Paine (and others) on political rhetoric. Paine distinguishes rhetoric as a particular kind of discourse, arguing that while most speech-acts concern ‘speech about something’, the kernel of

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rhetoric is that ‘saying is doing’ (1981:9). In this, rhetoric most resembles music or drama, for there too the doing and the effect are inseparable. The effect which rhetoric most often intends is persuasion, in particular the persuasion of an audience by a speaker—although a speaker might also be found to be persuaded by his own voicing of his words—and this is perhaps most clearly seen in the realm of politics. Rhetoric can be seen as an instrument by which a speaker gains or increases control over a political environment. And once this control becomes routinized, institutionalized, then control over language, over the right to speak, may be defined as an essential base of power and authority. So that those with power are those who control others, in part at least, via the medium of speech, and those in power are those with the right and duty to decide who speaks when and how (cf. Goldschlaeger 1985).

While it was in the eighteenth century that Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova first propounded a systematic link between the study of rhetoric and the study of cultural forms and effects, it is more recent thinkers such as philosopher J.L.Austin and critic Kenneth Burke who have inspired an anthropological focus on the power of speech to affect others. For Austin (1971, 1975), speech should be appreciated as having meaning, force and effect. In particular, an important range of speechacts, ‘performative utterances’, do not merely describe the social world (‘declarative’) but give it form and content too. Here is speech with the ‘illocutionary force’ to create social happenings, speech as an instrument of social action with significant social consequences. For Burke (1973), symbolically mediated and interactionally coordinated forms of behaviour (speech, gesture, dress) can be studied for the ways they are used artfully so as to influence others’ beliefs and attitudes. In particular, the effects of such successful rhetorical usage may be to cause an audience to achieve a state of ‘identification’ with a speaker, whereby aspects of the social identity or being of the people involved in the rhetorical encounter come more closely to approximate one another. Hence, Paine’s definition (1971) of a patron as someone whose power is to have values of his own express choosing affirmed by others—those who come to identify themselves as clients.

As a development of the above focus on speaking and power, perhaps the most popular approach to discourse in anthropology of late has been that influenced by the French philosopher of systems of thought, Michel Foucault (and other post-structuralist theorists). In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) Foucault set forth a programme for what he called ‘the pure description of discursive events’. This was important, he claimed, because there were inexorable links between forms of communication, knowledge and power. Discourse was a key determinant of social life

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and exchange, for particular cultural discourses maintained both conventional ways of knowing the world and a network of power relations among those who did the knowing. Discourse amounted to certain conditions and procedures regulating how people may communicate and what and how they may know.

Insofar as Foucauldian concerns have become anthropological ones, the key questions are whether it is true that formulaic limits to routine and conventional ways of speaking in a social milieu need be said similarly and necessarily to limit what is known (thought, experienced and imagined) by individual speakers, and the extent to which this formulaicism elicits hierarchies of power, knowledge and belonging which speakers can but barely escape (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990).

A Foucauldian anthropology of discourse

‘Discourse’ is perhaps Foucault‘s key conceptual term, but it also figures as part of a broader post-structuralist imaging of social life as the playing out of impersonal and largely unconscious systems of signification: anonymous, depersonalized networking of images (cf. Kearney 1988:13– 14). Here, collective discourses or forms of life are seen to cause to be true or ‘real’ certain constructions of the world and its components, as well as instituting a set of knowledge-practices with inevitable ties to a mastery of power. In other words, it is language which ‘discourses’, not individual speakers, and they only speak to the extent that they respond to (and correspond with) the conventional discursive forms of their language. In this anti-idealist and anti-humanist vision, linguistic expression is the fount of knowledge and of power (of ‘powerknowledge’) while its human speakers and their subjectivities, their selves and societies, are the ‘effects’ of expression. Individual speakers are not responsible for the expression and constitution of identities effected through their speaking; discourse deprives the human subject of any alleged status as ‘source and master of meaning’ (Culler 1981:33).

The wider intent is to displace (dissolve and decentre) the individual speaker from analysis so as to make room for the hierarchy of ‘subjectpositions’ which a particular discourse is seen to articulate. Here is an exploding of humanist notions of what it is to partake of speech— including subjective inwardness and originality, sequential development of topic, coherent expression of narrative. As Foucault sums up (1991:118): ‘In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject…of its role as originator, and of analysing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse’.To enter into discourse is seen perforce to comply, however artfully, with certain collective structures (hypograms, matrices,

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codes) of signification (cf. Riffaterre 1978:164–6). The symbolic process of linguistic expression and the social practice of speaking are both regarded as part-and-parcel of a conscience collective which classifies the world in terms of certain subject-positions and prescribes proper relations between them. Occupying particular subject-positions in particular discourses, human beings are said inevitably to find themselves viewing the world and being viewed by it in certain partisan, interested and power-laden ways.

At once verbal and behavioural, collective and coercive, discourses are seen as inhabiting the body and habituating the mind; so that it is in terms of particular discursive constructions of the world that individual human beings come to be socialized. Human beings are ‘bodies totally imprinted by history’ (Foucault 1977). The only partial transcendence involves the move from one discourse to another: subverting one power relationship by playing it off against others, as discourses develop and change, abutting against and jockeying with each other, through time. But this is no real escape, since it is still a matter of individuals’ coming to consciousness in terms of one particular system of discursive classification, one particular set of unequal power relations, or another. Thus do individuals find themselves ‘being spoken’ by unconscious, preconditioned linguistic codes and knowledge-practices. Far from speakers’ employing discursive measures for the effecting of original or even intentioned ends, here is ‘mimesis without origin or end’ (Kearney 1988:6). Indeed, were it not for the subject-positions which discourses offer, human consciousnesses would not exist as human as such. Discourses create our humanity.

An ethnographic example of a Foucauldian approach to discourse is provided by Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on Bedouin love poetry (1990a), specifically on a traditional genre of oral lyricism known as ghinnawa. Love poetry is a highly cherished and privileged art-form among the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin (of Egypt’s Western Desert) which is thought of as distinctly Bedouin and associated with a noble past of political autonomy, strength and independence, and Abu-Lughod explores its status as ‘social text’. Her particular intent is a critique of ‘mentalist models’ of individual thought and emotion—of individual consciousness as private—and she argues that it is discourse which informs individual experience and constitutes the realities and truths by which individuals live. Far from ghinnawa being an expressive stage for individual emotionality, and far from this representing an inner state, therefore, the conventional poetic form must needs be regarded as rhetorical usage which itself constructs emotions as legitimate social phenomena, as social facts. Emotionality is routine discursive practice. Moreover, it is of and

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about social-structural conditions that emotional expression, and poetry about emotion, speaks; formed in and by a certain social ecology and political economy, the emotion of ghinnawa necessarily reflects the form of society (the hierarchical Bedouin social structure, the relations of power) in which the genre lives, which gave rise to it and for which its expression has practical consequences.

‘Fathalla’, for instance, Abu-Lughod describes as a young Bedouin man whose plans to marry ‘his beloved’ are thwarted by her father, his uncle. In this situation, Fathalla resorts to expressing ‘his’ feelings of love and regret in ghinnawa. For while this poetic genre is very much part of daily life, and often interspersed in the middle of ordinary conversations with intimates, the sentiments which he may properly express in conversation and in ghinnawa are very different.Thus, it is legitimate for Fathalla to express a feeling of love (to feel love) in the poetry while continuing to express (and feel) very different emotions in the conversational discourse which precedes and follows it. For Fathalla, we are informed, appropriate emotionality and proper discursive practice are one and the same.

Ghinnawa is not resorted to by all of Bedouin society alike, furthermore; it is primarily associated with young men and women. For these latter are the disadvantaged dependants of the social structure, and the sentiment of love which ghinnawa constitutes represents a subversion of the sentiment of modesty and an adherence to the social-structural status quo. The ghinnawa is a conventional discourse of defiance to the authority of the elders. And yet, those, like Fathalla, who compose ghinnawa are not disapproved of, even by the elders themselves. In fact, cassette-tapes have been made of Fathalla reciting his poems in a ‘moving and pained’ voice, and it was on the car cassette-player of her (elder) host that Abu-Lughod was introduced to them. Elders ‘clearly admired this young man for his passion and for his ability to express it in poetry. They were moved by his poems and awed by the power of his words’ (1990a:36).

In people’s approval of ghinnawa, Abu-Lughod concludes, in their discomfort with its emotions in ordinary conversation and their glorification of them in conversation’s interstices, can be read a fundamental paradox in Bedouin life between the ideals of equality and the everyday practice of hierarchy.The fact that the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin may be frequently ‘moved’ by ghinnawa poetry pertains in no necessary way to individual qualities or subjective states, however. For, here are people far removed from Western habits of contemplation, interpretation, understanding, from what Foucault describes as the ‘psychologizing’ projects of the Western ‘individual’. Rather, ghinnawa

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