Words on the lips and meanings in the stomach: Ideologies of unintelligibility and theories of metaphor in Toraja ritual speech

Abstract

Previous studies have shown how forms of speech endowed with different types of unintelligibility have multiple consequences on social life. Semantic ambiguity and indirectness have been variously interpreted as means to promote social cohesion and avoid political conflict (Atkinson 1984; Brenneis 1984); essential technologies for the reproduction of hierarchical conceptions of knowledge and social stratification (Bloch 1975); or important devices for gender differentiation (Keenan [Ochs] 1974).

This paper argues for the coexistence within the Toraja community of upland Sulawesi (Indonesia) of multiple ideologies of unintelligibility concerning the local ancestral language. Increasing involvement in global flows of money and people and exposure to new languages such as Indonesian and English trigger the production of new orders of unintelligibility, which can be used for different purposes by different social groups. While the traditional cultural elite attempts to preserve its privileged position by appealing to an ideology of intelligibility grounded on highly conventional metaphors, the nonexperts react through several counterdiscourses of marginality. They highlight their exclusion from the cultural elite through a negatively charged notion of unintelligibility as insincerity, or they craft new forms of inclusion through an ideology of ethnic pride grounded on a positive representation of unintelligibility as semantic richness.