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Comments on ritual unintelligibility

• Joel Kuipers

  Joel Kuipers (born 1954, Ph.D. Yale 1982) is Professor of Anthropology and Human Sciences at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Since 1978, he has carried out ethnographic and linguistic research on language use and its relations to systems of authority. Beginning in 1978, he carried out over two years of fieldwork into a distinctive form of parallelistic ritual speech among the Weyewa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba. This research eventually resulted in the publication of Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (Pennsylvania 1990). In the late 1980s, however, he noticed that major changes were underway as the Indonesian national language came to supplant ritual speech as the language of religious and political authority. In Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia: The Changing Nature of Ritual Speech on the Island of Sumba (Cambridge 1998), he argued that these changes were largely due to shifts in language ideologies. Since 1998, he has been examining the role of authoritative language in psychiatric clinics and in science classrooms, making extensive use of videotapes.