Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology
-
Eve Danziger
Eve Danziger received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. She held a multi-year post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and is now Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Virginia. Her research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mopan Maya of Eastern Central America to investigate the extent to which the categories of individual thought are shaped by those of socially shared but culturally particular convention and culture. She is the author of Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship Among the Mopan Maya (2001) as well as of many articles and chapters. Recently, she co-edited with Alan Rumsey a collection entitled Intersubjectivity Across Languages and Cultures (2013, Language and Communication 33, 3: 247–343). More information can be obtained by visiting her website athttp://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/evedanziger/ .
Abstract
Classroom training for attention to utterance recipients’ likely states of knowledge is useful in order to compensate for the situations of reduced co-presence that characterize literate communication at a distance. But many aspects of the Mopan (Mayan) philosophy of language resonate instead with non-schooled practices of Mopan socialization that support oral and not literate transmission of knowledge. In Mopan, everyday speech and action are evaluated with reference to a more-than-human moral order in which what counts is fidelity to ancestral prescriptions rather than to one’s own or others’ momentary mental states. Such cultural differences in beliefs about the (non-)importance of mental states are known to enter into institutionalized moralities such as those governing legal decisions or religious obligations. At the same time, many unconscious and embodied aspects of meaning-making in interaction are clearly conducted without apparent input from differing cultural beliefs. The present study shows how cultural attitudes about meaning-making play out at a level intermediate between these two apparently contradictory extremes. Mopan farmers and US English university students engaged with an interactional matching task in which visual common ground is occluded and speakers must describe a photograph in such a way that the listener succeeds in picking out that very photograph from among a set of similar ones. Schooled US English participants rarely describe any attributes of the photos other than their minimum distinguishing features, and they almost always mention those features. In contrast, Mopan participants often construe the interactional task as one that requires accurate and complete description of single items one at a time, rather than requiring identification of key attributes that will uniquely identify the target referent in its current context to a particular listener. Significant differences in strategic approaches to real-time construction of conversational reference is thus shown to correspond to contrasting cultural belief systems about the making of meaning, themselves related to literate versus oral modes of knowledge transmission.
About the author
Eve Danziger received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. She held a multi-year post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and is now Professor and Chair of Anthropology and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Virginia. Her research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mopan Maya of Eastern Central America to investigate the extent to which the categories of individual thought are shaped by those of socially shared but culturally particular convention and culture. She is the author of Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship Among the Mopan Maya (2001) as well as of many articles and chapters. Recently, she co-edited with Alan Rumsey a collection entitled Intersubjectivity Across Languages and Cultures (2013, Language and Communication 33, 3: 247–343). More information can be obtained by visiting her website at http://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/evedanziger/.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the residents of the Toledo District, Belize, and to the Belize Institute for Social and Cultural Research for their generous hospitality while this research was in progress. I especially wish to thank the individuals, both Mopan and English speakers, who agreed to play the photo-matching game for me. The present research was supported by the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and by the University of Virginia, including the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Michael Fraser and Katie Lake were especially helpful in processing the recorded data. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their valuable suggestions and ideas. Any errors are entirely my own responsibility.
References
Arundale, R. B. 2008. Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics 5(2). 229–258.10.1515/IP.2008.012Search in Google Scholar
Barr, D. J & B. Keysar. 2005. Making sense of how we make sense: The paradox of egocentrism in language use, In H. L. Colston & A. N. Katz (eds.), Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences, 21–42. Mahwah: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620539Search in Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & D. Wilkes-Gibbs. 1986. Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition 22. 1–39.10.1016/0010-0277(86)90010-7Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. (ed). 1992. Manual: Space Stimuli Kit 1.0. Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2001. Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship in Mopan Maya. New York: NY: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780195099102.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2006. The thought that counts: Understanding variation in cultural theories of interaction, In S. Levinson & N. Enfield (eds.), The Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction, 259–278. Oxford: Berg Press.10.4324/9781003135517-13Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2010. On trying and lying: Cultural configurations of the Gricean Maxim of Quality. Intercultural Pragmatics 7(2). 199–219.10.1515/iprg.2010.010Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2011. Distinguishing three-dimensional forms from their mirror-images: Whorfian results from users of intrinsic frames of linguistic reference. Language Sciences 33(6). 853–867.10.1016/j.langsci.2011.06.008Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2013. Conventional wisdom: Imagination, obedience and intersubjectivity. Language and Communication 33(3). 251–262.10.1016/j.langcom.2013.06.002Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. 2017. Toward an anthropology of intersubjectivity: Comments on Alessandro Duranti’s The Anthropology of Intentions. Book symposium. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(2). 451–455.10.14318/hau7.2.037Search in Google Scholar
Danziger, E. & A. Rumsey. 2013. Introduction: From opacity to intersubjectivity across languages and cultures. Language and Communication 33(3). 247–250.10.1016/j.langcom.2013.07.004Search in Google Scholar
Duranti, A. 1993. Intentions, self and responsibility: An essay in Samoan Ethnopragmatics, In J. Hill & J. Irvine (eds.), Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, 24–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Duranti, A. 2010. Husserl, intersubjectivity and anthropology. Anthropological Theory 10(1). 1–20.10.1177/1463499610370517Search in Google Scholar
England, N. C. & S. R. Elliott. 1990. Lecturas Sobre la Lingüística Maya. Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica.Search in Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation, In P. Cole & J. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004368811_003Search in Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. 1989. Meaning, In H. P. Grice (eds.), Studies in the Way of Words, 213–223. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226471013.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Luria, A. R. 1976. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social foundations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Malinowski, B. 1948. The problem of meaning in primitive languages, In C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards (eds.), The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.Search in Google Scholar
Needham, R. 1975. Polythetic classification: Convergence and consequences. Man new series 10(3). 349–369.10.2307/2799807Search in Google Scholar
Ong, W. J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780203328064Search in Google Scholar
Reichard, G. 1944. Prayer: The Compulsive Word. New York: J. J. Augustin.Search in Google Scholar
Robbins, J. & A. Rumsey. 2008. Introduction: Cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2). 407–420.10.1353/anq.0.0005Search in Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z. 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11. 203–237.10.1017/S0047404500009209Search in Google Scholar
Rosen, L. 1995. Other intentions: Cultural contexts and the attribution of inner states. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.Search in Google Scholar
Rumsey, Alan. 2013. Intentionality and the “opacity of other minds”: Perspectives from Highland New Guinea and beyond. Language and Communication 33(3). 326–343.10.1016/j.langcom.2013.06.003Search in Google Scholar
Scribner, Sylvia & Michael Cole. 1978. Literacy without schooling: Testing for intellectual effects. Harvard Educational Review 48(4). 448–461.10.17763/haer.48.4.f44403u05l72x375Search in Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139173438Search in Google Scholar
Tomasello, Michael, Melinda Carpenter, Tanya Behne & Henrike Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28. 675–735.10.1017/S0140525X05000129Search in Google Scholar
Wu, Shali & Boaz Keysar. 2007. The effect of culture on perspective taking. Psychological Science 18(7). 600–606.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01946.xSearch in Google Scholar
Zlatev, Jordan, Timothy P Racine, Chris Sinha & Esa Itkonen. 2008. Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?, In Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha & Esa Itkonen (eds.), The shared mind: Perspectives on intersubjectivity, 1–16. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/celcr.12Search in Google Scholar
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Corrigendum to: Line Brandt. 2016. The rhetorics of fictive interaction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
- Introduction
- Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity
- Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses
- Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology
- Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts
- Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions
- Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology
- Retraction of: The rhetorics of fictiveinteraction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
Articles in the same Issue
- Corrigendum to: Line Brandt. 2016. The rhetorics of fictive interaction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
- Introduction
- Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity
- Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses
- Contrasting attention to mutual knowledge in English and Mopan Mayan conversation: Schooling, orality, and cultural cosmology
- Upright posture and the meaning of meronymy: A synthesis of metaphoric and analytic accounts
- Temporality of sense-making in narrative interactions
- Meaning making from life to language: The Semiotic Hierarchy and phenomenology
- Retraction of: The rhetorics of fictiveinteraction in advertising: The case for imagined direct speech in argumentation
