Volume 27, Issue 4

This article explores how ritual unintelligibility reconfigures participants' engagement, based on an analysis of two video clips of a belian performance, a shamanic healing ritual practiced among the Petalangan of Indonesia. These video clips show two phases of the ritual: the shaman's performance of a magic spell and a ritual song. The analysis reveals how a specific mode of unintelligibility in each scene of the ritual emerges through the mismatches among semantic, pragmatic, and metapragmatic levels of meaning. Furthermore, each scene's unintelligibility intersects with the locals' conventional genre expectations, the violation of which leads to a reconfiguration of the participants' structure. In the first scene, the spell's semantic unintelligibility does not exclude the audience from understanding its pragmatic meanings. The audience expects the spell to be an ‘act’, in which referential meanings are not important for understanding the intents and functions of the ritual act. However, in the second clip, the shaman's semantically transparent but pragmatically ambiguous ritual song engages the audience more in the ritual process. Since the audience expects the ritual song to be understandable ‘talk’ between a shaman and spirits, the violation of the genre expectation leads the audience to participate in the ritual in a creative way through their imaginations. Unlike many previous studies that have assumed ritual unintelligibility blocks nonspecialists' access to ritual meanings, this article demonstrates that the unintelligibility in this particular ritual may also encourage the audience's engagement by stimulating their imaginative interpretations of the meanings.

A high level of unintelligibility in ritual utterances would seem to inhibit their meaningfulness to participants, but I argue that the opposite is the case when deities called oricha descend to possess and speak to humans in Santería ceremonies. My analysis of how an oricha's message to a ritual participant is delivered, interpreted, and received illustrates how the oricha's ambiguous and semantically opaque utterances are rendered into a specific message that reveals a secret and ‘proves’ the divine origin of the message. I also argue that the oricha's use of particular esoteric registers does not make the message particularly unintelligible, despite a widespread metapragmatic characterization of their ritual register, Lucumí, as semantically opaque and in need of ‘translation’. Rather, the markers of unintelligibility deployed by the oricha function to highlight the message's divine authorship, urgency, and importance. They also trigger a participation framework in which the metapragmatic frame of ‘unintelligibility’ and the meaning of the message are co-constructed by speaker and audience. That is, the oricha's speech is rendered unintelligible at the same time that it is interpreted into a meaningful divine message.

‘Unintelligibility’ is not an on–off phenomenon, but rather a processual, bydegrees, and phase-relative phenomenon, as recent literature has demonstrated. With these facts in mind, this article approaches ‘unintelligibility’ in terms of discourse ‘accessibility’, emphasizing especially how ‘access’ is regulated in multiple ways (not only through language), and how it centrally involves changes in participation structure. Using a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter as my focus, I examine how the verbal and nonverbal regulation of accessibility helps bring into play forms of mediation, where the interactant conferring access offers to the patient both expert knowledge and contact with incorporeal beings. During a divination phase, a phase of maximum inaccessibility, contact with these beings comes to be presupposed in the healer's discourse as he positions himself as a mediator who stands between the patient and the unseen sources of advice and curative power. By making the inaccessible accessible over phases of the encounter, the healer both invokes expert knowledge and constructs an interdiscursive figure, a virtual ‘speech-chain’ structure, in which his verbal (and nonverbal) contributions become links designed to convey curative power and blessings from incorporeal beings to the patient in the immediate speech event.

Modernity's characterization of language has isolated certain vocal practices from scientific inquiry by labeling them as either ‘nonsense’ or wholly musical, when in fact they can serve important functions in performance and within local discourses of tradition. This study first examines how socalled nonsense vocalizations, or what I call unintelligibles, function in ritual language use. By closely examining linguistic form in various performative modes, two unintelligibles, /aa-wii-haa/ and zaġārīt (ululation) are shown to serve as characteristic features of m-ha-ha , a type of tribute performed at marriage celebrations in the Levant. I argue that because they are salient and phonologically segmentable, these unintelligibles are highly effective in nonsemantic expressivity during ritual performance: first, they quickly arouse interest, excitement, and affective response in listeners; and second, they rapidly link the context, performance, and performer to specific norms (propriety and affinity) and stereotypes of personhood. An analysis of the circulation and metacultural treatment of these unintelligibles outside ritual contexts reveals a shift in meaning, to one of primarily ‘tradition’, or in the global sphere, an exoticism. Modernist projects disarticulate unintelligibles from their original cultural contexts or recirculate them in new media, opening up the possibility for new meanings to be attributed.

To examine the fraught relationship between intelligibility and subject formation in the Tibetan diaspora, this article first revisits Malinowski's classic discussion of the so-called ‘co-efficients’ of ‘weirdness and intelligibility’ in magical speech, noting how these qualities of discourse were mediated by a post-Enlightenment language ideology and evolutionist presumptions of alterity. Malinowski's text is instructive in this respect, for concerns with denotational transparency have long been wedded to larger ideological projects, including projects as ambitious as the very re-definition of the speaking subject. This article then turns to efforts by Tibetan Buddhist modernists in India to redefine the subject, specifically in the domain of monastic discipline. The focal practice is ‘public reprimand’ (tshogs gtam) , delivered by Disciplinarians at the major Geluk monasteries of southern India. Using transcripts of a reprimand recorded at Sera Mey Monastic College, this article examines how indirection and dissimulation characterize this practice, and it then shows how this and a related form of reprimand begin to trouble Tibetans who engage a modernist language ideology, one premised on clarity, sincerity, and civility—attributes that bear a family resemblance to those of the liberal speaking subject of modernity.

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.