Agency, Personhood and the ‘I’ of Discourse in the Pacific and Beyond

Abstract

Sahlins bases his account of Polynesian ‘heroic history’ partly on the fact that chiefs used the pronoun ‘I’ in reference to their whole group. Mosko (1992) argues that Sahlins’s consequent emphasis on ‘encompassment’ as the modality of chiefly action is diametrically opposed to Strathern’s on ‘partibility’, the effacement of parts of the person as a condition of action. Drawing on comparative material from the New Guinea Highlands, where big men also use ‘I’ for their whole group, and on Benveniste’s and Urban’s accounts of the meaning and use of personal pronouns, I argue instead that moments of both encompassment and partibility are inherent in language, corresponding to two distinct dimensions in which the pronouns are meaningful (the ‘direct indexical’ and the ‘anaphoric’), and that close attention to the interaction between the two can yield new insights into the nature of personhood and social agency.

Finding culture in ‘poetic’ structures: The case of a ‘racially-mixed’ Japanese/New Zealander

“…Rumsey 2000) is situated. In the latter, I interviewed four 'racially-mixed' Japanese/New Zealanders and one permanent resident who were enrolled in Japanese language courses at a university in New Zealand.…”

“…Rumsey 2000;Silverstein 2004;Urban 1989), which analytically focuses on deictics in combination with other linguistic resources in discourse. In the sections that follow, I first present rationales and assumptions (Shi-xu 2005(Shi-xu , 2007, and my conceptual framework from the perspectives of contemporary linguistic anthropology (e.g.…”

“Tired for nothing”? Women, Chiefs, and the Domestication of Customary Authority in Solomon Islands

“…This may reflect a practice in which a group (including men) are referred to by the name of a remembered clan ancestress (what Rumsey calls the "I" of discourse in the Pacific), whether or not she was directly involved in the raid. 24 Even if few women were actually involved in leading raids, early ethnography and oral accounts suggest a well-established role for women in welcoming successful expeditions home. Several lineage narratives I heard, told of women who intervened to prevent the sacrifice of a captive in order to adopt the person, often as a "sister" for a son.…”

Liminality in Language Use: Some Thoughts on Interactional Analysis from a Dialogical Perspective

“…Importantly, these reference points presented in the paper are somewhat skewed toward the pragmatic and linguistic conventions of Indo-European languages and tend to ignore, for instance, languages that have far more complicated pronoun systems (See Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990) and also Rumsey (2000) for an enthralling debate on this matter in social anthropology). Also, the reference points tend to overlook various linguistic devices of marking social relations, including race, class, gender age categories, ranks and hierarchies, which are evident in discourses of institutional life.…”