Linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology

Abstract

This chapter sketches out the relationship between speakers' consciousness and verbal ritual performances, and between ritual language and the social world. It discusses a number of works published in the last two decades, and draws on a variety of examples of ritual speech from societies in the Americas, the Pacific, South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on anthropological and historical research on Amerindian languages. The chapter defines and problematizes five domains that inform many known forms of ritual language in different societies: parallelism and repetition; representation and mimicry; enaction and personification; authority; and reflexivity and indeterminacy. These domains follow a path from discrete linguistic phenomena to broader forms of articulating and expressing beliefs through linguistic performances. These five domains arguably have a close ideational relationship with various forms of collective linguistic intentionality embedded in ritual language.