Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse

Abstract

Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse Martin Gaenszle (bio) In linguistic theories of what constitutes meaning in communication, or the purpose of a “speech act,” the notion of intention has been a crucial ingredient. If there were no intentions, so the general argument in the field of linguistic pragmatics goes, one could not distinguish meaningless words, like babbling, from meaningful speech. This position has been expressed in formal terms by the language philosopher H. Paul Grice: “‘A meant something by x’ is (roughly) equivalent to ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of a recognition of this intention’” (Grice 1973:46, also Du Bois 1993, emphasis mine). According to speech act theory, as developed in ordinary language philosophy by J. L. Austin and later expanded by John Searle, speech acts are performances that can have an intended effect on other persons, as in illocutionary acts like ordering, threatening, or demanding.1 In these cases an appellative act solicits the addressee to respond in some way. But speech acts can also be performances that are merely expressive of certain intentions, as in sentences that use verbal expressions of fearing, wishing, or hoping (Searle 1983). Intentionality is, in any case, a basic aspect of all linguistic communication and interaction. In other words, speakers are persons who have an intention to convey something to other persons; they want to “affect” the other person in some way, and the speaker as an individual agent is therefore taken to be responsible for these intentional acts and their consequences. This view of language in early speech act theory has been criticized by linguistic anthropologists as culture-bound, because in other cultural contexts, where other notions of personhood are prevalent, the situation may be quite different.2 In the context of the Ilongot studied by Michelle Rosaldo, for example, it is not so much propositions by individual speakers, but directive speech acts in complex social settings that are the paradigmatic case in linguistic communication. As summarized by Rosaldo, speech act theorists “think of ‘doing things with words’ as the achievement of autonomous selves, whose deeds are not significantly constrained by the relationships and expectations that define their local world. In the end, I claim, the theory fails because it does not comprehend the sociality of individuals who use its ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ to act” (Rosaldo 1982:204). This has consequences for the notion of a speaker’s intention, as the “force” of a speech act is not located in the individual actor alone. In fact, more recent studies in linguistic anthropology have stressed the social embeddedness of meaning and intention in social interaction.3 One important issue that emerged is the notion of responsibility. Who is the speaker as the source of the statement? The person who intends to convey something to others through words is also the person who makes certain claims and takes responsibility for the consequences of what is being said. Thus speech is a complex social act, often highly ritualized, in which roles and positions are negotiated. As Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine point out in the introduction to their volume Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (1993), the focus on responsibility and the related notion of evidence (that is, claims to knowledge) in speech is in line with more dialogical approaches, which bring out the interactive and processual quality of the productions of meaning. One case in point in which the ordinary intentionality of the speaker is absent is in the context of divination, that is, divinatory speech or prophecy (Leavitt 1997). As John Du Bois stresses, non-intentionality is especially pronounced in so-called “mechanical divination,” which can be distinguished from “trance divination” (that is, oracular divination), but in both cases a suppression of intention, and thus “intentionless meaning” is involved (Du Bois 1993:53, 70 n. 8). But if it is not the speaker who has intentions, this does not mean that intentions are not involved at all. They can be attributed to a special kind of person, for example, a divinity. The following study of a shamanic divination in eastern Nepal deals with a form of speech...