Referent-wrecking in Korowai: A New Guinea abuse register as ethnosemiotic protest

Abstract

Korowai of West Papua practice a register of transgressive vocabulary substitutions in which a referent's normal designation is replaced by another expression with independent semantic meaning. Uttering a substitute term in the presence of its referent is thought to damage the referent. Usually the terms are carefully avoided, but they can also be deliberately uttered in anger. Substitutions highlight uncanny iconic resemblances between entities that are otherwise mutually incongruous. Substitutions often involve grotesque imagery of bodily disintegration, and they focus on strange margins close to humans' positions. Speakers use the register to portray uncertainty about the categorial integrity not just of referents but also of language users themselves. Through the register's core idea of avoiding damaging effects of iconic connections beneath fragile surface appearances, Korowai express a reflexive sensibility about language, in which transparently affirmative semantic relations between words and referents are a contingent pragmatic possibility, not a natural certainty.A draft of this article was presented in June 2006 at a conference on “Honorification and Enregisterment” at the University of Chicago. I thank Sue Philips, Sue Gal, and Michael Silverstein for inviting me to speak, and I thank all participants for their generous comments. Additional crucial and detailed help was given by Courtney Handman, Laura Hendrickson, Steve Hibbard, Barbara Johnstone, Webb Keane, Anne Lorimer, and Alan Rumsey. Fieldwork in 1995–1997 and 2001–2002 was made possible by Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Reed College, the Luce Foundation, the Australian National University (RSPAS), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and Universitas Cenderawasih. I am grateful to all Korowai I have met for their patience and humor.