Speaking Only Your Own Mind: Reflections on Talk, Gossip and Intentionality in Bosavi (PNG)

Abstract

The ability to imagine privately what might be in or on someone else's mind is a capacity that we assume is panhuman, something children learn to do in culturally specific ways through participation in social interaction. Without theories of intentionality and desire, and knowledge of how they are locally and conventionally displayed and made meaningful, we would be unable to make sense of what is going on. In many Melanesian societies and beyond,1 the avoidance of verbally speculating about the intentions, motives, and internal states of others has been reported. This has caused some scholars to question the universality of theory of mind, to ask whether theory of mind is innate or socialized,2 and to puzzle over how intersubjectivity is achieved in such communities. My research on language socialization in Bosavi in the 1970s, as well as the ethnographic accounts of others, suggest that this dispreference for verbal speculation about others' intentions and internal states is not idiosyncratic or isolated, but linked to other cultural and linguistic practices and ideologies that directly bear on local notions of personhood and sociality. Besnier (1993:166-67) for example, writes that Nukulaelae (Tuvalu) thoughts are almost exclusively self-reported; they avoid interpreting one another's linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior and are wary of voicing conjectures, interpretations, and inferences from observable facts. Only children, adolescents and gossipers engage in such asocial and irresponsible behavior. McKellin (1990:336) states that the Managalase avoid open displays or discussions of individuals' supposed intentions and recognize that individuals' thoughts are often illusive, ambiguous, and imperfectly understood by others....Although people privately gossip about others' activities, they hesitate to assign motives and control others' actions directly. Other scholars working in Papua New Guinea report similar findings.3 These ethnographic observations raise several critical questions: Are claims that one cannot know what another thinks or feels articulations of folk psychological theories that locate intentions and desires somewhere inside persons, and thus outside the domain of visual evidence, what can be known, verified and talked about by others? What cultural constructions of personhood govern preferences for reporting self and others' intentions and internal states? Are notions of distrust and secrecy pervasive, such that persons are assumed to generally hide their true desires and internal states from others, verbally and otherwise, or are such notions contextually selective? What role does intentionality play in theories of action and/or information, and how does it figure within expectations and assignments of responsibility?4 What are the available verbal resources, e.g., indirection and other metaphoric and figurative varieties of language that speakers use in order to avoid being held accountable should they violate a cultural norm and verbalize someone else's intention? Finally, what is the relationship of shame-which in Bosavi is a powerful means of social control-to gossip and confession? Both involve speaking about ideas or information that someone wishes to conceal, transforming something private into something public. In Bosavi these may be seen as two sides of a coin: persons are expected to speak only what is in their own minds, and expect that they can choose when to do so. While there are many tantalizing claims, few ethnographic accounts provide linguistic, ethnographic, or what Duranti (1994) calls ethnopragmatic analyses that link these practices and attitudes to local language ideologies, speech genres and activities, notions of personhood and evidence, or to ideas about the ownership and exchange of things and ideas, for example, that shape and give meaning to sociality. Nor do we have detailed accounts of how such practices and ideologies are socialized or transformed or lost over time due to different types of linguistic and cultural contact, especially missionization and colonialization. …