Word Avoidance as a Relation-Making Act: A Paradigm for Analysis of Name Utterance Taboos

Abstract

This article outlines several layers of the relation-making indexicality of name avoidance in a New Guinea society. These layers include: avoidance's paradoxical logic of achieving relational intensification through relational restraint; the enthusiasm with which people seize on avoidance to create or define relations anew; the ways avoidance extends social involvement beyond spaces and times of face-to-face copresence; the emergence of micro-communities of common alignment around specific avoidances; and speakers' active engagement with powers of transgressing avoidance norms. I also suggest that the efficacy of avoidance in interaction can usefully be understood as similar to a religious logic of sacrifice.