John B. Haviland

Minimal Maxims: Cooperation and Natural Conversation in Zinacantan

Los procesos de la inferencia pragmatica, combinados con los principios cooperativos conocidos como 9maximas conversacionales,9 estructuran la comunicacion en los intercambios verbales. Este trabajo investiga la aplicacion etnografica del estudio comparativo de los patrones conversacionales en una comunidad tzotzil.

Who Asked You, Condom Head?

One kind of Mexican street vendor is a foulmouthed clown, whose off-color spiel uses racism, sexism, double-entendre, and nationalist chauvinism to assemble and entertain a crowd and, ultimately, to part its members from their money. Vulgar and highly formulaic, the clowns language reaches its creative peaks when the clown engages individuals—whether passers-by, shills, or marks—in direct interaction and subjects them to insult and verbal abuse for manipulative effect. I consider not the interactive insulation of taboo language but, in this highly public context, its subversive exploitation for both entertainment and commercial gain.

Kin and country at Wakooka Outstation: an exercise in rich interpretation

Much of ones understanding of social structure and social processes derives from observing (usually, in fact, participation in) a continuing stream of minute interactions. A word, a glance, or a gesture may alert us to the quality of a relationship; a glimpse of two peoples behavior, a snatch of overheard conversation, may link up with knowledge we already have about them, draw meaning from this knowledge, and, in turn, color our future perceptions. We routinely interpret interactions we observe, and our interpretations are neither parsimonious nor deductively well enclosed, but more often as rich and speculative as circumstances will allow. Behind this essay is a methodological issue: what expertise and what knowledge is required to reconstruct processes of interpretation and understanding that clearly accompany even the most prosaic and routine interactions? How can one penetrate the preformulated, though perhaps inexplicit, background of opinion against which interaction occurs? I will look here at a much smaller problem, arising from some particular bits of recorded natural conversation. A good reason for looking at the minute details of peoples conversation with one another is to find out, by reading between the lines (or listening between the words), about their relationships. It is a sociolinguistic commonplace that the choice between alternate ways of speaking (whether between alternate pronunciations, words, or even entire languages) can signal features of the relative status, rank, or genealogical connection between speakers, can respond to (and in turn set future parameters of) the context of speech. The classic instance — diglossia — maps a complex variety of asymmetrical social relations onto the single opposition between two linguistic varieties, themselves conceptualized (though not always realized) as discrete and distinct. In the more general case, the very availability of discrete linguistic varieties constitutes, inevitably it seems, a sociological and interactional resource. The varieties acquire specific values or characters (which lend themselves to special purposes: in irony, in mimicking or aping the speech of others, by metaphor or metonymy to remind participants of the features of relationships, and so on). Moreover, the possibility of switching between