DISENTANGLING REALITIES

An Analytical Abstraction

by Hugh M. Lewis

White, Geoffrey M., 1990 "Moral Discourse and the Rhetoric of Emotions" in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds.) Language and the Politics of Emotion Cambridge University Press, pages 46-48

This article is explanative, drawn from analysis of selected ethnographic recordings of discourse events (interpersonal meetings between family members and village mates) of A'ara speaking peoples on the Solomon Island of Santa Isabel in the Pacific region known as Melanesia.

The theoretical orientation framing this article has been only gradually and recently emerging upon the anthropological horizon. A marginal 'pre-paradigm', this interdisciplinary approach combines: 1. Socio-linguistic analysis of discourse, code switching and speech styles. 2. Anthropological linguistic studies of non-western languages within indigenous cultural contexts, focusing particularly upon the 'ethnography of speaking' and the 'ethnography of communication'. 3. Cognitive anthropological (ethnoscientific, ethnosemantic and ethnophysical) explorations of cross cultural relationships between analytically separable domains of language, culture and cognition. 4. Social psychology, small group dynamics and Irving Foffman's "Frame Analysis". 5. Post structural critique, 'destruction' of the familiar and the strange, hermeneutical anthropology and the anthropology of knowledge. 6. What has become received in cross cultural research as the anthropology of emotion. 7. And what may be called the anthropology of power as this is always empirically manifest in local events, interpersonal relations and as it becomes primarily expressed in terms of 'discursive practice'. Connected with this is the 'anthropology of practice' and the 'anthropology of performance'.

Rooted in 'social action' theory from Max Weber, Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz, this orientation comprises a challenge to the predominant 'structuralist' and 'semiological' paradigm; constituting a critique of structuralist orientations in linguistics and socio-cultural theory. Its premise is that 'structure' is a reified residum of western rationalistic categories of knowledge superimposed upon essentially non-western domains of subjective experience and speech practices and cultural and cognitive frameworks. It attempts to 'decenter' critical focus away from preoccupation with syntactical 'deep structure' (emphasis upon langue) considered unamenable to substantive falsification and refocus critical attention toward semantic and pragmatic functions of speaking as everyday reenactment and discursive practices in the construction of cultural meaning systems--as empirical events (emphasis upon parole) within locally bounded situational, cultural and conceptual contexts.

The particular 'problem' of this research was the discursive and contextual analysis of common A'ara speech practices of 'disentangling'. The more general 'aim' of this work is the ethnographic documentation and ethnological demonstration of 'disentangling' as an example of 'emotion talk' and 'moral discourse' as evidence for the foregoing theoretical orientation.

This is an analysis of a common speech practice of 'disentangling' (grarutha) of 'bad feelings' or 'sadness' (di'a nagnafa) which are 'buried' (fruni) or 'covered over' (plohmo) by 'problem and reluctance to talk about them, (page 54)' and which give rise to emotions of 'anger' (di'a tagna) and 'shame' (mamaja).

Metaphors for disentangling, 'talking out' (cheke fajifla) or 'opening up' (tora) or 'surfaces' (thagra) illustrate this practice as a process of revelation, "of moving personal thoughts and emotions into community awareness" (page 54). Disentangling allows the covert feelings to become transformed into overtly expressed emotions, discursive rhetoric and social action, 'airing' or 'defusing' ill will and providing a socially social appropriate and efficacious outlet for potentially harmful feelings.

The cultural postulate is the belief that negative emotions normally suppressed and therefore 'hidden' may cause serious illness and misfortune--"ranging from personal injury to a poor catch of fish or failure to locate domestic pigs in the forest" (page 53). These 'bad feelings' may become dangerous not only to the self but to others as well, and arise generally from some breach of moral conduct, transgressions which damage social relations or threaten the self, and situations producing actual or potential social conflict or confrontation.

Furthermore, these are feelings found within a cultural atmosphere of cognitive confusion and moral ambiguity. The sense of inconsistency is critical, and these discourse events become 'super critical' arising unplanned and spontaneously in an atmosphere of social tension and ambiguity which requires participatorial enactment in order to dissipate the sense of entanglement in which such bad feeling arise and in turn foster.

Methods consisted of multiple recordings of speech events construed as 'disentangling sessions' among the A'ara speakers, and the subsequent analysis of such discourse in terms of emotion 'schemas' of the following general form:

Social event General Schema Transgression

Emotion **'attributed emotion' ** di'a tagna di'a nagnafa

Action response inferred proposition ('angry') ('sad')

Retribution Repair

For example: "It's just that when my real father said that (reported Fala's remarks)

That I was sad and came and talked to the old woman (Sukhi) up

here."

SAD REPAIR DAMAGED RELATION

'sad' Tom's remarks to Skhi.

Tom's remarks =repair damaged relation.

"I was just ashamed is all. It was not (I didn’t mean), you all don't

come back. Don't set foot in my village, you all." I didn’t (mean)

that."

ANGER RETRIBUTION

Tom's remarks not retribution

not anger.

"That was just from my sadness, my own shame.

Etc., etc., (page 62)

Several implicit and explicit concepts are linked together in this article. The notion of general schema is used as a frame of reference delimiting both the inferred context of understanding and the 'events' experienced or expressed by the participants. Situational events of discursive enactment and practice constitute the particular 'units of analysis', composing and demonstrating general schema as "a 'prototypical scenario' of social and emotional process" that is "frequently structured in terms of scenario like schemata that represent emotions as arising in social situations and compelling certain types of response" (page 46). The socio-emotional process entails experiential instantiation, either past examples or present situations; propositional inferences that disambiguate inconsistencies; emotional, characteriological or attitudinal attribution (expression of folk psychology); cognitive and emotive ambiguousness arising from inconsistencies between beliefs and behaviors; metaphorical juxtaposition allowing 'nesting' and 'framing' of meanings within more specific or more general associations which enables the inter-penetration, generalization and transference of meaning and feeling across different contexts and situations; rhetorical disentangling as received practice in disambiguating social and emotional realities, smoothing out contradictions and inconsistencies; expressive abbreviation (metaphorical signification and symbolic communication); subsequential social action in terms of discursive practice and finally cultural codification reinforcing or reinventing existential and normative cultural codes of appropriate and expected belief and behavior. Perpetuating and refashioning a 'common sense' of cultural consistency demands the oral and literate hypostatization of a 'cultural code', the reproduction of which in everyday practices is at the center of the problematic interconnections between language, cognition and culture. Cultural codes, however implicit and invisible, are continuously reconstructed in everyday reiteration of common practices within shared socio-cultural contexts of understanding and expectation.

CONCLUSIONS: Real feelings have a biological basis, but their emotional expression is typically constructed within a socio-cultural context of shared understandings and expectations and have definite socio-cultural functions of maintaining 'common sense' consistency between beliefs and behaviors.

COMMENTS include: 1. Cultural constructivism by discursive practice (and critical destructionism by discursive analysis) depends upon, indeed, even demands, the definite delimitation of contexts, but fails to resolve in any constructive manner the concomitant 'dilemma of context'--how much or how little 'context' is necessary and sufficient to 'describe and explain' an 'event'. (Ben-Ami Scharfstein 1989) 2. The related dilemma of interpretation, the question of who's translation, of metaphorical salience, of distinguishing between 'loaded' and 'unloaded' metaphysical meanings (Roger Keesing 1985), in the 'taken for granted' definition of inference, reference and transference of meaning in particular metaphors and statements and in generalized 'codes' or 'entangled' or 'hidden' realities the speaker/actor's own or may they in fact be the 'observing/participating' anthropologist's transparent presumptions? One must only consider the possibility of multiple translations to reveal the hidden ambiguities of determining the necessary 'correct' or best or only translation possible. (Daniel Rosenberg 1990) 3. Rendering visible the apparently 'invisible', revealing the 'hidden' feelings (and enlightening 'back regions' and 'deep structures') and the consistent transparency of cultural codes presents and antinomy al paradox shared by both participants and observers, and this 'invisibility' of shared contexts and connotations tends to undermine the whole 'hidden' agenda of superimposing rational order upon apparent empirical disorder. This is a dilemma far greater for the observer than for the participant, because the former must successfully disentangle at least two or more differing but equally invisible, cultural codes, entailing a deliberate estrangement (distanciation, critical indifference, objectification, disinterested inquiry) divorcing or divisively sundering the 'dialogical betweeness' or intermediary or 'togetherness'. In allusion to the notion of scientific psychology's 'epistemo-pathology' (Sigmund Koch 1981), I will refer to this inherent antinomality of cross cultural realities and the existential predicament of the 'participant observer' as 'anthro-pathology'.

Precise statistical description helps to precipitate the rarefied and invisible and fixes inferences and frames and thus brings enhanced resolution and clearer 'visibility' to the inherently and apparently ambiguous, but statistical realities depend upon often superficial one to one correspondence between the term and the thing, a frequently factitious precision between the fact and the act, and its presumed facticity and preciseness may be only spurious and superfluous. Rendering the abstract concrete and the concrete abstract, transforming cultural schemata into statistical data, and vice versa, statistical measurement may hide more than it reveals, obfuscate more than disambiguate, rendering invisible the possibly visible, saying nothing about intentions, meanings, emotions or purposes behind its silent facts, and in the process providing the ultimate reification of human reality, transforming 'being-ness' into 'thing-ness' and people into numbers. Then statistical descriptions and their superficial realities become the defense of the insecure and their status quo.

The implicit critique of 'structuralism' and the destruction of its terminological rationalism as spurious, Euro-centric categorical coherence superimposed upon apparent indigenous inconsistencies of 'other-ness' poses the final question of whether the authoritative ethnographer might not yet be substituting one brand of 'Struktur' for yet another, opposite, kinds of 'structures' (schematas, codes, frames, events) smuggling into the 'hidden agenda' of making the strange familiar, the invisible visible, and the familiar strange, one mode of information to replace another, one form of fixed purpose for another, superimposing yet another arbitrary, transparent and categorical sense of organization, order, constraint and purpose upon 'other' people's subjectively constituted and shared realities. Analytical destruction of 'common senseness' whether strange or familiar, self or other, begs the question of 'whose common sense categories?'.

Might not the native's hidden inconsistencies and cultural contradictions and apparent arbitrariness be our own, and might not our own invisible inconsistencies and contradictions and arbitrariness become theirs in the process of disentangling our shared realities. I suggest this is always so. Human reality is always entangled, our meanings remain always invisible, our motives always hidden, and intentions always transparent.