Presentations

Abstract

In the 1920s, Bronislaw Malinowski – in the tradition of Herder and Humboldt and based on his experience during his field research on the Trobriand Islands – pointed out that language is not only an instrument of thought, but first and foremost a tool for creating social bonds and accountability relations in more or less ritualized forms of social interaction. Language is a mode of behavior and the meaning of an utterance is constituted by its pragmatic function: it can only be understood in relation to the context in which it is embedded. The rules that guide communicative behavior vary immensely in different cultures and have to be learned to achieve communicative competence within a specific speech community. This learning results in the understanding of how the speakers structure, pattern and regulate their ways of speaking. Malinowski’s ideas had an increasing impact in anthropology and linguistics – especially in pragmatics – and led to the formation of the subdiscipline “anthropological linguistics”. This paper presents three observations of the Trobriand Islanders’ attitude to their language Kilivila and their actual language use in social interactions which I made during my fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands. They illustrate that whoever wants to research the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction – be it linguist or anthropologist – must know how the researched society constructs its reality. Researchers need to be on ‘common ground’ with the researched communities, and this common ground knowledge is the indispensable prerequisite for any successful research on language, culture and cognition manifest in social interaction.

Abstract

This talk reports on the results of my research in 2006 and 2008 on the verbal expressions - the lexical means - Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders, offers its speakers to refer to and to describe emotions and inner feelings. Data were elicited with 18 so-called "Ekman's faces" in which the faces of three persons (one woman, two men) illustrate six allegedly universal basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and film stimuli staging and demonstrating standard emotions based on English. This latter stimulus set is called “Mind Reading Emotions Library (MREL)”. It was developed by Baron-Cohen and his co-workers in 2004. After the presentation of the data elicited with the "Ekman faces" and the MREL film clips I will discuss them on the basis of the following three research questions: How "effable" are emotions or can we observe ineffability - the difficulty or impossibility of putting experiences into words - within the domain of emotions? Do consultants agree with one another how they name emotions? Are facial expressions or situations better cues for labeling? In addition to the data elicited with these tools I also present lexical means the Trobriand Islanders use to refer to emotions and inner feelings which are documented in my overall corpus of the Kilivila language.

Abstract

The Trobriand Islanders' eschatological belief system explains in detail what happens when someone dies. Bronislaw Malinowski described essentials of this eschatology in his famous articles "Baloma: the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands" and "Myth in Primitive Psychology" There he also presented the Trobrianders' belief that a spirit of the dead, a "baloma" can be reborn; he claimed that Trobrianders are unaware of the father's role as genitor. In this talk I present not only a critical review of Malinowski's ethnography of Trobriand eschatology, finally settling the "virgin birth" controversy, I also document highly ritualized songs - the "wosi milamala" - the harvest festival songs. They are sung in an archaic variety of Kilivila - the "biga baloma" - the language of the spirits of the dead. Malinowski briefly refers to these songs but does not mention that they codify many aspects of Trobriand eschatology. The songs are still sung during the harvest festival and after the death of a Trobriander, but there are only a few people left who still understand the "wosi milamala". They are a moribund genre of Kilivila - and with them the Trobriand Islanders' complex indigenous eschatology will vanish.