Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

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Language & Communication

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Conventional wisdom: Imagination, obedienceand intersubjectivity

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⇑ Tel.: +1 434 924 3002.E-mail address: ed8c@virginia.edu

Eve Danziger ⇑Department of Anthropology, 100 Brooks Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history:Available online 13 August 2013

Keywords:MayanMutual KnowledgeOpacity DoctrineParticipant StructureRitual SpeechSpeakers and Hearers

Under the Opacity doctrines of the Pacific, wise listeners are skeptical about taking others’speech at face value. But among the Mopan Maya, who also espouse a version of Opacity,this is exactly what the wisest listeners are expected to do. When receiving the instructionsof elders, virtuous Mopan listeners (here dubbed ‘‘Acceptors’’) act as counterparts to Goff-man’s Principal, assuming the risks of faithful obedience regardless of their own momen-tary mental states, which are considered vulnerable to error and self-interest. A degree ofcross-cultural variation is thus found in the domain most globally characterizable as ‘‘inter-subjectivity’’. We should be cautious in appealing to universal attributes of human natureas we chart this domain.

� 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

1.1. The opacity of other minds

The human ability to discern the intentions of others, and to share perspectives with them under conditions of mutualknowledge was surely an important evolutionary development in making culture possible. Such capacities of ‘‘intersubjec-tivity’’, which humans do not share with the other great apes, seem plausibly to underlie the uniquely human ability toaccomplish intergenerational transmission of acquired knowledge, practical co-operation, shared communicative inference,the possibility of inter-generational teaching and learning, and cultural conventionality itself (Tomasello et al., 2005).

These kinds of claims bring into high relief the documented fact that societies actually differ in how intersubjectivity andits manifestations are ideologically construed. In the late 20th century, anthropological accounts began to appear from thePacific ethnographic region (Rosaldo, 1982; Duranti, 1993), of peoples who apparently conducted their interactional and cul-tural affairs without reference to what their compatriots were thinking, feeling, or ‘had in mind’. The premise that interactionwas centrally grounded in interlocutors’ mutual assessment of the contents of each other’s minds (Searle, 1969, 1976; Grice,1975) was explicitly challenged. Instead, the possibility was raised that substantial amounts of interaction might take placewithout recourse to specific speculation about interactants’ states of mind.

Over the years, the picture of what has come to be called the Doctrine of the Opacity of Other Minds has been carefullyelaborated by ethnographers of Oceania (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008). The discussion has moved from documenting culturalclaims about the near-impossibility of knowing others’ minds to noting also a deeply felt anxiety in these societies about theperceived desirability of doing so (Robbins, 2001; Rumsey, 2013). Significant variation in both space and time has been ob-served across the Pacific region (Schieffelin, 2008), and the logical implications of Opacity doctrines for Euro-American phi-losophy have been further drawn out (Duranti, 2010).

252 E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

During the same period, a description of attitudes and practices relevant to the cultural status of others’ minds has alsobeen quietly building in the Mayan-language area of Native Central America (Berman, 2011; Brody, 1991; Brown, 1990,1995; Danziger, 2006, 2010; Gaskins, 2006; Haviland, 1988; Kockelman, 2010; LeGuen, n.d.; Shoaps, 2009; Watanabe,1992). While not absolutely uniform within the area, observations from several branches of the Mayan language family havesignificant resonance with one another, and also with landmark accounts of language-related beliefs and practices fromother parts of Native America (Basso, 1984; Guss, 1989; Reichard, 1944; Witherspoon, 1977, see Nevins and Nevins,2013). In these accounts, it is frequently observed that assessment of an actor’s individual intentions and beliefs is notprioritized as part of the interpretation of his or her acts and utterances.

But the Native American ethnography does not simply replicate Pacific observations about claims as to the impossibilityof knowing other minds. On the contrary, it brings a substantially different class of relevant observations to the table. In thisessay, I focus on attitudes and practices relevant to language and mind among the Mopan Maya, an indigenous people ofEastern Central America, to point out this variation: whereas in the Pacific case the wise listener is cautious about takingothers’ speech at face value (Rumsey, 2013), in the Mayan case this is exactly what the wisest and most virtuous listeneris expected to do.1 It will be helpful in the discussion to use the vocabulary of Goffman (1981: 144), in which the ‘Author’of an utterance denominates that aspect of the complex speaker role to which are attributed the words and sentiments beingspoken, whereas the ‘Principal’ denotes that aspect of the speaker role which bears the risks and also reaps the moral rewards ofspeaking. The ‘‘Animator’’ in turn, is the physical entity who produces the perceptible phenomena of speech.

While this particular partition of the speaker role and its offshoots have come under scrutiny for being incomplete (Lev-inson, 1988), or inflexible (Irvine, 1996), the notion of Author in particular has obvious special relevance to questions ofOpacity, and that of Principal has been used to good effect in accounting for certain aspects of the Mayan linguistic ethnog-raphy (see discussion below). Consideration of the Mopan case will lead in this essay to the point where it is reasonable totranspose Goffman’s terms for these three speaker roles into counterparts for listeners: a Critic to evaluate the innovativecommunications of Author; a Recipient to process the physical signals of Animator, and a role which I propose to name thatof Acceptor, to compete or co-operate with Principal in assuming the risks and rewards of speech.

1.2. Levels of intersubjectivity

The fact that societies differ in their beliefs about language and mind may seem unbelievable (Robbins, 2008) or unim-portant, since fundamental matters of interactional bedrock seem self-evidently to depend upon the universal existence ofintersubjective orientation to social others, regardless of cultural beliefs about such orientation. Certainly, no ethnographicreport has ever suggested that basic conversational interaction is conducted in unrecognizable ways under the influence ofeven the most extreme Opacity doctrine. As part of my description, I consider whether Mopan attitudes to other minds mat-ter at all to Mopan interactional behavior.

As Duranti (2010: 2) points out, the term ‘intersubjectivity’ covers a territory in scholarly usage which ranges from ‘‘actsin which one is minimally aware of the presence of an Other to acts in which one actively works at making sure that theOther and the Self are perceptually, conceptually, and practically co-ordinated around a particular task.’’ This raises thepossibility that some levels of intersubjective orientation might be more vulnerable to cultural modification than others(Danziger, 2006). In turn, this means that the kinds of intersubjectivity which may have played a role in the evolution ofhuman sociality cannot necessarily be identified by reading directly from what is most familiar in scholars’ own culturesof upbringing.

There are certainly vast areas of human life in which some diffuse background of sensitivity to the activities of social oth-ers seems universally necessary (cf. Danziger, 2006; Duranti, 2010). I characterize such diffuse, out-of-awareness sensitivityto the general presence of social others as ‘we-orientation’.2 For the phenomenon of conscious reflection on and calculation ofstates of mutual knowledge among interactants, I adopt the phrase ‘‘mutual-knowledge-calculation’’ (Grice, 1975), or ‘‘mutualunderstanding’’ (Duranti, 2010). I qualify the terminology by adding, in a way similar to that of Grice and his followers, thatwhile awareness of the mutual-knowledge calculus is not at every moment uppermost in practitioners’ minds, it could atany time be brought to consciousness if the need arose.

Under the rubric of mutual-knowledge-calculation would come, for example, the situation in which a practitioner’s deci-sion to observe recognized convention X would run (Schelling, 1960): ‘We had better both know that we both know that weboth agree to observe convention X. If not, then neither one of us will bother to observe the convention’’. Each interlocutorhere assesses the degree to which he or she is prepared to trust in the sincerity of the behavioral intentions of the other, andacts accordingly.

By contrast, as an example of what might be meant by ‘we-orientation’ without any necessary component of ‘mutualunderstanding’, consider what happened during my stay in Mopan territory when a dramatic eclipse of the moon took place.I had already been told by several people that lunar eclipses were caused when a supernatural creature took hold of and

1 Mopan is a language of the Yucatecan subfamily, mutually intelligible with Yucatec proper (cf. Hanks, 2013), and also more distantly related to Tzotzil Maya(cf. Groark, 2013). In Belizean Mopan communities such as those in which I have worked, English is the second language, and most younger people have somedegree of fluency in it. Mopan is also spoken in Guatemala, where Spanish is the second language.

2 The terminology is clearly indebted to Schutz’ idea of the ‘‘we-relationship’’ (1966: 82; cited in Duranti, 2010: 9). I prefer not to presume, however, that anyactual ‘relationship’ is necessarily involved.

E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262 253

attacked the moon, and that these were very dangerous moments since the creature might devour the moon, who wouldthen never return to the sky. People in the village would be sure to make loud noises throughout an eclipse to frightenoff the invading creature, and to rescue the moon. On the night of the actual eclipse I wrote:

We watched the round shadow move across the white face of the moon until it engulfed it, and the moon turned a dullorange behind the shadow. And in the dark village, coming from nowhere and small-voiced under the stars, we heard thebanging of tin roofs, relieved by short yells, the clanging of pots- not a simultaneous clamour, not a raucous noise, but asystematic, responsible maintenance of sound, as people who could not see one another took turns producing the noiseand resting their arms.V. tells me again, and A.’s visiting father repeats, that an animal (b’aalche) is grabbing the moon, and that the noise isbecause ‘‘We are frightening it’’, with the sense in which frightening something can kill it.3

3

asKotra(b’

Tan-ti-jak’-s-ik-Ø

The Mopan belief that sudden fright can lead to illness and dea‘spirit’ above is used routinely in locutions parallel to this one, inckelman, 2010). This is the only form that can be translated as ‘sovel, or in sickness caused by others’ critical surveillance (Groarkaalche’) (Course, 2013).

uy-oola

DUR-1A.PL-scare-CAUS-TR.IPFV-3B

3A-spirit ‘We keep on scaring it.’

a Mopan orthography conforms to the conventions of the ALMG (England and Elliott, 1990). For more on Mopan grammar see Ulrich et al., 1986;Danziger, 1996; Hofling, 2011.

What seems to have struck me most about this event at the time was its we-orientedness. No one had set up or distrib-uted a roster for producing continuous sound for the several hours of the eclipse. Participants merely attended to the overallenvironment, and each acted to ensure that no moment would be left dangerously void of sound. The mutually coordinatednoise-making did not need to involve conscious mutual-knowledge-calculation because the activity was instrumental andmotivated – that is to say, non-arbitrary – in that the noise produced by banging the pots was believed to act directly tofrighten the supernatural creature. Each resting participant had merely to register an abatement of the general noise levelto feel individually motivated to start clanging again.

But even in the context of implementing quite arbitrary cultural signals and conventions, the need to resort to guessing atthe contents of others’ minds by no means always occurs. Such signals are by definition uninterpretable simply in terms ofthe perceived properties of the signified with respect to the signifier, but hearers may be able to interpret them without mu-tual-knowledge calculation simply by referring to an established pre-existing rule (Boas, 1911; Burge, 1975; Danziger, 2006;Grice, 1975), rather than by intersubjectively guessing at plausible signifier–signified relations in the mind of the speaker. Inshort, when nothing innovative or out of the ordinary has occurred, when the conventional value of signs is well established,and when effort (whether virtuous or malevolent) is followed by external success, the mutual-knowledge calculus may atbest occur only at a deeply unconscious level (Arundale, 2008; Carston, 2005; Gibbs, 1994; Giora, 2003). The need for con-scious mutual-knowledge-calculation arises most acutely, by contrast, when there is an innovative departure from defaultexpectations – perhaps for example, in order to interpret a novel figurative usage (Giora, 2003; Grice, 1975), to assign blamefor unexpected wrongdoing (Brody et al., 2000; Rosen, 1995), to unpack responsibility for a linguistic misunderstanding(Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984: 110), or to assign exceptional credit for ‘trying’ when external evidence of success is want-ing (Danziger, 2010; Malle and Knobe, 1997; Robbins, 2001). Constant reading of others’ minds is not actually necessary tothe conduct of much everyday interaction.

In the following discussion, I claim that while general we-orientation of the type exemplified in the pot-banging during aMopan eclipse is universal in humans, and is never denied by cultural ideologies, the phenomenon of conscious mutual-knowledge calculation is indeed the target of culturally variable philosophies of mind, and also of cultural attitudes to inno-vation, novelty and change. Under the influence of such philosophies, the degree to which calculation of mutual understand-ing is actually practised across cultures also varies significantly. Although no normal person in any society functionsinteractionally without a high level of unconscious ‘we-orientation’ to others’ subjectivity, or without reference to pre-estab-lished cultural rules, we will see that some peoples, in some domains, have attended sufficiently less to matters of others’intentions to have provoked puzzled commentary on the matter from outsiders.

1.3. Mayan minds

In contrast to what is reported from the Pacific, the claim that others’ minds are unknowable is not a central ethnographicfeature of the Mayan case (although see Warren, 1995). In Mayan ethnography, others’ minds may well be knowable, and areunderstood to be motivators of action. But knowledge of the momentary inner states of individual actors is not considered to

th is similar to ‘susto’ beliefs found widely in Latin America (Gillen, 1948). The form glossedwhich a variety of psychological states (anger, jealousy, joy, greed) are predicated of it (cf.

ul’ in Mopan; no doctrine of multiple souls is entertained. Mopan also have no belief in soul, 2013). It is of interest that the form is used here in application to a supernatural ‘animal’

254 E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

be a highly relevant parameter when it comes to interpretation of or, especially, to moral evaluation of others’ acts. In MopanMaya for example, actors are held responsible for wrongdoing even in cases of error or accident. False utterances are judgedas cases of blameworthy ‘lying’ (tus), even when it is known that speakers are merely mistaken rather than deliberatelymalevolent (Danziger, 2001, 2010).4 Children who make up stories for pleasure are reproved, and in general, Gricean Floutsof Quality such as those involved in institutionalized genres of fiction are vanishingly rare in traditional Mopan society (Dan-ziger, 2010).5 Humor, for example, concentrates around puns and double entendres rather than around narrative anecdotes.

In the closely related Yucatec-speaking Maya area, household blame is also apportioned according to damage done ratherthan to degree of malevolent intention (Gaskins and Lucy, 1986), children’s play avoids innovative fantasy (Gaskins, 2006),and ‘lying’ (tus) is attributed even to speakers known to be merely mistaken (LeGuen, n.d.). The relevant ideological perspec-tive on everyday communication appears to be that actions have a direct relationship with their consequences, unmediatedby passage through the intentions of the actors – even where these may be readily known. In Goffman’s terms (Goffman,1981: 144), this ideology combines the role of Animator directly with that of Principal, without evaluative attention tothe vicissitudes of the individual Author’s current mental state (Danziger, 2011).

Slightly further afield in the Maya area, Shoaps (2009) explicitly explores the idea that the special flavor of moral unques-tionableness conveyed by the Sakapultepek Maya (K’ichean) ironic particle derives from the fact that it casts quoted speakersin the role of Goffmanian Principal rather than in that of individual innovative Author. In order to derive the applicability ofthe moral censure encoded in the particle, listeners must ‘‘connect the dots’’ (Shoaps, 2009: 112) between the ironized nar-rated event and the listener’s own current circumstances (cf. Basso, 1984; Nevins and Nevins, 2013), rather than – as is thecase with a Gricean Flout – between what a speaker has said and what the listener guesses that the individual speaker mighthave intended. The particular brand of moral irony practiced by Sakapultepek does not require listeners to guess at speakers’intentions, and in general ‘‘little cultural importance is placed [on] originality in speech’’ (Shoaps, 2009: 96).

Elsewhere again within the Maya area, Kockelman (2006) shows that Q’eqchi (K’ichean) modality particles are bestunderstood as encoding logical relations among Goffmanian speaker roles, rather than as encoding mentalist relations ofsubjectivity such as surprise or doubt. Kockelman is in general a champion of the idea that across all cultures, ‘‘mental statesare no more ‘private’ than social statuses; each is known through the roles that enact them, and only relatively incontrovert-ibly known when these roles are emblematic.’’ i.e. rigidly conventionalized as in the case of uniforms, flags, etc. (Kockelman,2010: 7 see also Kockelman, 2007: 396). Much of Kockelman’s work (Kockelman, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2010) is devoted to thisproposal, which he may have learned first from his fieldwork with Q’eqchi speakers. Even while constantly projecting expec-tations of universality however, and while characterizing subjectivity-based analyses as ‘‘second-order’’ phenomena (2006),Kockelman also returns (2004) to the idea that what speakers have to say in exegesis of their own linguistic usage may berevealing for what it conveys of culturally distinct philosophies of mind. In particular, as part of his effort to problematize theextreme mentalism routinely assumed in linguistic glossing, Kockelman (2004) suggests that Q’eqchi notions of mind are notidentical in this respect to Euro-American ones.

The hallmark of the Animator-as-Principal (minus Author) ideology is the moral accountability which adheres to the pro-duction of utterances even in the absence of attention to the speaker’s individual state of mind. In Mopan, the perceivedtransgression involved in false speech is greatest, for example, when the interacting individuals occupy the religiouslycharged respect relationships of compadrazgo, which arise when one adult stands as godparent to the other’s child at a Cath-olic Church ceremony such as baptism, confirmation or marriage (Mintz and Wolf, 1950). In compadrazgo relationships,moral accountability is linked directly to the religious sphere, and the pressure to produce only correct speech and comport-ment is very high. Opportunities for individual expression are explicitly curtailed. Comadres and compadres may not laughand joke when in one another’s company. Even the everyday greeting speech which is prescribed for people in these rela-tionships is formulaic and scripted, and the individuality of speakers is ostentatiously effaced while indulging in it (Danziger,2011). People who already know each other well may refuse to enter compadrazgo relationships with one another becausethey cannot countenance the constraints on their existing, less formal, relationship that would be involved (Danziger, 2001).

In contrast to attitudes to polite interactional registers which are present in some other Mayan communities (cf. Groark,2013), and in accord with Mopan beliefs that correct behavior is a naturalistic prerequisite for the continuation of the currentuniverse, this style of hyper-polite speech and interaction is not felt by Mopan to be a vehicle for dissimulation of negativefeelings between the participants. On the contrary, successful formal exchanges between compadres and comadres are saidto indicate with certainty that there are no hidden animosities between the interactants. Production of this kind of speech iseven believed to be physically impossible if proscribed feelings, such as those of anger or sexual desire, are harbored byeither party toward the other (Danziger, 2001, 2011). The prospect of innovative, dissembling or figurative (‘false’) use ofthis kind of ritual speech is regarded with negative emotions ranging from uneasiness to outrage.

But Mayan ideologies which downplay the importance of intentionality are not, at least in the Mopan moral calculus,underpinned by any extraordinary denial of the existence of mental states (contra Nuyts, 1994). These are known to exist,

4 The gloss lying (rather than, say, morally neutral falsehood) is justified by the fact that Mopan tus incorporates a crucial component of moral blame which isabsent from English falsehood but present in English lying (see Danziger, 2010 for full discussion). Bilingual Mopan speakers routinely use lies or lying whenrendering tus into English, and conversely there is no Mopan expression which better renders English lying. Like all glosses, of course, this one falls short of fullequivalence to the original term.

5 Flouts (Grice, 1989) occur when one participant uses speech in an unconventional way, requiring the other participant(s) to calculate ‘what the speaker hadin mind’ in doing so, and thus to arrive at an unconventional, figurative, understanding of what was said.

E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262 255

named in the Mopan lexicon, and believed to motivate much of human action. Rather, the fact that speakers’ mental statesare not interrogated in the interpretation of untruths is due to the Mopan belief that dangerous cosmic imbalances follownaturally (i.e., of necessity, automatically) from verbal falsehood by virtue of its status as a violation of what is called ‘respect’(tzik). Other violations of tzik ‘respect’ include incest, murder, and failure to respect one’s elders (Danziger, 2001). TraditionalMopan characterize a world without tzik ‘respect’ using vivid anti-cultural images. In such a world, say the most knowledge-able consultants, men would marry their own sisters or grandmothers, and household furnishings would turn into wild ani-mals and wander away. The moral violation that is entailed in false speech is thus quite clearly felt to occur at thecosmological rather than at the interpersonal level.

In general, converging linguistic-anthropological investigations report from different parts of the Mayan cultural regionthat even everyday speech and action are evaluated with reference to a supra-human moral order, in which what counts isfidelity to cosmic prescriptions rather than to one’s own momentary mental state, itself acknowledged to be vulnerable toerror and self-interest. In the vocabulary of ordinary language philosophy, many traditionally oriented Mayans could be saidto regard conventional speech and action as ideologically ‘natural’ (Grice, 1989), since interpretation can be accomplishedwithout recourse to information about the intentions of the other. In such a cultural world, guessing at the momentaryand idiosyncratic content of others’ minds is perhaps felt to be merely unnecessary rather than regrettably impossible, asreported from some parts of Oceania.

2. Mopan truth and trust

How much do ideologies like the Mopan one matter in everyday interaction? In accord with the local non-mentalist ide-ology, Mopan speakers who accidentally tell the truth while intending to deceive are not blamed for ‘lying’ (tus) (Danziger,2010). But, since mistakes as well as deliberate deceptions fall into this blameworthy speech act category, unwitting orincautious speakers risk finding themselves at any moment unexpectedly in the wrong. Certain practices of interpersonalreticence in everyday conversation (preference for silence, underspecification, and overt marking of hearsay accounts) canbe linked to this interactional reality (Danziger, 2001; for more general discussion see Hill and Irvine, 1993; for discussionof Yucatec quotative marking, see Lucy, 1993). Conversely, since one’s interlocutor may be ‘lying’ (tus) without even knowingit, it is not surprising that Mopan audiences also tend toward skepticism, and that accusations of ‘lying’ are commonplace inthe Mopan community.

As a brief example, consider an exchange that took place during the lunar eclipse already mentioned. Recall that I was toldthat the explanation for the eclipse was the attack of a supernatural creature, and that many Mopan villagers acted on thisunderstanding during the eclipse by producing continuous noise in order to frighten off the invader. When another, moreinnovative, explanation for the eclipse was proposed, it was received by the ethnographer as possible metaphor (Griceanflout, involving mutual-knowledge calculation for its interpretation), but by others present merely as tus (‘lying’):

meek-b’-i

umen uy-icham a k’in hug-PASS-3B.COMPL by 3A-husband ART sun ‘She’s being hugged by her husband, the sun.’

This struck me at the time as a good way of mythologizing the explanation of eclipses that I believe, but his wife was swiftin her condemnation. She snapped:

chen

u-tus!a

merely

3A-lie ‘He’s just ‘‘lying’’.

a The woman’s condemnation is in order not just for the falsehood of the remark but also for its slightly salacious content, addressed as it was by herhusband to an unrelated female.

Intriguingly however, despite this attitude of skepticism with respect to others’ speech, there exists an equally strong areaof ideology in Mopan which promotes the virtue of unquestioning trust. Apparently paradoxically, given the ideology oftruth and falsehood that has been outlined, what requires strength of character among the Mopan – what is explicitly ad-mired and proclaimed as the height of virtue – is to believe wholeheartedly that others are speaking truth, and to act on thatbelief. To unpack this apparent paradox will help us to understand how Mopan beliefs in this area play out in more specificcultural ways, and in the long run will lead us to a more global understanding of the importance of the cultural contributionto the general phenomenon of ‘‘intersubjectivity’’.

2.1. Mopan tz’okes: ‘Believing’

The transitive verb tz’okes ‘believe’ is structurally a causative, but the base intransitive form (which in sister languages canbe glossed as ‘to be complete, to be over’, Briceño Chel, 2000) is no longer used in Mopan. There is no other Mopan term that

256 E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

translates as felicitously either the English verb to believe or the Spanish one creer (Ulrich and Ulrich, 1976: 132, Ventur,1976).

Ventur 3:18.6186

6

7

8

woDa

9

re10

11

u-tz’oks-aj-Ø

Translation in elicitation from RC, July 2011.Translation in elicitation from RC, July 2011.There is in fact no simple Mopan expression corresponding to English

rd yaal-t-e’ (‘to try, to try out’) always requires that the experience wnziger, 2010.)

It is noteworthy that Benveniste (cited in Pouillon, 1979) also deriveferred to economic indebtedness (and see the related modern English f

A separate pair of verbs (tz’aj and k’äm) denote giving and receivingOne extra point appears in the table, due to a scribal error.

u-t’an

try in the sense of mental effort without physical suchich was ‘tried’ should have actually occurred. (For

s the ultimate etymology of modern French croire ‘borm credit).in the everyday sense.

u-ja’an.

3A-believe-TR.COMPL-3B 3A-speech 3A-man’s.father.in.law ‘He believed the words of his father-in-law.’

It frequently also happens however that tz’okes is readily translated with the English word obey rather than with the Eng-lish word believe (Spanish obedecer; cf. Cajbon et al., 2003: 114; Hofling, 2011: 499). Once again, no other Mopan word existswhich is a better or more idiomatic translation.

Ventur 3:18.6187

u-tz’oks-aj-Ø

u-t’an u-ja’an. 3A –obey-TR.COMPL-3B 3A-speech 3A-man’s.father.in.law ‘He obeyed the words of his father-in-law.’

In many contexts, there may be room for doubt as to whether English obey or English believe would be the most felicitoustranslation. But in elicitation and some usage, Mopan consultants agree that Mopan tz’okes does not essentially requiremobilization of the actor’s mental states for its successful accomplishment. In one traditional story for example (Ventur,1976), a woman ‘obeys’ (tz’okes) instructions even as she reflects doubtfully on their validity. On the other hand, thosewho make a good-faith effort to carry out instructions but do not succeed in doing so are not considered to have performedtz’okes.8 The ‘obey’ sense of this word seems therefore to take precedence over the ‘believe’ one, (which latter may have its ori-gins in the introduction of Catholic Christianity to the area some centuries ago, cf. Pouillon, 1979 for the cultural history ofFrench croire, and Wierzbicka, 2006 for discussion of particularly Enlightenment additions to the history of English believe).

Tz’okes often also appears in yet other contexts that reinforce its primary affinity with tangible action.9 As elsewhere in theregion (Cancian, 1967), an important feature of Mopan ritual gatherings is conspicuous hospitality. The sponsor of such an occa-sion offers large quantities of food, drink, and music to the guests and to the public at large. This offering is characterized inMopan as si’-ool ‘free gifts’, for which no direct return is expected. It is definitely expected, however, that the guests will partakeof what is offered. And to do so is called, reverently, to tz’okes (‘gratefully receive’) these gifts.10 In all of its usages, the conceptconveyed by the word tz’okes enjoys high cultural evaluation, and is closely connected with the regime of ‘respect’ (tzik).

2.2. Imagination and obedience

Unusually explicit testimony to the positive value placed on tz’okes (‘obey’) in Mopan society is to be found in the recordof what occurred when the members of a long-running Catholic Church-sponsored youth group responded to a survey fromthe National Catholic Youth organization. Eleven Mopan boys and girls aged between 15 and 20 participated. Each was in-structed to vote for three out of a list of 15 character traits presented in English, as ‘‘What I Strive to Be’’, without rankingthem. Thirty-four votes were recorded as having been thus awarded, distributed over the 15 character traits.11 The final tallyfrom the activity is reported below, with the permission and exegesis of the Peace Corps worker who facilitated the activity. Inthis public context, the participants were of course likely to have responded in ways that reflected their sense of public valuesrather than their possible private inclinations; we should read the data accordingly. Fig. 1 shows the list of character traits of-fered, arranged in descending order by the number of votes which each one received:

Fig. 1 corroborates the ethnographic data in showing clearly the high public value placed by these Mopan teenagers onthe ideal of being obedient (Trait 1) which we may fairly translate into Mopan as tz’okes. The teenagers also, and perhapssurprisingly given the ethnographic account, ranked ‘‘obedient’’ noticeably more highly than ‘‘honest, truthful’’ (Trait 10).This recapitulates the apparent paradox of an ideology that makes ‘lying’ (tus) difficult to avoid, while valorizing trustful obe-dience (tz’okes). But Fig. 1 also contains one more piece of relevant data. The lowest value of all is reserved by the Mopanteenagers for being ‘‘imaginative, daring new things’’ (Trait 15), which received no votes at all in this public exercise.

Again, this corroborates ethnographic observation: in general in Mopan, as in much of the Maya area, the ability to imag-ine and bring into existence what has not before been seen is indeed negatively evaluated. This is true both in verbal and in

cess. Felicitous use of the Mopanmore discussion of ‘trying’, see

elieve’ from a Latin form which

1. Obedient (doing your duty)-5 9. Cheerful-2 2. Ambitious (to work for your future)-4 10. Honest, truthful-2 3. Helpful to others-4 11. Independent -2 4. Courageous (to do what you believe in)-3 12. Forgiving, not vengeful-1 5. Loving, affectionate-3 13. Clean-06. Polite, well-mannered-3 14. Logical -0 7. Self-controlled (disciplined)-3 15. Imaginative, daring new things-08. Capable -2

Fig. 1. ‘‘What I strive to be’’.

E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262 257

material production. A great deal of care is taken by traditional Mopan craftspeople, for example, to match product design toexisting templates. In general the term for imaginative or technological invention, kux-kin-t-ik {alive-FACT-TR.IPFV} ‘to bringsomething into being’, is negatively charged.

The data of Fig. 1 are, finally, not just confirmatory of the fact that in Mopan culture, established tradition is highly valuedand novelty is not (although these preferences are clear). I propose in addition that these two traits occupy opposing posi-tions in the Mopan teenagers’ public evaluation precisely because they are opposed to one another in the nature of the inter-subjective strategies which are required for their interpretation.

We have seen that the problem of interpreting arbitrary signals can be resolved in one of two ways: Hearers can eitherinterpret the arbitrary in ways that have been used before (solution by convention – minimal reference to the current con-text of use) or they can interpret the arbitrary by making imaginative reference to the particular context of use (‘guessing’ atplausible signifier–signified relations). A major axis on which the ideal of ‘obedience’ and that of ‘imagination’ contrast, inshort, is that of their reliance, when deployed in everyday communication, on interpreters’ willingness to guess at actors’states of mind.

2.3. Kostumbre: truth and tradition

In Mopan ethnography, there is a clear connection between the facts of cultural conventionalization and the ideology ofvirtuous ‘obedience’ (tz’okes). Despite the fact that injunctions to speak truth and disapproval of ‘lying’ (tus) partake of asacred aura, most Mopan speakers’ explanations for respect (tzik) behaviors do not directly invoke the authority of a deityto justify them. Mopan in fact sometimes translate the idea of tzik merely as ‘good manners’, and explain that, deplorably,other peoples do not display this faculty to the same degree that Mopan do. When pressed for exegesis, Mopan explain thatrespect behaviors including virtuous ‘obedience’ (tz’okes) are followed simply ‘‘because it is our custom’’.

por_ke

ti-kostumbre-Ø because 1A.PL-custom-3B ‘Because it is our custom.’

More elaborate explanations develop the point that things are done this way because this is the way it was done by ti-mam, ti-chich ‘our grandfathers and our grandmothers’. Remote ancestors of this kind are seen as having provided the cus-tomary law (Mopan ley): a set of precepts for action which living people should obey (Thompson, 1930). The dictates of tzik‘respect’ form part of this law (Gregory, 1984). When instructions are understood to depart from this traditional body ofknowledge, a climate of skepticism – even a justification for popular resistance – follows.

I was present, for example, at a meeting of one Mopan alcalde, the elected leader who has the authority to enforce tra-ditional law, with a group of development and health workers from outside the village. The topic was the outsiders’ ongoingproject to dig wells and install pumps for drinking water in the village. The difficulty was that the free-roaming village pigspersisted in rooting around the pump installations, creating muddy swamps, and rendering the pumps unusable. The chiefhealth worker (a non-Mayan Belizean) wanted villagers to be obliged to fence their pigs. ‘‘Why not just make a law?’’ hesuggested to the Mopan leader in English, ‘‘You’re the alcalde, you have the power’’. The alcalde replied, also in Englishand struggling to make the outsider understand, that this was not an option. ‘‘We have a different system here’’ he replied.‘‘Just making a law will not work. If I tell the people that they have to fence pigs, they will not believe me. ‘That is not theLaw’, they will say’’.

It is no accident that English ‘‘obey’’ would have operated as felicitously as ‘‘believe’’ in this utterance. To ‘obey’ a culturalrule in Mopan is prototypically also to ‘believe’ something about it: that it is part of the body of Law handed down as kostum-bre by the elders, whom kostumbre also instructs us to respect, believe and obey. I argue that this is not just incidental poly-semy, but a motivated collapse of the distinction between the form of the speech and its content – a precise analogy to theidentification of Animator with Principal, and the bypassing of Author, which is also characteristic of explicit Mopan philos-ophies of language, mind and authority. The privileging of form over content in the alcalde’s use of the English word ‘‘be-lieve’’ in this example is the reflex in lexical form of the prevailing Mopan ideology that Animator/ Principals are to betrusted, leaving Authors out of account wherever possible.

258 E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

The context of traditional law operates as a semantic bridging context (Evans and Wilkins, 2000) in which what, from anEnglish speaker’s point of view, are the two senses of this Mopan word, are readily interpreted as just one. Virtuous Mopanlisteners ‘obey’ (tz’okes) their elders exactly because they ‘believe’ (tz’okes) that the words which the elders say have beenfaithfully repeated in the form in which the elders themselves first heard them. In Mopan, instructions should be faithfullyobeyed, but only to the extent that their underpinnings lie not in individual imagination but in ancient law and tested expe-rience. Imagination, on the other hand, is a problem because it leads to innovation, which risks falling into a kind of error thatcomes very close to blasphemy. When Mopan elders themselves are asked why they repeat their ancestors’ words faithfully,they respond that it would be tus to do otherwise. The deepest meaning of avoiding tus is thus not about being sincere inone’s stated opinions, or even primarily about checking one’s empirical facts before speaking. It is about repeating faithfullywhat one has been told by one’s elders, without questioning the content.

In prescribing sacralized obedience to recognized conventions in the form of kostumbre, Mopan ideology thus militatesagainst the occurrence of innovative signaling, and therefore, ultimately, of the need for mutual-knowledge calculation. Inpolite compadrazgo speech as in the muddy pigs example, the risk that one’s interlocutor unknowingly speaks falsely ismuch reduced, because areas of imaginative innovation are vigilantly kept to a minimum, and behavior is calibrated as clo-sely as possible to the dictates of existing convention. To the extent that speech and behavior are regulated by kostumbre andby the Mopan traditional Law, the gesture of trust is at the same time thus both more obligatory and less risky to undertake.

The difficulty of unconditionally accepting what ancestors tell us is mitigated by the fact that ancestors never tell us any-thing new. In Mopan understanding, if the existing traditional law could somehow be unpacked and relativized, so as to per-suasively reveal that its underpinnings lay in innovative proposals from inventive individuals, it would, by the same tokencease to be reliably observed. Seen in this way, the sacred regime of tzik ‘respect’ as played out in kostumbre ‘convention’ isalso an eminently political one (cf. Stasch, 2008; Reynolds, 2008). Public political discussion is a lively and cherished tradi-tion in Mopan territory (Danziger, 2001; Gregory, 1984). But in the world to which the alcalde’s statement belongs, any pro-ponent of pig-fencing, for example, would do well to couch his or her argument in terms that proposed that such fencingwould not in fact violate the law, rather than proposing that respect for the Law should be set aside.12 Much current culturalchange now taking place in Mopan territory can be linked to a new relativization of the dictates of kostumbre, especially underthe influence of secondary school education and the arrival of widely available electronic media in the region.

We can now see clearly why, for traditional Mopan, there is no paradox in admiring credulity (tz’okes) while multiplyingthe contexts in which ‘lying’ (tus) can occur. Mopan tus is a vice for the very same reasons that Mopan tz’okes is a virtue: bothtake essential aspects of their meaning from sidelining questions of individual inner state. It is in fact most appropriate inrendering the Mopan concept of tz’okes to turn to Rappaport’s (1999) concept of ‘acceptance’, rather than to either Englishbelieve or English obey. Rappaportian ‘acceptance’ covers the kind of active participation in cultural events which is under-stood to be efficacious regardless of whether the participant ‘believes’ in the accompanying doctrine, and which thereforeleaves the question of personal inner belief in the underlying postulates moot.

3. The participant structure of listening

Faithful Mopan practices of Acceptance are behavioral effects from Mopan beliefs about other minds. Traditional attitudesof the general kind just described have in fact given rise to much anthropological frustration over the years, given the unsat-isfying logic of infinite regress which they appear to entail: If we act as we do because our ancestors so instruct us, who is itwho instructed our ancestors? While the proposal (Bloch, 2004) that such attitudes may have much of their force as indica-tors of deference rather than as intellectual explanations is persuasive,13 it is my thesis that to characterize the traditionalistattitude as simply an incomprehensible one that is in need of other explanation, is also to testify to the existence of incompat-ible interactional norms held by observer and observed when it comes to the importance of mutual-knowledge-calculation. Abrief examination of these now leads to a general conclusion for intersubjectivity.

What then do Mopan, so skeptical in other arenas, reply if asked why they so highly valorize the virtue of faithfully trust-ing their elders? Why, in short, should believing that what the ancestors tell us is a faithful rendition of what they themselvesheard, lead us at once to obey the instructions that they repeat? Setting aside the reaction of shocked outrage which wouldnormally follow from the posing of such a question, the Mopan answer is, quite simply, that it is ‘respect’ (tzik) which de-mands that one do so.

In other words, the answer to ‘‘Why should I believe the elders when they tell me to have respect (tzik)?’’ is ‘‘Because it isrespect (tzik) to believe the elders.’’ One of the principal cosmological motives for continuing to value the practices of tzik‘respect’, then, derives in a self-reinforcing circularity from the dictates of tzik itself. Appeal to ancestral authority thus ben-efits from the support of a much more stable type of infinite extension than that of logical regress – that of the closed circle.This architecture harnesses all the self-evidence of tautology, and can contribute its not inconsiderable share to the prag-matic manufacture of unquestionable necessity which is the speciality both of ritual (DuBois, 1986; Rappaport, 1999) andof adherence to convention in general.

12 Shoaps (2009) provides a revealing example of one speaker who uses Sakapultepek moral irony to propose ‘traditional’ acceptability for what is in fact aninnovative practice – leaving one’s marriage.

13 In the Maya area, see Berman, 2011, for example, who documents the ways in which obedience to elders among K’iche’ Mayan children takes precedenceover giving literally truthful replies to strangers.

E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262 259

Like all circles, the Mopan circle of trust and respect is impenetrable to the question of origin. The Mopan version of theOpacity doctrine is clearly an important ingredient in this configuration. Any question of a specific origin (‘‘but who in-structed the ancestors?’’) seeks an original Goffmanian Author – an individual innovator who can be taken to be personallyresponsible for the ideas that are proposed, and whose idiosyncratic notions the listener might therefore legitimately eval-uate and perhaps reject. But the kind of trust that is in play in Mopan tz’okes is not directed at Goffmanian Authors. It is,instead, a trust that the present Animator is indeed repeating faithfully the words that s/he also heard as a young person.By faithful repetition and avoidance of personal inflection, such an Animator also, according to ‘respect’ doctrine, instantiateshim or herself as a legitimate Principal.

Thus although the Mopan ancestors are thought of as having been real people and not gods, Mopan do not consider thatancestors’ instructions might be the product of contingent invention or of individual intentionality, such as might admit oferror or alternative (Rappaport, 1999, also DuBois, 1986). The specific virtue of indulging in Mopan tz’okes consists preciselyof bypassing the listener’s counterpart of Goffmanian Author – call it the Critic – who would evaluate in personal terms thelikely individual sincerity of the particular speaker, and decide as a function of that assessment whether to ‘‘believe’’ what issaid. Instead, in undertaking tz’okes, the virtuous Mopan listener positions him or herself as the listening counterpart to Goff-man’s Principal, and assumes the considerable risks of faithful obedience, regardless of his or her personal feelings and opin-ions. Drawing on Rappaport (1999) I propose the term Acceptor for this aspect of the listener role.

3.1. Discussion

While study of ritual speech in particular has focused on production, pointing out that in such speech the individual Goff-manian Author may be stylistically sidelined, creating a sense of unquestionable necessity from the impression that thespeech originates directly from a supra-individual Principal (Danziger, 2011; DuBois, 1986; Kuipers, 1993), the present essaymoves toward an understanding of some clear parallels in traditionalist attitudes of speech reception. More generally, thepresent proposal for subjectivity-oriented listener analogs to Goffman’s famous tripartition of Speaker roles offers a globalexpansion of existing discussions of the Hearer role. Such discussions to date (Goffman, 1981) whether focused on the cat-egories themselves (Levinson, 1988) or the dialogic processes which produce them (Irvine, 1996), have concentrated onuntangling the different degrees of recipient exclusion and inclusion (as Indirect Targets, Overhearers and so forth) whichcan be deduced from Speaker’s utterance and its context.14

The existing focus concentrates almost exclusively on the analogs of the Speaker as Animator, and questions of Speaker(not Hearer) subjectivity implicitly dominate (what, for example, is the difference between a Direct and an Indirect Target?).There has been much less thought given to consideration of the internal dynamics of the Hearer role from the perspective ofHearers themselves, and to the component of subjectivity which is known also to be inherent in the Hearer role (Benveniste,1966). The literature on Opacity doctrines on the other hand, is focused explicitly on the subjectivity of recipients. By virtueof its development in the context of an explicit interest in Opacity, the present proposal for a certain kind of theoretical elab-oration of the Hearer role has therefore perhaps broken new ground, and may thus have wider application to future study oflanguage reception.

3.2. Conclusion

Since some form of ‘we-orientation’ probably governs many aspects of most conversational and other interactions every-where, differences in cultural ideologies about conscious mutual-knowledge calculation are not likely to make much differ-ence to behavior in many areas of everyday cultural life.15 But the particular form of a culture’s ideology with respect tomutual-knowledge-calculation does have repercussions for the shape of interaction within it. There may be principled areasof cross-cultural universality and variation with respect to mutual-knowledge-calculation as a function of the signal to beinterpreted.

Convention and established rule can interpret even arbitrary signals, when these are familiar and not more than normallyinnovative in their context of use. Mutual-knowledge-calculation is truly necessary to interpretation only in cases – like thatof the Gricean flout – where communication is both arbitrary and so extremely innovative that appeal to convention fails.Cultural attitudes to innovation therefore constitute an avenue by which the occurrence of mutual-knowledge-calculationmight be culturally affected. In general, cultural values which militate in favor of convention and against innovation canbe expected to reduce the amount of mutual-knowledge-calculation which is necessary to the conduct of interaction. Like-wise, language ideologies which emphasize conscious mutual-knowledge calculation may be related to cultural ideologieswhich value innovation and which downplay the importance of convention.

In the Pacific (Robbins and Rumsey, 2008; Rumsey, 2013), the reliability of access to others’ mental states may be cultur-ally questioned, even while speakers acknowledge the value in principle of having such access. By contrast in Mopan andother parts of the Maya area, the relative avoidance of mutual-knowledge-calculation derives from a different ideologicalsource and gives rise as a result to culturally different manifestations. In these cases, the most highly valued kinds of

14 I am grateful to Alan Rumsey for this point.15 If so it follows that, despite its prominent place in Western language ideologies, mutual-knowledge calculation may actually play less of a role in Euro-

American culture than many modern philosophers have proposed (see Danziger, 2006 for more discussion).

260 E. Danziger / Language & Communication 33 (2013) 251–262

communication originate not in an individual innovator (Author), but in impersonal tradition (Principal). The Mopan inves-tigation has shown how, in this kind of cultural setting, listeners are exhorted also to function in an analogous way – elidingtheir own individual Critic (counterpart of speaker-as-Author) in order to maintain the stance of a trusting and obedient‘‘Acceptor’’ as listener, to partner the trusted ancestral Principal who speaks. The Mopan stance of trustful Acceptance allowsparticipants to avoid falling into the infinite regress that would be triggered by any search for Authorial origins (‘but whoinstructed the ancestors?’). The trusting Mopan listener is, in short, point for point the mirror image of the truthful Mopanspeaker, and only someone who has already been a virtuous Accepting listener can become a truly virtuous Principal asspeaker.

This Mopan picture is not altogether unfamiliar across cultures. The attitude of faithful Acceptance is already well knownto students of broader cultural participation in ritual and tradition (Bloch, 2004; Rappaport, 1999), and has already occa-sioned significant anthropological discussion by virtue of its relative unfamiliarity to Euro-American observers. Thisacknowledged unfamiliarity is in the end testimony to the fact that a certain degree of interactional variation is indeed tobe found across cultures in some parts of the domain most globally characterized as ‘‘intersubjectivity’’. In the Mopan caseat least, the specifics of this variation show significant resonance with the culturally particular tenets of the Mopan version ofthe Opacity doctrine.

In general, I conclude that elaboration of cultural forms dependent on deliberate mutual-knowledge-calculation is some-times affected by cultural-historical (including language-ideological) contexts. Overall, this means that some aspects ofinteractional ‘‘intersubjectivity’’ – loosely defined as the taking of others’ perspectives – are culturally specific and thereforecertain to have been variable in prehistory and in human evolution. We should therefore be cautious in the readiness withwhich we appeal to universal attributes of human nature in this domain.

Role of the funding source

Fieldwork was conducted at different times with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search Grant (# 4850), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Fellowship #452-87-1337), the Cog-nitive Anthropology Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the University of Virginia. None ofthe funders played any role in the study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of thereport; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

Acknowledgements

My thanks for making possible the several field research occasions which underlie this paper go to the people of SanAntonio village, Belize and to the staff of the Department of Archaeology and of the Institute for Social and Cultural Researchin Belmopan, Belize. Thanks also to Pierre Ventur and to Barbara Dickens for use of their observations. Many of the obser-vations were collected under a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Grant (# 4850), and a Social Sciencesand Humanities Research Grant of Canada Fellowship (#452-87-1337); others with the support of the Cognitive Anthropol-ogy Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and of the University of Virginia. Individuals withwhom personal conversations have contributed to the ideas reported here include Alan Rumsey and the other authors in thisvolume, also James Coan, Joel Kuipers, John Lucy, Suzanne Gaskins, Mitch Green, and Mike Tomasello. In Mopan examples,Leipzig glossing conventions are modified as follows: "A" = Set A argument (Actor of transitive, or argument of active intran-sitive, or Possessor); "B" = Set B argument (Patient of transitive, or argument of Inactive intransitive). Leipzig conventions canbe found at (http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing—rules.php)

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