CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Bambi B. Schieffelin (Anthropology, New York University), October 22, 1999.

"Reshaping Languages and Persons: Metalinguistic Innovations and Ethnopragmatic Obstacles."

New language practices, such as prayer and confession, are key speech acts introduced to communities in contexts of Christian missionization. The Bosavi people, in Papua New Guinea, developed a new metalinguistic vocabulary for these and other speech acts that were central to Christianity, but ethnopragmatic obstacles prevented the appropriate performance of those acts. To understand this communicative context, the concepts of sincerity and belief are examined from the perspective of local pastors who from 1975-1995 tried to explain ideas that were not part of local language ideology or notions of personhood.