Saying and Doing in Zapotec

Multimodality, Resonance, and the Language of Joint Actions

Mark A. Sicoli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350204119
• eBook ISBN: 9781350142183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.

1

Introduction

Andrea:	Too bad we didn’t dig the ground—that we just made it like this.
Elvia:	Not like this?
Andrea:	I see that like this it’s truly coming along badly.
Nazaria:	Think it will really stay up?
Andrea:	This may not stay up.
Elvia:	It will stay up.
Nazaria:	It will stay up?
Elvia:	It will stay up.

1.1 Language and Joint Actions in Lachixío

On the night of July 23, 2009, a coyote (bichoò) got into the turkey enclosure at the house of a family living on the flats near the southeast edge of the Zapotec village of Santa María Lachixío and killed a bird. The loss of the turkey was serious. Turkeys (becchò) are ritually valuable and form the iconic center of a system of gift exchange known in Oaxaca as guelaguetza and locally in Lachixío as eeliettzá. The turkeys are themselves the symbols of debts owed to other villagers, and the currency of loans that could be given to others as gifts. Determining that the turkey was killed because their enclosure was inadequate, the family gathered materials to build a new one. The transcription provided at the beginning of this chapter is a free translation of a few turns of dialogue that were woven into the family collaboration that produced, in the end, a new dwelling. The construction was recorded on video by my collaborator Pedro, whose family was the one affected by the loss. Their joint action built a complex artifact, one that itself emerged as the effects of constituent joint actions between participants who offered for and recruited from each other, and who built upon each other’s semiotic productions to repair and resonate attention and interpretations.

Yet looking at this dialogue transcribed in this way, the reader is left to wonder about many things. Besides wondering what the Zapotec language formulations were since only an English translation is presented, the talk assumes many open links to the multiple modalities of the activity. What does “like this” refer to? Don’t we need to see Andrea pointing to understand the point of her speech here? What evidence does Andrea “see” that looks like it is coming along badly? What are the three people doing in relation to each other and the developing corral structure so that their talk can be formulated the way it is? The joint actions of human life, where multiple parties share time, space, and purpose, occur in multimodal gatherings co-populated by talk, body movements, and actions with material artifacts that already exist, or that come into being along with the language of the interaction. Still, the vast majority of representations of language use and grammatical description only represent language in textual forms, as if the verbal dimension were a self-contained, self-explanatory system.

This book is about how joint actions that build worlds build languages. Examining the Lachixío Zapotec language in everyday use, it focuses theoretical attention on multimodal relationships emergent as people weave their talk and embodied actions to build social relations, displays of mutual understanding and contestation, and the material formations of their worlds. As Herb Clark (2006) has observed, language is often, though not exclusively, a vital element for both the conduct and the coordination of the joint actions achieved between people in interaction. The video-recorded collaboration from which the short transcript was extracted is examined in its multimodal order in Chapter 6. But in only the few turns of talk as presented here, we find several functions of language as social action that are examined in this book. Through the collaborative practices of interaction, ideas or actions are offered for others, recruiting responses that accept or reject, and building social relations in the joint action of the offer-response whole. Participants collaborate in repair sequences to build and fix the jointly constructed common ground of intersubjectivity, like Elvia’s interjection Not like this?, and her statement, It will stay up, contradicting Andrea’s assessment, This may not stay up, and answering Nazaria’s confirmation request, It will stay up? A response is also recruited by Nazaria’s question of whether others think the enclosure will stay up. We see further that the linguistic form of Nazaria’s question is made of material that resonates with the form of Andrea and Elvia’s prior utterances. The resonant moves of questioning, agreement, and disagreement are created in the accrual of form across interactional moves where the field of commonality built through repetition brings to focus the differ ences between them.

As the ends of their joint actions, aspects of their world were built: a physical structure on the landscape for turkeys to sleep at night, a limit to the world of the coyote, a “vault” for a family’s ritual wealth, future security for the birds and the humans, the potential for future gift exchanges that would build social relationships between this family and other families in Lachixío, and the ongoing tuning of family relations through working together, negotiating plans, and resolving conflicts around their developing project. What was also built are numerous exemplars of the Lachixío Zapotec language connected to this emergent world. Joint activity like this is widely instructive of how the Lachixío Zapotec language lives through its sociality. When we revisit this event in Chapter 6, we will see that collaborations and conflicts were worked out through coordinated talk, gesture, and action with objects, and how those actions actually left their marks on the form of the material artifact produced. Different structural aspects of the enclosure represented different ideas, disagreements, attempts at persuasion, and resolutions all achieved in the family’s multimodal interaction directed toward the ends of care for their turkeys.

The question of representation I engage is one that contrasts ways of knowing about a language and what such differences can mean for language documentation, description, linguistic and anthropological theory, and ethnographic methods. Lachixío Zapotec conversationalists often contrast the source of knowledge for their claims about the world as something that is “said” (nii), which can be opinion, hearsay, or received knowledge, and something that is “seen” (ri’yya) for empirical knowledge gained through sensory perception beyond received or produced words. In my own effort to work with the reader to produce knowledge of Lachixío Zapotec that is more holistically sensed rather than simply read as text, this work engages the language in its doing through collaborative joint actions in multimodal interactions. As a part of participatory actions that make worlds, the signs of a language are open to sensory modes of experience and semiotic dimensions for action with which they are interwoven. The pragmatic nexus in which we find languages shares qualities with what ecologists have called assemblages involving multispecies gatherings in often collaborative interactions. None of the species in an assemblage can be plucked out as an independent whole without the loss of our ability to understand its ontology in an interdependent world from which comes consequence and to which any species’ life processes create consequence, not only for itself but for others as well. I attempt in this book to examine and depict the Lachixío Zapotec language as—like any language—an always incomplete part of multimodal and multi-participant assemblages in which its grammatical forms have been shaped through accrued usage. This involves bringing together methods of video analysis, grammatical analysis, and ethnography, depicting language beyond a text transcription to attend to its multimodal-multi-participant relations, and complementing readers’ experiences with illustrations, figures and direct access to online video examples.

I started this chapter with a bit of talk transcribed without aspects of its speech environment to make the point that language, by its semiotic nature, is open to the multimodal assemblages through which it helps build worlds. We can also see this openness of language if we ask the reciprocal question of how the material world resulting from human joint activities presupposes talk that brought it into being. We can look at a material artifact, a relationship, or a social institution and ask what kind of talk was jointly produced along with its creation. How did the talk leave its marks on material objects? How does such activity itself leave marks on our languages in the shapes and functions of morphology and grammatical constructions? Focusing on the language of joint actions, I examine here how social, intersubjective, and material worlds are emergent from fundamental joint actions that offer, recruit, repair, resonate, and build in collaboration. Descriptions of language and our theories of language can benefit by explicit attention to the dialogic processes of multimodal attunement through which exemplars of language emerge in collaborative action. Through attunement processes, participants tie grammatical dimensions of language to other available semiotic dimensions like gaze, gestures, and actions with objects to pragmatic ends (see, for example, Kendon 1990a; Goodwin 2017). To understand language as part of a multimodal ecology, I take an approach that studies language through actual uses, and without privileging either the verbal or the nonverbal as analytical primaries, but rather attending to the spatiotemporal interfacing of multiple embodied dimensions of emplaced interactions (Duranti 1992). Further informed by subsequent work in multimodal interaction, my approach goes beyond the verbal-nonverbal distinction to examine resonance relationships built between modalities and participants made visible through a semiotic framework and methodologically potentiated through affordances of digital video for playback analysis. Building on my previous work on the multidimensionality of the “verbal” to create parallelisms and contrasts in configurations of words juxtaposed with their intonations and voice qualities (Sicoli 2007, 2010a; Sicoli 2015b), we hail the readers’ attention to the built resonances between participants and modalities and the emergent harmonies and discords of their relations.

My project is also a response to recent calls for documenting “language in cultural life” (e.g., Himmelman 2008), and thus, though different in scope, broadly shares some goals with the ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1964; Bauman and Sherzer 1974). It also responds to several recent calls of funding agencies including Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP). I work to show that approaching living language as it is bound up in matters of sociocultural life is fundamentally consequential for how we represent and build theories about language, and understand how it is reproduced and transformed through the accumulated uses of interaction. To do so I turned to participatory research methods to build and analyze a fifty-hour video corpus of everyday life events in Lachixío ranging from cooking and eating together to daily chores, agricultural team work, craft making, and construction projects. With this move this project also works toward reciprocal goals both bringing ethnography to bear on language documentation and grounding ethnography through multimodal analysis of the talk and embodied actions through which people make sense of, and at the same time build, a world of meaningful action with others. My goal in developing this multimodal ethnography of language in joint actions is to demonstrate some ways to interpret complexity in social interactions that can aid li nguistic scholarship and the project of interpretive anthropology, bringing them together in ways that reveal and inform overlapping concerns of linguists and anthropologists, especially at a time when the turn to multimodality is affecting both disciplines.

Modern linguistics largely came to limit itself to aspects of language more easily writable in alphabetic systems, inheriting the legacy of philology and its object of “texts.” It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that sign languages began to be attended to as full languages and that voice qualities and intonation gained the sustained attention of linguists. In anthropology, traditional print formats for ethnographies have effected a similar reduction. Books and articles expect the written word and privilege representations of human action that can easily be spelled out in the single dimension of a text line—a technologically mediated habit of representation critiqued in the contemporary turn to multimodal anthropology (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). While the turn by this name is relatively recent and amplified by the use of new media, the critique of monodimensional linguistic science has emerged several times before. Edward Sapir as early as 1937 pointed to the importance of multidimensional interaction in the creation of culture. Even so, the details of the interpersonal relations adjusted to by individuals in interactional encounters that he suggested be “the problem of the future” (Sapir 2002: 12) are still easily lost between field research and its disseminated products.

There have been many technological barriers to studying copresent interactions. The potential of sound film technology for studying gesture and embodied practice was pointed to as early as the 1930s by Malinowski (1935: 26), yet film has had limited uptake for examining interaction being both heavy and expensive to use in the field. And early pioneers of the use of film in the Natural History approach to interaction like Bateson and Birdwhistell found their analytical results and alternative formats of data presentation difficult to publish and critiqued as a hyper-structuralism (Lempert 2012). The development of analog video also posed challenges to multimodal analysis by giving up the affordances of the sequenced still frames of sound film that afforded focus on the alignment of visible action, visible touch, and audible action through pausing, slowing, and rocking back and forth the medium. Such actions with analog video rather turned the patterned visual information into the noise of “snow” that some readers will remember from VHS and Beta devices of the 1970s and 1980s. Most discourse analysts through the analog video period based their analyses on interactions reduced to audio recordings (Erickson 2004b), though there were important exceptions—for example, C. Goodwin 1980 and M. Goodwin 1980, Erickson 1982, Duranti 1992, Ochs 1982, Haviland 1993, among some others.

Decisions to still so often represent embodied interactions as audio-only are partly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Orthography and Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Offer
• 3 Recruit
• 4 Repair
• 5 Resonate
• 6 Build
• 7 Living Assemblages
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright