Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South

Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, Anna Kaiper-Marquez, Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, Anna Kaiper-Marquez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000389920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Langue en philosophie

Exploring the nature of possible relationships between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, this volume examines various ways in which Integrational Linguistics can be used to support the decolonizing interests of Southern Epistemologies, particularly the lay-oriented nature of Integrational Linguistics that Southern Epistemologies find productive as a 'positive counter-discourse.'

As both an anti-elitist and antiestablishment way of thinking, these chapters consider how Integrational Linguistics can be consistent with the decolonial aspirations of Southern Epistemologies. They argue that the relationship between Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics is complicated by the fact that, while Integrational Linguistics is critical of what it calls a segregationist view of language, i.e., 'the language myth, ' Southern Epistemologies in language policy and planning and minority language movements find the language myth helpful in order to facilitate social transformation. And yet, both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism that are founded on notions of 'named' languages. They are also both critical of linguistics as a decontextualized, and institutionalized extension of ordinary metalinguistic practices, which at times influence the prejudices, preconceptions and ideologies of dominant western cultures.

This book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students not only within the field of integrational linguistics, but also in other language and communication fields, in particular the dialogic, distributed, and ecological-enactive approaches, wherein integrational linguistics has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism.

1 Edward said, Roy asked, and the peasant responded: Reflections on peasants, popular culture, and intellectuals

David Bade

for Sinfree B. Makoni

J’accuse: Orientations

In his novel Mongólia, the Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho juxtaposed the travel diaries of a Brazilian photographer who had disappeared in Mongolia with the notebooks of a Brazilian diplomat sent to Mongolia to track him down. The photographer had responded to each place and person with delight, surprise, and keen interest. The diplomat, following the route indicated in the diary, recorded his suspicious, hostile disdain for all that he encountered along the same route. The photographer was oriented and animated by the world he encountered as a new friend; the diplomat was disoriented everywhere by a world that he refused to embrace. Two Brazilians in Mongolia recording the same world of places and peoples produced two irreconcilable narratives that the narrator of the novel tries to reconcile: the world is my friend, the world is my enemy. We are oriented by what we love and disoriented by what we hate.

Carvalho’s two Brazilians demonstrate two orientations toward the world that preceded any and all of their experiences and perceptions. The photographer was open to and changed by his experiences. He was attentive to everything around him, alive to differences, keenly interested in the details. His world grew larger and fuller with every encounter. The diplomat, on the other hand, closed himself off to experience, encountered everyone and everything as an opponent to be reconstructed according to his preconceptions about the way the world ought to be. He learned nothing, rejected the differences, and was blind to the details. These two contrasting orientations toward the world were not conscious, or rationally arrived at theories, but the perceptions and interpretations of Carvalho’s characters were determined by those orientations. Outside the world of fiction, in the real world in which we live, we too are oriented toward the world in one or the other fashion. For most of us I suspect, we are oriented in one way at times, and in another way at other times, for experience can radically change the way in which we live in the world, as any victim of violence can affirm.

Southern Theory, as all theory, begins somewhere with someone in the interest of some project, dream, desire, hope, question, or pathological condition. Southern Theory, as any theory, can be oriented in different ways depending upon who is elaborating the theory. In the 2019 Integrationist conference, organizers stated that our purpose was “to contribute towards the development of scholarship … from decidedly Global South perspectives”. This implies that there are other perspectives, whether those are thought of as Northern, Eastern, historical, alternative, or wrong. A “Global South” perspective implies, at a minimum, a different experience than a “Global North” perspective, and perhaps different conceptions of justice, religious beliefs, hopes, or desired futures. My interest is precisely in the existence of these different perspectives and orientations: they exist in practice, but can they exist in theory? Specifically, can Southern Theory assist us in thinking and living our differences alongside and together with our vehement opponents? Do proponents of Southern Theory follow the orientation of Carvalho’s photographer or Carvalho’s diplomat?

The orienting beliefs-desires-hopes-fantasies of Not-So-Southern-Theory are those of modern science and can be seen clearly at its birth. Consider Galileo’s remark (1960, p. 148) “if nothing useful were to be expected from it [i.e., knowledge], all the work employed in its acquisition would be in vain”. Add to that Bacon’s announcement (1964, p. 62) “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave” and Hobbes’ assertion (1839, v. 1, p. 7) “The end of knowledge is power; and the use of theorems (which, among geometricians, serve for the finding out of properties) is for the construction of problems; and, lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done”. Feminists (among others) have rightly seen in this foundation domination as goal and rape as means and method. Theologians have seen in this an expression of a recurrent religious fantasy, namely the desire to become God, a desire explicitly stated by the atheist Stephen Hawking (1988):

[I]f we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God. (p. 193)

The quest for theory always arises from an atheoretical impulse and an orientation, an impulse and orientation that the theory does not account for but projects into all matters upon which it touches. That impulse arises from the situation in which the theory builder lives. And here the virtues and shortcomings and possibilities and limitations of all theories come into question. Southern Theory arises from the experience of colonization and is both oriented and empowered, and limited, by its moral argument with the other world which it opposes, the European empires and their successors in political regimes and in mentality. Edward Said, a precursor of Southern Theory, argued that the perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs of citizens of colonizing states were largely oriented and determined by the interests of their nations. In particular, opinions about the peoples and civilizations of the colonized lands – Asia, Africa, indigenous America – were prejudiced by the myths and propaganda issuing from those pursuing and justifying the domination of those lands instead of and even in spite of all experience and evidence to the contrary. The myths of the colonizers prevented them from ever encountering the realities of the “Orient”; the colonizers (and their descendants) almost always and almost everywhere see only their own myths.

The problem, of course, is not just academic and not just for colonialists: understanding the world of our own experience is an every moment task for everyone. Not long ago, I hired a chimney sweep to check my fireplace and upon his arrival he noticed my peacocks in the driveway. “Where do you keep your peacocks?” he asked, and I replied “They like to roost atop the chimney”. He shook his head and said “Peacocks are flightless birds, they cannot fly” and as he said this, one peacock flew straight up over his head and alighted about 35 feet up on the roof near the chimney. He stood there staring at the peacock on the roof and repeated “Peacocks are flightless birds. They cannot fly” as if to drive his point home to that insolent rooftop peacock, or perhaps merely to reassure himself in his knowledge.

When theory becomes unquestionable ideology, when our experiences of the world are denied in favor of what we have been told rather than changed by our encounters with the world, we become incapable of learning, and from that incapacity we become incapable of doing justice to the world in our theories and in our actions. Yet even in the best situations of persons open to the world of experience and being changed by it, the question remains: How can anyone, necessarily thinking from one experience of the world, arrive at a theory that can do justice to all the experiences of the world? How can Northern do justice to Southern? How can feminism do justice to men? How can race theory do justice to all races? How can queer theory do justice to children?

My short answer to that – not to be interpreted as an expression of the mind of God – is that theory can never do justice and can in fact only do injustice whenever it is believed in – as so often appears to be the case among advocates and adherents of theories past, present, right, left, on the roof, and off the wall. What I want to suggest in this paper, not through scholarship or theoretical argument but from personal experience – Roy Harris’s and my own – is that theory can never lead us toward a mutually livable understanding of the world, but listening to each other just might. Southern Theory will not lead us to know the mind of God, but I allow myself to hope that it will lead me to better understand my own mind.

Respondeo etsi mutabor: Roy Harris and the peasant

In his 1990 essay “The dialect myth,” Roy Harris recounts a conversation with a peasant in 1966:

From my own experience of fieldwork in dialectology, the best evidence I can cite in support of Schuchardt’s answer was given to me by an old man whom I asked whether the patois of his Alpine village was the same as that of another locality a few miles distant. I here translate his reply, given in (what I at that time called) ‘“Valdôtain”:

Is it the same? I would not know how to answer you. Even in this village the younger people speak differently from my generation. And in the next valley perhaps they use words we don’t use here. But, for all that, everyone understands everyone else well enough. Is that the same?

By turning my own question back on me, he had made me understand that the mistake lay in the question. What I was asking corresponded to nothing in his own linguistic experience which could provide a determinate answer. When theorists begin to ask unanswerable questions about language (or – which amounts to the same thing – questions which can be answered “yes” or “no” as you please) that is the surest indication that in their investigations linguistic myth has taken over from linguistic reality. (p. 18)

Elsewhere in the world’s scholarly literature, there are anecdotes about scholars learning something important from the object of their study and changing their minds and their theories accordingly, but this passage is the only such passage that I can recall from my readings in linguistics. What is remarkable about it is that Harris specifically indicates that the peasant provoked his theoretical reflections precisely by turning his question back on him and that the issue in question later became the foundation of all his theorizing. The peasant didn’t respond with a theory of his own so much as to describe how things seemed to him, what seemed to be important, and then sending the question back at Harris. There was no debate, no agonistic academic ritual, but simply two people listening to each other and trying to understand what the other meant, and how the other understood the matters in question. The theoretical positions that eventually arose from that encounter were not those of the peasant for he had no need of theory; rather they were Harris’s theoretical demolition of western linguistic theory. 25 years after the peasant spoke, we find his own words put forth as the “best evidence” in support of the critical perspectives for which Harris was arguing.

When reading this passage in Harris (1990), what most struck me was the contrast between Harris’s attitude toward the theories he knew – what he had been taught in school – and the world of orientalism against which Edward Said turned all his attention and intelligence. I don’t know what Said ever said or wrote or thought about Harris – if anything – but surely had he read this passage with a knowledge of how much western theory Harris rejected in accepting the peasant’s reply, he would have gushed with appreciation and admiration. I certainly do. The passage is clear evidence that theory was abandoned precisely because Harris regarded the peasant’s understanding of his own situation as the only one that made any sense. And this regard for the peasant later became one of the pillars of Harris’s perspective on language: the primacy of the lay perspective. What I wish to stress is that Integrational theory did not lead Harris to engage the peasant with respect, attention, and an openness to learn and to be changed by the encounter. Instead, it was the reverse: it was Harris’s attitude toward the peasant that enabled him to learn from the peasant and pursue his extraordinary theoretical explorations. Positive social change and social justice come from respectful, loving attention to the Other, not from social theory.

It is perhaps also worth noting that this passage may be the only passage in the entire corpus of Harris’s writings in which he acknowledges that someone else was right and he was wrong. Harris, like many intellectuals, was rarely willing to acknowledge the value of another’s opinions even when they thought they were agreeing with him. And it does seem to be the case that the normal attitude of intellectuals is “I talk, you listen” which is somehow presented as dialog or the quest for truth and justice, if not boldly declared to be “speaking truth to power”. Taking differences seriously requires listening to and understanding dissenting voices from all sides, making room for all our differences with the hope of our being changed during the process into something better; it does not mean just listening to one side condemn the others.

The passage from Harris means far more to me than it may mean for many others because of the differences between my experience and Harris’s. Harris, the professor doing research among peasants and trying to understand that world, and David Bade, the child of Pentecostal Bible Belt American farmers who wanted their son to study at a school in which the Bible was the only textbook but who was somehow accidentally admitted into an atheist public university. (A neighbor woman who worked in the university’s admissions office was probably responsible for this little “accident” but I will never know. My mother believes it must have been God’s will, while my father thinks the Devil did it.) My path was more or less the reverse of Harris’s: a deeply religious teenager trying to overcome religious prejudices in order to understand modern science and linguistic theory. That young boy also had an intense longing to learn about and eventually live in an Asia known only from a childhood filled with missionary tales of pre-Christian Africa and Asia, the television series Kung Fu, biographies of Albert Schweitzer, Tarzan books, and an old atlas in which Africa consisted of a few very large areas “belonging” to some European nations, and a few countries with actual names.

Ich bin kein Berliner: Embracing the other without debasing oneself

Religious conversion frequently involves embracing some exotic Other – for Mongolians this is often some form of Christianity, while for Americans this is often some form of oriental religion – while turning away in contempt from the world within which we have been born and formed as children. This is as common in the world of intellectuals as in the world of religion, and we should probably best understand these religious and intellectual conversions as instances of the same development: beliefs about the world, whether described as religious, philosophical, ideological, or theoretical, are abandoned in favor of other beliefs. When Chomsky’s as yet unpublished Pisa lectures began to circulate as photocopies, all the generative semanticists in the department abandoned Lakoff and McCawley overnight and scrambled to put themselves in the vanguard of the Pisa program. This is the usual course of events when science has become one’s only religion, for there is no other perspective available from which to challenge it. Harris and the peasant followed a different trajectory: learning to appreciate the other perspective while also coming to understand their own worlds from outside as well as from within. Harris did not become a peasant, nor did the peasant become a professor; I imagine that neither would have been happy in the other’s shoes but they were able to have an extremely productive conversation.

How does a white, Christian boy from a farming/working class family in central Illinois learn to embrace the Other without debasing the world which made him what he is? Is it true – as some believe – that our origins preclude us from ever doing anything other than upholding and reproducing our gender, our class, and our national and racial origins? Must our perceptions be determined by our nationality and race as Said claimed? I do not think so and here is why: I adored my professor of Chinese linguistics C.C. Cheng and my Palestinian Arabic instructor Nicola Talhami (as well as his sister Aida). I thought Cornelius Muthuri, the Meru farm boy who was the language source in my field methods class, stood shoulder to shoulder with the finest human beings known to me. In graduate school, it was fellow student Daniel Bitrus and roommate Mobil Kolbon and still later my ESL student Nam-ju Lee. Then in the library, a Thai co-worker whose name I have forgotten but whose gift I still wear 40 years later and Mamadou Niang for whom I cataloged 11,000 volumes of Northwestern University Library’s collection of books in African languages in order that he would know what they had. In middle age Khotgoid ovogt Makhburiadyn Purevbadam taught me the songs of her grandmother from Khuvsgul AND how delicious were the wild cherries in my parents’ front yard, cherries that I had never even known were edible. Through these encounters, I learned of the real Africa and Asia, while at the same time understanding that Tarzan, Kung Fu, and missionary tales were just what they were, and not the real story, much less the whole story. I am still grateful for Edgar Rice Burroughs, ABC Television, and all those missionaries who gave me a child’s pl...