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C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004 2004 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2004/4505-0003$10.00

“Cultural” Conceptsand the Language-Culture Nexus1

by Michael Silverstein

Events of language use mediate human sociality. Such semioticoccasions develop, sustain, or transform at least part—some haveargued the greater part—of people’s conceptualizations of theiruniverse. Reserving the term cultural concepts for such socio-centric aspects of human cognition, this article sketches linguis-

tic anthropology’s methods for discovering truly cultural concep-tualizations, illustrated at the polar extremes of ritual efficacy(Christianity’s Eucharistic liturgy) and of everyday conversationallanguage games. Knowledge schemata structuring cultural con-cepts, here termed -onomic knowledge, turn out to be “in play”in interaction, made relevant to it as interactants use verbal andperilinguistic signs in the work of aligning as relationally identi-fiable kinds of persons. In interactional experience, -onomicknowledge anchoring cultural concepts is always implicit and iseven sometimes part of largely abstract cultural patterns only in-directly experienceable by people such as the cultural “edibility”of fauna in Thai villagers’ cultural concept invoked by use ofterms denoting animals. Furthermore, beyond unique micro-con-textual occasions of interaction, one discerns a macro-sociologyof -onomic knowledge. Privileged ritual sites of usage anchorsuch a multiplex social formation; their emanations constitutepower—frequently politicoeconomic— to warrant or license us-

age of particular verbal forms (e.g., American English “wine-talk” register) with particular meanings germane to certain inter-ested ends of self- and other-alignment, closing the circle ofanalysis.

m i c h a e l s i l v e r s t e i n is Charles F. Grey DistinguishedService Professor in the Departments of Anthropology, Linguis-tics, and Psychology and the Committee on InterdisciplinaryStudies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago 1126 E.59th St., Chicago, IL 60637, U.S.A.. Born in 1945, he was edu-cated at Harvard College (A.B., 1965) and Harvard University(Ph.D., 1972). His recent publications include “Dynamics of Lin-guistic Contact,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol.17, Languages, edited by I. Goddard (Washington, D.C.: Smith-sonian Institution Press, 1997), “Translation, Transduction,Transformation: Skating Glossando on Thin Semiotic Ice,” inTranslating Cultures, edited by P. Rubel and A. Rosman (Oxford

and New York: Berg, 2003), Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to W (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003),and “Boasian Cosmographic Anthropology and the SociocentricComponent of Mind,” in Significant Others: Interpersonal andProfessional Commitments in Anthropology , edited by R. Han-dler (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). The presentpaper was submitted 6 xi 02 and accepted 23 iii 04.

[Supplementary material appears in the electronic edition of thisissue on the journal’s web page (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/home.html).]

1. A somewhat truncated version of this article was presented atReed College, Portland, Oregon, on April 18, 2002, under the title“How the Culture in Language Puts Language into Culture.” I par-

Whenever languages and other, perilinguistic semioticsystems are used in their ubiquitous human habitats,cultures as well as people can be said to be communi-cating. In discursively mediated interaction, whether as“native” users or as analyst-investigators, we perceiveourselves to be sending and receiving messages to andfrom so-called real or fictional individuals; we commu-nicate about states of affairs concerning all manner ofexperienceable and imaginable things. But we are at thesame time experiencing culture by communicatingthrough this exemplar, medium, and site: language-in-use. I want to demonstrate here how linguistic anthro-pologists “listen to” language analytically in this secondmode in order to “hear” culture.

I want to point out, in particular, that we can “hear”culture only by “listening to” language in a certain way.This channel, I would maintain, is made available bycontemporary semiotic pragmatism in its theorizing the“conceptual” nexus linking language to culture, for such

study, in passing, investigates and clarifies the nature oftruly “cultural” concepts, as I hope to explicate here.To be sure, all human activity centrally engages con-

ceptualization in one or another respect. And, further,language is a semiotic complex most visible to our in-dividual reflexive gaze precisely for its instrumental rolein explicit, task-oriented conceptualization. Yet the ar-gument here is that there is a realm of what we mightjustly term “cultural” concepts to be discerned fromamong concepts in general and specifically among otherconceptual codings manifested in language. These “cul-tural” concepts define and reveal what is culturally spe-cific about human discursive interaction, seen both asitself human activity and as mediating semiotic “relay”

(Barthes 1968:11) of all other human activity.It is a truism that cultures are essentially social facts,

not individual ones; they are properties of populationsof people who have come to be, by degrees, tightly orloosely bounded in respect of their groupness, theirmodes of cohering as a group. Cultures are historicallycontingent though, as experienced, relatively perduringvalues and meanings implicit in the ways people do

ticularly thank Robert Brightman for collegial hospitality in ar-ranging the invitation and, of course, for a lively Reed audience.Yet earlier versions, entitled “From Culture in Language to Lan-guage in Culture,” were presented to the Departments of Anthro-pology and Linguistics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, on De-cember 8, 2000, at the invitation of Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney; to the

Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, on Feb-ruary 25 , 1999, at the kind invitation of Gregory Possehl; and tothe Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berke-ley, on November 16, 1998, at the invitation of Stanley Brandes(the two last-named at that time respective department chairs). Ithank all of them for those opportunities to synthesize this ma-terial. Questionsand comments from allthese audiences have stim-ulated much revision, as have insightful comments by Alan Rum-sey accompanying an invitation to submit this revised and recastversion for consideration by CA. In further revising, I have incor-porated excellent and extensive stylistic suggestions of RobertMoore, encouraged further by four (of five) anonymous reviewersand by the editor, Ben Orlove, to whom readers’ gratitude shouldbe directed for whatever small ease they may find in their entex-tualizing encounter with this text artifact.


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622 F c u r r e n t a n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 45, Number 5, December 2004

things and interact one with another. Such doings, asevents, have value and meaning only insofar as they arepatterned—the textually oriented word is “genred”—sothat even as they are participating in them, people ineffect negotiate the way that events are plausibly and

(un)problematically instances of one or more such pat-terns. So, culture being manifest only in such sociohis-torical facts, anything “cultural” would seem to dependon the contingencies of eventhood that, in complexways, cumulate as genred norms of “praxis” or “prac-tice.” Yet, in the event culture is always presumed uponin the course of that very praxis, even as it is alwayspotentially transformed by people’s very doings andsayings.2

And yet, we feel—do we not?—that cultures, like lan-guages, are fundamentally ideational or mental—or con-ceptual3—insofar as in communicating people seem (atleast at first) to be giving evidence of knowledge, feeling,and belief, even creating, sharpening, and transforming

knowledge, feeling, and belief in themselves and others.What, then, is the sociological condition of existence ofsuch—as we should term them—“cultural concepts” ofwhich cultures are constituted in the face of the veryindividual-centric assumptions that our own culture per-sists in having about knowledge, feeling, and belief? Howcan we see that language as used manifests such culturalconcepts, ones specific to a sociohistorical group, not-

2. On this sentence’s bland statement of the issue, perhaps mosttheorists could agree. Things become immeasurably more conten-tious when one tries to say how, precisely, “practice” (plus or minushuman “subjectivity,” “intentionality,” or “agency”) relates to“culture” (as “system,” “structure,” or “norm”) in the real-timefunctioning of social action. Structuralists and structural-function-

alists, for example, have tended to see practice merely as a workingor “execution” of the underlying or immanent system (thus Saus-sure’s [1916] parole and langue in respect of language itself). Bycontrast, praxis theorists from ethnomethodology to deconstruc-tivism have tended to see normativity and/or systematicity as amere emergent, even as an epiphenomenon of instances (or, inco-herently, of genres) of practice. As to the dynamics of how, over alonger real time, cultures or languages ( langues) change, even aSaussurean structuralist would be forced to admit that diachronicsystem change begins in the synchronic functioning of the system,in actual practices ( parole). Yet it is never clear, within the termsof this framework, how such changes in practice in effect accu-mulate and percolate “up” to the norm level ( langue) of languageor culture change. (Various dei ex machina, to be sure, populateaccounts in this style.) Similarly, in pure praxis approaches, theselectivity and seemingly structured “drift” of historical cumula-tion and normativization are left completely unaddressed except

by invoking—circularly, it turns out—such Hegelian (often misreadas Marxist!) essences as “power.” The dialectical semiotic prag-mati(ci)sm espoused here as a positive project, I think, avoids theworst of these dead ends, both that of the pure structuralist andthat of the pure praxiologist or reductive functionalist.3. I intend this term to be inclusive, thus notmakingthe distinctionbetween “cognition” (“ideas”) and “affect” (“passions”) that seemsto be a very local sociocultural legacy of European, especially(post-) Enlightenment, discourse about the mind, the first beingequated with ultimately formalizable representationality, the sec-ond with perturbations in organic physiological pharmacology andsuch. A group’s concepts, furthermore, are manifested through anyand all semiotic arrangements through which members participatein events, not, of course, just through language and language-like“codes.”

withstanding the “freedom” we think we manifest insaying what we want, as a function of what we, as in-dividuals, “really” believe we want to communicateabout? Is there, in short, a sociocultural unconscious inthe mind—wherever that is located in respect of the bi-ological organism—that is both immanent in and emer-gent from our use of language? Can we ever profoundlystudy the social significance of language without under-standing this sociocultural unconscious that it seems toreveal? And if it is correct that language is the principalexemplar, medium, and site of the cultural, then can weever understand the cultural without understanding thisparticular conceptual dimension of language?

The reorientation of linguistic anthropology over thepast few decades has made real progress in these mattersin good part by comprehending three lessons heretoforescattered in many literatures about language and culture,following them out and integrating them into its analyticapproach to revealing the “conceptual”—hence, “cul-tural”—in language.

The first of these lessons is that discursive interactionbrings sociocultural concepts into here-and-now con-texts of use—that is, as I hope to explain, that interactionindexically “invokes” sociocultural conceptualiza-tions—via emergent patternings of semiotic forms thatwe know how to study in the image of the poetics ofritual. Precipitated as entextualizations (by-degrees co-herent and stable textual arrays) in relation to contex-tualizations (how texts point to a framing or surroundfor the text), such “text-in-context” is the basis for allinterpretative or hermeneutic analysis. Both the com-prehensibility and the efficacy of any discursive inter-action depend on its modes and degrees of “ritualization”in this special sense of emergent en- and con-textuali-zation (see Silverstein and Urban 1996).

The second lesson focuses on the underpinnings andeffects of the denotational capacity of the specific wordsand expressions we use that gel as text-in-context. Thisis the complex way in which, on occasions of their use,words and expressions come specifically and differen-tially to “stand for,” or denote, things and states of affairsin the experienced and imagined universe. Yet integralto the very act of denoting with particular words andexpressions, it turns out, is the implicit invocation ofcertain sociocultural practices which, in the context ofdiscourse, contribute to how participants in a discursiveinteraction can and do come to stand, one to another, as

mutually significant social beings. The most interac-tionally potent components of denotation seem to func-tion in at least two ways: first, to be sure, as contextuallydifferential characterizers of some denotatum but secondas indexes of users’ presumed-upon (or even would-be)relational positions in a projective social distribution ofconceptual knowledge. So individuals in effect com-municatively “perform” a here-and-now interactionalstance in relation to such knowledge by the phraseologyand construction in which they communicate the sub-stance of what is being “talked about.” We read suchinteractional stances (cf. Goffman’s [1979] notion of“footing” and Bakhtin’s [1982] of “voicing”) as ritual fig-


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s i l v e r s t e i n “Cultural” Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus F 623

urations of social identity come to life, interactionallyactivated in the here-and-now of discourse for the inter-subjective work of creating, maintaining, or transform-ing social relations.

Given these first two points, the third lesson is thatthere are wider-scale institutional “orders of interac-tionality,” historically contingent yet structured. Withinsuch large-scale, macrosocial orders, in-effect ritual cen-ters of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-con-ferring influence on any particular event of discursiveinteraction with respect to the meanings and signifi-cance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it.Any individual event of discursive interaction occurs asa nodal point of a network of such in a field of potentiallyconflicting interdiscursivities across macrosocial spacesthat may be simultaneously structured by other (e.g.,political and/or economic) principles and dimensionali-ties as well. Viewed in such a space, every discourseevent manifests, by degrees, authoritative, warranted, orheretofore uncountenanced or even contested entex-tualizations licensed from centers of value creation.Here, human subjectivity and agency come to their po-tential plenitude. The flow of value thus comes to bemappable as a felt effect or adjunct of interlocutors’ stra-tegic positionalities—presupposed or entailed—in suchcomplex macrosocial space and of people’s stasis in and/or movement through its ever-changing configurations.

In showing how the cultural concept is key in bringingtogether these three cumulative insights of contempo-rary linguistic anthropology, I hope to elaborate, in turn,on all three.Let us focus first onthe matter of interaction

ritual, to use the late Erving Goffman’s (1967) term, andshow how the reorientation of linguistic anthropologyover recent decades—what we can call the pragmatic-

poetic turn in its study—provides the entry point to anaccount of specifically cultural conceptualization.

Discourse as Interaction Ritual

We can engage the problem of the kinds and degrees oftextuality in discourse by considering an example of astaged though nonscripted conversation.4 Figure 1 showsa minimally adequate, standard-orthography transcript

4. I have treated this at some technical length in two earlier papers.One (Silverstein 1985) presents a construction-by-constructionsyn-tactic and lexical analysis of the poetic form in the denotational

text (p “what has been/will have been said” in the way of referenceand modalized predication). This is shown to facilitate an inter-pretative theory of what is happening, segment by segment, on theintersubjective plane. A second paper (Silverstein 1998) shows thatthe denotational information appears to be metricalized—given po-etic form in a dimensionalized measure-space—by deixis, the var-ious categories by which one “points” to things and situations fromthe ever-moving discursive here-and-now that the interactional par-ticipants inhabit. Such a metricalization allows us to map the un-folding denotational text into a maximal interactional text(p“what has been/will have been performed-in-talk” in the way ofinteractional “moves” in genred discursive social action). Asser-tions made here about the interaction thus presume upon thesetwo prior, somewhat technical accounts, to which the methodo-logically interested reader is referred.

of a snippet of a conversation videotaped in ca. 1974between Mr. A, then a second-year student at the Uni-versity of Chicago Law School, and Mr. B, then a first-year student in the same university’s School of SocialService Administration. Mr. A was, in other words, the

“future lawyer,” we might say, and Mr. B the “futuresocial worker.” Each had been instructed by my col-league Starkey Duncan, then interested in “nonverbal”communication, to have a conversation with anothergraduate student whom he had not before encountered.

This bit of conversation reveals Mr. A to be in themiddle of a (lawyerly?) line of questioning. Like all“questions,” Mr. A’s is the first of a two-part, basic rhyth-mic unit of alternating conversational participation—theso-called adjacency pair in conversation analytic terms(Levinson 1983:303–8, 332–39). In and by the currentspeaker’s utterance there is strongly entailed a symmet-rical, interactionally coherent “reply” or “response”5

from the original addressee, subsequently become a

sender (as the original sender becomes an addressee, ex-changing roles). The first turn-at-talk in the transcript isMr. A’s sixth question to Mr. B about where Mr. B “camefrom” “before.”6

Before when? What is the culturally relevant frame-work of temporalization and of sequential relationshipswithin it? And what kind of a stipulation of a “there”in Mr. B’s past would satisfy the line of first pair-partquestions about “coming from” someplace as suffi-cient—even satisfying—second pair-part answers? Inother words, what is the relevant framework of spatial-

ization—physical and/or institutional—that correspondsto the temporal sequence? To what degree is each of Mr.

A’s conversational moves, as a phase in an ongoing socialpraxis, constraining, in any cause-and-effect way, of Mr.B’s moves (and vice versa)? How do such linkages allowMessrs. A and B interpersonally to create before our tran-scriber’s very eyes a precipitated text (-in-context) thatwe can understand to be culturally coherent? My pointis that the problem of informational “relevance” and theproblem of how discourse comes to some kind of seg-mentable textual “form” as effective social interaction

5. See Erving Goffman’s (1976) brilliant demolition of conversation

analysis and its attempts to consider “responses” as units of un-interpreted interactional “form” or mere earlier-to-later sequentialposition. Goffman showed both the defeasibility of any particularpragmatic entailment as such as well as the unlimited possibleevent-defining meanings of “next turns-at-talk” in culturally gen-red but innovatively nuanced ways.6. Each of these (type-level) expressions is inherently deictic (i.e.,its characterizing effect for denotation presumes upon the contex-tual conditions under which a token of them occurs). Come fromindexes an end point of “movement-to-which” that is relativelyclose to the here-and-now stipulated in co-occurrent text or, bydefault, presumed to be the here-and-now of the communicativecontext of the sender. Similarly, (temporal) before again indexes anend point aligned either in or relatively closer to the now explicitlystipulated or, by default, pragmatically presumed.


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Fig. 1. Transcript of a conversation between two American university students (Silverstein 1998 :283, fig. 12,1997 by the Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, reprinted by permission).


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are interrelated and cannot be either productively statedor solved independently.7

Most important, how would we go about achieving andjustifying our “reading” of the interactional text abuild-ing here between Messrs. A and B? It appears at first tobe an instance of “getting to know you,” a familiar genre,or recurrent schema, of interactional text. Indeed, allbourgeois Americans have indulged in this genre withotherwise unknown people, for example, in airplanes orto more pointed purpose in clubs, bars, and similar wa-tering holes. Messrs. A and B seem to be playing it inthe immediate context of Mr. Duncan’s video cameralens on that day in 1974, in the small room behind theLaw School auditorium, south of 60th Street, on the cam-pus of the University of Chicago, in the South Side neigh-borhood of Hyde Park, in the city of Chicago, in theCounty of Cook, dot-dot-dot—as Thornton Wilder sowell set out the limitless possibilities of nested contex-tualization in Our Town some decades ago.

It is context, we can see, all the way out from themicroscopic here-and-now. But which part of the context“counts,” as it were, is “relevant” to moving this inter-action along? How are culture and hence the interac-tional participant’s mind as informed precisely by cul-ture central to giving this verbal happening its distinctiveform as genred interactional text?

Just as those familiar with the culture recognize theinteractional text to be an instance of “getting to knowyou,” the more subtle amongst us will also recognizethat we have happened upon an instance of a game ofone-upmanship in the process of being embarrassinglyfoiled or undone by the antagonist’s own hand (ptongue). What is the role of our involvement in more or

less the same culture as the two participants in our com-ing to this recognition of interactional genre? And howdoes the specific cultural system of value that an analystmay lay bare in working from the transcript help to in-dicate something of the interactional form that Messrs.A and B seem to be inhabiting? Let us look more closelyat the interactional form that is emerging.

Down to segment 3 in our transcript, Mr. A has beenthe question initiator and Mr. B the respondent. Indeed,the denotational text, the “information structure,” thatthey have generated between them has come to constituteMr. B’s interaction-relevant biography. It is in the form ofa schematic of how he moved from “there,” “then” to“here,” “now” in various domains of what we might termdescriptors of personal experience, attributes of social in-dividuals constituting aspects of their narratable identi-

7. Note, by contrast, the at best culture-internal and post-hoc re-constructions of interlocutor intentions that go into Gricean doc-trines of “relevance” (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1986, following onGrice 1989 [1967]). The starting point of such analyses is the com-munication of a propositionally valuated grammatical sentence, anAustinian (1975 [1962]:109) “locutionary act.” This necessitatespostulating convoluted would-be chains of (logical) inference, in-cluding the ad-hoc reconstruction of (propositional) descriptions of“context,” to map what is said in a turn-at-talk onto what is com-municated in and by it—all with a rudimentary and rough-and-ready concept of interactional acts and events, if any.

ties. As Mr. A anxiously presses on with the inquiry, theflow of such biographical information about Mr. B in theemerging denotational text is congruent with the obvioussocial-structural status asymmetry between them—law-yer versus social worker—at the moment of the discursiveinteraction—“here,” “now,” that is, at the University ofChicago. Mr. B’s emergent biography augments that asym-metry in the past and projects it out to their respectivefutures, for it turns out that the current interactionalstatus asymmetry of future lawyer/future social workerin fact continues the terms of a comparable schema oftheir respective “old school ties.” Mr. B’s college, “Loyola[University of Chicago]” (R

B8), contrasts with Mr. A’s,

“Georgetown [University], down in Washington” (RA1

),from their respective pasts. The status-relevant asym-metrical structure of what is indicated as the interactants’pasts and presents thus remains a constant over the courseof biographical time from the narrated past up to the pre-sent moment (and implicated future).

Things change, however, in turn 5, when Mr. A makesthe interactional move of “opening up” a bit—or so atfirst it seems—to reveal seemingly highly personal infor-mation: that he is drowning at the University of ChicagoLaw School, which he describes with the vernacular pe-jorative “different,” whereas he had sailedalong as a happyundergraduate at Georgetown. Whether consciously ornot—consciousness being, in fact, a somewhat irrelevantdimension for seeing cultural form-in-motion—Mr. Bseizes on this revelation of Mr. A’s “opening up.” He pres-ents a denotationally incoherent but interactionally subtleand effective description of changes over time at LoyolaUniversity of Chicago, the erstwhile déclassé urban com-muter school, the institution from “then” to “now” goingin a contrariwise, “bad” to “good”—even “better”—direction.

Interactionally—note, not denotationally—Mr. B hasregistered the undoing of any witting or unwitting suc-cess Mr. A may have gained at one-upmanship up untilturn 5. In fact, it seems that Mr. B begins after this turn-ing point to inhabit in earnest the identity of socialworker, asking all further questions to the end of thevideotape recording of the conversation. He seems totreat Mr. A somewhat like a client in distress asking forhelp at an intake interview: in effect, “Do you think youcan handle the rough-and-tumble of corporate law afterthis?”—seeming almost mercilessly to twist the knifeby exaggerated concern.

But how do we know that this is a plausible—even, Iwould claim, the best—interpretation of the dynamiccultural form of this interaction (not, note, of each in-dividual’s actual momentary motivational and othersub-jective states) of which the transcribed snippet preservesa denotational record? To answer this theoretical ques-tion, we move to a slightly different kind of text, the oldanthropological chestnut “ritual text.” When we under-stand ritual text, we understand the principles under-lying the way in which every interactional text—in-cluding that of Messrs. A and B—mobilizes cultural signsto discursive effect. We ask, then, what really charac-terizes ritual text, universally?


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The Semiotics of Explicit Ritual

The presumptively shared knowledge and beliefs of agroup are accessed in a society’s rituals under dynamic

gestural (indexical) figuration. Ritual works in a kind of

pictorial or iconic (specifically, diagrammatic) mode.8

Ritual as enacted traces a moving structure of indexicalgestures toward the knowledge presupposed to be nec-essary to its own effectiveness in accomplishing some-thing. In ritual, participants spatiotemporally manipu-late signs of these beliefs and areas of knowledge in theiruttered words and their actions with each other and withobjects. And it is the overall “poetry” as well as theparticular forms of such manipulation of signs that counttoward performing a ritual correctly. What is performedin this way—though always at the risk of misfire or otherfailure—is the culturally specific “competence” orknowledge that renders the context of performance ac-cessible to someone we might term the believer or groupadherent—whose adherence to a particular belief may ofcourse be a normative presumption only.

Ritual can be verbal or nonverbal or, as is usually thecase, a combination of multiple modalities of figurationplayed out in an orderly—the technical term, as in po-etry, is “metricalized”—space-time envelope of partici-pation. The very hypertrophic orderliness of multiplemetricalizations thus bounds the performed text of rit-ual, giving it a semblance of formal plenitude-in-itself.In and by this property of seeming to self-entextualize,to stand as formally autonomous totality, a ritual textas a whole traced over space-time projects as its contex-tualization that which it dynamically figurates along a

“cosmic axis,” an axis of knowledge or belief. Such dy-namic, directional spatiotemporal movements in ritualentail in this fashion the causal (re)ordering of cosmicconceptualizations as figurally indexed, such as aspectsof sacred or foundational knowledge, feeling, and belief,made figurally “real” in the here-and-now of experi-enceable semiosis.

A person officiating at the service of the Eucharist, forexample, bounds off a ritual space of objects at a table,an altar in the space-time of liturgical rite—wine pouredfrom a cruet into a chalice, wafers or pieces of bread ona paten or ceremonial plate, both comestibles at a ritualtable between him- or herself and a congregation of co-

participatory onlookers. He or she begins to tell the story

8. We have already been using the Peircean notion of “indexical”semiosis in the sense of a “pointing-to” relationship between a signand some co-occurrent thing that it stands for. Here, we move moredecisively into the Peircean scheme (see Peirce 1931–58:2, 134–73),in which, among the types of “iconic” signs (that is, signs in virtueof a “likeness” to what they stand for) are “diagrams,” analogiesof structured relations of parts, as in the floor-plan of a house inrelation to the actual spatial division experienceable in thedwellingin other modalities (e.g., by walking around). All analogies, insofaras they are representable by the formula A

1 : A

2 : . . . : : B

1 : B

2 :

. . ., feature diagrammatic relations between the two sides of theequation. For this whole area of study, see the brilliant systema-tizations of Peirce in Parmentier (1994:1–44 and 1997).

of The Last Supper of Jesus and the Apostles,9 specificallyquoting in the transposed here-and-now of first-personfigural narration and, at the appropriate places for osten-sive reference (pointing to the objects of the congrega-tion’s perception and the officiant’s narration), gesturallyholding up in turn the ritual objects: the congregants areinformed that “This is my body,” and instructed “Par-take ye thereof!” and likewise “This is my blood,”“Drink ye of it!” just as were the Apostles, according tothe liturgical order of the fateful Passover Seder that con-stitutes, by belief, actually the first or authorizing oc-casion of the ritual in which the officiant and congre-gants are participating in unbroken (indexical) chain.Thediagrammatic figuration thus is [In the here-and-now]Officiant : congregant :: [At the sacred initiating mo-ment] Jesus : Apostles. The first is experienced, the sec-ond part of the cosmic order of sacred belief.

The specific figurational equivalences—the ritual bap-tism of objects with names—will have been stated bysomeone whose authority goes back—“indexically,” aswe say—in presumptively unbroken line to Jesus himselfvia a causal chain of authorization. The ritual action tofollow with these now figurating signs has thus also beengiven figurational value within the bounds of the ritualform. And, ritually “transubstantiated” as these comes-tibles now have become,10 to eat and drink—to consumeor incorporate, we should say—is mystically followed byan equal and opposite or greater incorporation. As oneconsumes or incorporates the host in turn, first the of-ficiant him- or herself and then the totality of individualcongregants figurationally resacrifice “the lamb of God”in the “new covenant” so as to be incorporated throughthe figure of mutual participation into the body-and-blood of Jesus made institutional on earth, to wit, thechurch and its spiritual corporation. The individual actof faith, incorporating so as to be incorporated, figuratesan aggregate becoming a collectivity “in Christ,” as onesays with a pregnant metaphor of containment made lit-eral—as is the case for metaphor in all ritual—in theEucharistic mystery.

This central ritual of Christian faith, moreover, is abrilliantly compact structure of action; it is chiastic asclassical rhetoric would see it, named for the Greek termfor a marking with the letter chi, chiasmós, a criss-crossreciprocation figurating, of course, the cross. Here, the

9. In the Gospels, one finds the parallel narrative passages at Mat-thew 26 :26–29, Mark 14:22–25, and Luke 22 :17–20. John 6:48–58

articulates the mystical equivalences that underlie the liturgicalfiguration in the Eucharistic service. For example, “And as theywere eating Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it tothe disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ Then he tookthe cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink fromit, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which isshed for many for the remission of sins. . . .’ ” (Matthew 26:26–28).“Then [Jesus] took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them,saying, ‘This is my body which is given up for you—do this in myremembrance.’ Likewise he took the cup after they had eaten andsaid, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is pouredout for you’ ” (Luke 22:19–20).10. Of course, the precise nature of such transubstantiation hasbeen a theological doctrine of some controversial nature over thecenturies over which churches have split.


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90-degree perpendicularity of the iconic cross is dynam-ically figurated by reciprocal action, a back-and-forthwhereby a small ingestion figurating incorporation istantamount to (i.e., results in) a large counterdirectionalincorporation into a mystical corporate union or fellow-ship. This is literally an act—as in “social act”—of re-newal of individual faith in the divine, selfless, self-sac-rificing agency of Jesus who became the sacrifice on thecross, this act the foundation for the faithful of Chris-tianity-as-lived.

The point for analyzing ordinary, everyday discursiveinteraction—relating to others through the medium ofthe most ordinary-seeming language—is this: An inter-action—even everyday, ordinary conversation—is to beanalyzed as the “ritual” event through which its variousparticipants are allocated ascriptions of adherence to orat least role-alignment with the cultural beliefs that un-derlie and thereby provide the stuff of sociality. This isfiguratively accomplished through the entextualizationof patterns of usage of words and expressions in the con-text of interaction. We as analysts “read” the interac-tional text of what is (denotationally) said in the socialcontext of role relationships in the same way that we asparticipants “understand” what “social text” is beingenacted (above and beyond what is being denoted). Thusto “read” or “understand” is in effect to reconstruct apiece of text as the realization of one or more genres oftypically “ritualized” triangulation: denotation—dy-namic figuration—context of sociocultural knowledge.The text of what is said (p denotation) gesturally figur-ates a framework of cultural values (p “cosmic” context)associated with denotata. Dynamically this constitutesthe crux of the social relationships of participants overthe (real-time) course of interaction. This more inclusive“text”—the “interactional text” of social relationshipsin progress here-and-now—is what we read from thefigurational dynamics of denotational material, thewords and expressions of discourse.

Discourse is a by-degrees “cooperative” (cf. Grice 1989[1967]:26–31) activity or praxis insofar as participants,whatever they intend, manage to precipitate an inter-personal, intersubjective, denotational text-in-context.With respect to such an emergent, real-time structure ofmeaningfulness, participants can mutually align theircontributions so as to align their personae in a sociallysignificant event. Such text-in-context is what we canartifactualize in a transcript, ready for in vitro (as op-

posed to in vivo) study as a record of an interaction. If,however, the participants in an interaction are informedby disparate and only implicitly metricalized genres,events can fail by degrees to achieve such intersubjectivecoherence. By contrast, official ritual is authoritativelyeffective at figurating terms from a system of culturalbeliefs because it is highly—even hypertrophically—andexplicitly metricalized into a “poetic” organization suchthat to participate at all is to participate metrically.

For example, in figure 2 one cannot help but be struckby the poetics of the ritual text transcribed some yearsago by James Fox (1974:74) among speakers of Rotineseon Roti (Indonesia). It is (internally) structured as a de-

notational textual message, in terms of a tight poeticsof parallelism around the terms goat, front, neck, hairand cock, rear, tail, feathers as oppositional sets intro-duced in parallel in lines 1–2 and 3–4, respectively, alongwith personal and place names. The dynamic figurationhere—the diagram emergent over the real time in whichthe message is articulated—is, of course, what makesthis ritual text “work” as effective social action. Theparallel, dyadic messages about the cutting or pluckingof the animal’s valued beauty (lines 5–6 and 9–10) arefollowed by the regeneration of the value (lines 7–8,11–12), “still perfect as before/and ordered as at first”(lines 13–14). It is the ritual text ofa speech thatoccurredat the moment when, on the death of an old politicalleader of the clan village, a young successor (lacking anachieved glory of beard or plumage, we might say) wasinstalled. “Don’t worry,” the ritual speech soothes;“things will right themselves to the status-quo-ante.”

Dynamic figuration in ritual, then, depends on a tightmetricality within the “literal” or denotational text toeffect its goal or end, to bring about something in thefield of socially deployed symbols. In transcript, and es-pecially as the chart of parallelisms that graphs it, yousee the diagram (the type of Peircean icon involving anal-ogy of parts) of that which the denotational language is“doing” at this very moment, namely, bringing into thisspatiotemporal envelope of interactional context thelonged-for reality of authoritative soothing because, fig-uratively speaking, one’s inhabiting a “severed” socialcondition leads inevitably, the speech observes, to one’sreinhabiting a resumptively “regenerated” one. Theiconic diagram applies to this context, here-and-now:over discourse time, the time of talk, it indexes (i.e.,

invokes as contextual parameter) the political situationfaced by the people of the group as going from “needingsoothing” to “soothed,” we might say. The literal formof ritual text is always such an iconic index —a picturemade real in the here-and-now—of that which it accom-plishes, patently or transparently mapping the diagram-matic figuration of its denotational language in what wemight appreciate as its “literal” interpretation into itsinteractional import, or effect.

Interaction Ritual in Virtual MetricalizedDiscourse Space

The interaction ritual of Messrs. A and B may not seemtransparent to us in its formedness, though we can in-tuitively interpret or understand what is going on. How-ever, to model the interactional text here is the meth-odological problem. It requires us to recognize that eachof the operative semiotic forms—each quantal coding ofcommunicated denotational or conceptual informationthat plays a semiotic role in the interactional story line—does not just occur by itself; the units of effective se-miosis are not, for example, simply words or lexicalforms given in advance, as folk analysis might assume.Nor does any interactionally relevant sign occur purely


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Fig. 2. Dynamic figurational structure of a Rotinese oration (bini) for a situation of succession (Fox 1974:74, reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press).

as a function of the linguist’s sentence grammar or theone-sentence-at-a-time reconstructions of denotationaltext done by linguistic philosophers or conversation an-alysts (though of course everything can be nicely parsedaccording to English syntax and sense semantics [see Sil-verstein 1985]). Each contributory bit of information,rather, fits into an emerging multidimensional array ofrepetition, comparison, and contrast, an organization ofdenotational information that is interactionally effectivebecause it comes to entextualized formedness in a par-ticular way in the course of conversation.

But the operative structure in such ordinary conver-sation is not a transparent poetic organization of the de-

notational text, as in our two “real” ritual examplesabove. In ritual poetics, the semiotic material is simul-taneously measured out into foot, line, verse, and otherrecurring chunks, allowing us to locate every operantsign with respect to every other along dimensions of fi-gurated interactional meaningfulness. This creates acomplex “space” akin to a multidimensional crystallinestructure through which the interpreter of an entex-tualization must move to “get the [ritual] point” beinginscribed through the metrical semiosis of participants.

In everyday conversations like this one, by contrast,the operative structure occurs in an immanent concep-tual poetics—the conceptual material organized into a


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virtual metricalized space of points that are themselvesdenotationally created as the referents of deictic cate-gories and otherwise indexed by systematic categorialforms. These include such pragmatic operators as lexi-cally coded paradigms of opposed deictic spatializerssuch as English here versus there and adverbs such asEnglish now versus then, the inflectional expression ofcategory paradigms such as English “tense” categoriesof “present” ( p “nonpast”) versus “past,” and so forth.These organize information into a conceptual metrics,in addition to the explicit poetics of metrical repetition,constructional parallelism, and lexical ligature. Lookingat the transcript in figure 1, we can observe, thus, howin Q

A8 (“An’ you wént to undergraduate [school] hére,

ór” –) in 2, Mr. A uses the “past tense” of the verb go-in the idiomatic phrase go- to [school] that predicatesthis relationship between “you” (pMr. B) and some“here,” a “place” category deictic being used, in the flowof discourse, for “Chicago” (cf. R

B7). Q

A8 is straightfor-

wardly a propositional schema of the rough-and-readycanonical form “ f ( x,y )”, “go-to-undergraduate-school(Mr. B, [Chicago])” within the spatiotemporal frameworkof Mr. B’s dialogically elicited biography-in-progress—and of his life, including the moment of interaction!—that is explicitly deictically signaled by “here” and “pasttense,” schematically here

B–then

B.

Figure 3 presents the results of such a retranscriptionof the explicit metrical transcript in the framework ofwhat we might term the deictic metricalization of prop-ositional (denotational) content. A rough schematizationreconstructing the propositional information in eachturn is presented in the lefthand column, while in therighthand column are listed the deictically anchored spa-tiotemporalizations seemingly in discursive focus at thatvery utterance interval of the conversation. At R

B8, Mr.

B has introduced a distinction between a university-in-stitutional framework of location, coded with small cap-ital letters (thus: “there

B” for Loyola University of Chi-

cago), and a city-geopolitical framework of location,coded with lower-case letters (thus: “here

B” for the city

of Chicago). At the bottom of the retranscription, I sche-matize the denotational content of Mr. A’s first pair-partin turn 5 and its corresponding second, Mr. B’s turn 6.It will be immediately seen that in turn 5 Mr. A describesa situation that, for him, goes from good to bad; by con-trast, Mr. B in 6 describes a situation that, for him, goesfrom bad to good, an overall reverse direction along an

evaluative dimension that is, nevertheless, closely par-allel to Mr. A’s earlier statement.In figure 4 I have charted what is intersubjectively

shared between Messrs. A and B about the roles and bi-ographical attributes of each of them at two points ininteractional time, according to the various frameworksthat are contrasted along “there” : “here” and “then”:“now” deictic differentiations of role inhabitance anddenotational information emergent in the transcript.The first point is where our transcripted snippet begins;the second is where it ends.

The various frameworks, it will be noted, are realmsof knowledge about the world and about the interaction

ongoing. In each frame are grouped together the piecesof intersubjective biographical knowledge that haveemerged by that phase of interaction. There are fullerand more precise propositional descriptions of curricularparticipation and of university affiliation for each par-ticipant by the conclusion of the transcribed interval.The talk has been directed to, in effect, filling in theboxes for Messrs. A and B within the deictically andlexically differentiated frameworks. Further, at the con-clusion of this segment the interactional roles of initiator(of questions) and respondent (to them) have decisivelyreversed (something that would, in fact, become clearonly by examining the rest of the transcript). This createsa multidimensional array of information—here aboutMessrs. A and B themselves, as it turns out, because thedescriptive content is frankly about these two people’snarratable relationships of “living in,” “attending or ma-triculating at,” etc., with reference to certain named en-tities such as states and cities and universities that in-habit shared cultural space.

Down through turn 4, Mr. A and Mr. B have beenconstructing conversationally usable biographies, first ofMr. B under Mr. A’s relentless questioning and secondof Mr. A as Mr. B reciprocally obliges by asking for hisundergraduate institution. When, in 5, Mr. A, elaboratingon his answer, ventures a negative comparison of hisexperiences at Georgetown and Chicago, Mr. B, in 6,launches into a description of all of the changes for thebetter that his undergraduate institution, Loyola, has un-dergone in the five or six years since he matriculatedthere. But what we can describe in this merely sequentialfashion is densely structured into pieces of informationorganized by “placing” each with respect to other piecesof information through the use of syntactically co-oc-curring deictics implying dimensions of comparison andcontrast in various cultural realms of knowledge.

The conversation is organized in this way into threeparts, the first, starting even before the stretch in thetranscript, building up the biography of Mr. B, the secondever so briefly giving the interactionally relevant biog-raphy of Mr. A, and the third composed of the two de-notationally disconnected evaluative judgments thatcount, however, as the moment of real interactional re-versal for Mr. A and Mr. B, as shown.

The more general principles of interaction ritual are,then, in a way the same as those in “real” ritual. In eachcase, our interpretations or understandings of and stra-

tegic self-alignments to interactional text—in short, ourinterested modeling of it—are always through the lensof available denotational form. Certain partials of de-notational text—what one is saying—“count as” (or atleast contribute to “counting as”) instances of perform-ing a certain kind (or genre) of socially consequential actin emerging interactional text—what one has (or willhave) socially done or accomplished in and by sayingsomething. And any determinacy in accomplishing thisdepends on the dynamic—though orderly and intersub-jective—indexical-iconic figurative value of verbal de-scriptors set into frameworks of knowledge structuredin the here-and-now by deictics and other indexicals. In


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Fig. 3. “Objective” and deictic components of propositional information communicated in the conversation of figure 1, with schema of dynamic figuration at turning point. To represent the propositional content of talk, aschematic “predicate-argument” is followed in the lefthand column, roughly “predicate-about (referent/topic).”

[ ], material not uttered in the turn at talk but carried over from prior turn(s); A, B, indexes of participants’explicit sentence-subjecthood or implied subjectivity; X, as yet unspecified propositional argument; HERE/THERE, university differentiated as deictic object (versus here/there, all other place-deixis).

the case of explicit ritual, the hypertrophied formalmetricalization of denotation makes it transparent to theaccomplishment of “acts” relative to frameworks ofknowledge, including beliefs. In the case of everyday in-teraction ritual, the figuration depends on deictically me-diated orderings of denotation that have the force of con-ceptual metricalizations. The semiotically operativefigurations of relational stance of participants in inter-

action are conceptually metricalized along dimensionsgiven by deictic usage in addition to the way they maybe explicitly metricalized by cotextual structures of par-allelism, repetitions, etc.

Thus, for Messrs. A and B, Mr. B’s nonsequitur in 6,his denotationally—that is, logically or propositionally—incoherent description of the reverse direction of changeof Loyola University, his emblem of identity, interac-


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Fig. 4. Transformation over conversational time of already intersubjectively shared information about par-ticipants laid out in deictically differentiated frame-works (Silverstein 1998 :290, fig. 12.2, 1997 by theGreenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, re-

printed by permission). [ ], information not uttered inthe turn at talk but carried over from prior turn(s) or

from nonverbal context; A

, B

, deixis within the biographical spacetime of participant indicated.

tionally comes to “count as” a third phase of the inter-actional segment transcribed here. It is the registrationof foiled one-upmanship and the beginning move in hismetaphorical self-transformation into the participantholding the better interactional position—truly a role-relational reversal from what had been good-naturedlygoing on up to this point.11

Verbalized Knowledge and SocialPositionalities

Occasions of talk like the chat of Messrs. A and B makeconceptual information intersubjective (“on record”) inreal time through layers of form of organized text. Suchform, we have seen, mediates how participants come tostand one to another and how an interaction is a dynamicof assuming and transforming relational stances. But wemust go farther and ask of the conceptual information

communicated and made intersubjective, what is its na-ture? How is it anchored to language? Where, as culturalknowledge, does it “live,” so to speak, in society?

In addressing this issue, we come to the second im-portant differentiating dimension of contemporary lin-guistic anthropology, for we have discovered that inter-actionally relevant concepts indexed (cued) by wordsand expressions in text are cultural concepts that have

11. The methodological importance of this analytic focus via whatI term the “sign’s-eye view” of ritualization cannot be overesti-mated. It unites the traditional linguist’s concern for formednessof messages (utterances, texts, . . .) with concern for the contex-tualization conditions of messages—semiotically, their indexical-ities or conditions of co-occurrence with various factors of the com-

municative situation. From the sign’s-eye point of view, in asituation in which, at any moment of interactional time, there aremultiple interpersonal possibilities “in play,” the gradual cominginto being of a determinate text-in-context is the gelling of onespecial kind of indexicality, cotextuality, of a privileged set of signswith respect to the rest of what is significant. Cotextuality deter-mines a special, central cohesive structure, the “text,” in a largerand dynamic field of indexicality, namely, all that the occurrenceof that text points to in the way of its surrounding contextuali-zation. Ritual proper (as anthropologists no less than its practi-tioners would identify it) and interaction ritual differ, of course, inthe degree—not kind or mechanism(s)—of compulsive obtrusive-ness of cotextuality for both participants and analyst. In our ownculture, this cotextuality is first and foremost understood—by par-ticipants no less than by analysts within the culture of language—to center around the “what is said” aspect of semiosis, what weterm the denotational text. Therefore, it is our task to open up this

denotational text in interactional terms to show that Messrs. A andB’s interaction one with another, like that of all people within thisculture, is not direct but mediated by the denotational text thatemerges betweenthem as an intersubjective fact about structured—and in particular, mostly deictically structured—information.Thus, “understanding” a discursive interaction such as that be-tween Mr. A and Mr. B is, in effect, being able to model it as adenotational text-in-context that, as interaction ritual, figurates theinteractional doings between them as it entails them, such figu-ration always summoning to context cultural values as the stuff-at-issue of social interaction. To study the effective form of inter-action, then, we work through its mediating denotationaltextuality. This is why all cultural study is hermeneutic (and di-alectic) in nature, seeking to interpret the interactionallysignificant(i.e., efficacious) “meanings” of denotational text.


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a special status among the several components of mean-ingfulness of language. (Hilary Putnam [1975] termedthem stereotypes about the world.) It is important to seethat such cultural concepts, as opposed to all the otherkinds of meaningfulness associable with the words andexpressions used by Messrs. A and B, play the decisiverole in bringing this conversation to formed significanceand effectiveness.

In effect the participants’ use of certain expressions inparticular metrical positions of a developing textual formindexes—invokes—structures of knowledge about theworld. For example, use of names such as “Georgetown”in parallelistic relation to “Loyola (of Chicago)” in-dexes—brings to the intersubjective denotational textualmicrocosm—nodes in the “taxonomy” of Jesuit univer-sities in the United States, just as the juxtaposition ofthese names of institutions concurrently invokes thedenotata (for the cognoscenti) as an ordered set, or “serialstructure,” by their rank on a scale of institutional pres-tige giving value to their graduates’ credentials (or de-grees). Any time one uses a word or expression it indexesspecific values or nodes within such knowledge sche-mata. Each such schema of conceptual information isnow made “relevant” to discursive interaction as aframework projected from it (as well as now indexicallyanchored to it here-and-now); in other words, it is spe-cifically indexed (pointed to, gestured at) as the in-playfocus of figuration (in our sense of ritual[ization]) in theinteractional work being done.

What type of person, with what social characteristics,deploys such knowledge by using the expressions thatnormatively and actually index (invoke) it in a particularconfiguration of cotext? With what degrees and kinds ofauthority do interactants use expressions (reflectingknowledgeable familiarity from the social structural po-sition of the user with respect to ritual centers of au-thority that “warrant” their use)? To whom is authori-tative knowledge ascribed, and who can achieve at leasta conversationally local state of authority with respectto it, if not a perduring authority stretching beyond theinstance of interaction? In such ways the variability oflinguistic usage presumes upon—and points to (in-dexes)—the nonuniformity of knowledge within a com-munity. Importantly, nonuniformity in what peopleknow or are at least allowed to manifest knowledge ofis a function of numerous types of social categorizationsof people and people’s membership in groups of various

sorts, of which, then, using certain words and expres-sions becomes a direct or indirect indexical sign.We understand what is going on in the conversation

between Mr. A and Mr. B as we can discern the centralityof the participants’ predicating the “went-to-school (pcollege)-at” relationship between, respectively, Mr. Aand Georgetown (oldest, richest, almost Ivy—thoughCatholic—Jesuit university at the center of nationalpower), and Mr. B and Loyola of Chicago (located in aMidwestern manufacturing and commercial center, in1974 a generic, commuter school with not much of atraditional campus). Such associations become intersub-jective facts at particular points in interactional time

through the verbal accounts of the biographies of theinteractants, in effect placing Mr. A and Mr. B in seriallystructured value positions within the overall taxonomyof Jesuit institutions. Their respective social selves havebeen in effect wrapped in these culturally widespreademblems of identity (Singer 1984:esp. 105 and referencesthere) with entailments for dynamic figuration; indeed,such emblems are “old school ties” in American male,bourgeois professional society.

Of course, there is a process of essentializing that un-derlies and results in the emblematic power of such in-dexed positionalities, as I shall show in detail in the lastsection below (since emblems are “naturalized,” that is,essentialized icons indexically deployable). Various com-plex and dialectical institutionalized processes yield sim-ilarly emblematic values for their own sorts of signs inidentity politics, priestly incumbencies of expertise,“brand”-allegiance groups, and other forms of group for-mation around emblems at least deictically locatable onor in respect of persons and even bodies (think, further,of people even wearing school insignia or colors on theirclothing, of the class-differentiated wearing of gang col-ors, of the flying of national flags on the portals of homesand even on vehicles).

The interactional text of what Messrs. A and B have“really” been doing in the way of a cultural event as theywere talking about this and that thus becomes clear. Mr.A has, we can now infer, been providing opportunities,through relentless first pair-part questioning of Mr. B atthe outset of their conversation, long before and up untilour snippet begins, for Mr. B to predicate in second pair-parts of adjacency pair structures such a “went-to-school(p college)-at” relationship for himself, so as toreveal his emblem of identity; and finally, in adjacencypair 2 at R

B8, with some hesitation, Mr. B accedes, ex-

plicitly disambiguating “hereB,” that is, Chicago, from

Loyola of Chicago (p “thereB”), his university alma ma-ter (“in Chicago át, uh, Loyola”). Then Mr. A has hismoment “one-up,” announcing—note the descriptiveframework of taxonomy he explicitly invokes as now “inplay” for self-other comparison!—that he, too, is a “Jes-uit” college product (for in stratified American society,below the level of the traditional male prep-school WASPrich, it is generally one’s undergraduate [Bachelor’s de-gree] institution that counts).

In the flow of talk, this creates an asymmetry of char-acterization between participants in the co-constructed

intersubjective space, for they both now know Mr. B’sbiographical emblem of Jesuit-institutional value but donot know Mr. A’s. The gap can only be filled by Mr. B’sasking his now good-natured return question Q

B1,

“Where’d you gó [to school]?” This will open the spacefor Mr. A to predicate the equivalent information abouthimself. While all he needs to do from a denotationalpoint of view is to give the institution name as descrip-tor, he makes his formulation symmetrical with the oneMr. B has earlier used. In response RA1 he predicates ofhimself having gone to “Georgetown [University] (p“there

A”), down in Washington (p “thereA”).” (Mr. B

doesn’t even wait for this last piece of locational infor-


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mation before launching into his next turn at utterance,it should be noted, so superfluous an added specifier isit in the in-group universe of “old Jesuit boys” that bothhe and Mr. A belong to.)

Deploying such biographically contingent culturalknowledge—here, for example, knowing about namedJesuit institutions—constitutes the central modality ofestablishing and transforming qualities of social rela-tions. Having such cultural knowledge is group-relative:it is, as Hilary Putnam put it in a famous 1975 paper,echoing Durkheim (1893), based on a sociolinguistic “di-vision of labor” in which the fact of social distributionof conceptualization is an essential characteristic ofwords and expressions insofar as the way in which theybecome meaningful identity signs deployed in interac-tion underlies their very capacity to denote—just as wasmy writing “Durkheim” and not “the great master ofFrench sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917),” in theimmediately preceding passage.

Thus, particular words and expressions emerge inmetricalized text as indexical differentiae of a discourseparticipant’s having—or seeming not to have—certainconceptual structures and distinctions, which arebrought to bear on denotation at that point of discoursetime precisely as a function of the use of a certain form.This is, as we shall see below, tantamount to indicatinggroup or category membership of participants in a dis-cursive interaction, both as a presupposed fact about asocial world indexically anchored to the here-and-nowand as a fact entailed (performatively created) for such aworld in and by the very textually organized use of cer-tain words and expressions at that moment. As Putnamand others have pointed out, for any denoting word orexpression the preponderance of its “meaning” lies injust such concepts as are revealed in usage and itsco(n)textual indexical patterns, somewhatindependentlyof the meanings signaled by formal grammatical aspectsthrough which sentence constructions are shaped.

The use of certain words and expressions at a partic-ular point in discursive real time therefore does morethan contribute straightforwardly to denotational text.It marks (indexes) the user as a member of a certain groupor category relative to the groups or categories of persons,things, etc., already in play through contextual and co-textual indexicalities up to that point (see the conceptof “membership analysis” in Schegloff 1972). It therebyindexes—points to—an in-group including that user

within which one can presume a sharedness of specificconceptual schemata such as taxonomies, partonomies,paradigms, seriations, etc., that begin and end in occa-sions of talk and their intertextual, interdiscursive qual-ities in a whole economy of verbal usage in social life. 12

12. The study of such structures in a number of practical domainsof conceptualization has long been the province of self-styled “cog-nitive anthropology” and congeners, though with a dubious un-derstanding of “meaning” and virtually no understanding of gram-mar (see the collection of papers in Tyler 1969 and, notwith-standing, the very useful discussion of “ordering functions and vo-cabulary structure” surveying the types of knowledge schemata inTyler 1978:255–300; see also the oddly triumphalist account of

Consequently, when I have had occasion to talk tointernational audiences about Messrs. A and B (see Sil-verstein 1998)—recognizable, highly locatable social per-sonae of American bourgeois culture—it has necessitateda vast labor of explication on my part of the frameworkswithin which what the two men are saying is culturallyinformed and culturally coheres in figurating an inter-actional text that can be made analytically transparent.I have had to become, in other words, a cultural inform-ant revealing what is communicatively specific here inthe way information-bearing words and expressions, thevery denotational currency of this interpersonalexchange, index group memberships that come to inter-actional realization in the instance.

It is clear that at least some interlocutors in theseinternational audiences had enough competence in Eng-lish to follow the denotational text of what Messrs. Aand B were saying and my own exposition. However, thefact that they missed all this indexical meaningfulness(or at least needed laborious explication of it to show itssystematicity in frameworks of knowledge about partic-ular worlds) is, of course, the demonstration par excel-lence of “culture” immanent in language. Messrs. A andB appear to be operating with—pointing to and identi-fying each other with positions within—these schemataof cultural concepts without losing a cotextual beat, sosmooth is the interactional textuality with which theychat. But one can imagine an outsider’s seeing nothingof the nature of this interaction because knowing noth-ing of the stereotypic knowledge schemata indexed bythe use of specific words and expressions from culturallyloaded pragmatic paradigms of not merely denotationalbut indexical and emblematic value. Messrs. A and Bdeploy this knowledge like identity-linen by hanging itout interpersonally and intersubjectively not only in ex-plicitly metricalized poetic turn-taking but in a second,more subtle layer of deictically structured conceptualspace—“here’s” Chicago; “there’s” Loyola; etc. Theythus surround their respective conversational personaewith these emblems of personal identity, negotiating andcoconstructing a deictically denoted field with the polar-coordinate geometry common to any such indexed re-

D’Andrade 1995, written against all the gains in epistemologicalsubtlety won in the postpositivist study of language and other cul-tural phenomena and resolutely set against all of it). Within thecognitive anthropology literature, Frake (1969 [1964]), in particular,has succeeded in showing how discursive coherences involving

words and expressions over sequential adjacency-pair (Q;A)routinesfind their explanation in various “-onomic” structures of knowl-edge that are, by hypothesis, presupposed by the responding con-sultant to be the conceptual frameworks giving coherence to suchdialogue—hence his “notes” on the suitability of various types ofdomain-specific “queries” (and their responses). At the same time,the -onomic structures invoked are creatively useful to the an-thropologist by virtue of theapparent ability ofspeakersrelationallyto structure various denotational terms at issue by such metase-mantic descriptors as “is a type of,” “is a part of,” and the like.The way in which particular words and expressions substituting insuch diagnostic frames of conceptual relations in coherent pairingsof dialogic (Q;A) discourse metricalizations of various sorts revealsinteresting networks of terminological—hence, cultural-concep-tual—relations.


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gion surrounding an origin point (here-and-now) in theperson or persons communicating.

Now, such stereotypic or cultural concepts are invokedin and by the use of tokens of words and expressions towhich they are attached. Arrayed in deictic-poetic realtime, these concepts constitute the denotational spaceof play that gets figurationally mapped in the practicalwork of interactional textuality, of inhabiting and “de-fining” this social event as starting in some state ofsocialrelations and winding up in another. Such culturalknowledge lives and dies in textual occasions. We createit on occasions of use of particular words and expressionsin particular cotextual arrays one with respect to an-other, as much as, on subsequent occasions of use ofthem, we try to presume upon the knowledge previouslyexperienced and, perhaps finding our presumption beingquestioned, have to create it again or modify it for somenew interlocutor. The doing of all this denotational tex-tual work, at the same time, figurates interactional tex-tuality, the participants coming to stand in social rela-tion one to another, and therefore the culturalconceptualization on which interaction turns can neverbe neatly abstracted from its dimension of interaction-ality. Rather, such textual occasions—occasions for lan-guage to be used to describe phenomena in the universeof experienceables—are occasions when people (indexi-cally) associate specifically patterned words and expres-sions with specific, valuated pieces of conceptual knowl-edge that people invoke as interlocutors in such-and-such kinds of social event. Interlocutors thereby bringthat knowledge into interpersonal social space and makeit relevant to their ongoing interactions, all in the verymoment of seeming to fashion an individual thought.

The use of some particular word or expression at amoment in denotational text-time thus comes differ-entially to invoke—to summon to the here-and-now—some specific cultural concept in a schema of such. (Iwill return later to the issue of whose indexical associ-ations and schemata “count.”) But it does so in a waythat is dependent on sociocentric and interactionally lo-catable patterns of language use both as themselves con-stituting social action in the way I have demonstratedand as associable with other modalities of social action.[The distinction between these and other aspects of theconceptual content of language is clarified in the elec-tronic edition of this article on the journal’s web site.]

Lexically Explicit “-onomic” Structuresversus Cultural Concepts beyondLexicalization

The way we denote what we consider “real-world”things by lexical expressions reveals at least one kind ofknowledge, for example, that certain plants and animalsare members of a category and that members of thatcategory have certain properties. These denotata are orcan be conceptually interrelated in various by-degreessocially shared and/or perduring schemes of discursive

knowledge about them; they “go together” in a classi-fication that can be revealed in explicitly metasemantic(sense-characterizing) discourse. The fact of such clas-sificatory knowledge can be revealed by special kinds ofmetalinguistic conversations with (Q; A) participant-rolestructure. Consultants as respondents can coconstruct“-onomies” in response to the query-based stimulationof a friendly anthropologist: “A T-shirt is a kind of shirt”within the domain denoted by “clothing,” of which“shirt,” to be sure, is a kind, and so on.13

Such induced lexicalized -onomic structures are pre-cisely what, more explicitly, underlie an older philo-sophical view of Western “science.” Stipulated networksof scientific terms are interrelated by in-essence term-defining theory the fashioning of which constitutes,then, a privileged, in-essence “ritual” site of discourse.One should thus be able to measure the coherence ofany denotational discourse that emerges under such atheory by whether or not the critical terms defined or

entailed by theoretical texts are used consistently withwhat the ritual center prescribes or at least does notproscribe. It is not difficult to see the analogy long lurk-ing in studies of culture-as-mentality that a culture islike a totalizing folk-scientific “theory”—or implicit“view”—of the world (Weltanschauung ) that providesfolk-scientific terms to its users (the culture-bearers),methodologically systematizable in terms of -onomiesthat one can explicitly induce in the metalinguisticmode.

To investigate a culture’s concepts, in this approach,one tries to extract or induce the semantic consistenciesin such lexical usage and model them in terms of -on-omies. If one can, one tries to give the intensional prin-

ciples of conceptual classification that lie behind suchan -onomy’s structure, more or less identifying theseprinciples with the conceptual meanings—senses—ofthe critical theoretical terms, the lexical labels of thesystematizable culture. Unfortunately, cultural conceptsof the kind we are focusing on here just do not work inthis fashion; they are indexically invoked in and by theuse of certain language forms in context, but the con-cepts will never be systematizable by the approach thatsees culture as a “(folk-scientific) theory of the world.”

A revealing example of the difference between struc-tures of lexically explicit -onomization and actual cul-tural conceptualization appeared some years back in oneof Stanley Tambiah’s (1985 [1969]) contributions to thelong-running though in my opinion ill-conceived “de-bate” on other peoples’ rationality in classification by

13. See Frake’s (1969 [1964]) demonstration of the method. Thisexercise, if metasemantic (i.e., truly sense-characterizing), dependsentirely on discovering a language’s privileged set of text-formingmetasemantic operators such as “is a kind of (X,Y)” (for X,Y de-noting lexical expressions of some language), which, transitivelyiterable across pairs of expressions, generates a so-called taxonomy.From this term, I have generalized the term “-onomies,” intendingto include all types of knowledge structures thus revealed or gen-erated in these and other metasemantically regimenting textualoccasions, for example, partonomy, paradigm, and serial (linearlyordered) structure.


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table 1Edibility Ascriptions of Domesticated and Forest Ani-mals among Thai Villagers

Sad baan (DomesticatedAnimals) Sad paa (Forest Animals)

Wild counterparts of Sad baan:Khuay (buffalo)—edible

with rulesKhuay paa (wild buffalo)—

edibleNgau (ox)—edible with rules Ngua paa (wild ox)—edibleMuu (pig)—edible with rules Muu paa (wild boar)—edibleMaa (dog)—not edible

(taboo)Maa paa (wolf)—not edible

Maew (cat)—not edible Chamod (civet cat)—edible(ambiguous)

Kai (chicken)—edible Kai paa (wild fowl)—ediblePed (duck)—edible Ped paa (wild duck)—edibleHaan (goose)—edible but

rarely eatenOther animals:

Kuang (deer)—edible

Faan (barking deer)—edibleNuu paeng, nuu puk (forestrat)—edible

Kahaug (squirrel)—edibleKadaai (hare)—edibleLing (monkey)—not edible

Animals of the deep forest,rarely seen:Saang (elephant)—not

edibleSya (tiger)—not edibleSya liang (leopard)—not

edibleMii (bear)—not edible

sour c e : Tambiah (1985:table 5.1, Copyright 1985 by the

President and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted bypermission.)

cultural concepts.14 Tambiah described the apparent—practically evidenced and verbalizable—beliefs of Thaivillagers about differences of “edibility” of the universeof lexically nameable faunal types. Each time a particularfaunal nominal expression is used in discourse, fromamong an elaborately taxonomized set of such, such be-liefs are, of course, potentially cued as contextually rel-evant cultural concepts about the named fauna (in Put-namian terms, differentially indexed as stereotypecultural beliefs about the denotata of fauna terms). Theproblem for us in a curious way is that local ascriptionsof “edibility”—a projected “property,” to be sure, pred-icable as true or false of every type of named creature inThai villagers’ belief—seem to be askew from two pointsof view.

On the one hand, as shown in table 1, when we con-struct careful taxonomies of types of animals accordingto the Thai villagers’ own verbalizable “is a kind of”relationship, this categorial structure bears no transpar-ently direct relationship to the ascribed property of “ed-ibility.” If such a property is shared stereotypic knowl-edge, it is communicated indexically, constituting in thisway—but not as a taxonomic principle of discourse co-herence—much of the direct as well as figurative dis-cursive rationality of text-making use of animal names(in unproblematically smooth discursive interaction fo-cused on human relations to potential faunal foodstuffs,for example). Among nonhuman creatures (tua) and inparticular animals (sad), some domesticated animals (sadbaan) are “edible” and some not; some forest animals(sad paa) are “edible” and others not (and similarly forwater animals [sad naam]). At the same time, “edibility”proscriptions, restrictions, preferences, or prescriptionshave little “natural” basis beyond local cultural beliefs.For example, there seems not to be a relation to what isin some physical sense readily “available” or biochem-ically “harmful” or explicable by any of the myriadWest-ern a priori optimizations or minimax calculi that informvarious crypto-rationally reductive theories such as percapita protein capture or energy expenditure as the “re-ally real” meaning of the only apparently (mystified) cul-tural concept of “edibility.”

As Tambiah’s data show (table 2), the concept of “ed-ibility” is a degree concept that peaks in the middle ofan abstract cultural structure of homologies across in-habitable and indexically anchored role relations withfauna and others. This homology draws together ste-

reotypically conceptualized animal habitat and stereo-typic animal behavior with two other systematizations

14. The debate is framed in precisely the same termsas the questionof the universality versus “cultural relativity” of various aspectsof linguistic form and function, to wit, the universality versus “cul-tural relativity” of “rationality,” “moral sentiment,” etc. Are everyculture’s classifications of the phenomena of the experienceableworld “rational” in some sense? Note, among others, the lines ofphilosophical and anthropological worry in the twentieth centuryfrom Boas and Lévy-Bruhl on through to Sahlins and Obeyesekere.Notable way stations, in terms of which Tambiah’s involvementcan be construed, include Leach (1964), Lévi-Strauss (1966), Douglas(1972), Wilson (1970), Hollis and Lukes (1982), and Tambiah (1990:84–139).

of inhabitable domains of Thai village life. One is kin-ship, articulated in terms of ascriptively legitimated ver-sus performatively legitimatable marriageable persons inan exogamous though cognatic kinship universe. Theother, anchored to a local, house-centered understandingof concentric social and cosmic spaces, is the stereotypicspatial perquisites of humans of various classificatorycategories.

“Edibility” as an implicitly communicated conceptthat Thai villagers have about nameable fauna turns out

to be (1) indexically anchored in the cosmos via a pointof connection in this world, (2) the reflex in animal-typeascriptive projections of a more abstract structure of con-ceptual relations across a number of domains, and (3) adegree concept much like “incest” and other seriouslyrelational matters. Whatever it seems to those who in-voke the concept, “edibility” is clearly not merely a prop-erty to be projected as inherent in objects themselves—not a property of the individuable denotata of a lexiconof folk-scientific fauna terms. And whatever taxonomyor other kind of semantic structure can be induced onthe set of such terms, these orderings are independent


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table 2Parallelism across Rules of Human Exogamy, Rules of Human Domestic Access, and Rules of Edibility of Ani-mals among Thai Villagers

Human series Blood siblings First cousins (sec-ond cousins are

ambiguous)

Classificatory siblings beyond

second cousins

Other people Outsiders

Marriage and sexrules

Incest taboo Marriage taboo;sex notcondoned

Recommendedmarriage(and sex)

Marriage andsex possible

No marriage

House categories Haung phoeng and huang suam

Huean yaai(sleeping room)

Huean naui(guest room)

Saan (platform) Compound fence

Rules relating tohouse space

Sleeping rules separ-ating parents fromson-in-law andmarried daughter

Rights of entrybut not sleeping

Taboo to crossthreshold into

huean yaai

Visitors washfeet if in-vited in

Excludingoutsiders

Animal series Domestic animalsthat live insidethe house

Domestic animalsthat live underthe house (and

have been reared there)

Domestic ani-mals belonging to other

households

Animals of the forest: coun-terparts,deer, etc.

1. Powerful ani-mals of the

forest2. Monkeys

Eating rules Inedible and taboo Cannot be eatenat ceremonials

Eminently edibleat ceremonials

Edible Inedible andtaboo

sour c e : Tambiah (1985:table 5.2, Copyright 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted by permission.)

of this important—and, for fauna, ubiquitous—culturalconcept.

As for indexical anchoring, this cultural concept of“edibility” is dependent upon a radial distance functionfrom a center point. This becomes apparent in the locallystructured conceptualization of zones of a village micro-cosm-to-macrocosm organized first around the internalstructure of the living quarters of the house of a head ofhousehold and then around the various correspondinglocations of the house’s undercroft. Then it includes thevillage of several houses, its surrounding land for floodedrice cultivation, its surround in the (uncleared) forest,and finally what may lie beyond. The stereotypic houseitself, as shown in figure 5, top, is in effect linearly zonedstarting from the point on the northeast corner of thesleeping room where the Buddha’s statue and ritual altarconnect the house—and its head of household—to thecosmic realm. The line moves next to the west of thatorigo or anchoring point, then to the south out to theentrance platform and down to the undercroft (fig. 5,bottom), duplicating the arrangement, then outside andinto the macrocosm of the village, and then beyond to

other villages.Privileges of access to these zones are isomorphic withan egocentric kinship structure centered on the stereo-typic male head of household (not on a marriageablechild). Marriage and thus legitimated nonincestuous sex-ual relations for a young woman of such a household andultimately a son-in-law’s access to the sleeping room(west side) are permissible, indeed stereotypically ex-pected, in the mid-range of the kinship classification inthe homologue of table 2.

The abstract structure of analogies anchoring ascrip-tive “edibility” to other kinds of experienced social re-lations follows in the realm of relations of humans to

animals. In fact, the implicit conceptual metaphor—“ed-ibility” (as ego’s comestible) is homologous to “(avail-able) sexuality” (as ego’s legitimate marriage object)—is,as we might expect, ritually literalized as “figuration”and thus made experiential in cases where expiation isnecessary for an incestuous (too close) marriage in thiscognatic system. Both parties to a relatively more in-cestuous union have to “eat” from the same “tortoiseshell” (a pun on the older lexeme for “vagina”) in public,a metaphor, it is thought, of the sexuality of “omnivo-rous” dogs. The spouses indexically-iconically performthis public act of self-mortification to overcome the ta-boo they have violated by marrying (Tambiah 1985[1969]:172–73, 175).

It is to be expected, of course, that an abstract conceptthat is culturally normative is thus anchored in the fig-uration of ritual, such practice authorizing its defaultinvocation as knowledge of the world in the everydayusage of the linguicultural community; whether any in-dividual who uses a faunal term “believes” is, of course,not to the point. The abstract structure authorizing thiscultural concept is made flesh, as it were, in this ritual

site, (re)authorizing its experienceable force in everydaylife—itself experienced in a space that is orderly and in-dexically anchored in the house altar.

“Edibility,” as a degree concept, moves across a spaceof animal types designated by the various faunal terms—a culturally stipulated seria

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