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Joking Avoidance: A Korowai Pragmatics of Being Two
Author(s) -
Stasch Rupert
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2002.29.2.335
Subject(s) - personhood , kinship , pragmatics , ideology , psychology , reflexivity , sociology , linguistics , mythology , identification (biology) , social psychology , epistemology , philosophy , anthropology , botany , politics , political science , biology , theology , law
Korowai of New Guinea participate in person‐reference partnerships in which two people call each other by a term recalling some past event of mutual and mildly transgressive bodily identification. This genre of person reference is hybrid between personal names and kinterms and between joking and avoidance. Details of the genre's internal organization and links to other person‐ referring expressions provide evidence that Korowai speakers affirm a dyadcentric model of personhood, and that these same speakers affirm an ideology of language according to which words do not only represent persons but also impinge on them causally. This genre of person reference underscores the methodological importance of recognizing reflexive, metarepresentational dimensions of people's use of different person–referring forms. [food, transgression, language ideology, personhood, name avoidance, kinship, New Guinea]