Area of inquiry (group 2): communication, expression and technology practice questions.

Geertz described cockfights staged in a Balinese village in the late 1950s in which men wagered heavily on birds that stood for their own kin group, although no land, office or rank actually changed hands afterwards. He argued that the event is best understood as

• a dramatic form through which Balinese men read a commentary on their own rivalries
• an economic institution whose main purpose is the redistribution of money between the households of a village
• a survival from an earlier stage of society that had long since lost its original function
• a release of aggression that keeps the village peaceful by discharging accumulated tension

Answer: a dramatic form through which Balinese men read a commentary on their own rivalries

Geertz treats the cockfight as a text to be read: it says something about status rivalry that is never stated openly, which is why he calls the heavy betting 'deep play' rather than gambling. Reading it as redistribution or as a safety valve substitutes a function for the meaning participants themselves attach to it.

Abu-Lughod watched Egyptian television serials during the 1990s with poor women in a Cairo neighbourhood and with villagers in Upper Egypt, and set what she saw against the intentions of the Cairo writers and directors who made the programmes. Her account of that reception argued that

• the serials had no effect at all, since viewers in both settings simply ignored the storylines they were offered
• viewers made sense of the serials from within their own circumstances, so what was sent was not what was received
• the serials imposed a national outlook, and the frames of reference viewers arrived with gave way to the one on screen
• television can be analysed adequately from the programmes themselves, without observing anyone actually watching them

Answer: viewers made sense of the serials from within their own circumstances, so what was sent was not what was received

Abu-Lughod treats a serial as material completed by its audience: producers in Cairo wrote developmental melodramas, and the women who watched them read those stories against the lives they were leading. Studying the programmes alone leaves out the only place where their meaning is settled.

Horst and Miller studied mobile telephone use in low-income Jamaican households in the early 2000s and recorded the practice of 'link-up': keeping a very large number of contacts warm with short calls, rather than concentrating on a few close ties. In their account the handset is best described as

• a technology that replaced older forms of sociality with thinner and more distant kinds of contact
• an object whose meaning follows directly from the intentions of the firms that sell it
• a tool taken up within an existing strategy of keeping wide networks available for support
• proof that poorer households adopt a new device only once its price has fallen far enough

Answer: a tool taken up within an existing strategy of keeping wide networks available for support

Their argument is one of appropriation: the phone was absorbed into a pre-existing strategy of maintaining many potential sources of help, so its effects ran through local social practice rather than over it. The common error is to treat a new device as an independent cause of social change.

Appadurai argued in 1996 that electronic media and migration together turn imagination into a social practice, because audiences assemble possible lives out of images produced far away. In his vocabulary, the circulating image-worlds and the capacity to produce and distribute them are called

• ethnoscapes
• technoscapes
• ideoscapes
• mediascapes

Answer: mediascapes

Appadurai separates five kinds of global flow: mediascapes are image-worlds and the means of producing them, ethnoscapes the moving people, technoscapes the distribution of machinery and ideoscapes the travelling political keywords. Naming the wrong scape usually means collapsing images into either the people or the ideologies that move with them.

Malinowski, writing in 1923 about the speech he had recorded in the Trobriand Islands, noted that long exchanges of greetings and comment on the obvious carry almost no information yet are never dispensed with. He proposed that such talk should be analysed as

• an inefficient use of language that literate communication would eventually make unnecessary
• speech whose work is to establish and maintain a bond rather than to transmit content
• an early stage in the development of language towards the precise reporting of facts
• a set of formulae addressed to spirits rather than to the people who happen to be present

Answer: speech whose work is to establish and maintain a bond rather than to transmit content

Malinowski's term for this is phatic communion: the utterance does social work, so its meaning lies in the relation it sustains, not in the information it carries. Judging such talk as empty applies a narrow model of language as fact-transfer to a use it was never doing.

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr in northern Queensland, as recorded by Haviland and later tested by Levinson, give directions using fixed compass-like terms rather than left and right: a cup is described as standing to the north of a plate, and a speaker recalling an event reproduces its orientation years later. Researchers use this material to argue that

• speakers of such languages are unable to understand descriptions given in terms of left and right
• spatial vocabulary has no effect on anything beyond the words a speaker happens to choose
• a habitual way of speaking can require constant background reckoning and shows up in memory and gesture
• the terms are used only in formal storytelling and are replaced by ordinary terms in everyday conversation

Answer: a habitual way of speaking can require constant background reckoning and shows up in memory and gesture

The claim is carefully limited: to speak this way at all one must keep track of orientation continuously, and that habit is detectable in non-linguistic tasks. It is not the discredited strong claim that a language sets a boundary on what its speakers can think.