Stephen Pax Leonard

This essay explores what one might call the “nihilistic turn”: the structures of intellectual self-destruction that seem to have become embedded in social anthropology. Using the author’s long-term fieldwork in Greenland as a backdrop and from the point of view of the ethnographer in the field, it finds that much of the nihilistic navel-gazing that has come to characterise the subject is to be found wanting. The ethnographer is seldom in the superordinate position vis-à-vis his or her interlocutors that so many assume, and if we stopped insisting on framing questions of representation through the post-modernist lens of power differentials we would see that the supposed ‘power’ that a western ethnographer has is often grossly exaggerated.

Comedy has long been analysed from a pragmatic perspective with the predictable conclusion that we laugh because one of the four Gricean maxims has been violated. However, the wording of Grice’s maxims is so loose and flexible that more or less any joke would violate one of his maxims and thus the ‘Cooperative Principle’. So, we are still left mediating the meta-pragmatic question of what it is that lies behind verbal incongruity that makes us actually laugh? This article analyses the notion of incongruity from a Peircean semiotic perspective and focuses exclusively on a selection of British comedy duo sketches whose humour is derived overwhelmingly from discursive, lexical and socio-phonetic incongruity. On the basis of classic British comedy due sketches at least, there is some mileage in perceiving incongruity as a semiotic misalignment or ‘indexical shock’ which subverts our basic social expectations by indexing non-presupposed contexts. We laugh because our verbal norms are not only challenged, but are turned upside down and torn apart. Moreover, we laugh because the social identities that the speech acts aim to index non-referentially often clash or conflict immediately with those of his or her interlocutor’s.

What does it mean to lose a ‘divine’ language? The liturgical language used in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) (Church Slavonic) is perceived to index an authenticity because it is believed to be attuned to the inner, spiritual life of the worshipper. This article analyses the metasemiotic framing used by Russian Orthodox ‘traditionalist’ bloggers when discussing the status and fate of the ‘divine language’. In accordance with the aesthetic consciousness of a traditionalist, the liturgical language has been semiotized for the linguistic code is perceived consciously and subjectively as a sign. Some traditionalists equate liturgical language reform with ‘disenchantment’ (for them an ingredient of secular modernity), and they discuss this disenchantment as ‘a semiotic event’. More generally, this article shows how so-called ideologies of worship mediate semiotic assumptions made about linguistic codes.

What is the relationship between speech and experience? What is the experiential quality of speech? At first glance, these might seem like peculiar questions as speech and experience are inextricably tied together through habitual practices. The apparent inseparability of speech and experience renders such questions problematic for we cannot get beyond or outside of language by means of language alone. This article explores the ideological constitution of language as seen from the perspective of a remote group of Inuit hunters. It urges a more phenomenological approach to speech and experience. It is shown how moments of phenomenological awakening might help us understand better local indigenous ideologies of language and how this could shed light more generally on the relationship between experience and speech.

How do Russian Orthodox Christians frame their understanding of semiotic ideologies of worship? That is to say, how do worshippers interpret liturgical language ‘signs’ and how do these interpretations colour their views as to which language is ‘right’ for the Church? There are to be found two semiotic ideologies of worship in Moscow. There are traditionalists for whom the liturgical language is embodied; it becomes the language of God through its vocalisation and enactment. Then, there are those who believe that Church Slavonic is not an indelible part of Russian Orthodox life and that in terms of its semiotic status its relation to the world it represents is an arbitrary one. Those who invoke the former, folk understandings of semiotic praxis perceive the Holy language as an icon or experiential portal that makes the presence of God more presupposable. Conceptions of language and linguistic register vary intra-culturally. Fieldwork showed how different perceptions of form map onto consciousness, raising questions of intentionality as assumptions about who is speaking (God or the priest) are bound up with the form that is used.

What was the impact of one-way radio messages aimed at hostages kidnapped by the FARC and held captive in the Colombian jungle? Messages were read out on air every Saturday night (reception in the Colombian jungle is best between 01:00am and 04:00am) for 22 years. Here, radio animated emotional registers of lived experience as one-way radio messages intensified novel forms of imagination for both speaker, hearer and the ‘community’ of other hearers, in this case thousands of hostages dotted around the jungle. This article examines the linguistic instrumentality of the radio voice. The research is based on interviews with all parties (released hostages, defected guerrillas and relatives of hostages). By analysing the Voces del Secuestro messages, it is shown how a phenomenological listening of the radio voice gave hope in times of anguish.

This article makes the claim that the social justice ideology that has become hegemonic and institutionalised throughout the universities of the Anglosphere is best understood by analysing what I call ‘harmonious discourse markers’. Using discourse analysis, a methodology itself embedded in the social justice ideology, it is shown how the connotative value of language is manipulated to index a false compassion and harmony. The ideological code employs antonymous discourse markers such as ‘safe/dangerous’ and a family of ‘values’ such as ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ to make the discourse seem unimpeachable. Throughout the discourse, it is the esoteric meanings of the ideological tokens that are prioritised over the exoteric meanings. The objective of the discourse is to polarise and demonise the alternative discourse on grounds of moral standards and discompassion. In doing so, its attempt to invert power structures is seen to be a charitable endeavour even if it directly discriminates against the ethnic majority. All ideologies are involved in the weaponization of language. The social justice ideology and its revolution of empathy is no different, but it is cleverly disguised as the discourse is wrapped in terms of compassion and inclusion.

Religious cosmologies put forward by Russian philosophers and thinkers at the beginning of the last century had important things to say about the linguistic construction of personhood and the relations between words and reality. Not shying away from personal phenomenologies which regard words as cosmic self-expression, these philosophers help us rediscover both the sensuality and physicality of language. This article explores how such apparently long forgotten philosophies of language live on to some degree in religious Orthodox practice in Russia today. What is more, it serves to remind us of the connections between language, spirituality and the sacred. By engaging with the spirit of prophecy, thinkers such as Bulgakov (and indeed some contemporary worshippers) show us the significance of what it means to ‘feel’ language.

This article explores the tension between mystical prayer and immutable, ritual speech. The tension derives from the fact that mysticism resists linguistic formulation. In the context of embodied, psychosomatic prayer, long-term fieldwork shows what brings about the efficacy of such petition. “Felt” intimacy with God is a slow process and is aided by “sincerity” and “embodying the word”; “sincerity” comes about through the pointedness of the intentionality conveyed by the words. As a public-private practice, the Jesus Prayer keeps crossing boundaries between ritual, everyday socialiation, and hesychastic isolation. t is this permeability which makes it such a compelling ethnographic study. Such research clarifies the relationship between repetitive, conventionalied acts of piety and its effects on the supplicant because it shows that language is not diminished by formalization or repetition as has previously been implied.

The first-hand experience of learning an alien language is seldom the subject of a discussion on phenomenology, and yet the insights from fieldwork can be very rich in this regard. Immersed in a very different language culture where the pragmatics of silence, jokes and gestures have to be carefully interpreted to be understood, this article explores briefly a number of issues relevant to the phenomenology of speech such as the arbitrariness of the sign. In doing so, it engages with language, indigenous environmental philosophy as well as ‘ways of speaking and knowing’. These issues are discussed both from the perspective of fieldwork and from that of my informants – the Inugguit of north-west Greenland, a remote community of Arctic pseudo hunter-gatherers. It is shown that an intersubjective, non-Cartesian approach to language shared by this Arctic speaker community leads one to question some of the assumptions underpinning contemporary linguistic research. Further research is encouraged in order to develop a more complete and comprehensive phenomenology of speech whose basis should be the anthropology of experience and a healthy scepticism towards determinate systems of knowledge.

What is it about Orthodoxy that helps the worshipper build the“right” interiority? It is shown here how the transcendental may be perceived as a sonorous cosmology. The chanting of a semi-intelligible, liturgical language that can appear at times as more signs than words can be endowed with a transcendental appeal. Orthodoxy is a sensorium and the commingling of the senses is conducive to a semiotic ambiguity. This article, which weds the anthropology of the senses with the anthropology of religion, claims that the transcendental appeal of chanting can be explained by this ambiguity and liminality. This reflexive self-ethnography of conversion to Orthodoxy shows how God might appear as accessible through stimulation of the senses. A transcendental pathway does not tend to emerge from dogmatic prescription or doctrine, but is instead a subjective, experiential phenomenon.

Attempts have been made to examine how speakers frame linguistic varieties by employing social semiotic models. Using ethnographic data collected over many years, this article applies such a model to Iceland, once described as the ‘e-coli of linguistics’ – its size, historical isolation and relative linguistic homogeneity create conditions akin to a sociolinguistic laboratory. This semiotic model of language ideologies problematizes the prevailing discourse of linguistic purism at a time of sociolinguistic upheaval. The analysis shows how an essentializing scheme at the heart of Icelandic language policy ensured that linguistic “anomalies” such as “dative disease” and “genitive phobia” indexed essential differences. “Impure” language was indicative of un-Icelandicness. Once monolingual (indeed monodialectal), the Icelandic speech community is increasingly characterized by innovative linguistic transgressions which thus far have not been instrumentalized by language policy makers. It is shown how a semiotic model can help us analyse the function of language ideologies more generally.