Abstract
This book includes chapters spanning Alessandro Duranti’s career. Those familiar with his work within a Samoan fono will find it reconceptualized and the addition of the historic reconstruction of the Samoan bible translation fascinating. He also adds analyses from local political campaign speeches and team-taught jazz improvisation courses.
The book is a rare example of a shift in an established scholar’s position. By reconsidering John Searle’s philosophical concept of intentions, Duranti demonstrates the way that anthropologists like him, with a three-decade history of dismissing the concept as irrelevant to some cultures, may have missed out on a potentially fruitful dialogue about what it means to be human. In taking up Searle’s arguments in a more serious way, Duranti suggests moving beyond a preconception of what some have derogatorily referred to as belonging only to the realm of an opaque mind to a fuller appreciation of an intrapersonal stance towards others.
To gain this fuller appreciation, Duranti uses adeptly conducted analyses of data ranging from micro-interactions to macro-structures within a range of contexts. For instance, when examining intention through micro-analyses of word choice in translating Samoan into English, Duranti strikingly illuminates the differences between a ‘promise’ and an ‘oath’. He just as easily moves into a conversation analysis of talk during campaign stump speeches and Samoan fono meetings. His facility for different levels of analysis is apparent in his final move to an examination of organizational roles and participants’ relationships and the differences at this level between individual agency and joint action within larger community groupings (interestingly avoiding talking about culture).
In the middle of the book, after a compelling historical review of key concepts, readers are treated to copies of an email exchange between Duranti and Van Dijk about intentions. Perhaps because of the additional contribution by an undesignated graduate student or postdoctoral fellow, Throop, the exchange feels like a discussion rarely experienced beyond graduate school. In fact, it reminded me of my own graduate school experience in a course with Donal Carbaugh, where I was persuaded to accept Rosaldo’s claim that some cultures do not use intention-talk.
During this particular email interaction between Duranti and Van Dijk, each scholar illustrates how specific parts of an argument may need to be fleshed out in order for a perspective to be considered complete. Through a respectful reading and questioning, each scholar provides the space for the other to clarify concepts that allow for alternate interpretations with few points of convergence. This exchange was one of the most provocative and revealing moments in the book that well illustrated differences about the matter of speech acts necessitating intention. In fact, this discussion is a nice model for debate that we rarely experience in public discourse.
Throughout the book, Duranti raises several interesting dialectics, in addition to the translation between promise and oath mentioned earlier. He differentiates between purpose/goals and intention, agency and intention, and intersubjectivity and intention. One of the subtle but significant distinctions raised is between cognitive and ‘sociocultural-interactive’ (first labeled by Van Dijk; p. 158). Duranti stretches the latter to a three-part term (‘social, cultural, interactive’), which is akin to what in the field of communication we refer to as ‘language and social interaction’ (LSI). This part of the exchange illustrates what I consider the only minor shortcoming of this book: the shift of attention away from communication as a process for people to achieve common goals to a focus on how an individual relates to others.
It may be that Duranti takes for granted a communicative perspective, as his subtitle refers to language and he cites sociologist colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, while using conversation analytic methods. However, I think that by not citing LSI scholars within the field of communication, Duranti is making a clearer distinction between those whose project is focused on elaborating cross-cultural differences and one that he now embraces, privileging universal humanity.
For those not familiar with it, the LSI project is well documented in Leeds-Hurwitz’s (2010) edited volume that traces the evolution of LSI within the field of communication. Within this field, we have scholars who have taken up and elaborated upon Shotter’s (1980) work on ‘joint action’, attending closely to the ways people work together to achieve common goals. Rather than focusing on internal intentions, LSI researchers have explored post-act ‘accounts’ that can be requested by and are provided to those with whom we have a responsibility or moral obligation (see Buttny and Morris, 2001). While Duranti briefly alludes to accounting talk, his purpose seems to shift attention from how people work together towards an examination of individual cognition.
This brings me to a question. If communication scholars, among others, have pursued fruitful lines of research about social accountability within different contexts, why go back and talk about the importance of individual intention now? I believe that two poss-ibilities exist. One may be that Duranti seeks to draw attention to the unit of analysis, examining individual speakers versus a group of interactants. This difference turns Duranti’s key interest in what it means to be human into actionable analysis of individual utterances or performances.
While his overtly stated purpose is to ensure that anthropology maintains its relevance to philosophy, my hunch is that the second reason to shift positions now (away from culture and towards universalized humanity) is that Duranti may prefer aligning with individual cognition because of the burgeoning field of neuroscience and its quest for what can be discovered about a person’s brain. This preferred allegiance away from those who study LSI from within the field of communication may be a clever way to maintain anthropologists’ relevance to questions that are gaining in importance and prominence. While there have been news reports about the humanities being under attack and increasing academic resources being diverted towards science, technology, engineering and math fields, there have also been many within the field of human–computer interaction since Suchman (1987), who have embraced Searle’s work for its applicability to machine interaction and artificial intelligence.
As Duranti has illustrated, in particular in the chapter about biblical translation, there are specific historic reasons for preferring one explanation to another. It may be a good time to shift anthropology’s allegiances and in this respect Duranti’s book about intentions is important to read in this context. Perhaps more significantly, the book continues to maintain the relevance of and clarify the way Searlian speech acts are used; therefore, to employ one directive intentionally, ‘read it!’