Space and morality in Tokelau

Hoëm, Ingjerd

doi:10.1075/prag.3.2.02hoe

Cited by 21 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…However, the ethnographic literature in cognitive anthropology also supports that such alignments of morality on the landscape are more widespread and points to some questions for further research. Hoem (1993), writing on space and morality in a Tokelau Pacific atoll society near American Samoa, characterizes a distinction made between the moral area of the village with its front toward the central lagoon and the bush to its back, where danger lurks and where one is vulnerable to attacks by spirits like in the dáññi 'forest' beyond the edge and surrounding the Lachixío village. Though parallel, and worthy of an exploration of a grounding of such moral landscapes in human cognition or social-psychological experience, each moral-spatial system is bound up with local systems of representation and (re)produced through discursive practices which require detailed analysis of conversational interaction within engaged ethnographic research.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He writes that "if place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities" (Basso 1996, 7). In studies that focus on the discourse of places, references to and stories of places are also seen to convey feelings and experience (Feld and Basso 1996), morality distributed across lived landscapes (Hoem 1993), and how the "spatialization of knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of places" (Rumsey 2001, 12). This area of work is itself informed by phenomenological philosophy since Husserl (1958), particularly by Heidegger's concept of "dwelling" (1977) as "forms of consciousness with which individuals perceive and apprehend geographical space" and by dwelling taken as "'lived relationships' that people maintain with places" (Basso 1996, 106).…”

Section: Place As Structure and Place As Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

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Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Sicoli

2016

Open Linguistics

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Abstract:People make reference to places in the variable formulations afforded by their languages and to multiple ends that in addition to picking out a referent, simultaneously build conceptual common ground about seen and unseen landscapes, including moral stances about the social geography. This paper examines the different ways that Lachixío Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca, Mexico, formulate and interpret place references in the dialogic narratives of their conversations. I examine sequences of interaction within stories that emerged in conversations as joint social actions. These sequences include both speakers' place formulations and addressees' responses that publically display their uptake and stances toward the references. I describe resources of the Lachixío Zapotec language for referencing place and show how place references are entangled with person references, references to historical events, and participants' moral stances toward such references. Through examining references to locations within sequences of conversational story telling we gather some evidence for how conceptual common ground and moral value is developed through the step-wise progression of turn-taking and how stances about places come to be culturally shared or contested between interlocutors dialogically.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Place As Structure and Place As Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Sicoli

2016

Open Linguistics

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“…The social organization of space has been recognized as crucial in interpretation processes (e.g., Firth 1970Firth , 1972Frake 1975;Goffman 1974;C. Goodwin 1995;Hanks 1990;Kendon 1990) and in communicating social relationships (Bourdieu 1973;Cunningham 1973;Duranti 1994;Fox 1993;Hoem 1993;Lawrence and Low 1990;Massey 1994;Toren 1990), particularly in the Pacific.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moments of Hierarchy: Constructing Social Stratification by Means of Language, Food, Space, and the Body in Pohnpei, Micronesia

Keating

2000

American Anthropologist

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In this paper I examine relationships between multiple semiotic modes used to construct hierarchy, and I show the importance of going beyond our traditional notion of language to look at how social actors employ a range of semiotic resources in organizing and interpreting social relations. Using examples from Pohnpei, Micronesia, I show how notions of superior and inferior are compounded through several sign systems-spatial relations, food sharing, the body, and language. These systems act oppositionally as well as cooperatively to produce situated ideas of social inequality, ideas built out of disequilibrium of bodies in space, of referents in language, and distribution of resources, as well as contradictions in the interactions of these signs. The compounding of signs not only recruits multiple sensory modes and perspectives in the exposition of hierarchical relations, but entails a notion of the contradictory nature of status relations. Using examples from a Pohnpeian feast, I explore the creative interplay of sign systems in the construction of "moments" of hierarchy in a large, public setting and discuss how through the practice of title-giving, which virtually every adult member of the society participates in, a particular idea of social inequality, built out of multiple sign systems, is mapped onto each body, [language, interaction, politics, Oceania, social stratification, hierarchy] P ohnpeians formulate the abstract idea of social inequality with tools from their physical world, including relationships among bodies, topographical relations of sea level and mountain heights, the built environment, cyclical relations of production, and mediated sensory experiences, such as the sounds of spoken language. In this article I investigate a complex of semiotically charged resources that co-incidentally, co-oppositionally, and co-operatively construct relationships of hierarchy in Pohnpei. Language, space, food, and the body work to activate the past as simultaneous within the present and to construct social stratification within a scheme of recurrent but also incipient ideas. Moments of hierarchy in Pohnpei are built not only out of the disparate notions of superior and inferior that are compounded through several sign systems, but out of another sort of disparity-momentary contradictions between those sign systems. Although the latter (contradictions) might seem inconsistent within the conventional practice and reproduction of hierarchy, the contradictions or inversions not only serve as sites for the creative interplay of semiotic systems, but,

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“…It is the binary and arbitrary nature of the system that makes it absolute. Lichtenberk (1983;572) illustrates the use of the directionals in Palmer then presents a (slightly modified) summary of Ingjerd Hoem's (1993) description of the spatial reference system of Tokelauan, the language spoken on the atoll Tokelau. Atolls usually have the land in a ring or fragments of a ring around a central lagoon.…”

Section: Lists the Following Directionals For Manammentioning

confidence: 99%

Absolute Frames of Spatial Reference in Austronesian Languages

Senft

2017

Vestn. Ross. univ. družby nar., Ser. Lingvist.

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Abstract. This paper provides a brief survey on various absolute frames of spatial reference that can be observed in a number of Austronesian languages -with an emphasis on languages of the Oceanic subgroup. It is based on research of conceptions of space and systems of spatial reference that was initiated by the "space project" of the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group (now the Department of Language and Cognition) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and by my anthology "Referring to Space" (Senft 1997a; see Keller 2002: 250). The examples illustrating these different absolute frames of spatial reference reveal once more that earlier generalizations within the domain of "SPACE" were strongly biased by research on Indo-European languages; they also reveal how complex some of these absolute frames of spatial reference found in these languages are. The paper ends with a summary of Wegener's (2002) preliminary typology of these absolute frames of spatial reference.

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Space and morality in Tokelau

Cited by 21 publications

References 4 publications

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Formulating Place, Common Ground, and a Moral Order in Lachixío Zapotec

Moments of Hierarchy: Constructing Social Stratification by Means of Language, Food, Space, and the Body in Pohnpei, Micronesia

Absolute Frames of Spatial Reference in Austronesian Languages

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