Abstract
This chapter examines the models of language held by the group and the social scientists, models that underlie what each holds to be possible in terms of activity and speaking, as well as what cannot be said or done. The model underlying the scientific account is compared with evangelical Christians’ desire for sincerity, truth and self-making, and that underlying the group’s approach is compared with an ethnography of the occult, with a focus on the power of words and silences in the construction of new possibilities.
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Notes
Keane cites Irvine to the effect that a language ideology is ‘a cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests’ (Irvine 1989: 255, in Keane 2007: 16). Th is account questions the autonomy or boundedness of language as such; language is always already embedded in social forms and practices. Keane therefore expands the conception of language, including it in what he describes as a ‘representational economy’, an economy in which interactions can take place between persons, words, things, spirits and so forth (Keane 2007: 19). He calls these forms of representation’ semiotic ideologies’, rather than linguistic, in order to emphasize both the plurality and the materiality of signs. With regard to the latter quality, he speaks of ‘the sounds of words, the constraints of speech genres, the perishability of books, the replicable shapes of money, the meatiness of animals, the feel of cloth, the shape of houses, musical tones, the fleshiness of human bodies, and the habits of physical gestures’ (op cit: 5–6). And because of this confusion of kinds, a major concern of his evangelical subjects is—within the orbit of his analysis—to sort out or purify these practices in a moral fashion, distinguishing between such terms as immanence and transcendence, materiality and spirit, determinism and freedom. Work has to be done to recreate the separation of language from the physical world. Keane’ s task then is close to the ‘rhetorical’ approach I advocate: seeking to take the categories and distinctions we normally take for granted back into the field of observation and analysis, describing the materiality of the mental (cf. Engelke 2007).
See Keane (2007), Engelke (2007) and Latour (1993).
See the works named in the text, above all, Keane (2007). In addition, I have been particularly helped by reading Laur Vallikivi’ s as-yet-unpublished thesis Words and Silence: Nenets Reindeer Herders’ Conversion to Evangelical Christianity (2011), and in these paragraphs draw on his synthesis to explore the parallels with positivistic social science as expressed in Festinger’s book. I return to his analysis in considering the second language model, below.
Luhrmann (2004) criticizes Harding for overemphasizing speech and neglecting embodiment and ritual but, as Bender points out, speech in these situations is already ritualized and embodied (Bender 2010: 209).
Lurie is excellent on the mutual criticism of schools of sociology, epitomized by Columbia sociology students in the novel as ‘nuts and sluts’ (the Chicago School), ‘the numbers racket’ (statistical approaches), and ‘boxes and arrows’ (Harvard followers of Talcott Parsons) (Lurie 1995: 4).
Keane suggests that evangelical Christians seek to rid themselves of the materialized forms of social convention first in a distrust of liturgical repetition, decried as magical or superstitious, and second by abstracting the Word in a series of uses that remove it from any specific (human) context, ‘by means of scriptures, sermons, prayers, creeds, hymns, didactic literature, and so forth’ (Keane 2007: 15). In a parallel fashion, social scientific procedures purify and isolate their human object.
Bender outlines a history of notions of dissociated consciousness, double consciousness and so forth, which have been used to explain phenomena such as automatic writing, explanations that can lie on either side of the boundary dividing psychology and parapsychology (Bender 2010: 79; cf. note 29, pp. 209–10). In particular, she contrasts earlier practices of seeking to give form to the voice of the dead to contemporary practices of articulating the inner voice. Mrs Keech’s aliens represent an intermediate stage. Bender also brings out the effective collaboration between practitioners and social scientists in the production of effects, while at the same time distinguishing (in a fashion compatible with this analysis) between the continual revisions of experiences of the other world by the first party and the fixed language of interviews and tabulation of opinions by the second (op cit: 74; 81; 84).
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Jenkins, T. (2013). Language of Science, Language of Secrecy. In: Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357601_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357601_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
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