Introduction: beyond bad words.

Introduction: beyond bad words. As that which ought not to be said, taboo speech involves the morallife of language. Efforts to proscribe speech may be justifiedvariously, by appeal to religious dictates, state policy, or etiquette.They may be conventionalized and institutionalized, policed and punishedin myriad ways. But a familiar irony haunts all these efforts:proscription is, in a word, productive (cf. Foucault 1978, Butler 1997).The more intense the interdiction, the more power seems to accrue to thetransgressive act. From Freud's theory of subconscious repression to the lamentsover the failure and futility of civility campaigns, this irony is afamiliar one. The more that taboo acts are prohibited, the more theirpower seems to grow. The same is true for language use. Underproscriptive regimes, like the FCC-ban on obscenities on broadcasttelevision and radio, or the edicts of the royal court in Tahitiprohibiting the utterances of the king's name (Simons 1982), onecan't even innocently "mention" a taboo expression, byembedding the wayward curse in a quote, for instance, without theutterance counting as a taboo "use." Verbal taboos are,properly speaking, unmentionable. Ironically, proscriptions and even theappropriate substitutes these regimes recommend (e.g., euphemisms,circumlocutions, special citational forms like "the F-word")make taboo utterances more salient. And rather than fix or stabilize aspeaker's relation to the taboo object--by ensuring a safe,respectful "distance," for instance--proscription and effortsat containment seem to make such relations less stable. As conventions,they may now be flouted, parodied, played upon, or otherwise altered forstrategic and interactional effect. These essays on the moral life oflanguage thus explore the dynamic affordances and instabilities ofverbal taboo, with cases that draw on diverse languages from sites andpopulations across the globe. In addressing the manifold ways in whichproscription is productive, we push past an earlier literature that sawverbal taboo as a matter strictly of "avoidance" and"control," and as involving the mechanical reproduction ofcultural norms and values. 1. Unmentionables as Performatives. A core irony explored in thisissue is the way proscriptions can intensify the performativity ofwould-be taboos items, investing the prohibited forms with a seeminglyinherent power and efficacy, to the extent that the expressions are seento have inescapable, indefeasible effects. John Austin (1962), it may berecalled, argued that speech-act performativity depends in part onfeatures of context, which he formulated in terms of "felicityconditions." For a wedding to be successful, the individual whosays "I now pronounce you man and wife" must be an ordainedminister, the couple willing, and a witness present. Such felicityconditions precede, condition, and otherwise constrain theperformativity of language; without them the performative utterancewouldn't count as an act. But taboo utterances (e.g., saying theF-word on FCC-regulated broadcasts or uttering the Tahitian king'sname) rest on few, if any, such conditions. Like pragmatic"prefabs" or "readymades," these expressions seem tohave their context coiled tight inside. Utter them, and they count as asocial act (as profanity, blasphemy, social injury, etc.) irrespectiveof felicity conditions like the intentions of speech participants or theinstitutional authority of the speaker to engage in the act. Quote averbal taboo in a reported speech construction and you risk replicatingthe offense. Unmentionables may become so essentialized that theirperformativity comes to rest on few if any felicity conditions,demonstrating a seldom appreciated point: performativity is gradient, amatter of degree. (1) The strong indexicals--from curse words tostigmatized dialects--that the authors in this volume discuss representpoints at the far end of this continuum. 2. Hazards of Addressivity. Strong performatives usher intoexistence not just actions, like 'blasphemy,' but addressees.Unmentionables not only accomplish acts, they also project their ownparticipation frameworks-their own models of communicative events andthe actors that inhabit them. Given that linguistic deference andinsult, confrontation and avoidance are typically a function of who theaddressee is, this suggests that we should inquire into what Bakhtin(1986:95) called "addressivity," an utterance's"quality of being directed to someone." Prophylactic practicessurrounding verbal taboos, like in-law avoidance registers in Australia,often require speakers to avoid directly addressing the taboo target.Here the figure of the "bystander," frequently a trigger ofavoidance practices, emerges from these anxieties and avoidancessurrounding certain categories of would-be addressee. Taboo expressions (and even substitute expressions like euphemisms)ironically thrust the speaker, the potential transgressor, into therelational co-presence of these (now ratified) addressees, some of whommay be present or in ear-shot, while others may be virtualaddressees--addressees who can't be seen or heard because theyreside beyond the close quarters of the here-and-now speech event (Aghaand Wortham 2005). Such is the case with the verbal taboos surroundinghunting and fishing (especially prevalent in Oceania) where speakersavoid everyday words to mask their presence and intentions from spectraloverhearers, whether those be predators or prey, demons or ancestorspirits (e.g., Pawley 1992, Fox 2005). Whom do I risk offending with badwords and blasphemes, a co-present bystander, like a mother-in-law, oran overhearing "superaddressee" (Bakhtin 1986) like God, theFCC, or, as Lempert (this issue) shows, a constituency--as in caseswhere commentarial pundits read candidate avoidance of "TheIssues" as a bid to appease segments of the electorate. Thisdoesn't mean that these spectral overhearers and etherealaddressees are necessarily materialized in the moment of utterance, asillustrated well by Silverstein's essay (this issue) on what is nowa minor industry of political commentary: critical, after-the-factreadings of candidate bloopers. Nevertheless, anxieties about, andheightened attention to, addressivity, which arise under regimes ofproscription, can materialize the addressees these regimes try not tooffend. Stasch's essay (this issue) on Korowai speakers of WestPapua, Indonesia, shows with particular clarity "avoidance'sparadoxical logic of achieving relational intensification throughrelational restraint," that is, "[a]voidance indexes attentiverestraint toward an other, and thus creates intensified relatednessthrough that restraint." Irvine (this issue) spotlights this ironywell when she recalls A.W. Read's (1964) notion of"ostentatious taboo," expressions like the furtive"you-know-what"--said with non-vocal accompaniments like"smirking, the arched eyebrow, a slyness of manner" (Read1964:162)--that draw attention to the "eight-hundred-poundgorilla" precisely through the noisy effort to shoo it away. 3. Strategies of Containment and Conventionalization. Proscriptionmay ratchet up the performative strength of speech and ironically maketaboo addressees more salient, but proscriptive regimes do offerspeakers acceptable, conventionalized methods of "avoidance"and "containment." What do these methods do, though? Thesesubstitute signs mitigate--or, rather, purport to mitigate--the risk oftransgression and fix appropriate, often morally inflected, relationsbetween speaker and the hazardous agent or object. Irvine's essaysurveys several major categories of containment strategy, includingstratagems by which speakers displace "responsibility" forutterances (Hill and Irvine 1993), as they do when they frame a tabooutterance as "merely" reported speech and thereby appearuncommitted to its content or consequences (Goffman 1974, 1981). Thesestrategies often include non-linguistic modalities of communication. InGuugu-Yimidhirr, an Australian Aboriginal language, there existed adistinctive "brother-in-law" register used for speaking withinearshot of taboo kin (Haviland 1987). This was not exclusivelylinguistic, for one would also sit at a distance and studiously avoideye contact. Earlier literature on taboo often resorted to functionalistcorrelations between social structure and taboo behavior, as if thelatter just reflects and reproduces the former, but the containmentstrategies of proscriptive regimes don't necessarily preserve andstabilize social relationships to taboo objects. If anything, thesemethods ironically engender entropy, destabilizing the containment theydesire. As the case of Guugu-Yimidhirr's brother-in-law registerreminds us, conventionalization here involves register formation or"enregisterment" (Agha 2007), where repertoires of speechforms like oft-studied "avoidance registers" (Haviland 1979,Laughren 2001) become separated out and invested with cultural value forsome social domain of people. Once ways of handling taboo objects areenregistered, they can become objects of further, second-orderreflection, making counter- and alternative-valorizations possible(Silverstein 2003). In this volume, for instance, Stasch shows how,among the Korowai, close friendships can be created by troping upon thename avoidance conventions which characterize in-lawavoidance--deferential attention to the other in speech coming here tosignal not the respect and distance of the affinal relation but theaffection of friendship. Haviland (this issue) shows how fast-talkingstreet performers in Mexico City use bad language to comic effect, whileparting their clients from their money. Seizer (this issue) shows howthe enregisterment of bad language in the stand-up comedy scene, thefact that it is now expected, inspires secondary forms of classificationthat stand-up comics use to sort out who they are. It allows them todistinguish true performance artists from hacks who get cheap laughsfrom "dick jokes." 4. Sign-Fetishes in Ideologies of Verbal Taboo. An oft-reportedinstability that stems from conventionalization has to do with the waytaboo expressions infect expressions that sound like them, or the way inwhich substitute expressions--avoidance terms--themselves become taboo.Euphemisms are notoriously unstable and need to be replaced rapidly, adynamic Pinker (2007:320) has dubbed the "euphemismtreadmill." Forms of contagion (of. Tylor 1913, Frazer 1963),whereby speakers avoid not only the taboo expressions, but signs thatseem similar in material form, are common as well. Where words felt toresemble the taboo expression are also avoided the class ofunmentionable forms expands. In the Ethiopian language Kambaata, forinstance, married women observe a name taboo with their in-laws toconvey deference to them; they avoid not only the names, but many wordssharing the same first syllable (Treis 2005). In Australian languageslike Guugu-Yimidhirr, name taboos were traditionally observed upon anindividual's death, but one also avoided words that sounded likethe deceased's name. To fill the gaps in the lexicon, the communitywould then borrow words from a neighboring dialect or language leadingto rapid linguistic change. The avoidance of forms iconic to verbal taboos reflects the ideathat the performative power of the forms resides in the material signsthemselves. The avoidance registers that emerge around verbal taboostend to naturalize convention (Parmentier 1994), making thearbitrariness of unmentionables seem motivated by their very substance.Prophylactic measures surrounding the mentioning of unmentionables tendto frame the performative power of these utterance-types as inherent tothe sign forms themselves, as if their potency were lodged"in" the material substance of the sign itself. In her essayon a forbidden performance of the 'Great Speech' of the MopanMaya, Danziger (this volume) calls this a kind of "symptomic"(Keller 1998) conception of language, in which "sign form is takento be necessarily related to sign content through indexical relations ofcause and effect, part-whole, or other kinds of (meta)physicalcontiguity." Explaining the naturalization of verbal taboo requiresappeal to institutional practices and language ideologies that fosterit, like the FCC-ban on obscenities on broadcast television and radioduring the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. or royal edicts in Tahitiprohibiting the use of words that sound like the king's name(Simons 1982, Stokes 1955:323). But at the same time, the tendency ofideologies of verbal taboo to fixate on the materiality of signforms--their essentialization of performative efficacy as a force"in" the signs themselves--may be reinforced by strategies ofcontainment that frame the sign's substance as having powerindependent of any sign-external felicity conditions. Prior work on verbal taboo tended to privilegewords-and-expressions while neglecting the manifold nonreferentialindexical effects of proscribed language. Several essays in this issuedo focus on canonical examples of verbal taboo, proscribed words andexpressions like personal names, bad words, and blasphemes. Others,however, describe cases of more diffuse, configurational, and multiplyrealizable verbal taboos, like the avoidance of accent, register, anddiscourse topic. Lempert, for instance, considers the way professionalcommentators scrutinize candidate behavior before "The Issues"in US political debate--a category of discourse topic--while Kuipersshows how framing knowledge as a collective effort is stigmatized inmiddle-school science classrooms. A pair of papers, Frekko on theavoidance of Castilian in Catalonia, and Moore on a moral panicsurrounding a stigmatized dialect in Dublin, showcase unmentionablelanguages and "accents," units that possess much of theperformative potency of swear words. Any facet of language, Irvinereminds us, may be targeted for proscription. While the study of verbaltaboo needs to look beyond the special case of proscribed words andexpressions, Fleming considers why some kinds of words, like personalnames, do tend to become taboo more frequently than others. He findscross-linguistic motivation that explains why certain forms tend to besingled-out and enregistered by proscriptive regimes, just as he findsmotivation for the avoidance of forms iconic with taboo targets--animportant way in which proscription is linguistically productive. In sum, work on "bad language" (e.g., Andersson andTrudgill 1990, Wajnryb 2005, Allan and Burridge 2006, McEnery 2006) hasrarely explored the myriad nonreferential indexical effects ofproscribed speech varieties or the way these repertoires do things otherthan threaten the moral order. Explaining such effects meansappreciating the natural histories of taboo language, how they areconventionalized and made into value-laden registers--and not bytreating bad words as readymade repertories whose pragmatic meaningderives from their unclean or salacious semantic content, which is justhow many proscriptivists, and some researchers, tend to think about badlanguage. Rather than approach verbal taboo with paradigms thatexclusively focus on the referential and denotational properties oflinguistic form, the essays in this volume approach unmentionables interms of their performative and indexical functions. In analyzing theinterplay between proscriptive regimes and the intense, oftenindefeasible, performativity of unmentionables, we hope this volume willopen up new perspectives on the study of indexicality as a gradientphenomenon. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This issue grew out of a conference session we co-organized called"The Unmentionable: Hazards of Addressivity, Strategies ofContainment," held at the American Anthropological Associationmeetings in San Francisco on November 20, 2008. Discussants JudithIrvine and Michael Silverstein offered valuable direction, as did themany external reviewers from Anthropological Quarterly. We thank AlexDent of AQ who steered the collection toward completion. REFERENCES Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. 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Wajnryb, Ruth. 2005. Expletive deleted: a good look at budlanguage. New York: Free Press. Luke Fleming Eckerd College & Michael Lempert University of Michigan ENDNOTE (1) For a different, more purely speech-act-based attempt to scaleillocutionary force in terms of relative "strength" and"weakness," see Ahern's (1979) essay on ritualperformativity.