alan passes - the place of politics

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THE PLACE OF POLITICS: POWERFUL SPEECHAND WOMEN SPEAKERS IN EVERYDAY

PAIKWEN (PALIKUR) LIFE

Alan Passes

This article focuses on the practice of female scolding in a community of Paikwen (orPalikur), a native Amazonian people (French Guyana and Brazil), in order to explore ideasabout power and speech and the phenomenon of political speaking. The article takesissue with claims that politics are to be equated specifically with the formal public arena,and that political discourse is the exclusive province and prerogative both of leaders andof men, whether institutionally authorized or not. It is argued, on the contrary, thatthe everyday speech of common villagers, in this case women, is among other thingsintegrally political, and no more powerless in effect than the so-called empty speechof Amerindian chiefs postulated by Clastres. It is further proposed that Paikwen womens

scolding not only embodies their own power but also regenerates symmetrical genderrelations, and thus the polity itself.

Much, if not most, anthropological work on the topic poses political lan-guage in terms of formalized speech used by instituted (Bourdieu 1991)speakers in the formal arena (Bloch 1975; Brenneis & Myers 1984; Duranti1994).This article argues instead apropos Deuxime Village Esprance, here-after Esprance 2, a Paikwen community in French Guyana1 that the

everyday sphere can constitute, at least in Amazonia, a place where the verbalactions of so-called ordinary, and female, individuals have as much politicaleffect on the process of community life as official discourses. My choice ofsubject is motivated by the lingering stress in ethnographic studies of tradi-tional societies on mens importance as speakers, and therefore social andpolitical agents, which persists in eclipsing that of women despite researchattesting to the contrary.2

Beginning from the assumption that only public speech is political, it isfrequently presumed that because their activities are (supposedly) limited to

the domestic, or private, arena, women even in egalitarian societies aresilenced politically, and politically silent (Brenneis & Myers 1984; Overing1999; Strathern 1988). It has been shown for native Amazonia that womennone the less exercise their public and (hence) political voice through suchcontext-related formal discourses as ritual wailing and the verbal aggressionof enemies (Als 1990: 240; Briggs 1992; 1993). There is also evidence indi-cating the existence of female chiefs.3Yet regardless of such regional data onwomens public speaking and leadership, the focus remains principally on

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women as audience rather than agents (Overing 1986: 140; Rapport &Overing 2000: 152; Seeger 1981: 86, 89).4

This article concentrates on a gender-specific verbal genre, scolding, as

practised in Esprance 2, to show that native Amazonian women not onlycontribute as productively and publicly as men to the conversation that issocial life (Ingold 1986: 141), but also that their everyday womensspeech5 can be political speech. By this I mean that in given contexts thespeakers words have practical outcome in and for the societys ongoingpolitics, the latter to be understood in one of the basic senses of the wordas the aggregation of relationships of people in society (Collins dictionary1989: s.v. politics, 2) and anything associated with it. This includes here self-instituted authority and the maintenance of proper relations. Scolding itselfI shall describe, like quarrels, insults and intracommunity greetings, as inter-relational behaviour that while not necessarily formal is not wholly informaleither,6 falls in between the mundane and the ritualistic, and is as muchpublic as private. Taking account of recent work highlighting the creationof embodied gender through the practice of everyday proper relationshipsmaking up Amazonian sociality (Belaunde Olschewski 1992; Lagrou 1998;2000; McCallum 1989; 2001), this article also explores how Paikwenconstruct gender in the pragmatics and performance of the interpersonal actof scolding.

Anthropologys relative lack of concern for the everyday talk of indige-nous peoples7 stems from an assumption that what gets said in the everydaysphere and who says it, especially where female discourse is involved, are soci-ologically but a function of what gets said in the political and ritual spheres,and also culturally less significant.8 Linked to this is the notion that while the(almost-always male) persons operating in the latter sphere are authorized bythe group to speak (Bourdieu 1991: 72-6), they are somehow separate fromthe everyday world that they speak for (Rapport & Overing 2000: 338-40;Sahlins 1972), and on which they act through their words.

The paradigm whereby men alone have a public, and social-political, voice,

which is encountered in the accounts of egalitarian Pacific and Amazonianpeoples largely rests on two perceived factors. These are universal maledominance and womans equivalence with nature, and thus disorder, ratherthan culture (Gregor & Tuzin 2001a; 2001b; MacCormack & Strathern 1980;Moore 1988; Pateman 1989). Although for both the Pacific and the Amazonthere are accounts in which particular women stand out as publicly vocalindividuals,9 women as a class are still widely characterized as confined tothe domestic sphere and thus without power in the social order. Despite theextensive work by anthropologists and others10 documenting the intrinsically

political character of the domestic sphere, and the power of women inside itand beyond, such views have proved particularly resilient. Their proponentsoften hold that womens discourses function merely to accommodate andreproduce relations of dominance, even while subverting and challenging them(Abu-Lughod 1986; Gal 2001; Moore 1994).This is emphatically not the casefor life as it is lived in Esprance 2, as I show below: the people of this local-ity appear to consider women politically equal to men, and their deeds andwords just as instrumental in the creation and maintenance of sociality andorder.

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Some non-indigenous views on Amazonian gender

The male domination that is reportedly a common feature of many egalitar-

ian societies in Melanesia is also sometimes found in Amazonia (Gregor &Tuzin 2001a; 2001b; Strathern 1982; 1988). However, in a significant pro-portion of Amazonian societies gender relations are conspicuously moresymmetrical, with women having political power as well as men. Because ofthe association in Western minds of the word Amazonia with female warriors,the notion of powerful women in connection with the region bearing thatname may not be new; but it is contentious. For some anthropologists,the idea is understandable solely in mythic terms, as the reality is male hege-mony and female oppression (Bamberger 1974). Other authorities maintainthat it is male supremacy which is mythic and a matter of ideology ratherthan practice, and that in reality women are as aggressive as men both in ritualcontexts ( Jackson 1992) and everyday ones (Siskind 1973). Another view isthat conceptual and institutional egalitarianism exists but masks or fails toprevent pragmatic gender-based hierarchy (Descola 2001; Seymour-Smith1991). Alternatively, there is the political-economic model in which elitemales control and economically exploit women by means of ritual action(Rivire 1983-4; Santos-Granero 1986). Equally neo-functionalist are asser-tions that in Amazonia, as in Melanesia, ritual and mythological malesupremacy is the structural and/or psychological means of reproducing socialmale supremacy (Gregor 1985; Gregor & Tuzin 2001b) and legitimating it(Bamberger 1974). Other scholars recognize indigenous female politicalagency as an historical fact (Renard-Casewitz 2002: 137; Viveiros de Castro1992: 260), albeit endangered by contact with colonialism and capitalism asreported for Amerindians across South America (see e.g. Seymour-Smith 1991;Silverblatt 1987).

However, female power and gender equality do exist today in Amazonia incertain societies, if in varying degrees from group to group and between sub-groups. Although this does not always preclude male violence towards women

in everyday life,11 it has been argued that Lowland Amerindian gender egal-itarianism is practised even among peoples with a phallocratic ideologicalsuperstructure (McCallum 1989; 2001; Murphy & Murphy 1974).12 This egal-itarianism typically manifests itself in sexual co-operation, complementarity,and interdependence in all productive spheres. It is expressed through a rela-tive male-female parity of access to, and ownership of, the material and sym-bolic means of production, a relatively equal participation in the socio-politicaland economic processes, and the effective autonomy, authority, and power ofwomen within the conjugal, domestic, and wider social arena (McCallum

1989; 2001).13With many perspectives owing more to the ethnographers preconceptions(Freudian, Marxist, feminist, biological) than ethnographic realities, general-izations about gender in Amazonia are clearly invalid either way. As an objec-tive reading of the literature will reveal, some groups are egalitarian, othersnot; and some are to only a limited degree, while others, including thePaikwen, are highly egalitarian. Hence, according to McCallum (2001: 158,163-4), the advisability of analysing societies and sub-groups, whether they arepresumed egalitarian or not, in terms of their particular situation in time and

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space and the pragmatic expression of their social organization. Undeniably,what was once true of a society may not always be so today.

Paikwen women and men: present practices

Paikwen women and men have equal autonomy, and women the right ofdivorce. Marriage is inter-clan exogamic and uxorilocal with brideservice(though the latter is now falling into disuse). Non-systemic man on womanand woman on man violence exists. For Esprance 2 people, the sexual divi-sion of labour is less marked than that of their Brazilian Paikwen ancestors,as recorded in 1925 by Nimuendaj (1971: 24-5), the first modern observerto study the Paikwen in depth. Most tasks then classified as male, such ashouse-building and working for strangers, are nowadays also done by women,and female tasks such as manioc-processing are also done by men. Gather-ing and fishing are traditionally activities carried out by both men and womenand hunting exclusively male, though I know of Paikwen women huntersin other communities. Men, women, and also children co-operate in all hor-ticultural work, bar site-clearing (male), and household chores such as cookingand infant-care. Nominally and/or pragmatically, most tasks today are bisex-ual, including some non-economic activities also termed work, like healingand being chief (Passes 1998: chap. 8; 2000a).14 It is through such shared prac-tices that Paikwen children of either sex experience and learn gender equal-ity (cf. Grenand & Renault-Lescure 1990: 31).

A Paikwen woman determines the destination of her personal products,and what she wants in exchange, even when her husband does the transact-ing (Arnaud 1984: 35). She also controls the distribution of most domesticproducts, including the mans (such as game), and the money he earns in themarket economy.

Politically, communities are autonomous and designate their own leaders,though Esprance 2 itself is acephalous. The head of the main village in

Akwa, the Paikwen homeland in northeastern Brazil, is recognized by someas a sort of pan-Paikwen super-chief (Passes 2002). Local leaders are some-times female and women are active in political decision-making generally(Passes 1998: chap. 5; 2004; cf. Capiberibe 2001: 74). Paikwen women, then,are not confined to the domestic sphere, nor are men inactive in it. I turnnow to a contrasting socio-political and economic picture drawn some eightyyears previously by Nimuendaj, who visited Akwa in the mid-1920s andfound Paikwen womens socio-political influence excessive (Nimuendaj1971: 92).

Paikwen women and men: past representation

The very first sentence of Nimuendajs section on women (1971: 54-7)declares that, Of all the phenomena connected with [Paikwen] society, themost striking is assuredly womans dominant position relative to man. Plainlyunsettled, Nimuendaj describes how this social and economic dominanceapparently asserts itself. Until aged 10 or 12, he writes, Paikwen little girls

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are as friendly and sociable as the little boys, after which they look down onthe younger members of the male sex and act highhandedly with men ingeneral, strangers included. Once a woman takes a husband, his fate is sealed

and he is fully in her thrall: [H]e undertakes nothing of his own initiative.His wife tells him when he must hunt, fish, and tend the garden [She]decides what goods he must purchase on the Oyapock If he resides uxo-rilocally, his mother-in-law also bosses him via her daughter The womancommands [T]he man but obeys (Nimuendaj 1971: 55).

For Nimuendaj, then, the prevailing situation was one of female tyrannyagainst which men but seldom revolt (1971: 56, my translations). Arnaud(1968: 10-11), researching the same area forty years later, disagrees, reportingmale violence to women and male economic control.

Nimuendajs view, reiterated by Fernandes (1948), Grenand and Grenand(1979), and others, does not accord with my own observations either (Passes1998: 157 ff.). Rather, notwithstanding the aforementioned female control ofthe domestic purse-strings in both Esprance 2 and Akwa, which I have alsovisited, I would say that each gender broadly enjoyed, in principle and prac-tice, as much economic power as the other. The same equivalence of powerexisted politically and in contexts where knowledge was concerned, despitethe absence in Esprance 2 of women chiefs and shamans found in othervillages.Wondering whether the Church might be affecting things through itsinjunction to women to respect and obey their husbands, I was told by SusanaL.: Of course we do that, but so do our men respect and obey us.Thats thePaikwen way: wives and husbands respect and obey each other.

Although one occasionally sees Paikwen women who exhibit a degree ofaggression or bossiness beyond the permitted customary assertiveness, I wouldnot qualify such behaviour, which is criticized by female and male co-villagers alike, as generic female domination.Also, no Paikwen man ever toldme he felt oppressed by womens power. On the contrary, many professed tobe proud of it and considered such strength a defining property of Paik-wen-hood. As villagers of either sex were wont to inform me: La femme

Paikwen, cest fort! [The Paikwen woman, shes strong!]. Indeed, thePaikwen female social persona is as self-assertive and robust as the males,and can sometimes seem overbearing to a non-Paikwen. Hence, possibly,Nimuendajs account of Paikwen womanhood as domineering and despoticat a time when images of strong, autonomous, socially and politically activewomen were still seen as provocative and even threatening in many Westerncontexts.

For my part, without suggesting that the Paikwen are frozen in time, Ibelieve that the relations between the sexes today remain substantially the

same as those reported by Nimuendaj early in the last century, that is tosay (contrary to his own interpretation of the material), equal. A comparisonof Nimuendajs empirical observations with my own reveals that, despiteincreased contact with the Western world and, in Esprance 2, exposure to anEvangelical Christian ideology with a strong male supremacist bias (see note1), these relations are in practice not weighted in favour of women, as hehimself and most subsequent observers would have it. Nor do they give pre-cedence to the power and authority of men (Arnaud 1968; 1984). Rather,they are symmetrical overall, with women and men having equivalent and

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complementary instrumentality in the social, economic, and political processesoutlined above. I will now consider two theoretical aspects of the last namedof these, namely, the location of politics, and power.

The place of politics

The question of where politics take place is as fundamental, and germane,as who gets to do it?15 and what for? (cf. Brenneis & Myers 1984: 3). Intheir comparative survey of political speech in Pacific indigenous societies,Brenneis and Myers (1984) caution against the tendency to equate politicssolely with the activities of men of power performing in the formal publicsphere of official grand events. For what occurs there is often more formthan substance, with the actual business of decision-making or settling adispute achieved unofficially, in the informal everyday sphere (Marcus 1984),and by women as much as men (Lederman 1984).

Moreover, as Schieffelin (1990) and Duranti (1994: 144-66) show, the lattersphere instrumentally shapes the formal and functional features of the officialpolitical one. The resolution of tensions through the negotiated interplay ofactors interdependence and autonomy; their strategies and debating and per-forming skills; the mutual understanding of implicit meanings and values: allthese factors are acquired and developed in the process of ordinary social inter-action. Thus even the most formalistic political discourse is grounded in thepractice, poetics, and meanings of everyday speaking. This indicates a differ-ence between the two spheres not in kind but degree, a gradation effected bytheir common moral underpinning, as embodied in the similar linguistic,grammatical, rhetorical, and pragmatic conventions that actors learn fromchildhood in the mundane realm and manipulate in the formal political one.Such cross-contextual affinities disclose the political nature of what we mightthink of as private or less consequential activities (Duranti 1994: 146).

Indeed, political speech itself, rather than reflecting the political order

(Bloch 1975: 1-28), is constitutive of polity, thanks to linguistic, grammatical,rhetorical, and organizational devices such as metaphor, indirection, andvalue-stressing. For example, they may provide a means of averting conflict bysafeguarding speaker-hearers autonomy. They also provide the conditions forindividual exegesis and evaluation, thereby enabling collective agreement andsolutions, as against the imposition of decisions from on high (Brenneis &Myers 1984).

Power

This leads us to the issue of power, an ambiguous one given cultural varia-tions in practices and concepts (Cheater 1999; Fogelson & Adams 1977;Hamilton 1981: 79 ff.). In Western secular, rationalist thinking power is gen-erally equated with the political (Anderson 1972: 67-8;Weber 1968: 212-45),and represented as an asymmetric relationship wherein the powerful possesspower over others almost as though it were some tangible private property.Serious problems arise, however, if one insists on seeing power in native

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Amazonia in terms of a Western-type political economy, with its implicationof coercion, differential access to the means of production, and in-built struc-tural power (see Clastres 1987: 1-26, 189-218; Overing 1983-4; Rivire 1983-

4; 1984: 87 ff.). As McCallum (2001: 157 ff.) suggests, in Amerindian societieswhere there is relatively equal access to material and symbolic resources, powerand inequality are best understood, not as intrinsic to the social structure butas present to a lesser or greater degree in the unfolding of all social relationsas it [power] is reiterated, negotiated and contested.

There is also a widespread belief in Amazonia (as elsewhere) that power isimmanent in words, with utterances being endowed with the cosmogonicpower of creation and destruction. Typically conceived as a violent, danger-ous, anti-social, and intrinsically extra-social force, power should only beallowed into society once the culturally appropriate actions have been takento render it safe. Central among them is language, which for Amerindians,notes Clastres (1987: 46), is the opposite of violence.16

Brenneis and Myers (1984), addressing relations of power reproduced bythe political speech event itself via such factors of social organization as whocan or cannot speak, maintain as a given a notion of power relations thatassumes structural dominance of gender or age. But is this model, relatingto Pacific non-egalitarian and egalitarian systems alike, applicable also toAmerindian egalitarian societies? For example, as Clastres (1987: 1-47, 152-5,189 ff.) argues, although Amerindian stateless societies are not apolitical theleaders themselves lack personal political power or institutionalized authority,and thus their political speech functions to recreate non-dominant relations.However, Clastres unconvincingly concludes that chiefly talk, as a discoursenot of power but powerlessness, is thus merely empty ritual, a claim rebuttedby Belaunde Olschewski (1992: 97-8), Gow (1991: 127, 226-8), McCallum(1990), and Santos-Granero (1991: 301-2) among others.What I propose hereis that we should be equally dubious about the supposed emptiness of thespeech of non-chiefs, including that of women.

Chiefless Esprance 2

As already mentioned, Esprance 2 had no chief, male or female. Pioneeredin 1980 by migrants from Brazil (six adults plus children), it was at the timeof my fieldwork fifteen years later a thriving community of some one hundredand sixty persons. None of the founders was regarded as its owner or leader(paceRivire 1984: 72). Neither, as far as I could ascertain, had anyone soughtthe position. Nor apparently had it ever been foisted on anybody, although,

according to informants, certain members of the original group, as well assome later incomers, possessed the customary qualifications for leadership, suchas organizational and oratorical skills. Notwithstanding the reputed naturalproclivity for personal power that is the psychological prerequisite for theexistence of human society (Lvi-Strauss 1967: 46), Esprance 2 did notappear to harbour a single power-driven individual (institutionally sanctionedor self-instituted) to whom others subordinated themselves.

Although for Western observers acephaly is commonly identified with lackof politics or anarchy (Clastres 1987: 1-47), the community patently existed

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as an authentic and cohesive entity. It was also one in which politics weremanifestly not a missing quantity, being empirically observable every day inthe different activities fashioning and sustaining it as an orderly social corpus.

In Esprance 2, political activity mainly takes place informally through egal-itarian self-governance and ever-renegotiable interpersonal relations. Formalpolitical meetings involving the wider community are infrequent. In suchcases, and for big issues entailing relations with the non-Paikwen world,people seek guidance and representation from, and are free to accept or rejectthe authority of, a capitaine (headman) in a neighbouring Paikwen village.

A Paikwen view of speech and power

Unlike some Amazonian peoples, the Paikwen do not categorize speaking orhearing and listening hierarchically or along gender-specific lines. The Suy,for example, classify speaking as male and active, listening as male and femaleand passive (Seeger 1981: 84-6, 89-91). Rather, for Paikwen, to speak well auna kabai and to hear-understand well tchimap kabai are equally active,ungendered acts. This explicit linking of hearing and understanding and/orknowing is widespread in Lowland South America (see among others Fisher2001: 120-1; Kidd 2000; Seeger 1981).While the Paikwen follow the equallycommon Amerindian custom of demanding that leaders speak well,17 suchskill is not the chief s alone, for in practice every person is expected to masterit from childhood. Good speakers of whatever sex or age are respected andappreciated, and fine talk is called pretty, baruyo, an evaluation informed con-currently by the locutors grammatical, rhetorical, and performative compe-tence and vocal quality, and by the ethical and emotional weight of their words.

The terms kabai, translatable as good,fine,well,right, and baruyo,pretty,beautiful, clean, proper, correct, lovely, and their opposites ka kabaiandka baruyo, do not connote moral attributes only, but also affective, aesthetic,technical, and practical values (cf. Rosengren 1998: 253-5). Good speaking

means more than grammatical and socio-pragmatic correctness. It refers alsoto the axiological dimension of utterances: their moral and aesthetic worth.Another critical aspect relates to the ability to use words in a manner strongin knowledge, persuasion, care, and concern. Emically, good further signifiesstrong in tone and volume; and the term auna kihao,to speak loud-and-strong,describes this technically correct and socially proper way of talking which isincumbent on Paikwen women and men alike and emblematic of their verbalperformance (Passes 1998: 26-33; 2003). Among other things, speaking loud-and-strong embodies a persons health, strength, and, beyond that, humanness

(cf. Erikson 2000: 133; Fisher 2001: 119). Learning proper loud-and-strongspeech is one of the ways in which girls as well as boys acquire the assertive-ness that is integral to the Paikwen sense of personal autonomy.

As with other Amerindians, great value is placed on the aesthetics of speech,including everyday speech, and on its presentational, phonic, and poetic aspectsas much as its linguistic ones (Sherzer & Urban 1986; Sherzer & Woodbury1987).Thus, for a Paikwen, hearing-understanding is more than a means ofdealing with the semantic meaning of words. Through it one also interpretsand responds to the style in which the words are delivered: the speakers tone,

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pitch, cadence, and loudness, the implicit moral values referred to, and thenon-oral parts of the presentation. These are the performance features (para-linguistic, kinetic, sonic, affective, aesthetic, contextual) which, through the use

of technique and artistry, embody, and project for each listeners evaluation, aspeakers sociality and sociability.As a defining attribute of speaking well, strong talk is for Paikwen the

requisite and most common vocal style of everyday verbal communication,and is neither reserved for ceremonial intercommunity exchanges nor limitedto leaders, as happens among many Lowland groups.18

Like other Amerindian peoples, Paikwen posit a link between words andthe potency attaching to them. In mastering good speech and hearing-understanding, individuals gain access to the power of and in words.These areconsidered not so much the instrument of power as the active medium throughwhich power is effectable, both positively and negatively (Hymes 1979;Isacsson 1993;Viveiros de Castro 1992: 223-51). As Evangelical-Pentecostalistconverts, Esprance 2 people follow the Christian line that there are two powers.That of doing all things good is attributed to God, Ohokrij; that of doing allthings bad to Satan,Wavitch, or, in Crole, Le Diab (the Devil). But the latter,greatly feared as an instigator of mischief and begetter of affliction, is alsocredited with benign acts. According to a (non-Christian) shaman informant,Wavitch is one of several pre-Christian super-spirits, amoral in essence, whosepower can be brought into the community by, and transmitted through, humanagency for either moral or immoral, social or anti-social, ends: a not uncom-mon Amazonian assumption (see e.g. Rosengren 1998). As elsewhere, too, thisambiguous power can be incarnated in a persons words. For instance, I oncesaw an Esprance 2 woman stop a furious argument between two co-villagerswith the following condemnatory utterance:

Tchinogben (Women), Wavitch is in you to make you speak such ka kabai (ugly/bad/improper) words! Wavitch is in you Putting anger into you! Wavitch islike a violent bird that comes into the houses! Wavitch perches like an angry takaag

(chicken) and squawks,Aag! Aag! Kiaviy (Jesus) does not like it! Your words are ugly,angry chicken squawks the Devils screams! They disturb the whole village! Women, come back to Jesus! He will chase the Wavitch-chicken away!

Whereupon the quarrelling ceased. The cosmological power and authorityunderpinning political speech can belong, then, not only to the institution-ally authorized and powerful but, as here, to the unauthorized people wetend to call powerless. It is now time to examine Esprance 2 scolding, whichI suggest, though my example makes no reference to metaphysical power, isno less politically effective as a manifestation of womens power.

Scolding

Scolding, whose local name I regrettably failed to record (see note 5), isresorted to by Paikwen women specifically, and always against men. Thetone assumed for it is louder and stronger than for standard loud-and-strongspeech, auna kihao, and charged with a combination of crossness, impatience,indignation, and asperity. Women deploy it, generally but not exclusively,

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against husbands and sons, in order to complain, demand, berate, recriminate,accuse (laziness being a common charge), sermonize, and vent grievances.Scolding voices, in short, express the very model of anger; however, the

Paikwen distinguish it from dagaon, being cross/being angry, an illegiti-mate emotion feared for being socially divisive. Like other Amazonians, theyvalue the positive virtues and affects (generosity, sharing, compassion, love, andso on) as constitutive of sociability and sociality, and condemn negative, sociallydestructive states like anger and greed.19 Linked with uncontrolled violence,ordinary angry speech is nowadays judged symptomatic, in Evangelical-Pentecostal terms, of ungodliness, as shown above. In contrast, scolding is ameasured, mastered knowledgeable act, and the emotion associated with it isthought of as legitimate. It is an aspect of proper assertive behaviour, includ-ing verbal action which in both sexes indicates not aggression or an anti-socialattitude, but social and physical well-being and strength.

Scolding generally takes place in the communal space before the houses.Sometimes two or more people, for example a woman and her sister andsister-in-law, unite to rail at some poor, improper, male object of their dis-favour. Usually though, it involves a lone individual publicly inveighing againstsome kind of lapse on the part of her husband or son, as in this example frommy fieldnotes:

Ossis mother is screaming at him to either go hunting or earn some more money: they

need food and his father is absent. Ossi stands there silently taking it while she goes onand on for all to see, arms raised and throat tilted backwards as if addressing the entirevillage and calling on the very sky as witness.

In Esprance 2 such action, a value of the languages affective register(Irvine 1990) whereby culturally constructed, legitimate emotional verbalstyles are linked to given social situations and cultural images of persons, con-stitutes an aspect of positive female personhood.This is thus unlike the scold-ing conduct in Gapun, Papua New Guinea, reported by Kulick (1992: 104-17;1993; 1998), where anger, while recognized as an expression of personal

autonomy, is represented in terms of negative female stereotyping: lack ofcontrol, childishness, disruptiveness, selfishness, non-co-operativeness (cf.Keenan 1974).

Other differences between Esprance 2 scolding and Gapun scolding, orkros, outweigh similarities (for example, loudness). The former is monologicand directed only at men, the latter variably monologic and dialogic and eitherwoman on woman (cf. Als 1990: 224-5) or woman on man affairs. Also,even if the anger displayed is justified and legitimate, kros is seen as antithet-ical to knowledge and is contrasted with oratory, the supreme male verbal

genre. For the Paikwen on the other hand, scolding is a female attribute ofknowledge, and oratory ungendered. Perhaps the greatest distinction betweenthe two scolding behaviours is political. For, as proper gendered social action,the Esprance 2 variety constitutes a mode of speech that transcends thegripe and dissatisfaction of individual female speakers. In doing so, what itarticulates are not relations of inequality, as in Gapun, but of equality likethose described above.

Paikwen scolding is both spontaneous and theatrical. By this I mean that,unlike the usual unfocused casualness of domestic rites, performances have a

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dynamic yet somewhat staged quality, and performers a purposeful air. Stand-ing in full view of the community, legs firmly planted, her body taut and con-centrated, her face at a stiff, resolute angle, a scold such as Ossis mother exudes

righteous angry intent. Her very stance has, unambiguously, its own seman-tic value for others, the audiences reading of, and response to, a speakersemotion being instrumental for meaningful social intercommunication (Abu-Lughod & Lutz 1990: 11-12; Basso 1985; 1995; Brenneis 1990; Feld 1983;Irvine 1990).

The scolds performance entails the striking of a tableau-like pose, throughwhich she physically projects an archetypal role: the Aggrieved and Long-Suffering Woman, the Ill-Provided-For Wife. In Antiquity such formulaicbehaviour, by which orators manifested their emotions corporeally, was knownas actio (Barthes 1976: 66).The Paikwen version is effectively embodied (andgendered) emotion experience involving learnt body techniques for the enact-ment of the passions towards a socio-political end (Abu-Lughod & Lutz 1990:12-13). Acquiring the method from mothers and aunts, little girls of 5 and 6are to be seen publicly developing their scolding skills by rehearsing them onbrothers and male cousins.

Paikwen scolding is the means whereby the scolder-actor calls on heraudience, the community at large, to behold and hear-understand hergrievance and its cause, and to judge the anti-socialness of the scolded.Theoretically, the latter, under the weight of this public presentation of hisshortcomings, will be led (or decide) to comply, not so much with his scoldersdemands as such, but with group norms of behaviour. Somewhat like gossip,then, scolding is a form of social control. But Paikwen men are not as sub-missive as Nimuendaj reports; that is, when someone like Ossi is scolded forfailing to satisfy a womans particular needs and wants, he does not necessar-ily go out and fulfil his obligations (Ossi in fact went off to play football).That would go against the sense of personal autonomy and dislike of ordersthat Paikwen share with others in Amazonia.20 At the same time, however,and in contrast to what is reported for Gapun (Kulick 1992: 104, 110-11),

Paikwen men do not generally defend themselves during the scolding, butremain impassively silent throughout.

For Kulick (1992: 114 ff.), scolding enables (Gapun) women to assert theirrights and autonomy in a society predicated on gender inequality, therebyredressing the balance. However, Esprance 2 women do not need to usescolding to obtain something which they already possess in practice, that is,equality. Conceivably, scolding acts here as a means of maintaining the balancewhen mens anti-social tendencies threaten to destabilize it (see Lvi-Strauss1995). Paikwen female power is therefore not just dramatically represented

in the interaction of scolding; it is embodied behaviour (re)productive of thepolity, and heard-understood as such by both parties.

Conclusion

Like other Paikwen, and other Amerindians, Esprance 2 people considerthe speaking action that is required of leaders to be fundamental to a com-munitys well-being. Acephalous themselves, they also perceive their own

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words to be just as instrumental in the creation of the proper and sociablerelations comprising sociality and, by the same token, the field wherein thepolitical process occurs. Even in hierarchical societies this field should not be

equated solely with the formal public arena since, as was shown above, effec-tive politics and political speaking also happen, and are constructed, outsideit, through the everyday interpersonal relations of ordinary people (Brenneis& Myers 1984). Integral to this efficacy, and the politys verbal construction,is the dialectic between speakers and hearers within a common rubric forunderstanding among equals (Brenneis & Myers 1984: 12-13). This pertainsto the process of interpretation not just in terms of semantics and pragmat-ics, but in respect of its instrumentality in the ongoing intersubjective rene-gotiation of the moral and, consequently, the political in communities withoutinstitutional political offices, such as Esprance 2 (cf. Duranti 1994: 172-5).

Given the parity of womens power in this society, their scolding differsqualitatively and functionally from the scenario described earlier wherebywomen deploy gendered verbal behaviours as strategic responses to anunalterable structural impotence. For Kulick (1993: 532-4), acknowledgingstructural inequality yet contesting its immutability, performances like Gapunwomens scolding are not reactive but proactive behaviour. Such behaviournot only compels a response from men but is constitutive of social life throughits power to reconfigure social relations and, in the process, to destabilizegender stereotypes, albeit reconfirming them at another level. But this assumesa structural and sexual inequality conspicuously absent in Esprance 2. Here,as a verbal political act the scolding of its female members appears to consti-tute, not so much a prescriptive monologue (on proper male conduct towardwomen) as a (re)actualization of proper relations between the genders, whichis configured and thought (and, by scolders and scoldees, experienced) on thebasis of equal strengths. Thus, Paikwen scolding embodies female powerwithin a socio-political frame that is founded on equal relations of power anddependent on the autonomy an ungendered value for Paikwen as for manyothers in native Amazonia (Als 2000: 134; Overing & Passes 2000) of each

of its constituents. Moreover, the polity itself, while having no formal officeof authority, is effectively recreated, and order reintroduced, thanks to thescolders temporary self-institution of authority.

NOTES

This article developed from a paper presented at the Centre for Indigenous American Studiesand Exchange, University of St Andrews (18 April, 2000). I thank the anonymous reviewers,

Luisa Elvira Belaunde, Don Kulick, and Joanna Overing for helpful comments on earlierversions; and Catherine Als, Javier Carrera, Marie Perruchon, and Elizabeth Tonkin fordiscussions on topics contained in the article. The research was funded by the ESRC (GrantR00429334265) and the RAIs Emslie Horniman scholarship.

1 Numbering between 1,500 and 1,600, the Paikwen (aka Palikur) are an Arawakan peopleof French Guyana and Brazil. Esprance 2 is situated by the Crole town of St Georges onthe French side of the river Oyapock, and had at the time of my fieldwork (1993-5) someone hundred and sixty inhabitants, the majority Evangelical-Pentecostal converts.

2 See, among others, Briggs (1992; 1993; 1996: 222-7), L. Goldman (1986), Harding (1975),Jamieson (2000), Keenan (1974), Kulick (1992; 1993; 1998), Lederman (1984), Nash (1987),Ochs (1992), and Schieffelin (1990).

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3 See Viveiros de Castro (1992: 260), Fisher (2001: 116-17, 132-3), McCallum (1989: 223 ff.,247-8; 1990; 2001: 69-70, 102, 108, 111-17, 126), Overing Kaplan (1975: 51), and Passes (1998:78; 2004), apropos the Arawet, Kayapo, Cashinahua, Piaroa, and Paikwen respectively.

4 Not that I do not consider the audiences role as active and constructive as the speakers

in both intercommunication and politics (Passes [1998; 2000b; 2001]). The present articleassumes listeners instrumentality regarding speakers meanings and intents (Duranti & Brenneis[1986]; Grice [1975]; Hymes [1986]) and a speech events wider meanings (Brenneis & Myers[1984]; Goodwin & Duranti [1992]; Gumperz [1977]).

5 Both scolding and the category to which it belongs, womens speech, are problematicterms. The former, though its use is technically correct, has a frankly sexist connotation inEnglish; the latter presupposes a lesser sphere to mens speech rather than an equal and com-plementary one (Gal [2001: 427]).

6 It is appropriate to note that our conceptual distinction between formal and informaldoes not necessarily translate to native Amazonian societies, where there often tends to be eitheronly the barest demarcation between, or a conflation of, the two types of activity (Als

[2000: 133]; Monod Becquelin & Erikson [2000]; cf. Brenneis & Myers [1984: 8-11]; Irvine[1979]).7 The ethnography of speaking (Bauman & Sherzer [1974]; Hymes [1971]) and of com-

munication (Gumperz & Hymes [1972]), highlighting context and socially embedded prag-matics, tends to privilege formal political and ritual verbal genres over everyday ones. Similarly,the discourse-centred approach, notably applied to Amerindian societies (Basso [1990]; Sherzer& Urban [1986]; Sherzer & Woodbury [1987]; Urban [1991]), acknowledges the performativeartistry of informal conversation, but focuses mainly on formal verbal arts like myth-telling,ceremonial dialogue, and songs.

8 See also Duranti (1994), Kulick (1992; 1993), Monod Becquelin & Erikson (2000), andSchieffelin (1990).

9 See Duranti (1994: 70-1), McCallum (1990), Schieffelin (1990: 2, 10).10 See, among others, Friedl (1967), Harding (1975), McCallum (2001), MacCormack &Strathern (1980), Moore (1988), Overing (1986; 1988), Sacks (1979), and Strathern (1988).

11 See Descola (2001: 99-100), I. Goldman (1979), and Murphy & Murphy (1974: 136).12 See also Hill (2001), and Siskind (1973).13 See also Belaunde Olschewski (1992), Conklin (2001), Descola (1986), I. Goldman (1979),

Overing (1983-4; 1986; 1989), Overing & Passes (2000), and Passes (1998).14 According to Capiberibe (2001: 74), although Paikwen women are influential in the

chief-making process they do not themselves become chiefs. This is contradicted in practice,however, by such individuals as Mauricienne, whom I met in the 1990s, the well-known headof a Paikwen settlement at Macouria, near Cayenne.

15 For example, in the West, according to Bourdieu (1991), politics, and political speaking,increasingly reside in a series of distinct institutional fields, peopled by various sets of profes-sionals detached from the rest of society whose power, and voice, they seek to dispossess (cf.Foucault [1981]).

16 Cf. Bourdieu (1991: 163-70) on the invisible violence of language through which thedominant wield power over the dominated; see also Bloch (1975).

17 See, for example, Clastres (1987: 152-5), Lvi-Strauss (1967), and Santos-Granero (1991:301-2).

18 See, for example, Als (1990, 225ff.), Rivire (1971), and Sherzer (1983: 91-9).19 See, for example, Belaunde Olschewski (1992), Ellis (1997), I. Goldman (1979), Overing

(1989), Overing & Passes (2000), and Santos-Granero (1991).20 See I. Goldman (1979), Kidd (2000), Overing (1988; 1989), Rivire (1984), and Viveiros

de Castro (1992).

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La place de la politique : locutrices et pouvoir du discoursdans la vie quotidienne des Paikwen (Palikur)

Rsum

Cet article est consacr la pratique de la rprimande par les femmes dans une commu-naut de Paikwen (ou Palikur), un peuple indigne dAmazonie (Guyane Franaise etBrsil), et explore les notions de pouvoir et de discours et le phnomne du discours poli-tique. Lauteur remet en question deux ides, savoir que la politique serait cantonne lascne publique officielle et que le discours politique serait lapanage et la prrogative exclusifsdes chefs et des hommes, quils soient ou non autoriss institutionnellement. Au con-traire, il affirme que le discours quotidien des villageois ordinaires, et en loccurrence celuides femmes, est entre autres de nature politique, et na pas moins deffet que le discours difiant que Clastres prte aux chefs amrindiens. Il postule en outre que les rpriman-des des femmes Paikwen, tout en donnant forme leur propre pouvoir, rgnrent gale-ment une relation symtrique entre les sexes et, de ce fait, la polis elle-mme.

50 Hamilton Road, London, SW19 1JF. [email protected]

18 ALAN PASSES

alan passes - the place of politics

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