Social systems – languages, habitus, structures, cultures, etc. – are created and recreated, reinforced, reshaped, and reconfigured by the actions and words of particular individuals, groups, and institutions acting in socioculturally conditioned ways. In other words, languages and cultures emerge dialogically in a continuous manner through the social and linguistic interactions of individuals “always already situated in a social, political, and historical moment” (Mannheim and Tedlock 1995:9). Neither structure nor practice, therefore, should be seen as analytically prior to the other. Instead, each should be seen as being embedded in the other. Social and linguistic structures emerge from the everyday actions of real people, and vice versa.
The concept of emergence as it is used here originated in biology, and it goes beyond the simple everyday sense in which one thing gives rise to another. In addition to this sense, emergence as it is used in linguistic anthropology (as well as other fields) also refers to instances when the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Ernst Mayr, the famous biologist, writes of inorganic as well as organic systems that they “almost always have the peculiarity that the characteristics of the whole cannot (not even in theory) be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the components, taken separately or in other partial combinations. This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been designated as emergence” (1982:63, emphasis in the original). Mayr is quick to point out that there is nothing mystical about such a view of emergence; in fact, the characteristics (for example, its liquidity) of a system as “simple” as water cannot, according to Mayr, be deduced from a study of its hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Language, as a whole, cannot be understood merely from a study of its grammatical features. Likewise, language, culture, and social structures emerge from social practice on the part of individuals but cannot be understood with reference only to those individuals.
Nevertheless, emergence does not imply absolute, unconstrained unpredictability. On the contrary, Mannheim and Tedlock (1995:18) emphasize that cultures have their own organizing principles that emerge through the linguistic and social interactions of individuals who themselves embody and enact social structures and cultural patterns, just as practice theorists maintain. Take, for example, the actions of individuals who are protesting something in their society by engaging in street demonstrations. Their underlying assumptions, methods, and principles are very likely to have been deeply influenced by the very norms that they are protesting, even if the individuals work extremely hard to counter such influences. What emerges from such formal protests, as well as from informal, everyday activities, is shaped and constrained by these influences – but not totally determined. Understanding the constrained yet at least partially indeterminate outcomes of human actions can help explain how social and linguistic structures that usually reproduce themselves nevertheless always change over time. Whether reproduction or transformation results, all languages and cultures can be said to be emergent from social and linguistic practice.
Indexicality
Identifying the precise ways in which language and social relations intersect is one of the most pressing issues in linguistic anthropology. A key concept that assists scholars in pinpointing these intersections is “indexicality” (Hanks 1999), which, as it is used here, stems from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics (Peirce 1955; cf. Mertz 2007b). Semiotics, the study of signs, can seem somewhat complex but it is well worth going over some of the essentials in order to obtain a fuller understanding of the term “indexicality.” Semiotics starts with the definition of the linguistic sign. Perhaps the best-known definition is de Saussure’s: a sign is the link between a concept (the “signified”) and a sound pattern (the “signifier”) (Saussure 1986:66). Thus, in de Saussure’s famous example, the word “tree” is a sign because it links the mental concept of a tree with the pattern of sounds that comprises the word. For Peirce, however, semiosis, or meaning-making through signs, involves a concept of the linguistic sign that is quite different from de Saussure’s, for it is a process that “involves three components: signs (whatever stands for something else), objects (whatever a sign stands for), and interpretants (whatever a sign creates insofar as it stands for an object)” (Kockelman 2007:376; see Figure 1.6). In other words, meaning-making involves a sign such as the word “tree,” the object that is represented, such as the actual tree – so far, these two aspects could be said to be fairly similar to de Saussure’s “signifier” and “signified” – but then there is in Peirce’s model the extremely important interpretant – the effect or outcome of the semiotic relationship between the sign and the object, such as a feeling of appreciation for the beauty of a tree. Peirce’s tripartite signs do not reside solely in one person’s head, therefore, as de Saussure’s signs do, but extend out into the physical and social world.
Figure 1.6 Semiosis as a relation between relations.
Source: Kockelman (2007:377). Reproduced by permission of Paul Kockelman. Current Anthropology, a journal published by University of Chicago Press.
There are three ways in which a sign can be related to its object, according to Peirce, and it is the second of these ways that leads us to the important concept of indexicality. These three types of signs – icon, index, and symbol – are defined as follows (Peirce 1955:102–115):1955:102–115):13
Icon. A sign that refers to its object by means of similarity. Examples include photographs, diagrams, or sketches. Onomatopoeic words (e.g., “choo choo train,” “meow”) have an iconic dimension because of the similarity in sound to that which they represent.
Index. A sign that refers to its object “because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand” (Peirce 1955:107). In other words, just as an index finger points to an object, an indexical sign “points to” its object through some connection or contiguity, that is, a co-occurrence in the same context. Examples of indexical signs include the classic one of smoke, which indexes fire; a rolling gait, which indexes the profession of sailor; and a clock, which indexes the time of day. Other indexical signs include pronouns and words such as “here” or “now” because they are connected to (indeed, cannot be understood without knowledge of) particular elements of the context. More will be said about this property of indexicality below.
Symbol. A sign that refers to its object by virtue of convention or habit. Most words primarily fall into this category (though words can have iconic, indexical, and/or symbolic aspects simultaneously). The word “bird,” for example, does not represent its object by virtue of similarity or any sort of “dynamical connection”; it is simply conventional in English to call most flying animals with wings “birds.” Some signs combine iconic or indexical features with conventional ones. For example, it is conventional in English to use the word “chickadee” to label a small black, white, and grey bird – but this symbol also has an iconic aspect to it because the name of the bird resembles the bird’s call, which sounds like “chick-a-dee-dee-dee.”
While all three of these types of linguistic signs have been employed by linguistic anthropologists in their analyses, Peirce’s concept of the indexical sign has drawn a great deal of attention in recent