0.0 In this paper we examine the sequential organization of the telling of a dirty joke in conversation. For the organization of the joke and also of its telling we find that there is a single most decisive feature: the joke is built in the form of a story. The decisiveness of that feature involves the fact that, there being means for sequentially organizing the telling of a story in conversation, the sequential organization of the telling of this joke's being built in the form of a story is largely given by those means. This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences which we call the preface, the telling, and the response sequences. We shall proceed by considering each of them in turn, intending that the adequacy of such a characterization as is developed in terms of these types for these materials will provide support to our proposal that the joke's construction in the form of a story is indeed its decisive feature.

0.1 In what follows we shall largely be concerned to subject the utterances of the fragment, of which we present a transcription at the close of this section, to analysis in terms of how they figure in the three types of sequences we have proposed to constitute organizational parts of the telling. In this endeavor one recurrent theme may be extracted for introductory comment.

Informants' statements, memoirs, previous studies, and collectors' comments in the introductions to their published materials show a remarkable consistency in their insistence that narration is a cultural focus in east European Jewish society (Gross 1955:10, 11; Olsvanger 1965:xxii–xxiii; B. Weinreich 1957:145, 151; Ravnitsky 1922:iii–iv; Schwarzbaum 1968:88; Holdes 1960:4–5; Bialostotski 1962:158). From the statements examined, the following emerges:

1. Stories are important and storytelling is frequent in this culture.

2. This has been the case from time immemorial. The Aggadah, the stories (and other non-legalistic materials) in the Talmudic-Midrashic literature, and the fame of ancient saints and sages as narrators are often cited as evidence of the antiquity of the Jewish penchant for narration.

3. Everyone can tell stories.

4. There are no professional storytellers who are hired for the sole purpose of telling stories.

5. Stories may be told at almost any time.

6. There are no ‘public performances’ for the sake of storytelling alone.

7. Jewish narrators are specialists in parables and jokes.

These notions are prevalent in both academic and non-academic circles and are accepted here as representing this society's own view of its narrational habits.

Yiddish terms are available for distinguishing types of storytelling acts (following Hymes' [1967] terminology): dertseyln a mayse (tell a story); zogn a vits (say a joke); gebn or brengen a moshl (present a parable), and other formulations.

The past decade has seen a great increase in scholarly efforts directed to exploring the systematicity of the relationships between sociocultural organization and language use. A basic assumption behind this search has been that speakers functioning as members of a particular society in terms of a particular culture have internalized not only rules of grammar, but also rules of appropriate speech usage which are broadly shared by other members of their society, and which they apply in their speech behaviour. Thus competence has been extended from the notion of the mastery of a set of grammatical rules to the mastery of a set of cultural rules which include the appropriate ways to apply grammatical rules in all speech situations possible for that society (Hymes 1972b). The notion of context has been extended to apply not only to linguistic context or environment, but to the social-situational circumstances of the speech event, even to the intent or ends of the speaker.

Many important concepts were developed during the 1960s for dealing with systematic sociolinguistic variability, as it came to be generally recognized that no community or individual is limited to a single variety of code (Hymes 1967). Such concepts include the idea of a linguistic repertoire (Gumperz 1964, 1965, 1968) of a community or of an individual, the code matrix of a community, consisting of all of its codes and subcodes, including languages, dialects, styles (Gumperz 1962), or registers (Halliday 1964) in their functional relationships; the idea that speech events can be characterized in terms of a set of components, such as channel, setting, participants, etc. (see Ervin-Tripp 1972; Hymes 1967, 1972a), each of which may be factored into a number of relevant features.

This volume is rooted in the conviction that something has been missing from our understanding of language, and that established lines of linguistic research will not – even cannot – fill the gap. Whether one's concern is with the analysis of language as a purely scientific subject, or with the role of language in practical affairs, questions arise that are quite outside the declared scope of the conventional disciplines which claim an interest in language. Patterns and functions of speech are recognized that are not taken into account in grammars, ethnographies, and other kinds of research. Differences in the purposes to which speech is put and the ways it is organized for these purposes are observed, whereas the scholarly literature seems to consider only the ways that languages and their uses are fundamentally the same. In recent years, work to remedy this situation has come to be known as the ethnography of speaking.

The ethnography of speaking has had a relatively short history as a named field of inquiry. It was called into being by Dell Hymes' seminal essay of 1962, which drew together themes and perspectives from a range of anthropological, literary, and linguistic scholarship, and brought them to bear on speaking as a theoretically and practically crucial aspect of human social life, missing from both linguistic descriptions and ethnographies, and on ethnography as the means of elucidating the patterns and functions of speaking in societies.

Cuna society (in both San Blas and the interior Darien Jungle) is striking for vitality and richness in speech usage. From a formal or ceremonial point of view, there are many genres of speaking – chiefs' chants which deal with history, politics, and religion; formal speeches which are uttered by official and non-official individuals; long ikar which are used to cure diseases, hunt animals, make fermented drinks, and direct girls' puberty rites; and secret charms which enable an individual to have power over another individual or an object in nature. There is also a rich variety of non-ceremonial or colloquial genres – animal and plant stories, comical songs, lullabies, riddles, and linguistic games. Speaking ability at any level (from colloquial and conversational to formal and ceremonial) is highly valued and is a source of personal prestige among the Cuna.

It is not the purpose of this paper to deal in detail with all Cuna genres of speaking but rather to describe three basic patterns found in Cuna speech events and to discuss the constellations in speech usage that are associated with each of them. The three patterns are expressed most clearly in

1. the chanting and talking that occurs in the centrally located village congress house;

2. curing and related ikar;

3. kantur ikar which occurs during girls' puberty rites.

The three patterns will be investigated by means of descriptions of the events, focusing especially on the addressor, addressee, and the linguistic variety.

That people of different cultures have different concepts of time is a fairly popular notion, and one which many people find appealing in an exotic sort of way. Most often this realm of cultural diversity is dealt with in rather grand and mysterious terms that compare ‘our’ western European – derived concepts of time with those of ‘other’ cultures. Thus while we may conceive of time in primarily ‘linear’ terms, others will have an essentially ‘cyclical’ orientation; while our activity is regulated by clock and calendar units, that of others is governed by the seasonal shifts in nature.

Among the peoples of the world whose activities have been drawn on for illustration of cultural variation in concepts of time, North American Indians can only be matched in popularity by Latin Americans, as evidenced by the Indians' repeated appearances as bearers of a distinctive temporal orientation in works as diverse in approach as A. I. Hallowell's ‘Temporal Orientation in Western Civilization and a Preliterate Society’ (1937), Benjamin L. Whorf's ‘An American Indian Model of the Universe’ (1950), Edward Hall's The Silent Language (1959), and Stan Steiner's The New Indians (1968).

It is Hall's orientation toward time as a dimension of activity which in itself conveys information and is systematically organized that perhaps comes closest to the present-day orientation of the ethnography of communication, especially when he is informally discussing the meaningfulness of ‘when’ an event happens:

The papers in this volume present a wide range and impressive quantity of new empirical data on how people talk and on the rules which govern that talk and its interpretation. Authors have used their data in several different ways, variously (1) organizing descriptive frames from which testable propositions can be derived; (2) creating theoretical frames which facilitate the search for new data sets; (3) actually testing theories. In this connection I would like to elaborate somewhat on the theme of the interaction of data and theory – or more specifically, the uses of societally or culturally specific social behaviors in moving toward identification of behaviors (and structural features constraining those behaviors) characteristic of men in all societies. I will do this by remarking on: (1) sources of data (and their dangers); (2) some modes of organizing data in our search for descriptive adequacy, and (3) reasons for formalization and possibilities for theory which has explanatory adequacy. While I will not always make it explicit, all of what I say should be seen against a comparative backdrop – the ‘theys’ of specific ethnographic reports and the ‘us’ of our own society combined into a global ‘us’ – social man wherever he is found.

Data

Concern about the validity of informant reports is central to the ethnographic enterprise. Labov (1972b) recently chastised a group of linguists about the dangers of circularity and reflexivity in the theory-informed intuition-theory confirmation cycle.

The community

Namoizamanga is a hamlet composed of twenty-four households, situated in the southern central plateau of Madagascar. This area is generally referred to as Vakinankaratra, meaning ‘broken by the Ankaratra.’ The Ankaratra Mountains do in fact form a natural boundary in the north. They separate this area somewhat from other parts of the central plateau area. This separation has sociological significance in that the people of this community and communities nearby identify themselves as Vakinankaratra. The present generation recognize an historical link with the dominant plateau group, the Merina, but choose a separate social identity.

A partial explanation for this parochialism lies in the nature of the ties which brought these people formerly in contact. In the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, people of the Vakinankaratra were conquered by the Merina and brought north as slaves. When the French abolished ownership of slaves and the existence of a slave class (andevo), many slaves moved back into the traditional homeland of their ancestors. A villager speaks of this time with great difficulty and embarassment. The people know themselves to be former andevo and are known by others to be such, but the term itself is almost never used. To address or refer to someone as andevo is a grave insult. Genealogical reckoning is shallow, typically going back two to three generations. With some exceptions, local histories begin with the settling of ancestors into these villages in the early part of this century.

Background

The Maori people, New Zealand's Polynesian inhabitants, were first effectively contacted for the European world by Captain James Cook and his party in 1769. They immediately acquired a reputation for belligerence, because whenever the explorers tried to approach a group, ‘they rose up and every man produced either a long pike, or a small weapon of polished stone’ (Banks 1896:42). In fact it was standard practice for stranger groups to make such ritual displays of strength upon first encounter, but the explorers weren't to know this, and retaliated with musket fire whose effects were anything but ritual. Subsequent arrivals in New Zealand – the missionaries, traders, and whalers – were greeted more tentatively, and as they became better acquainted with Maori custom they learned that challenges, sham fights, and war dances as well as oratory and other verbal arts were an expected part of ceremonial occasions. For their part, the Maori people learned to keep their greeting forms to themselves, and it was only Europeans who had frequent cause to parlay with the chiefs and elders who ever mastered them. As increasing numbers of settlers arrived in New Zealand, the pattern became established. Maori gatherings, or hui, once held in the village plaza, were now staged in a marae complex, with its carved meeting-house and courtyard for orators fenced off and isolated from other settlement. Europeans were only rarely to be found at a hui, and the privacy of the marae was jealously preserved.

When a language, or reasonably isolated dialect, appears to be “on the way out” one might hope to find some traits or symptoms that would be interesting to watch. Nancy Dorian, in her numerous and seminal publications (1981 and refs. there cited), has in fact done just this in greater detail and with greater responsibility than anyone else. Over a goodly number of years I have collected data from living dialects for a number of purposes, often for more than one reason: in order to document a rare variety of a language for ultimate historical and comparative linguistic ends (e.g. North Geg Albanian or Vannetais Breton), to fill in the dialectology of a language (Tetovo Albanian, various sorts of Scottish Gaelic), to explore the manifestations of language contact and multilingualism (Prespa Albanian, Arvanìtika of younger speakers of Attica, Resia Slovene, Tiefencastel Romauntsch, Aromân / Koutsovlah, Mandrítsa Albanian), to verify the presence of a language (Màndres Albanian, Arbanasi Albanian at Zadar, various Albanian enclaves of Arbresh in southern Italy and Arvanìtika in Greece). I restrict the content of this chapter and the above mentions to dialects of Europe in order to give our discussion a degree of cultural and situational homogeneity, as well as to maximize the presentation of substance in a short space. In numerous such situations I have found myself observing societies with only vestigial groups of speakers or semi-speakers, and with predictably ultimate terminal heirs of the native language.

To make our topic manageable and to explore a consistent segment of linguistic structure, the ensuing observations will be restricted to phonology, including phonetics.

Linguistics lacks a term more felicitous than “normal” for language in its optimal state of knowledge and use, i.e., language as it is commanded by native (mono- or multilingual) speakers in full possession of adult intelligence, social skills, language processing abilities, etc. But we need a way to refer to this unmarked case, one which does not invite the kind of confusion between the state of the speaker and the state of his/her language abilities which arises from the use of the term “normal” language. I propose to call this optimal state “full” language: this is to be distinguished from the abstract notion of “ideal” language, since “full” language is intended to denote a normal range of lects and modalities; thus it is not homogeneous within or across speakers, nor devoid of metaphor, archaism, or the like.

The label “full” encodes our sense that language which has been learned and/or deployed under various less-than-optimal circumstances is simpler and poorer than “full” language. In the first section of this discussion chapter, I offer some comments on the notion of “simplicity” as it applies to child language and aphasic language, comparing it with the kinds of simplification in the contracted manifestations of language reported in the present volume. This volume in fact demonstrates that a rich set of dimensions of variation, rather than a unidimensional (implicational) simplicity hierarchy, will be required for the characterization of potential universals in the case of language contraction. In particular, we have seen that degrees and differing circumstances of original acquisition and conditions of subsequent use/disuse appear to have important effects on the patterns of the contracted language, as already suggested by Dorian (1982c).

The Ugong speech community in western Thailand has been in decline ever since it was first reported, by a surveyor (Kerr 1927); he said that the language was on its last legs in the 1920s. The anthropologist Theodore Stern encountered this group in the 1960s and found the language very moribund (pers. comm.). In a series of visits beginning in 1977, I have found several locations where the language is still regularly used, even by some second-language speakers; but indeed it is virtually dead in the two locations found by Kerr, one of which was also visited by Stern. The language is in the Burmic subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family.

Factors contributing to language maintenance in the surviving locations are various; some or all of these factors are absent in the other former locations. The political prestige and individual dynamism of recently deceased headmen, though in decline as the Ugong area became settled by Thais, was a major factor in two cases, but failed to promote Ugong in a third where other negative factors were present. Geographical isolation and lack of schools, economic independence, and continuing in-group contacts were all also favorable to Ugong in the same two locations until very recently. Now roads, schools, cash crops, and large-scale influx of Thais have changed this. Another negative factor has been extensive marriage with other groups, partly due to a lack of suitable Ugong spouses as the community contracted. There is a strong stigma in Thailand attached to minority status; some of the effects are noted below (p. 39); Ugong are beginning to feel this stigma increasingly strongly.