Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and the power of language · 9:42pm Jan 25th, 2021
This is just a little snippet today that really stuck out to me, about his time in post-Colonial Madagascar.
In other contexts, relations of command, particularly in bureaucratic contexts, were linguistically coded: they were firmly identified with French; Malagasy, in contrast, was seen as the language appropriate to deliberation, explanation, and consensus decision-making. Minor functionaries, when they wished to impose arbitrary dictates, would almost invariably switch to French.
I have particularly vivid memories of one occasion when an affable minor official who had had many conversations with me in Malagasy was flustered one day to discover me dropping by at exactly the moment everyone had apparently decided to go home early to watch a football game. (As I mentioned, they weren’t really doing anything in these offices anyway.) “The office is closed,” he announced, in French, pulling himself up into an uncharacteristically formal pose. “If you have any business at the office you must return tomorrow at eight a.m.”
This puzzled me. He knew English was my native language; he knew I spoke fluent Malagasy; he had no way to know I could even understand spoken French. I pretended confusion and replied, in Malagasy, “Excuse me? I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.” His response was to pull himself up even taller and just say the same thing again, slightly slower and louder. I once again feigned incomprehension. “I don’t get it,” I said, “why are you speaking to me in a language I don’t even know?” He did it again. In fact, he proved utterly incapable of repeating the sentence in the vernacular, or, for that matter, of saying anything else at all in Malagasy.
I suspected this was because if he had switched to everyday language, he would not feel he could be nearly so abrupt. Others later confirmed this was exactly what was happening: if he were speaking Malagasy, he would at the very least have had to explain why the office had closed at such an unusual time. In literary Malagasy, the French language can actually be referred to as ny teny baiko, “the language of command.” It was characteristic of contexts where explanations, deliberation, and, ultimately, consent, were not required, since such contexts were shaped by the presumption of unequal access to sheer physical force. In this instance, the actual means to deploy such force was no longer present. The official could not in fact call the police, and nor would he want to—he just wanted me to go away, which, after teasing him for a moment with my language games, I did. But he couldn’t even evoke the kind of attitude such power allows one to adopt without calling up the shadow of the colonial state.
For the power of language, i usually point at the much less obscure newspeak from '84
5441911
I have more mixed opinions about Orwell
Fascinating. That makes me wonder if there are perfectly understandable English words or phrases for Latin legal terms that a judge would be unwilling to accept... and now that I think of it, "nolo contendere" and "no contest" ought to be interchangeable, but I haven't been in a courtroom very often (thankfully), and I don't know.
Read this, read the Orwell one as well. Very interesting stuff.
Oh, interesting; thanks for sharing this.
Reminds me of the bit in one of Gladwell's books (I forget which one, Outliers probably?) where he talks about the airline Korean Air having more crashes because the language/culture doesn't allow a inferior speak sharply to a superior, socially speaking. So if the captain was making a poor choice the rest of the cockpit flight crew had only very soft and polite ways to try and get him to change his mind. Part of the solution was to have the flight crews speak in English to overcome that.
To a lesser extent, there's something similar in the concepts of an "acrolect" (dialect treated as superior) and a "basilect" (dialect treated as inferior), though both accents come from the same language. I don't know how strong the effect is in the U.S., but it's something very prominent in the U.K., specifically England.
It's one thing if you treat, say, Received Pronunciation as just a mundane solution to a general audience understanding. Some accents can be hard for a general audience to interpret, true. It's when accents are corrected just for being non-RP accents that it starts to look less forgiveable.
Especially since accents can induce a strong psychological disposition towards tribalism and group identity, even in young children, it's morally suspect to teach the idea that some accents are inherently "superior" to others. Rather than, say, merely an arbitrary accident of history.
5442266
I'm actually familiar with this one! Another part of it that was interesting was that to deal with that problem - inferiors having to speak to superiors and being misunderstood - in Europe they taught the superiors to be better listeners, and in America they taught the inferiors to be better speakers.