Words of Truth: Authority and Agency in Ritual and Legal Speeches in the Himalayas

This issue of Oral Tradition presents a collection of anthropological studies on the sources of authority for ritual and legal speech in the Himalayan region. Its goal is twofold: first, to shed new light on a region whose diversity of oral traditions has so far resisted comparative studies; and second, to reconsider two major theories of language communication that confront linguistics and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu’s essays on the symbolic power of language have the advantage of presenting strong views on the subject and provide a stimulating point of departure for a collective work exploring authoritative speech from a comparative perspective. Written between 1975 and 1982, Bourdieu’s essays (1982 and 2001) were motivated by the then overwhelming position of linguistics in social sciences and the need he felt to reintroduce social relations in the analysis of linguistic communication. His criticisms also targeted anthropology, which assumed the neutrality of the observer and ignored relations of power. Thirty years on, while these criticisms have lost some of their relevance in other contexts, the social and political rooting of oral traditions in the Himalayas have remain little explored. This collection of articles aims at encouraging such a perspective and at developing comparative studies in the Himalayan region. Indeed, the latter forms a unique context where “archaic” ritual contexts meet modernity. All the essays address contemporary situations that are embedded in inherited social and political relations that now face social transformations.

Himalayan communities are characterized by rich oral traditions that remain extremely lively in rural and urban contexts, although the studies of the latter are scarce. The oral compositions remain a fundamental part of religious and even economic activity. These traditions, which are highly diverse and yet belong to the same cultural area, have not yet been reconsidered along common theoretical guidelines. The originality of the present collection of essays lies in its presentation of oral speech belonging to different fields: bardic tradition (Leavitt; Lecomte-Tilouine), shamanic tradition (Gaenszle; de Sales), judicial speech (Berti; Berardi; Jahoda), musical language (Bernède), and ordinary language (Ghimire). All these registers claim a certain authority and even to tell the truth. Indeed these case studies highlight that the issue of truth is central to ritual and legal speech in the Himalaya. The bard, the shaman, and the judge all claim, in one way or another, to speak the truth. The issue of truth is, thus, central, and appears as the common denominator of the main genres of oral tradition explored in this volume.

This introduction presents the theoretical issues at the origin of this collective work, recalling a few points of Bourdieu’s theory, as well as the linguistic theory he criticizes. We then try to identify the limits of his seemingly universal socio-linguistic approach when it is confronted with a socio-cultural context very different from that in which it was elaborated. Next, we present an overview of the essays gathered here as well as a few comparative questions that the contributors were asked to consider. Finally, a brief presentation of a few selected works on oral texts in the Himalaya for further readings is offered.

Theoretical Issues

“Saussure’s Coup” and “Austin’s Error”

For Bourdieu, the inaugural coup (“le coup de force inaugural”) of Ferdinand de Saussure, who excluded from linguistics the relationships between society and language, determined the fate of modern linguistics (Bourdieu and Boltanski 1975:14). Moreover, it turned language into an abstract and artificially unified product based on transparent and egalitarian interactions. Bourdieu’s criticism focused thereafter on the theories developed by John L. Austin and John Searle, and centered on the pragmatics of language.

This major school of thought argues that when we speak we do not just describe the world but we act on it; we perform speech acts; the acting dimension of utterances is a structural property of language; semantics cannot be separated from pragmatics. Following Austin’s seminal work How to Do Things With Words (1962), Searle (1965:222) defined a speech act or illocutionary act as “the minimal unit of linguistic communication...