Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective

1. On Riveting Objectivity

i 1 i On Riveting Objectivity He [the historian] must ever remember that while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as the whole truth unless genius is there to paint the truth. —Theodore Roosevelt, ‘‘History as Literature’’ Introduction to Ideophones There was a look of amusement and embarrassment on the face of Alfredo ,∞ the man who was helping me teach Quichua in the spring of 1993 at Indiana University. His suppressed laughter finally erupted as he confessed to my students and me that the utterance I had asked him to say was too much like ‘‘a woman’s way (of speaking),’’ and he couldn’t bring himself to repeat it.≤ We had just begun a lesson on ideophones, and the chapter I had written for this lesson contained many examples of ideophones I had heard from Luisa and many other people just a few years earlier. I’d never had this kind of response from him about any examples from previous chapters. Given the genuineness of his reaction, I realized that I’d just stumbled onto something significant. I was particularly excited to hear one of the first examples of metalinguistic commentary on ideophones from a speaker of Quichua.≥ Ideophones are a class of expressions found in most language families throughout the world.∂ They communicate by imitating a variety of subjective impressions spanning a range of sensory domains. Ideophones are typologically widespread in the world’s languages. Yet, anthropological linguistic acknowledgment of ideophony’s significance has been rather scarce. Notable exceptions are: Basso 1985, 1995; Feld 1982; Harrison 2004; Kohn 2005, 2007; Noss 2001; Sherzer 2004; and Webster 2006. Research on ideophones has traditionally been associated 30 lessons from a quechua strongwoman with African linguistics, from which the term originates. Doke (1935: 118) first defined the ideophone as follows: ‘‘a vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, colour, smell, action, state, or intensity.’’ Although English is ideophonically impoverished (Nuckolls 2004b), examples of the ideophonic impulse may be observed in vivid descriptions by creative people such as cartoonists, architects, and others who invent unique combinations of sounds to describe unusual events and processes. As a lexical class, ideophones have been characterized by their expressivity , which is often attributed to sound symbolism (Nuckolls 1999). Although ideophones are functionally restricted in mainstream middle-class American culture, they are a significant form of expression, constituting a culturally sensitive performance style, in a number of linguistic traditions. Ideophonic performances are, however, distinct from what is typically understood as performance (cf. Bauman 1977; Bauman and Briggs 1990). They exist as fleeting moments of performance within discourse that may itself be minimally or maximally performative.∑ Kunene , writing about Southern Sotho, a Bantu language, says the following about ideophones’ performativity: The ideophone stands aloof from the connecting tissues, the sinews, and ligaments that flesh out the basic components of speech into a morphological, grammatical, and syntactic system. By thus isolating itself, it, so to speak, climbs the stage to become an act, thus removing itself from the ordinary run-of-the-mill narrative surrounding it. By its very nature, it imposes on the subject the function of an actor or performer whose surrogate is the narrator. The closest analogy is that of an oral narrative performer who from time to time ‘‘becomes ’’ the characters he/she is narrating about and acts out their parts (2001:190). Kunene’s allusive, metaphorical description of ideophonic performance gives us a rare portrait of ideophony from a man who, as a linguist, an actor, and a native user, can comment from multiple vantage points. For the purposes of my overall argument about the perspectival significance of ideophony, his comments are particularly helpful. He states, in essence, that an ideophonic performer is like other performers who displace their subjectivity onto characters they are narrating about, thereby becoming those characters. It is the way in which ideophones Riveting Objectivity 31 make use of perspectival shift or, to adopt Goffman’s (1974) term, frame change that make them a bit incongruent for models of the way discourse is supposed to work. In models of conversation developed by Gumperz (1982) and clari fied by...