Power Sharing: Language, Rank, Gender, and Social Space in Pohnpei, Micronesia (review)

Approaching language as a potent form of social action in the conception of speech act theory (cf. John L. Austin, How to do things with words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), this highly original work analyzes the use of honorifics in a major Oceanic language. Based on extensive fieldwork, much of it conducted during traditional Pohnpeian feasts and public ceremonies with the aid of video recordings, Elizabeth Keating augments in important ways existing structural descriptions of the Pohnpeian system of honorific speech, such as the authoritative Ponapean reference grammar (Kenneth L. Rehg, with Damian G. Sohl, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981). K goes beyond the referential meaning of Pohnpeian status-marked speech forms to explore the social implications of how honorifics, defined as ‘systems of marking relative social status through grammatical choices’ (37), are actually deployed in real speech situations. Her findings add important dimensions to our understanding of social deixis, which she defines as ‘the encoding of social distinctions that are relative to the social relationship between participants in an interaction’ (9).

The book consists of an introduction (3–16), seven chapters (18–194), a conclusion (195–7), bibliography (199–210), and index (211–4), with maps showing the general location of Pohnpei (16–7) and the island’s traditional territorial divisions (4). Numerous photos throughout illustrate the positional interactions of the speech act participants in the analyzed dialogs (these pictures are important, since Pohnpeian status-marked behavior involves nonverbal actions and body positions as well as speech forms). There are also numerous examples of discourse, each with interlinear glosses and literal English translations, as well as tables showing the formal structure of elements of Pohnpeian honorific speech, so that the book can serve as both corpus and reference for this particular aspect of the grammar.

Many of K’s observations are new and unexpected. Rather than functioning as a means of social distance (a role linguists typically ascribe to honorific systems), the use of Pohnpeian status-marked speech can also construct an interdependent intimacy between contrasting levels of society. And rather than being imposed exclusively from above, the use of honorific speech also represents an active means by which commoners (nonroyalty) negotiate their own social position and rights vis-a-vis the chiefs, so that these elements of grammar express a system of shared values in a dynamic, interactive way, hence the book’s title, Power sharing. For instance, the contrastive use of inclusive vs. exclusive pronouns during oratory speech can elevate commoners by intimately associating them with royalty.

Particularly interesting and persuasive is K’s argument that Pohnpeian honorifics include two structurally nonisometric levels—the exaltive and the humiliative—whose use depends upon a semi-fluid hierarchy of factors involving speech act participants as well as the activity in progress during discourse. Exaltive speech elements often lack a specifically low-status honorific equivalent. Nouns in particular tend to have exaltive, but not humiliative, forms. Also, exaltive forms evince a richness of metaphor (for instance, a chief’s memories are referred to by a noun that literally means ‘clouds in the sky’). Humiliative forms, on the other hand, show a bleaching of semantic content in relation to high-status forms, so that one or two generic verb forms convey a whole range of body movements or positions expressible by separate lexical items in non-status-marked or exaltive speech. Both types of Pohnpeian honorifics cluster in specific areas of the lexicon which K lists as: ‘body location in space, possession, knowledge, food, and references to speech itself’ (196). Finally, while previous studies emphasized the male-dominant aspects of honorific usage and tend to overemphasize the importance of high-status forms, K explores the active ways in which women exercise social influence through the use of both humiliative and exaltive forms (122–54).

This study obviously has important theoretical implications for the functional and typological analysis of...