3 - The avoidance of intentional discourse: a Samoan case study

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter I return to a case study first presented in a paper I delivered at the 1983 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, later distributed as a technical report (Duranti 1984) and then slightly revised as a journal article (Duranti 1988), and as a chapter of an edited book (Duranti 1993b). What I present here is a revision of the original paper that takes advantage of some additional inspection of the Samoan data collected in 1978–1979 and frames the issues in the broader context of this book.

Overall, the data presented in this chapter support previous claims that Samoan interpretive practices are fundamentally non- or even anti-introspective and as such tend to privilege a reading of a person’s actions in terms of their effects on social relations and on the public face of particular institutions, groups, and positional roles. Samoan epistemology, that is, shows similarities with a pragmatist interpretation of human action whereby the truth of a statement tends to be evaluated in terms of its effects. Even when people seem to be searching for causes, reasons, or sources (māfua) of wrongful behavior, discussions about “causes” usually have a brief discourse life as they tend to be quickly dismissed or ignored by the participants in the interaction (see §3.4.1 and Chapter 5). For example, we will see that even though lying is considered by the matai or ‘titled holders’ a violation of trust and something to condemn, it usually does not evoke a discussion about what the liar was trying to achieve by not telling the truth, with the exception of stereotypical explanations such as being under the influence of alcohol regardless of whether there was empirical evidence that alcohol was involved. This suggests that in Samoa, even though there is language that could be used for speculating about one’s emotions and motivations (see Gerber 1985), there is a cultural dispreference for engaging in such discursive practices and a recourse to typifications of standard cause-and-effect connections as opposed to an individual-specific analysis that might reveal unexpected and potentially unsettling results.