Power Sharing: Language, Rank, Gender and Social Space in Pohnpei, Micronesia
Research funded by the National Science Foundation, the International Institute for Education (Fulbright), the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Language and Status in Pohnpei
Pohnpei is an island nation in the western central Pacific Ocean, a member of the Federated States of Micronesia. In 1992-3 I conducted a research project to understand relationships between social hierarchies and language, using Pohnpeian society as a setting to investigate this issue. I was interested in closely examining particular social interactions between people at a “micro” level (focusing on small details) to show how they can explicate the nature and constitution of what are usually understood as “macro” (larger) social processes, such as power and status relations.
I studied interactions among members of the island nation of Pohnpei as the people skillfully used the resources provided by their language to indicate relative social status between interactants in a conversation. In addition to grammatical status marking, an elaborate visual map of ranked social space is also encoded onto the physical environment.
One of the principal aims of investigating status marked language is to understand how social relationships are built in particular interactions between particular members of society, and how building social inequality is a collaborative process. Status differences are constructed, maintained, and challenged through specific practices, namely language practices and other symbolic systems of communication and reproduction. In Pohnpei, as in many societies, hierarchy is socially valued and viewed as a “natural” and productive way of ordering social life.
I acknowledge a great debt to the Pohnpeian people, especially those of the Madolenihmw chiefdom for their generous help and hospitality during my research.
Publications from the project
| In Press | The Sociolinguistics of Status in Pohnpei. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language. |
| 2002 | Everyday Interactions and the Domestication of Social Inequality IPRA Pragmatics 12:3.347-359. |
| 2002 | Space and its Role in Social Stratification in Pohnpei, Micronesia. In Representing Space in Oceania: Culture in Language and Mind, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Bennardo, Giovanni, ed., 201-213. |
| 2002 | Anthropological Linguistics. Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics. Raj Mesthrie, ed. Pergamon Press. |
| 2002 | Spanish and the Missionization Effort on Pohnpei: Language and Cultural Influences. Lo ropio y lo ajeno en las lenguas austronesicas y amerindias. Klaus Zimmerman and Thomas Stolz, eds., Frankfort am Main: Vervuert, Madrid: Iberoamericana, 295-312. |
| 2001 | Language, Identity, and the Production of Authority in New Discursive Contests in Pohnpei, Micronesia. Journal de la Société des Océaniste, 112, annee 2001-1, pp. 73-80. |
| 2000 | Moments of Hierarchy: Constructing Social Stratification by means of Language, Food, Space, and the Body in Pohnpei, Micronesia. American Anthropologist 102(2):303-320. |
| 1999 | Contesting Representations of Gender Stratification in Pohnpei, Micronesia, Ethnos 64:3, pp. 350-371. |
| 1998 | Power Sharing: Language, Rank, Gender and Social Space in Pohnpei,
Micronesia. Oxford University Press. |
| 1998 | Honor and Stratification in Pohnpei, Micronesia. American Ethnologist, 25(3):399-411. |
| 1997 | Honorific Possession: Power and Language in Pohnpei, Micronesia.
Language in Society, 26(2): 247-268. |
| 1997 | Constructing Hierarchy: Women and Honorific Speech in Pohnpei, Micronesia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 129:103-115. |
| 1995 | Spatial Conceptions of Hierarchy in Pohnpei Micronesia. In Spatial Information Theory, A. Frank and W. Kuhn, eds., pp. 463-474. Berlin: Springer, pp. 463-474. |