Year: 1981
Type: article
Abstract: To understand ... social systems, we must study the practical action of [people's] daily lives as well as the metaphor in which [they] express it.(Murphy 1971: 162) I NFORMATION, ITS concealment, management, and control, is a central concern to any human society.People use information to form their existential understanding of .their particular condition and their relationships to other persons, groups, or even gods.People talk about themselves and others, significant and insignificant.In this paper I look at how people talk about one another through teasing, gossip, and local names.Although partite studies of naming, gossiping, and teasing have appeared, my purpose is to propose these as a process through which individuals and their actions are compared, controlled, and manipulated.Data from Rapanui, as the inhabitants of Easter Island refer to themselves, their island, and their language, illustrate the phases in that symbolic passage of person and behavior from simply corrective tease to the fixing of an event and its perpetrator in a community's collective and intimate history.In this paper, I am interested not just in the character of the information in a community, but also information about the characters who transact their daily lives in their social groups.I am not claiming uniqueness for the Rapanui in the way that they handle information, but contend that the following analysis may be applied to any ethnographic context where people tease one another, talk about one another, and have a local descriptive naming system.Even in those societies where naming has become the prerogative of the state, which
Author: Grant Edwin McCall
Language: English
Topic: Language and Culture
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2242699113