Charles Zuckerman

A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the "Limits of Awareness," set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' "awareness" of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential "awareness" of aspects of language has since been foundational to linguistic anthropological understandings of language ideologies. Here we consider Silverstein's argument with reference to our research in Laos, exploring the limits of metalinguistic discourse. We argue that the apparent constraints on our capacity to talk about aspects of language do not evidence limits of awareness of elements of language, but rather constraints on our ability to thematize those elements, that is, to bring them into joint attention. The central issue is thematization, and the relation of interest is a relation of joint attention between speakers. Metalanguage is thus constrained not (only) by psychological limits but by the social and semiotic limits on what people can bring into mutual focus within interactions. To present our framing of the issue and show what it helps us see, we distinguish two kinds of thematization and describe their subtypes, affordances, and constraints. We then demonstrate how social conventions--broadly understood--can circumvent these constraints, allowing people to thematize otherwise difficult to thematize forms.

In his essay on the cockfight, Clifford Geertz charted a now familiar course in anthropological argument. He showed how the minute details of a practice can dramatize cultural ideas about it. Many anthropologists since have been persuaded that “prac- tice” matters, that carefully examining the conduct of events is bound to reveal something about the status of such events in cultural life. This article reflects on the role of video footage in this equation, arguing that footage is useful for, among other things, tempering assumptions that all practice is thick with reflexive meaning relevant to its overarching type. Through an ex- tended example drawn from my research on gambling in Laos, I suggest that, when squinted at in the right way while writing and thinking, video footage can be a heuristic for countering the urge to reduce practice into a cultural gestalt, in which all interactional details carry the same meaningful architecture.

At a sparsely populated wake in Luang Prabang, Laos, the guests appeared to re- strain themselves from evaluating the deceased’s son-in-law to his face, even as they said to one another that he had neglected his mother-in-law and pocketed the funds for her wake to feed his methamphetamine habit. What are we to do with moments of apparent restraint like this, those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? What do they mean for ac- counts of ordinary ethics? In unpacking the events of Paa’s wake, I suggest that such moments force us to reckon with the relation between signs of evaluation and me- ta-ethical accounts of them, as they also give flesh to the descriptive claim that hu- mans are evaluative. Doing so makes clear that, at times, whether a particular person is being evaluative in a particular moment remains uncertain. At other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves. [ordinary ethics; anthropology of ethics; Laos; evaluation; face-to-face inter- action; sincerity; character]

Kri people in central Laos traditionally engage in 'heavy' practices, including a stipulation that houses must be relocated and the flooring discarded upon a death in the family. Such 'heavy' practices are considered 'real Kri', and they are not adhered to by those who identify as Kri Phòòngq. This article examines the adoption of more enduring housing construction among the Kri, and the dynamics of ethnic identity implied by the dilemmas raised for individuals and families who must choose between (a) maintaining the heavy life of real Kri, (b) innovating new and less heavy solutions, or (c) changing identity entirely.

In Luang Prabang, Laos, pétanque players distinguish two types of gambling: 'gambling for beer' and 'gambling for money'. They readily and vividly contrast these types in abstraction but are more circumspect about identifying actual games as instances of one kind or another. In this article, I trace how players use these types in two modes of typification--as generics and specifics--and articulate a new way to approach similar salient and ideologically weighty 'ethno-metapragmatic terms', which can appear messy and unwieldy. I argue that pulling apart these modes of typification clarifies how and why people use such terms for social action, and where anyone studying them-or the types that are thought to underly them-should begin.

Linguistic anthropologists have shown that the way a person reports speech or represents discourse—for example, whether they ‘put on an accent' or merely repeat attributed words—is crucial for understanding what social action that person is undertaking. And yet, our tools for talking about the form of represented discourse are still crude. This paper offers a new tool in the notion of figure composition, defined as the formal semiotic elements that comprise a given voice. Reflecting on figure composition, alongside Agha ’s (2005) notion of figure transparency, invites us to shift from asking what kind of represented discourse any given stretch of represented discourse is to asking (1) What elements of represented discourse appear to be coming from the quoted figure(s)? and (2) How are these elements used to produce interactional effects?

Some anthropologists have developed "processual" approaches to classification, arguing that we should turn our attention from reified categories to processes of categorization. A focus on how gamblers in Luang Prabang, Laos, use the categories "gambling for beer" and "gambling for money" makes clear that an adequate processual approach must disentangle two kinds of typification: one generic, one specific. People in Luang Prabang are drawn to categories of gambling as tools for both painting the world abstractly (generics) and putting action under a description (specifics). Distinguishing these two kinds of typification resolves the apparent tension between "ideal types" and messy "practice," and it redirects the study of human classification toward understanding how people mobilize categories for diverse moral ends.

The notion of the "phatic" is less a single empirical object than two tangled threads of inquiry, separable into communion phaticity and contact phaticity. The former sense is a shorthand for "small talk" aimed at building relations rather than imparting information. The latter sense captures the extent to which signs are oriented toward communicative contact. Recent work on the phatic demonstrates that people the world over have elaborate ideologies about the significance of contact. Reflecting on such ideologies helps explain why scholars so often entangle contact and communion phaticity and clarifies the big questions at phaticity’s core.

“Tempted,” as he put it, by the “demon of terminological invention,” Malinowski first coined the term “phatic” as one half of a two-word compound, “phatic communion.” Since Malinowski, “phatic” has often been used to imply a semiotic equation where mere communicative contact automatically produces positive social relations among those communicating. This article explores a genre of “trash talk” on the pétanque gambling courts of Luang Prabang, Laos to challenge this assumption and clarify multiple senses of “phaticity.” With close attention to talk used not for positive communion but for distraction, I argue that communicative contact as a technical phenomenon must be separated from communicative contact as a sign of other kinds of meaning.

This chapter tracks the dissolution of a group of close, male friends or siaw1 to explore the “problem of peers” (Sidnell and Shohet 2013:623) in otherwise hierarchical Laos. My argument draws a parallel between how siaw1 relations are imagined and enacted, and ideologies surrounding the ‘bare’ pronominal forms these men use to refer to one another and themselves. Borrowing from a classic anthropology of ‘loose structures,’ I show that both ideas about siaw1 relations and the bare pronouns siaw1 employ, involve a mixture of aggression and solidarity. Siaw1 alternately represent and enact their friendships as perduring, stable, and sturdy social knots, bound ‘to the death,’ and as delicate ties that might unexpectedly fray or snap. These ambivalent forces contradict one another, but they also work together to prove the resilience of friendships. The same analysis illuminates the pragmatics of the bare first and second person pronouns ‘kuu3’ and ‘mùng2.’ Many have described these (and similarly ‘low’ pronouns cross-linguistically) as having two separate expressive forces––one intimate, the other aggressive. But in siaw1 friendships, kuu3 and mùng2 serve to entangle intimacy with masculine aggression, such that ‘aggression’ is not distinct from ‘solidarity’ but, rather, a means for expressing it.

Anthropologists have long pointed out the intensity with which people sort economic practices into moralized types based on the practices’ purported aims such as gift-giving, ‘deep play,’ and guanxi. Yet more than a century after Malinowski first pitched his tent in the Trobriand Islands and some nine decades after Mauss proposed his theory of the gift, we still know little about how people invoke these types in interaction and why they find them so compelling. In this dissertation, I explore the moral and pragmatic life of economic types in Luang Prabang, Laos and challenge the epistemological life of similar types in anthropology. I argue that understanding moral economy is fundamentally a semiotic problem. That is, moral economic types can only be understood if we study the communicative acts in which they are made manifest. With close attention to these acts, I show that any answer to the classic ethical question of ‘How one should live’ (Williams 2006) is inevitably entangled with another question: ‘How is one living?’

          In Laos, since the 1975 socialist revolution, typifying economic conduct has been a national project. As the late-socialist state adopts once-banned forms of economy, it reframes these practices using the moral categories of its socialist past: the lottery has become ‘pro- development,’ capitalistic business has become a vehicle for the eventual attainment of ‘socialism,’ and gambling, in certain forms, has become ‘good.’ Although I touch on a broad range of empirical economic and social practices—theft at a funeral, lottery buying and selling, paying for food at a bar—I focus empirically on conduct that seems to blur moral types of economy and combine conflicting aims and logics, like generosity and greed, friendship and estrangement, socialism and capitalism. Most centrally, I reflect on the moral and pragmatic dimensions of a contrast that gamblers on the French colonial game called pétanque make between ‘gambling for money’ (lin5 kin3 ngen2) and ‘gambling for beer’ (lin5 kin3 bia3).


          Using materials from more than fifteen months of fieldwork in the rapidly developing city of Luang Prabang, I disentangle the variety of reflexive forms people use to invoke these moral economic types, including implicit and explicit typifications of conduct as well as generic propositions about the types as kinds. I show that close attention to these forms reveals their allure and multifunctional utility: they are not just conceptual categories for reflecting on the world but also clusters of semiotic resources people use to make ethical and pragmatic claims about others as well as themselves. While anthropologists have been wary of ‘ideal types’ in recent years because they ‘distort’ practice, I show that by attending to the heterogeneous ways people use types, we can better understand the reflexive dimensions of ‘ordinary ethics’ and the methodological and epistemological muddles that arise when scholars try to disentangle communication from action.

Although once propagated by the revolutionary government, during the last three decades the Lao Lum-Theung-Suung system has been formally replaced and critiqued by Lao political leaders. Instead of using it, they advise organizing and referring to the groups of Laos with ethnolinguistic categories. Academics also normally prefer these ethnolinguistic categories, regarding them as more exact and scientific. And yet, many academics and government workers still use the tripartite Lao-Lum-Theung- Suung system in writing and in speech. What is it about this system that makes it so lasting, not only among the Lao populace, but among academics? Is it compelling? Is it ingrained?