Chapter 5 – The ethnography of language and language documentation
115
speech situation: Setting/Scene, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key,
Instrumentalities, Norms, Genre (Hymes 1971; Saville-Troike 2003 offers a
more comprehensive compilation of analytic units in the ethnography of
communication). We need such heuristics, because patterns of usage are
not always noticeable or easily interpretable. While we encounter some
patterns as weird and jarring, others are so easily naturalized that they be-
come invisible before we ever notice them. I have two rules I share with my
own students: The first is to always assume that a difference is meaningful,
not natural. The second is never to assume that a difference is due to inade-
quacy on the part of speakers. Indeed, for the ethnographer, the feeling that
your interlocutors are rude, or stupid, or crazy, is an extremely useful signal
that you have probably bumped into a very interesting difference.
Let me give an example of a mistake of my own, where I assumed that a
difference was natural instead of meaningful. When I was working in cen-
tral Mexico and would visit my Nahuatl-speaking friends in their homes,
they would greet me with a peculiar intonation contour that starts in falsetto
and terminates in creaky voice. Women do a particularly exaggerated ver-
sion of this “squeak-creak” contour. I simply did not pick up on this as the
highly formal politeness that it was. Why? I think the reason is that most
people in this population are physically rather small. It is not uncommon
for older women especially to be less than 150 centimeters tall, and I often
felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The falsetto voice of the squeak-
creak contour seemed a perfectly reasonable sound to emanate from these
tiny little women, and I never stopped to think that in fact on other occa-
sions they spoke in perfectly normal voices. I had been in and out of the
field in Tlaxcala for four or five years when the Mayanist linguist Louanna
Furbee asked me at a conference party if Nahuatl speakers used the same
polite falsetto that she had heard among the Tojolobales, a Mayan commu-
nity of the Mexican state of Chiapas. I had the sort of experience that car-
toonists represent by showing a lightbulb going on in the balloon above the
character’s head; suddenly I could hear my friends saying, “Coma:lehtzi:n!
Ximopano:ltitzi:no! Ximotla:li:tzi:no!” and realized that what I had been
hearing was not a natural index of how small they were, but a highly mean-
ingful message expressing social distance and hierarchical order. They
meant not just “Comadrita! Come in! Sit down!” They also meant, “We are
greatly honored by your presence.” Fortunately my failure to understand
exactly what they were doing did not, I think, have much impact on my
work. But other cases of “naturalization” might have precisely such conse-
quences. It is for this reason that one of the ethnographic arts is to “make
116
Jane H. Hill
strange,” always to ask, “Why did that just happen? How might it have
been different? Does it mean what I think it means? Can I find evidence in
favor or to the contrary?” Staying for months on end in the hypothesis-
testing mode of “making strange,” rather than simply “being there,” is ex-
hausting, and we will always slip, but training in this ethnographic attitude
and how to sustain it is essential for documentary linguists. And the rule of
thumb – “Assume difference is meaningful, not natural” – is very helpful.
In contrast to differences in usage that are easily naturalized, some dif-
ferences in usage are highly salient and even startling. These are the kinds
of differences that are categorized under “cross-cultural miscommunica-
tion,” that lead people from one community to conclude that those in an-
other are uncivilized or stupid. I want to give an example that will not only
show how such differences are some of the most interesting for the ethnog-
rapher, but also to show how deeply embodied in speaker habitus the dif-
ferential patterns of language use are, and how departures from them will
seem almost physically uncomfortable. One extremely annoying feature of
my fieldwork in Mexico was working with people who treated appoint-
ments – compromisos – as less than fixed. When I tried to make appoint-
ments for interviews, people would smile happily and tell me to come a
una buena hora (literally, ‘at a good hour’, which turns out to mean
“early”), and assure me that primero Dios (‘if God wills it’), they would be
pleased to be available to help me. About 60 % of the time people in fact
kept such appointments. But on more than a few occasions I arrived for the
appointment only to learn that the intended interviewee was far away on
some errand that could have been easily predicted, such as a pilgrimage to a
saint’s festival that was fixed on the annual calendar or attendance at a
market that occurred on the same day every week without fail. I knew better
than to think of them as rude or insincere, and began to think about why this
happened. Eventually I developed an account of it in terms of the theory of
types of “face” from politeness theory (Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson
1987), which was very helpful in understanding other communicative prob-
lems as well. Put briefly, these communities were heavily biased toward
attention to so-called “positive face,” everybody’s right to feel wanted and
liked. In local terms, to make a social commitment that you could not keep
was a fairly minor white lie, while to say “No” to someone’s face, even
very politely and with elaborate excuses, was a major threat, a threat to
positive face. The threat to my negative face (the right to the autonomy that
would permit me to avoid inconvenience) was practically irrelevant. I
would be annoyed when I found myself 50 kilometers from my home base