"What Are You Going to Do with the Village's Knowledge?" Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court

Law & Society Review, Jun 2005 by Richland, Justin B

Often Conley and O'Barr's analyses of the larger macrosociological forces operating within and upon these interactions are laid out in ways that could make more explicit a reckoning of the specific manner in which representations of norms of talk and social relations are invoked and constituted by interlocutors through their interactions. While their conclusions concerning the relationship between trial talk and legal power are not doubted here, it seems at least as important to attend to the schematics concerning language and its links to other sociocultural phenomena that participants themselves index and construct when they are engaged in their legal discourses. What are the implicit images of relations between men and women, and their language practices, that lawyers constitute in their cross-examination tactics such that they smack of gender discrimination and violence? How do witnesses participate in the constitution of these images of gendered relations and interactions? Are they complicit in them, or do they work to counter them; and how does such participation contribute to witnesses' (re)victimization through courtroom discourse? Moreover, is this (re)victimization itself the product of some particularized form of gendered violence constituted through images of male/female discourses and relations? Or is it more generally the "violence" that seems to attend the adversarial cant of cross-examination proceedings?

Such questions may not immediately present themselves in the U.S. courtroom contexts where Conley and O'Barr have conducted their work. But assumptions regarding the social force and meaning of particular speech activities cannot be so safely made in situations, such as many (post)colonial legal contexts, where cross-cultural influences and concerns of legal pluralism are more explicitly at work. Importing the theories and methodologies of legal discourse analysis into interactional contexts such as those of the Hopi Tribal Court thus requires an approach to the data that takes more measure of the sociocultural images and norms that participants index or claim through their talk and how such representations impact that talk and the social force that flows through it. The recent focus of scholarship into what are being called language ideologies and metadiscursive practices is concerned with just these kinds of discursive features.

Language Ideologies and Metadiscursive Practices

In the 1990s, linguistic anthropologists who had long investigated the details of actual language use and interaction began to pursue lines of inquiry that account for the ties that situated instances of language use have to local norms and beliefs about language and the macrosociological forces of social order that might flow through them (Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998; Gal 1996; Silverstein & Urban 1996; Bauman & Briggs 1990). An interest emerged among these scholars in understanding the local schemas and practices of interpretation and evaluation with which participants and their audiences make sense of their own communicative events. Focused inquiries into aspects of verbal art and performance, metapragmatics, and even textuality all evinced a recognition of the dialectical relationship that perdures between the beliefs that people have about language and the actual use of specific language forms. Most recently, and under the rubric of language ideology analyses (Kroskrity 2000; Woolard 1998), this interest has taken on an even broader focus, expanding the study of this dialectical relationship farther into society and its forces by considering how beliefs and talk about talk are informed by political economic forces. As such, language ideologies and metadiscursive practices (communication that implicitly and/or explicitly refers to, indexes, or otherwise frames other discourses [Briggs 1993]) are explored today as mediating, in complex and often conflicting ways, the manner in which details of language use and practice are invoked by social actors to authorize, naturalize, and/or resist and deconstruct local, colonial, nation-state, and even global social orders (Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998).