Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv, 207 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-087697-5.
This excellent monograph engages critically with the theoretical literature on language socialization and the study of age through ethnographic exploration of village life in the Marshall Islands. Berman uses precise ethnolinguistic data to make her conceptual points and narrative threads to create coherence within and between chapters. She also situates herself as a young American female within the narratives, thus investigating various ethical issues involved in doing research of this kind while also making cross-cultural comparisons that facilitate legibility for readers without prior knowledge of linguistic anthropology or Pacific cultures.
At a theoretical level, Berman’s insights are considerable. She uses ethnographic and discursive evidence to develop her conceptual approach in chapter 2 as well as in every other chapter. First, she confirms the axiomatic understanding of language socialization scholars that nature does not determine the embodied beliefs and communicative practices of human beings, but that ideologies and habits are developed across the lifespan through multimodal social interactions within the communities of practice into which individuals are born. Furthermore, she contributes to the language socialization paradigm by exploring how the social category of age itself (like gender, class, and race) is contextually co-constructed rather than universally ready-made to be studied. This in turn supports the theory that human agency is influenced but not wholly constrained by sociocultural and political economic parameters, as even children have a say in their own self-production. Finally, mingling the given of culture’s semi-mutability with her insights that childhood subjectivities are reproduced and transformed through cultural dialogue, Berman concludes that age differences plus history produce cultural change.
These theoretical points are fleshed out at the ethnographic level first in broad strokes (an overview of the field site is found in the first chapter) and then through the strategy of presenting a single narrative as the backbone of each individual chapter. Over the course of the book, these narratives build in the reader a sense of having come to know the community even though we have only had an in-depth look at several interactions between a few select individuals. But this is the magical mission of anthropology: to make sense of how communities create themselves (their ideologies, social institutions, and normative practices) by way of the interactions of unique individuals. And the only way we accept ethnographic results as credible is if we somehow come to believe that the researcher has spent the requisite time coming to know a range of individuals and the community at large. Berman establishes this trust by telling us about her long and ongoing experience (begun in 2003) with the village of Jajikon (an alias) and Majuro (the capital of the Marshall Islands), first as a volunteer teacher and later as an anthropologist (including 24 months of immersive fieldwork). This has led to her competence in the local language and deep entanglement in local social networks. Additionally, her transparency about the roles she played in each of the vignettes she analyzes provides the reader with perspective on how her presence has influenced the ongoing interactions of the people she is seeking to understand.
Her richly suggestive data include maps, photos, kin charts, multisensorial descriptions, local terms and quotes (different types of quotation marks distinguish between words caught on tape and those she captured as accurately as possible in her notes), as well as ethnographic vignettes and transcripts based on audiovisual recordings of natural discourse. The latter, which include Marshallese participants from across the age, gender, and village-urban spectrum, are used to explore a range of communicative practices and related cultural values. For instance, in chapter 3, events unfold from Berman’s invitation to a friend to accompany her to the neighbouring town’s store where soda is rumoured to be newly available and leads to her learning norms and choices (given those norms) for how and what sorts of goods and information need to be hidden and/or requested from whom. The cultural values at stake include the expectation that adults are (and feel shame for not being) generous, with respect to food in particular, in order to create strong ties of reciprocity and mutual care. The communicative strategies developed for avoiding giving (or responsibility for not giving) include lying about and hiding signs of possessing things, employing indirect requests and refusals, and using jokes, gossip, and other genres to cooperate in the facework of assigning or avoiding blame.
By contrast, the narratives in the remaining chapters explore how children do this all differently, and they do it differently not because they have not yet been effectively socialized into appropriate adult behaviour but because they have already been effectively socialized into appropriate child behaviour. For instance, in chapter 4, a boy parades around eating a lollipop, refusing to share it with other children who ask, all behaviours (public eating, asking, refusing) deemed incorrect for adults but socially constructed through such interactions as natural for children. The next chapter’s story is about a child who was wounded with a knife, probably by his adoptive mother (but some things can never be known for sure given how gossip works and blame assigned in Jajikon). Here adults, while acknowledging that children have (these days) acquired the communicative competence to lie, use the ideology that children do not (by nature) lie to attain their own adult, but discursively occluded, goals. Finally, in chapter 6, Berman relates the tale of a female teenager who was sent by an older female to request a can of tuna from a teenage boy sitting in a group of males. But because of the shyness she was developing as part of becoming an adult female, the teenager sent a pre-pubescent female, who did not feel shame, to do the task of asking. Here Berman’s central point is realized: the child’s behaviour and feelings were not naturally age-related but had been and were being socialized into existence through such agency-infused interactions just as much as was the teenagers’ gendered habitus.
Only one critique can be levied at this work: that it does not spend more time examining the historical context or the larger structural power relations that may be interdiscursively affecting the micro-politics of Berman’s participants’ social interactions. In particular, she presents data that suggest some interesting context-specific, gender-related ideologies and practices yet does not unpack how these are influencing the production and performance of age in this specific ethnographic moment. However, a well-constructed monograph cannot do everything, and Berman’s primary goal of highlighting the self-making agency of individual children in the cultural construction of age as a sociocultural category is excellently achieved and is a key insight for the ongoing development of the language socialization paradigm.
Kathleen C. Riley
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick