Linguistic ideologies And the naturalization of power in warao discourse

Abstract

I want to take up an issue that is succinctly raised by Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory of hactice.The notion that social groups produce arbitrary modes of thinking and acting, social structures, and the like is common anthropological fare.Interested in the Marxist problematics of power and ideology, Bourdieu (1977: 164) goes on to suggest that "every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness."A similar concern guides Foucault's work on the emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 0f "a new technology of the exercise of power" that gained its productive capacity through its ability "to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behavior" (1980: 724, 125).Gramsci (197t) was interested in the way that hegemony, resistance, and revolution both create and challenge dominant structures; literary critics, such as Williams (7977), and anthropologists, such as Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) and Scott (1985), have drawn on Gramsci's insights in exploring the politics of culture.Taussig has demonstrated the power of commodity fetishism (1980) and terror and shamanism (1987,1991) for naturalizing social relations in post-colonial South America.My goal in this paper is to link this question to a subject of growing interest in linguistic anthropologfthe ideology of language.As Hymes (1974) pointed out years ago, perspectives on language structure and use vary as widely between speech communities as do linguistic structures and speech norms.While linguistics has ' ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.My primary debt in this paper is to the residents of the Mariusa region, particularly Santiago Rivera and Manuel Torres, and of the communities of Iflamuhu and Murako.H.

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