Communication
Ritual / BeliefPerformative vs. Descriptive
The term "Performative" was coined by John Langshaw Austin (How to do things with words; Harvard University Press, 1962) and names a class of linguistic constructions. Example: "I name this ship the 'Enterprise'" As it were, at the moment of speaking becomes this statement "reality". Also the sentence "She/He is the one" can be used performatively. Still another example from everyday life: "Hereby we dissociate ourselves from the contents of all linked sides." It has been pointed out by Austin and others, that such constructions result in meaningful statements only in a certain social and semiotic environment. I.e. the attention of certain rules is necessary. With "It shall be light" it functions rather rarely.
A phenomenon: The terms "lifelong learning" or "sustainable economic development" come along, nobody actually knows from where, and our handling of the terms suggests, that the contents would be new, and until the terms coinage not existent. Which is not correct, these terms designate established facts, possibly pointed, or from a special perspective, which is actually not expressed. Or they use well-known facts, which came so far without an explicit term, in order to introduce a new content.
Immanuel Kant wrote: "Percepts without concepts are blind, concepts without percepts are meaningless / Intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty".
Performative Rituals
Anthropologists and Linguists have long been interested in ritual and ceremony for what they reveal about the religious, political, social, and aesthetic aspects of societies and cultures. As a symbolic and or performative action, rituals can be explored not only for their meanings but also for the effects they have on the lives of their participants.
Even so the definition of a ritual is not quite clear; it is one of the themes in the area of religion and culture that affects most of us. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through pre-decided signs and words and a mutual understanding of the participants about the rituals meaning.
This text contains an intelligible description of a religious ritual. Rituals have by no means always a religious context, as can be observed in sport rituals. Ritual practice and their effect on social communities have been analyzed in this study about rituals and beliefs.
Rituals and ceremonies are social events which are believed to have the power to effect meaningful transformations (e.g. healing rituals). Recently sociologists have broadened the notion of ritual to include the patterned interactions of everyday life, such as etiquette and ordinary daily performances. And also sophisticated and subtle humor, at least in the written form of sayings, quotations and puns, can have a performative aspect.
Linguistics: Babel's children
"IT IS hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase “the chicken is eating” translates into colloquial Riau as “ayam makan”. Literally, this is “chicken eat”. But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse as “the chicken is making somebody eat”, or “somebody is eating where the chicken is”.
There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the definite from the indefinite (“the”, as opposed to “a”). Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that western linguists are familiar with have them."
"[…] This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky—in particular, his theory of “deep grammar”. According to Dr Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, “I dided it” instead of “I did it”). There is also the ability of the children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its minimum requirements."
"[…] Many of the people who developed modern linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, English was often described until well into the 20th century as having six different noun cases, because Latin has six. (A noun case is how that noun's grammatical use is distinguished, for example as a subject or as an object.) Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not have noun cases at all, others that it has two (one for the possessive, the other for everything else) while still others maintain that there are three or four cases. These would include the nominative (for the subject of a sentence), the accusative (for its object) and the genitive (to indicate possession)."
"[…] A project that Dr Gil is just beginning in Indonesia, in collaboration with Lera Boroditsky, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is examining correlations between the way concepts are expressed in languages and how native speakers of these languages think. This is a test of a hypothesis first made by Benjamin Lee Whorf, an early 20th-century American linguist, that the structure of language affects the way people think. Though Whorf's hypothesis fell into disfavour half a century ago, it is now undergoing something of a revival.
Dr. Boroditsky's experiment is simple. People are shown three pictures, one of a man about to kick a ball, one of the same man having just kicked a ball, and a third of a different man who is about to kick a ball. They are then asked which two of the three are the most similar. Indonesians generally choose the first two pictures, which have the same man in them, while English speakers are likely to identify the two pictures that show the ball about to be kicked — an emphasis on the temporal, rather than the spatial, relationship between the principal objects in the picture."
"Dr Gil believes that this might be because time is, in English, an integral grammatical concept — every verb must have a tense, be it past, present or future. By contrast, in Indonesian, expressing a verb's tense is optional, and not always done." [Jan 8th 2004, The Economist]