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Gender and Language in Ethnographic andEvolutionary Perspectives

WILLIAM A. FOLEY

Falk, Dean. 2009. Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of Language. New York: Basic Books.

Goodwin, Marjorie Harkness. 2006. The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Hoffman, Katherine E. 2008. We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber Morocco. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Inoue, Miyako. 2006. Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Much research in the field of language and gender has beenhampered by unquestioned a priori dualistic assumptions about contrasting gender roles for men and women. The works reviewed here all demonstrate that simplistic dualistic beliefs about what are typical male or female ways of speaking do not hold water. The variables that determine speech styles are complex and mutually interactive: place of residence, class, formality, age, and gender,and others. Women are just as capable of directive speech as men, and men, of hedged speech. Dualistic thinking about gender serves only to reinforce current hegemonies.

KEYWORDS conversation, gender, language evolution,language variation, linguistic ideology, sex

Address correspondence to William A. Foley, Linguistics F12, University of Sydney,

Sydney, NSW, 2006 Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Reviews in Anthropology , 40:82–106, 2011Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00938157.2011.572460

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INTRODUCTION: DUALISTIC IDEOLOGIESOF GENDER AND TALK

Dualism is a very pervasive pattern in human thinking; to take some random

examples: the Manichean contrast of light and dark and the linked conceptsgood versus evil; the Cartesian opposition of mind versus matter; the typicalMiddle Sepik River social organization of two opposing moieties and theirtotems, Sky versus Earth, and the ubiquitous cognitive organization of infor-mation there into pairs denoted by a metaphorical appeal to older versus younger sibling (Bateson 1958); and, finally, the perennial nature-nurturedebate in psychology and ethology.

But, undoubtedly the most salient dualistic contrast to human percep-tion is that of sex, the contrasting body types of male versus female. Typically the first question asked of a newborn baby is, ‘‘is it a boy or a girl?’’ What isperhaps remarkable about this is that the body types of all newborn babiesare overwhelmingly similar, yet we focus on rather small anatomical differ-ences in the genital region in order to classify them into mutually exclusiveopposing categories of male versus female sex , so salient is this contrastfor us.

When in the normal course of genetic mutations a baby is born who ishard to classify into one or the other of these mutually exclusive and exhaus-tive categories, we react with horror, and a surgeon’s skill is quickly resortedto in order to resolve the ambiguity and redesign the newborn’s body so thatit conforms acceptably with one of our dual opposed categories. Intersexu-ality flies in the face of our overweening demand for a tidy dualism in ourcategorization of sex; we take it as an offence against the proper order of things, the way the world must be ordered, and hence our quick appeal toremedy this, but not all cultures react in this way. Geertz (1983), for instance,mentions the case of the Pokot of Kenya, for whom an intersex child is justlike a poorly crafted pot, not well made, but certainly not the source of a hor-rified reaction demanding the world be put right. Such facts suggest that theseeming biological bedrock of sex, what is understood about the physiologi-cal contrast between male and female bodies, is a cultural construct; different

societies construe and react to this in different ways. In our culture we brookno blurring of this opposition, but others seem less fazed by cases of ambiguity here.

Whatever may be said about the cultural basis of our understanding of sex and its more or less obvious grounding in biology, there can be no doubtthat gender , what is made of this contrast into two types of bodies and whatsignificances are ascribed to it, is undoubtedly a cultural construction. Thephysiological contrast in sex, male versus female body types, provides apowerful basis for constructing opposing dual cultural categories of mascu-line versus feminine. The content of these categories is not permanently

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set, but, rather, is built up in an ongoing fashion through the daily practicesof social interaction.

Gender is not something we have, but something we do . This is the per-formative theory of gender, laid out in a number of pioneering works on this

topic, notably Butler (1990, 1993), Connell (1995), Fausto-Sterling (2000),and Herdt (1996). Our gender is performed, learned, and reproduced inthe countless routines and rituals through which we live our lives: not justour roles in copulation, but what restrooms we go to in a mall, how we walk, what types of jewelry, if any, we wear, how we pitch our voices, etc. Genderis based on erasing the overwhelming similarities, physiological and other- wise, that men and women share and exaggerating the differences, enjoiningindividuals to perform properly the cultural behavior mandated for personsof their body type. The reasons for this erasure are cultural and ideological,as the three ethnographies reviewed here illustrate, but also quite probably

rooted in asymmetrical parenting practices that go back deep in our evol-utionary past, as Falk’s book argues. Of course, individuals can behave in ways contrary to the norms expected of them, for example, men crying or wearing pink jeans in some cultural settings, but they are commonly met withdisapproval for such infractions, although the severity of censure for gender violations does vary from culture to culture.

Violations of expected gender roles in our culture and perhaps moregenerally do seem to be less strictly condemned for women than men: girlsand women’s wearing of prototypically male clothing like jeans and evensuits has now gained wide acceptance, whereas dresses have yet to catchon with men, and certainly any man caught wearing one outside of liminalinstitutions like drag shows will find themselves severely reproached. Thisundoubtedly reflects the hegemonic position of the masculine gender; itsborders are heavily policed so as not to threaten its supremacy.

The performance theory of gender is resolutely anti-essentialist. Thegender role differences we find between men and women, even those widely attested cross-culturally, do not reside in the genetic differencesbetween their respective body types, but result from how cultures constructsocial roles around these body types and other things (see Butler 1993).

Hence, the performative theory of gender rejects a dualistic construal of gen-der: gender is not a binary contrast of masculine and feminine, but a wholepanoply of roles through which actors can construct their gender identity by adopting, mixing, or altering expected social roles for men and women. Suchan approach gives us much greater scope for enriching our concepts of gender roles, inclusive of gay men, lesbians, transsexuals, intersexuals, trans- vestites, and so on.

In spite of these insights of gender as performed, dualistic thinking con-tinues to be strongly evident in much contemporary research on gender andgendered behavior. Consider two books on gender, highly influential within

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the academy and without: Carol Gilligan’s (1982) In a Different Voice andDeborah Tannen’s (1990) You Just Don’t Understand (the latter developingideas originally proposed in a foundational paper by Maltz and Borker[1982]). The reader should not deduce from the dates of publication of these

works that they are passe´; they are still very influential and guide muchongoing research, particularly cross-disciplinary work. Indeed, one of thebooks discussed in this review is really a sustained attempt to refute them,a fact that demonstrates their continued influence.

These books argue that there is a fundamental contrast (that is, a dual-ism) in the way men and women accomplish interactional tasks. Gilligan(1982) claims that boys are socialized into becoming men who value auto-nomy and their individualized ability to wield power. Boys and men arealleged to reason about fairness and justice by an appeal to abstract princi-ples, while girls and women are said to reason contextually, through the

ongoing demands of the relationships they build. Girls and women areclaimed to reason concretely through specific cases, a mode of ethics basedon care and attachment in relationships rather than autonomous decisionsreached by abstract principles. Tannen (1990) and, earlier, Maltz and Borker(1982) argue that men and women view the goal of conversations differently and thereby conduct them appropriately. Men are said to be competitive andhierarchical and hence view conversations as arenas of contest for status in which their rank rises or falls. Women, on the other hand, are argued tosee conversations as ways to forge interpersonal relationships and build inti-macies. Tannen (1990) does recognize that not all male or female speechbehavior conforms to such stereotypes. For example, she notes that it isnot the case that men interrupt women more often than women interruptmen, but that power and class can play central roles in determining suchasymmetric speech behavior. Nevertheless, her overall thrust is to argue infavor of a gendered dualism of speech behavior for men and women,although clearly individuals can exemplify divergent behavior on occasion.

Maltz and Borker (1982) trace these differences to the styles boys andgirls adopt in childhood during play. Boys typically play in larger groups thangirls, and these groups are structured hierarchically according to status. Status

is relative and ever changing so the main point of boys’ play interactions is tomanipulate their peers to enhance their status. In these competitive attemptsto enhance status, speech has three roles:

1. to assert one’s dominance2. to attract and hold an audience, and3. to assert oneself when others have the floor.

The styles of speech used will reflect these functions: orders, threats,and ridicule (asserting one’s dominance), boasting or other types of

display of verbal skills (attracting and holding an audience) and refusals to


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listen to others or interruptions of their turns (asserting oneself when othershave the floor).

The world of girls is utterly different in this account. Their playgroupsare smaller, often just pairs, and their games are cooperative and organized

in non-competitive ways. Differentiation among girls is not established interms of status differentials of power, but in terms of relative closeness.Friendship is construed in terms of intimacy, commitment, and loyalty. Thegoal of interaction is to reinforce these feelings of connection. To put itbaldly and oversimplistically in terms of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory,boys are more focused on their negative face, in that status gives them inde-pendence and freedom to act, including coercing others to act as they want(i.e., power), while girls are more concerned with positive face, the positiveevaluation they give each other through mutual closeness. Of course, conflictnecessarily arises sometimes in all human groups, even those exclusively

of girls.Boys typically resolve conflict through displays of dominance, often

involving physical force, but in the more egalitarian cooperative groups of girls this option is not easily available. Girls must learn to use interactive stra-tegies, which attend to the positive face needs of the other, but at the sametime effectively criticize them for their behavior. Girls, then, are necessarily more ‘‘polite’’ than boys. Speech for girls must serve both these ends:

1. to create and maintain relationships of equality and closeness, and2. to criticize others effectively without rupturing a desired relationship.

Their typical styles of speech will emphasize offers rather than ordersand exhibit a high proportion of modalized constructions and emotionalterms (marking close, equal relationships) and be relatively polite andindirect (acceptable criticism).

INDEXING GENDER IN CHILDHOOD CONVERSATIONS

The first of the books under review, Marjorie Harness Goodwin’s The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion (2006), is a direct attackon the dualistic lines of thinking about gender roles epitomized by Gilligan(1982), Tannen (1990), and Maltz and Borker (1982) summarized above.The book is a careful ethnographic study of pre-teen girls in a few schoolsin the United States, most importantly, a private elementary school in amiddle-class suburb of Los Angeles.

The methodological and theoretical framework that Goodwin employsis conversational analysis (Sacks 1995; Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974;Sidnell 2010; Silverman 1998), an approach that pays exact attention to

the details of what people say and how they say it, instead of obtaining

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information in interviews or notes drawn from participant observationrelying on memory. Goodwin videotaped more than 80 hours of childreninteracting on the playground or over lunch, and transcribed the conversations recorded using the conventions of conversational analysis

(presented in her Appendix A). Conversational analysis relies on transcrip-tion of much more than just the words spoken; it captures as much aspossible of the oral communication, noting volume, pitch, length, speed,in-breaths, laughter, interruptions, overlaps in speakers’ turns, and so on.This type of minutely transcribed data is the lifeblood of Goodwin’s eth-nography; the conclusions she is able to draw are strongly supported inthe transcribed conversations and available for any reader to peruse. Thisis all to be lauded and a great improvement on many traditional ethno-graphies, in which ethnographic conclusions are reported, but often thedetails needed to evaluate the claims remain buried in the author’s

unpublished fieldnotes.Unfortunately, this strong point is also the cause of what in my view is a

shortcoming of the book: it produces a text that is often tedious to read.Goodwin presents a transcribed conversation in her text and then followsit with a paragraph or two of prose explaining the conversation. When theconversation is opaque vis-a-vis the point being made, this is helpful, butmore often it is simply repetitive of what the reader has already gleaned fromreading through the conversation; hence this feeling of tedium sets in. Sug-gesting a remedy is not easy, as having a close transcription of the primary data is a valuable aspect of this monograph. A compromise may be to putthe transcribed conversations in appendices, cross-referenced to the placesin the text where the specific interactions are discussed and the ethnographicconclusions drawn.

Chapter 1 sets the framework and provides an overview of the book.Goodwin locates the work as an ethnography of pre-teen girls’ verbalbehavior that will challenge prevailing dualistic theories, for which she provides a critical summary. She presents her methodology and a synopsis of conversational analysis, emphasizing the importance of practice approachesto ethnography, those that take the ongoing situated activity of social actors

as the primary unit of analysis.Chapter 2 documents disputes that arise in the course of girls’ interac-tions in a typical childhood game, hopscotch. For this chapter in particular,the author presents data from children from a wide variety of class and ethnicbackgrounds and from different regions of the country. She demonstratesthat contrary to dualistic views of gender concerning girls’ supposed cooper-ative and caring stances and their preference for contextual rather thanabstract reasoning, disputes are common in these games, and further, girlsexhibit a clear sense of proper behavior as governed by rule. They showgreat facility in arguing for positions within the game and in censuring

violations according to such rules.


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background signaled their status by stories about their activities and privi-leges, particularly bragging about their access to valued consumer goodsand the leisure and travel associated with wealth. Girls in this age range werealready highly aware of the relative social value of goods and activities and

how these indicate the status of those who have access to them. They wereespecially cognizant of the relative rank of the junior high schools they willpotentially be graduating to in a year or two.

Clearly, the girls were as aware of relative rank as boys and assertedtheirs at will, but there are some gender-related differences: the girls were lessprone to overt bragging than the boys. Boys bragged about their achieve-ments and jousted for rank in their ongoing hierarchical games, with thoseof lower rank recognizing this and acting accordingly. Girls claimed status dif-ferences more indirectly through consumption patterns, and the meanings of these were often in dispute. Girls commonly disparaged and applied sanc-

tions to other girls who too openly flaunted their perceived high status.Chapter 6 deals with gossip, a verbal activity commonly but inaccurately

regarded as a predominantly female activity (see Cameron 1997 for anexample of male gossip). Gossip can be defined as speech in which thebehavior of normally absent others is assessed and typically criticized. Good- win’s earlier book (1990) dealt mainly with gossip and the offended party’s verbal defense against it among adolescent girls in an African-Americandistrict in inner-city Philadelphia.

Gossip can function to build cohesion within a social group, but it canalso be used as a weapon to censure inappropriate behavior by a member of the group. Goodwin here shows how the girls use gossip and especially ridi-cule to impose norms on each other. Normative and valued behavior exploitsthe status symbols of the wider consumerist culture, and this in turn createsdistinctions among the girls: some can enhance their status through storiesabout their access to these and impose negative evaluations of othersthrough gossip and ridicule.

Chapter 7 further scrutinizes in detail how the girls in the clique usegossip, ridicule, directives, and other verbal means to stigmatize, exclude,and even victimize an unwanted peer. Dualistic theories of gender have

claimed that girls are socialized into a cooperative manner of speaking,emphasizing networking and connection, polite avoidance rather thanconfrontation (Holmes 1995).

The data in this chapter show such a broad universalizing claim to befalse. A girl marginal to the clique is regularly verbally degraded by its mem-bers, that is, subjected to bullying, through insults, threats, bald orders, andrumors. Threats, insults, and bald orders have been argued to be features of boys’ groups and carried out by those higher in rank toward those lower. Butboys’ hierarchies are transient to the extent that they are established throughjoint activities, typically sports, which provide opportunities to construct

alternative rankings. Girls gauge themselves according to the relationships


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they forge with others, and these tend to be longer lasting. Hence, such ver-bal devices do not index relative status ranking for them, but actually policethe membership of the group. Girls use such confronting verbal means to vic-timize and exclude those they do not wish to allow into their relationship

network. It is not the case that only boys are directly confrontational, aggres-sive, and competitive, with girls normally cooperative and caring, restrictingtheir aggression to indirect means like gossip; girls are just as capable of using the same confronting verbal means toward those they regard worthy of exclusion.

Chapter 8, the conclusion, summarizes the findings of the ethnography and points to the importance of going beyond simplistic dualistic under-standings in the study of gender and social interaction. The author notes thather findings really call into question monolithic claims about girls’ and women’s speech being ‘‘prosocial’’ (Macoby 1990, 1998), cooperative (Coates

1998), or polite (Holmes 1995). Such generalizations simply do not hold water when carefully investigated. Strikingly, girls seem just as capable ver-bally as boys in bullying and victimizing a perceived social inferior, a findingof great practical importance, given the now worldwide epidemic in bullying witnessed in schools (Sanders 2004).

Like previous dualisms such as nature and nurture, this book shows it istime to retire the presuppositions that come with a simple binary contrast of two types of persons according to their gender and investigate carefully onthe ground the kinds of verbal routines both males and females use indiverse social situations to construct and perform their gendered identities.Counterattacks to dualistic thinking about gender like Goodwin’s are notnew. Such thinking has came under sustained criticism and refutation sinceit was first proposed in the 1980s, and a summary of such research can befound in Cameron (2007); but what is most surprising is how entrenched itseems to remain, not only in the popular imagination, with slogans of the‘‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’’ type, but in academic circlesas well. The fundamental ethnographic question to ask here is why do suchstereotypes of dualistic gendered speech behavior persist, and strikingly con-tinue to do so in academic circles in spite of sustained scholarly refutations of

them over two decades? How did they first arise and what and whose pur-poses are being served by their perpetuation? What is the ideology of linguis-tic practices that maintains them? To explore these questions we need tocross the Pacific to another cultural setting.

STANDARDIZING WOMEN AND STANDARDIZINGLANGUAGE IN JAPAN

Miyako Inoue’s Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in

Japan (2006), is a brilliant book, wonderfully erudite and compellingly

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written. It exemplifies the best in linguistic anthropology. It includes insight-ful ethnography and painstaking documentary work embedded in a richdescriptive framework forged by a synthesis of cutting edge theory, that is,the political economy of language (Friedrich 1989; Gal 1989), linguistic ideol-

ogy (Irvine and Gal 2000), and semiotic indexicality (Silverstein 1979, 2003).This work is so dense and rich with insights that I can only hope to skim thesurface here; the reader is invited to plumb its depths.

Inoue approaches the question of dualistic thinking in gender from adifferent direction than Goodwin. It is a commonplace of Japanese folklinguistic ideology that Japanese men and women speak differently; there was no need for a bestseller like Tannen (1990) to popularize this notionthere. There has been much recent lament in the popular press about thedemise of this contrast, as women are claimed to be speaking increasingly like men, an indication of cultural decay (Gagne ´ 2008; Miller 1989, 2004;

Okamoto 1995).Inoue is concerned with showing how this ‘‘women’s language’’ arose in

Japan and to demonstrate its close link to cultural change brought about by modernization in the post-Meiji Restoration period. While growing up in arural area of Japan, Inoue was struck by how this ‘‘women’s language’’ was not her language, but what was what she heard on radio and television,the refined speech of sophisticated middle-class, urbanized Tokyo women.Because this prescribed sharp contrast of men’s versus women’s speechdid not apply to her everyday experience, as it generally does not to ruralor working class women, Inoue (2006:3) wanted to know:

Why then does it make sense to talk about how men and women speakdifferently? Why is women’s language a national obsession? . . . Why arethe densely heterogeneous linguistic practices of people in Japan soradically reduced to one single binary, that is, gender — male andfemale — and to a single set of speech forms?

In essence, then, what are the social, political, and economic conditionsthat have so powerfully constrained the Japanese public to articulate and

defend this radically dualistic view concerning appropriate gendered lan-guage behavior in the face of multiple dimensions of language variation by class, age, residence, and gender. Inoue (2006:14) defines ‘‘women’s lan-guage’’ in just such terms: ‘‘a network of cultural practices of objectifyingfemaleness =femininity and mapping a reified gender binary onto the sounds,figures, manners and organizations of talk.’’

Chapter 1 deals with the historical period in the late 19th century in which the linguistic features now labeled as ‘‘women’s language’’ first aroseand received public comment. Surprisingly, in this early period these innova-tions were universally condemned in the press. They occurred in a social

group labeled ‘‘schoolgirls,’’ who were girls and young women from elite


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families attending same-sex secondary schools, themselves a result of mod-ernization following the Meiji Restoration. These linguistic innovations wereoverheard by male intellectuals of the period and cited by them as vulgar andlow-class speech, a fact now completely erased from the nation’s collective

consciousness. These male intellectuals disapprovingly quoted ‘‘schoolgirlspeech,’’ in their writings, newspaper columns, and novels, as emblematicof the undesirable effects of modernization and the abandonment of Japan’straditional values. This ‘‘schoolgirls’ speech was ‘‘unpleasant to the ears’’precisely because it disrupted their symbolic dualistic alignment betweenmodern versus traditional and men versus women. These speakers were women and modern, and, as such, an illegitimate and undesirable outputof social change.

Chapter 2 investigates the interrelationship between the movement toestablish and prescribe a standardized Japanese language in the early 20th

century, language ‘‘modernization,’’ and the appearance of ‘‘women’s lan-guage.’’ This was the period when centralization of the Japanese state andcapitalist industrialization, with consequent social class restructuring, wastaking off, especially after the defeat of Russia in the War of 1905. The goalof this language modernization was to create a Japanese language thatexpressed a modern subjectivity, one that represented reality as faithfully as possible, for instance, through reported speech (Bakhtin 1981). This sub-jectivity was male, an ‘‘objective’’ and reliable reporter of the reality that heperceived. Under the gaze of the objective male reporter of the new moder-nizing nation state, schoolgirl speech, which had been previously been con-sidered vulgar, was now a sign of the newly empowered modern Japanese woman. Contrary to Japanese popular opinion, ‘‘women’s language’’ is any-thing but a continuation of a pristine Japanese tradition where it indexedfemale gentleness and poise, but rather a wholly modern invention.

In Chapter 3, Inoue looks at women’s magazines, particularly theiradvertisements, between the 1890s and 1930s. These were the first arenain which women actually observed women’s language, and Inoue traceshow its indexical value gradually shifted. These magazines were a major con-duit through which middle-class, literate women were enculturated into

becoming bourgeois consumers.Inoue focuses on the kind of language cited in these magazines anddemonstrates how schoolgirl speech shifted from being the language of the object, a way of speaking commented on and consumed, to the languageof the empowered consumer-subject for communicating her desires andthoughts. It became the generic feminine speech style, representative of anidealized modern Japanese middle-class woman as a canny consumer, loyalcitizen, and dutiful wife and mother. Unlike the male, but ideologically hegemonic and hence neutered, standard Japanese, women’s languageassumes an indexical value of the legitimate aesthetic of femininity —

gentleness, hesitancy, and nurturing — so that all factors in its historical

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origins and its original links to a urbanized, privileged, middle-class areerased in a dualism of prescribed gender roles.

Chapter 4 moves on to the late 1980s and early 1990s, the era of the bub-ble economy and its aftermath. At this time the popular press was obsessed

with a perceived decay in the use of women’s language. In a hundred years we have come full circle: whereas in the 1890s, commentators on schoolgirlspeech, the forerunner of women’s language, deplored it as vulgar. In the1990s, newspapers and other media outlets again commented on the speechof contemporary schoolgirls and lamented its vulgarity and lack of refine-ment because they eschewed the prescribed women’s language. In the bub-ble economy of this period, there was a massive entry of women into theemployment market and a surge in their power as consumers. Gender rela-tions were seen to be altering, and new laws came into force in an attempt(mostly unsuccessful) to create equal opportunities for both genders in the

workplace.The increased economic visibility of women in the public eye triggered

a commensurate anxiety about a collapse in traditional roles, and particularly that of women as home-based wives and mothers. This led to a flurry of pub-lic commentaries on the decline of women’s language, the salient index of proper femininity, and the moral decline of the nation, all of this in the con-text of unprecedented economic growth. The salience of women’s language was also tied to the nation’s ideological project of being uniquely Japaneseand modern, nihonjinron ‘‘Japaneseness’’ (Befu 2001). The possible lossof women’s language rekindled a fear that modernism in Japan would resultin a cutting loose of all traditional moorings and produce a nation state whichis at best an imitation of the West, and at worst a substandard one at that.

Chapters 5 and 6 are the ethnographic heart of the book. Inoue under-took fieldwork for about 18 months in a medium-sized pharmaceuticalcompany, a subsidiary of a foreign multinational. She interviewed andobserved the speech of a number of women working there. Chapter 5 dis-cusses a middle manager at the firm. This woman was quiet and unassuming, wore no bright colored flashy clothes or striking makeup; she was the least‘‘spectacular’’ of the nine female managers at the firm.

Her speech style is well summarized by her own aphorism: ‘‘just stay inthe middle,’’ a motto highly iconic of her rank in the firm. She eschews themore elaborate honorific forms associated with women’s language and itsgendered hesitancy marking particles, but she regularly uses the polite verbendings — masu =-desu. These indicate deference to the addressee, but do noteither honor him or her or humble the speaker. Her speech style wasdescribed as ‘‘flat.’’ She does not violate the norm of women’s language tobe polite — she is being polite — using masu =-desu — but her speech is notovertly gendered because she does not employ the forms prototypically asso-ciated with women’s language. She stays in the middle by refusing to partici-

pate in a gendered dualism of language forms in Japanese; her speech is not


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overtly marked as men’s or women’s language, but she does not violate thenorms of the latter either. Aware of her position as both a manager in thishierarchical organization (overwhelmingly a man’s position) and a woman,a situation that defies the gender presuppositions in this society, she navi-

gates and rises above any dualistic expectations in language use.Chapter 6 considers an assortment of other female workers at the firmand their practices of women’s language. Inoue demonstrates that they per-form it for a wide range of reasons, and, interestingly, not typically to invokean identity of an idealized female citizen-consumer. For instance, the womenoften used it mockingly to comment critically on women of the comfortable‘‘leisure class housewives,’’ who are believed to speak like this, and contrastthem with ‘‘us,’’ the working women of the firm. Notably, the woman whomost closely approached the ideal of use of women’s language came, likeInoue herself, from a rural region and only learned it following her move

to Tokyo for university and employment. For her, women’s language whichshe labeled as ‘‘beautiful’’ and ‘‘elegant,’’ and was emblematic of the tran-sition to her current valued identity, and she regarded her prior rural speechas ‘‘rough’’ and ‘‘crude.’’

These differences among the women at the firm, in their appropriationof the resources of women’s language, again lays bare the contradiction inthe dualistic claim of normative gendered ways of speaking. Women’s lan-guage is a resource that some educated, urbanized women can employ ordecline to use for a wide variety of situated communicative tasks. There isno decline in women’s language in Japan, nor in the United States or Australia for that matter, because the hegemonic forces which promulgatethis are as much or more class-aligned as gendered, a fact that people repre-senting industrialized capital and the nation state wish to erase (Irvine andGal 2000). It is much easier to focus attention on and attempt to regulate adualism of gender roles than to admit to the multiplex social asymmetriesof class (Ortner 1990, 1998), and this is the nub of the ethnographic questionthat needs to be investigated in language and gender research.

I regard this work as one of the most valuable monographs in linguisticanthropology to appear in the last two decades. Its importance goes well

beyond its apparent specialized topic. The erudition of the author is spell-binding; she moves across the disciplines of the social sciences, Japanesestudies, and philosophy with a deftness and confidence that one mightexpect of a much more senior scholar. It is a work to give to our Ph.D.students to read for inspiration.

TALK AND TOIL IN RURAL MOROCCO

Katherine Hoffman’s We Share Walls: Language, Land and Gender in Berber

Morocco (2008), is the most conventional ethnography among the four books

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reviewed here. It is beautifully, even poetically, written. Again, the book is sorich and dense in ethnographic description that I can only hope to summar-ize and comment on the main points here. The title sums it up well: thismonograph investigates the semiotics of language repertoires among a min-

ority Berber-speaking group and how these are changing. It examines theinterrelationship between a parallel set of pervasive cultural dualisms: male versus female; urban versus rural; plains versus mountains; modern versusbackwards; and, most importantly, the national language, Moroccan Arabic, versus the regional vernacular, the Berber language, Tashelhit. Kulick (1992)reported a similar constellation of oppositions for the semiotics of languagechoice in Gapun village in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. Hoffman’s work is similarly rich in ethnographic detail, but in contrast to Kulick (1992),she focuses on the role of women as the locus around which this cluster of dualisms is articulated and reproduced.

Chapter 1 introduces us to the ethnographic field site in Morocco, the Anti-Atlas Mountains in the country’s southwest, an isolated rural area wherethe indigenous language Tashelhit stills holds out against the advances of Moroccan Arabic emanating from the cities. With the massive rural to urbanmigration of the 20th century, overwhelmingly involving men, the area isnow mainly occupied by women, who bear the responsibility of tendingthe land and the Tashelhit language that symbolically goes with it. Throughthis symbolic linkage women are viewed as the crucial lynchpin; they repro-duce not only their families, but also the entire ethnolinguistic group.

The women themselves are ambivalent about this role, often bemoan-ing their Tashelhit monolingualism and Arabic illiteracy as entrapment incontrast to the men’s mobility. Arabic speakers regard speaking Tashelhitas backward, as hindering social and economic progress, and, indeed, underthe previous king’s rule, as threatening the integrity of the nation itself. Fromthe national point of view, Tashelhit marks the women’s low socioeconomicstatus, yet within the local ideology, it is exactly their monolingual guar-dianship of the language that is cherished. The women bear the moralresponsibility, especially valued by the absent men, of being the uncontami-nated agents of the transmission of the language and culture to the next

generation.Chapter 2 is a short chapter describing the author’s fieldwork experi-ences and methods. Hoffman is competent in both Moroccan Arabic andTashelhit and was able to follow most daily verbal interactions. She wasnot permitted by her consultants to record informal conversations in mostcases, as they felt that such conversations did not present ‘‘good Tashelhit.’’Rather, she was instructed to focus on the language of songs in preference.This approach had the happy result of generating much meta-talk duringperformances about the language and its usage; this dialogue providesproductive insights into local linguistic ideology and the political economy

of language practices in the region (Gal 1989).


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Chapter 3 deals with constructions of authenticity in representing Ashelhi culture (that of speakers of Tashelhit). With the rise in awarenessof indigenous rights under the present king, Berber languages and heritageare now being taught as subjects in schools, typically male and town domains

associated with progress and modernization. Such developments directly challenge understandings of the language’s indexicality of women in backward rural lands. These developments threaten further marginalization of the rural women who have been the moral custodians of the language.

Tashelhit may be at risk from Moroccan Arabic in many areas where itearlier dominated, because emigrants commonly switch to the latter withinone generation, but now even the previously ‘‘pure’’ female Tashelhit of the rural Anti-Atlas Mountains faces challenge from a new ‘‘purified’’ standardimposed by reformist male political elites based in the cities. The Tashelhitlanguage has been maintained for a few generations now by gendered spa-

tial practices, keeping illiterate, monolingual women in poor rural areas where they subsist by disdained manual labor, while men migrate to the cit-ies, speak Arabic, and hope for upward mobility to clerical jobs. Is the price worth it? (See Hill 2002 on this question.)

Chapter 4 takes us into the daily village life of the Anti-Atlas Mountains.Life is physically hard; the dry barren mountains do not provide an easy livelihood, and this fact is the major cause for the extremely high emigration. Villages contain few male inhabitants beyond boyhood. Emigrant men remitfunds to support the family (often sporadically) and typically return no morethan once a year for a short spell. Such emigrant men harbor nostalgia fortheir mountain hamlets, but the resident women do not: for them it is a placeof hard labor and daily struggle. But for both it was still seen as a moral placecarrying on pure Ashelhi culture, in contrast to the corruption of the ethni-cally mixed cities (Williams 1973). A system of mutually dependent dualismshas been forged: emigrant men are symbolically dependent on the moralfoundation of Ashelhi authenticity provided by women resident in the purerural heartland, while resident women are materially dependent upon theresources remitted by emigrant men in the ethnically mixed urban centers.

Chapter 5 deals with how these male and female understandings are

mediated through Tashelhit song and conversation. For male emigrants itis the traditional practices, dress, language, song, and distance from urbancenters with difficult access that mark a village as authentic Ashelhi. Move-ment away from these prototypes signals moral decline, not unlike the publicreaction to a perceived reduction in the use of Japanese women’s languagediscussed above. The resident women, on the other hand, locate Ashelhiculture in the people in the village, their interrelations, labor, and sharedactivities in cooking, weaving, and talking.

Men have valued crafts and speaking skills too, but those are what oneneeds to survive in the city and are not authentic Ashelhi. Song is typically

associated with times of play, parties, and weddings, all of these usually

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times of return of the men, in contrast to the daily grind of hard labor. Villagecommunity is a common topic of songs, but again men and women providedifferent viewpoints on this topic. Women’s songs typically describe move-ment and relocations of people, such as in marriages, and emphasize the

articulation of a community’s borders. Their songs often require considerableskill with rural and agricultural terminology, and this puts the men at a dis-advantage. In contrast, men’s songs tend to idealize the village as a moralcommunity and describe them more abstractly as places for contemplatingand grounding authentic states of being. It is interesting how these differ-ences both somewhat dovetail with some claims of Gilligan (1982) andTannen (1990), but they also not surprisingly exhibit cultural specificitiesas well.

Chapter 6 turns our view away from the high barren mountains to thefertile Sous plain below. It describes the socioeconomic transformations in

this area over the last century. While historically the plains had also beenan Ashelhi stronghold, since they were irrigated and became fertile they havebeen heavily Arabized, so that most of the Tashelhit-speaking communitiesthere are bilingual, with Arabic a prominent feature of their linguistic reper-toire, a resource which provides greater access to economic and symboliccapital. Given the pervasive linguistic ideology which links the mountains with pure Tashelhit, the plains speakers are viewed as peripheral to thisspeech community in spite of their socioeconomic advancement. The plainsare a liminal place between the coastal cities and the mountainous heartland,so that discourse about authenticity gives way here to a concern with things Arab and urban. In contrast to the mountains, here the men work the land, while woman handle livestock and do domestic chores, a pattern typicalof Arab communities.

Further, the tribal consciousness central to the Ashelhi identity con-structed in the mountains yields here to social groupings along the lines of class. The plains Ashelhi are well aware of their ambivalent status and conse-quently have adapted many of their cultural practices to Arab norms,although they are not regarded as Arabs either by themselves or their Arabneighbors because they continue to use Tashelhit as their everyday vernacu-

lar (an echo here of the contrast between the Mountain Arapesh described by Mead [1938] and the Plains Arapesh described by Tuzin [1976]).Chapter 7 looks at musical productions by young women on the plains.

These women draw upon both Tashelhit and Arabic linguistic resources,code switching (Romaine 1995) for semantic effect: Tashelhit the languageof solidarity (Hill and Hill 1986) and Arabic that of public formality. Among Ashelhi villagers good language practices generally require a facility to adaptto one’s interlocutors and to be skillful in using language arts like metaphor,rhyme, allusion, etc. The use of Arabic in mixed language contexts or formalceremonies is in keeping with this ideology. But singing in Arabic indexes a

plains identity for Ashelhi and is disapproved of by their co-ethnics in the


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mountains as giving in to the Arabs and a departure from authentic Ashelhiculture. From the plains Ashelhi point of view it is valued accommodation totheir Arabic-speaking neighbors with whom they share territory, culturalfeatures, and history. These plains Ashelhi are Ashelhi by definition: they

speak Tashelhit as their everyday vernacular. But culturally, economically,and historically they share much with their Arab neighbors, and bilingualismin Arabic is a necessity. Speaking whichever everyday vernacular, Tashelhitor Arabic, does define ethnicity in the consciousness of plains dwellers,but singing through code switching in both signals a wider plains identity which blurs this division.

Chapter 8 describes language practices on the local Tashelhit radio.Radio programming is a contested site for what is authentic Tashelhit. Thelanguage of radio invokes a theme of nostalgia for the Ashelhi heritage,but strikingly it does not do this through the medium of the ‘‘pure’’ Tashelhit

of the rural mountain heartland. Instead, it advocates a ‘‘purified’’ ModernStandard Tashelhit analogous to the Modern Standard Arabic of educatedurban elites. This register of the language is typified by extensive neologismsmodeled on Modern Standard Arabic or French and rurally inspired meta-phors. The task of radio is viewed as acknowledging regional cultural andlinguistic diversity in the nation without compromising its integrity. This isaccomplished by shifting allegiance from a place where one resides to a lan-guage which one speaks. Being Ashelhi is decentralized and available to all who speak Tashelhit regardless of residence. Dialect differentiation thereby needs to be erased in favor of a standardized Tashelhit available to all witha claimed Ashelhi identity.

The language of radio also exhibits a strong tendency toward purism. After many centuries of sustained contact, Tashelhit and Moroccan Arabic haveconsiderable overlap in lexicon and phrasing, but the reigning ideology man-dates purging the Modern Standard Tashelhit, used on radio, of Arabic loans.Such a move requires many linguistic innovations to compensate for therejected items, and many of these substitutions are opaque to speakers inthe mountains. Modern Standard Tashelhit then becomes an index of an urbanprofessional elite and a register removed from the everyday Tashelhit of the

rural heartland, with a consequent additional marginalization of its residents.The conclusion in chapter 9 is a short overview of the wider implica-tions of the monograph and in particular of the role of language in construct-ing identity. It poses a crucial moral question about minority languages andlanguage endangerment, a currently hot topic, as projections are such that upto 90 percent of the world’s languages could cease to be spoken by the turnof the next century. Hoffman’s own prose is typically eloquent, so I will justquote it (Hoffman 2008:232):

. . . the methodological and human rights dilemma I am proposing is how

activists and anthropologists alike can ethically encourage the same

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language practices and ideologies that, while helping perpetuate anendangered language, also gender space, restrict women’s movements,and confine women to lives of hard labor. Social and geographical mar-ginality of some groups may be the surest safeguards against languageshift for the collective, but it is difficult to advocate that some groupsbe denied equal access to resources.

Questions for linguists to ponder indeed.

DID NAKED MOTHERS SPEAK FIRST?

Dean Falk’s Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants and the Origins of Language (2009) is the odd book out among these four. Rather than beingan ethnographic study of some aspects of gendered language use in a given

culture, it is a quest for the origins of human language in some genderedpractices of child rearing in our prehistory. This short book is amonograph-length development of an article that Falk published in Beha-vioral and Brain Sciences , the foremost journal in the field of cognitivescience, in which she first proposed the ‘‘putting the baby down’’ hypoth-esis (Falk 2004). Falk has had a long and stellar career in the field of brainevolution; her earlier work on the ‘‘radiator theory’’ (Falk 1990) and sub-sequent publications (Falk 1992, 1993) have been very influential. Becausethis book is essentially an elaboration of a hypothesis first advanced in ajournal article rather than an extended, dense empirical case study, I willbe briefer. Also, much of the discussion within this monograph, while very valuable in the wider context of understanding brain evolution, does notfocus specifically on gender issues, and so I will limit myself to addressingthose that do.

Most current theories of language evolution are gender-neutral or leanheavily on the need to coordinate activities typically undertaken by men suchas hunting and warfare (Christiansen and Chater 2008; Deacon 1997; Dunbar1996; Tomasello 2008). Falk’s hypothesis is strikingly different in that itemphasizes the bond between mother and child, the key female responsi-

bility, as the crucial sphere in which this innovation appeared. The pickingup the baby hypothesis in a nutshell is this: as the hominid line was selectedfor hairlessness, bipedalism, and ever increasing brain size, there was a con- vergent loss of the ability of infants to cling to their mother’s body. Thetrauma of physical separation caused the infants to cry, just as separated baby monkeys and apes do. But rather than necessarily running to their infants topick them up, hominid mothers began to interact with them through sooth-ing sounds, a Proto-Motherese, the ultimate source of human language. Themonograph is an extended argument to support this thesis and drawsevidence from linguistics, prehistory, archaeology, music, and primatology —

a tour de force of data synthesis.


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Given such a wide canvas, we should not be surprised that occasionalinaccuracies or questionable claims have crept in. Linguists will note a fewinfelicities in the discussion of linguistic features, for instance, but this is tobe expected in the case of a non-specialist drawing and interpreting data

from an unfamiliar field. But the overall impression of the book is of highimagination married to solid research that provides the reader with thingsto mull over in every chapter, even if they remain unconvinced of the mainhypothesis.

Falk starts supporting her hypothesis by describing female parentingbehavior among chimpanzees, a probable close analog of that of ourcommon ancestors. She notes that chimp mothers and infants are rarely phy-sically separated; the infants grasp the hairy coat of their mothers and literally hold on for dear life; and they do so largely in silence: only when separateddo the distressed infants cry out.

Human babies, of course, also cry when separated from their mothers.But natural selection has dealt them a cruel hand in this regard. First of all,humans have lost the thick body hair that chimp infants cling to; and, sec-ondly, bipedalism and the ever increasing size of the brain have causedhuman infants to be born at earlier stages of development with much weakergrasping skills. Bipedalism on its own completely wiped out in humans theability to grasp with toes so salient in baby chimps.

Hominin mothers from at least the time of Homo erectus , but probably earlier, had to carry their infants with them in their arms or in slings. For aground foraging species this clearly created problems. Falk hypothesizes thatlong before baby slings were invented, hominin mothers would have hadoccasionally to put their babies down on the ground as they went about for-aging. The infant would of course cry in distress at the separation, anunhappy development for a defenseless animal in open country teeming with hungry predators. Evolution would clearly have selected in such a scen-ario for those pairings which could obviate the threat. Falk believes thathominin mothers innovated, using soothing vocal signals to maintain contact with and reassure their infants. Such a speech register in contemporary cultures is called Motherese and is claimed to be universal.

Falk makes a reasonable case against claims to the contrary such asOchs and Scheffelin’s (1984). Motherese is slower and more repetitious thanspeech used among adults, with a musical type of prosody of high pitch andsingsong intonations. For Falk, a Proto-Motherese of our hominid femaleancestors was the crucible of all human language, and even music and art.Of course, a speech register akin to Motherese is not restricted to mothers.Men use similar registers with a range of interlocutors, but clearly it is mostprominently associated with child care, and this task falls heavily upon women and mothers.

While Falk’s arguments to this point are strong and relatively convinc-

ing, as she has been mainly presenting evidence from her own areas of

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expertise: primatology, physical anthropology, and neuroscience. Once shemoves beyond these, the book becomes more speculative and less persuas-ive. Linguists will find it hard to accept the hypothesis that a Proto-Motheresecould develop into the rich, intricately structured systems of full human lan-

guages. It is possible , but possibility is not proof, and no real evidence isoffered to support it. Falk’s treatment here is more like wishes being pre-sented as facts. I personally am very skeptical of a single prime moverexplanation for the origins of language. There is nothing in Falk’s hypothesisthat is actually in contradiction with Dunbar’s (1996) gossip theory; bothmechanisms and many others besides could have been operative in the ori-gin of language. The complexity, diversity, and flexibility of human languagestrongly suggest that its origins lie in multiple causes, with both neuropsy-chological and social factors co-implicating each other through ongoingevolutionary processes. Perhaps Falk does not intend to claim Proto-

Motherese as a sole prime mover, but this is not made clear in the book.I have similar reactions to her claims for the origins of music in the

melodies of Proto-Motherese, and art in the gestures linked to it. All threeof these are complex semiotic systems unique to humans. While they may have precursors in ancestral hominin behavior, it is highly unlikely thatany had a single origin. Proto-Motherese may have played some sort of rolein their evolution, but not as a privileged prime mover. Demonstrating that would require much more convincing evidence than that provided here,and it is unlikely that such evidence would ever be forthcoming.

CONCLUSION

A great deal of research in putative differences in the understandings anduses of language by men and women has unfortunately been hamperedby some unquestioned a priori assumptions about gender roles generally.Sadly, often the research presented is not much more than a rephrasing of truisms of the ‘‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’’ variety. Whilethere has been sustained scholarly research criticizing such dualistic thinking

in the field of gender and language since it was first proposed in the 1980s,seemingly to little avail especially in the popular press, scant carefullong-term ethnographic work investigating these questions has been done,either in urban Western societies or elsewhere. Eckert (1989) is a majorexception, but even here gender was only one factor among several in astudy of the patterns of language variation among adolescents of variedsocial backgrounds. Kulick (1992) is another important source, but againgender is secondary to a concern with linguistic ideology, bilingualism,and language death.

The ethnographic works discussed here directly target gender as the key

issue and provide a new rigor in addressing questions of how women and


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girls use language to construct their identities, negotiate their social position,and wield power in their communities. The women’s lives that emerge fromthese works show that the dualism so pervasive in thinking about gender,both in cultural folk beliefs and scientific writings, is highly misleading. It

is surprising that dualistic thinking has continued to hold such a powerfulgrip here, even in scientific treatments of the subject in the light of the dissol-ution of dualistic oppositions in favor of modularity in most other areas of thesocial and cognitive sciences. Dualistic theories of gender in fact serve moreto reinforce continuing male hegemony than to enlighten us much aboutfemale uses of language. Falk’s work provides us with a window as tohow these stereotypes about female caring and non-hierarchical cooperativespeech could have evolved, as Motherese is a speech register which neces-sarily has exactly such features and, further, is an index of social liminality and hence weakness and emotional vulnerability (not unlike the type of

language used to address foreigners with poor language competence).The expertise of men in political oratory, which again has been claimed

to have evolutionary precursors (Rosaldo 1974), provided a basis for theideological associations of male speech with competition and hierarchy.But dualisms are not necessarily ‘‘good to think with’’ (Le vi-Strauss 1966),for they oversimplify what is commonly a phenomenon with complexdimensions to a linear contrast and thereby obscure those dimensions andprovide a false certainty. Such certainty favors the dominance of whateverhegemonic forces obtain in the domain under scrutiny. Dualistic theoriesof gender have invariably favored men (Rosaldo 1974, 1980), and, whilethe findings of a few academic works on gender performance are unlikely to threaten this hegemony, given the powerful global social and economicforces that prop it up, they do provide robust testimony that such viewsare empirically false.

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WILLIAM A. FOLEY is University Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He is the co-author of Functional Syntax and Universal Grammarand author of The Papuan Languages of New Guinea , The YimasLanguage of New Guinea, and Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduc-tion, and many book chapters and journal articles. His research interests include the description of the Papuan languages of New Guinea, especially those of the Sepik region, grammatical theory and typology, and linguistic relativity. He has carried extensive fieldwork in the Sepik region over many years and to a lesser extent in other areas of island Southeast Asia and the Pacific .

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