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nous “performativist” to the modern “referentialist” approach to language. 738 The
former ideology views language as an effective means to present, constitute, and act
upon the world. The modernist referentialist language ideology, on the other hand,
emphasizes semantic meanings of language and disregards the performative aspects.
Words “are mere symbols and signs, the purpose of which is to talk about a reality
that lies beyond them and apart from them”. 739 Language uses became a matter of
rational explications of texts rather than a means of presenting them in effective and
powerful acts. Against the general assumption that modernity involves a linear transition
from the performativist to the referentialist approach, Kang (2006) persuasively
argues that the two language ideologies do not necessarily exclude one another but
can be at work simultaneously, “interacting in different ways across different genres
and contexts.” 740 Modernization does not entail a transfer from traditional performative
to a rational approach to language and words, but involves “multifaceted processes
of the change, in which local people intentionally choose and selectively employ
different views of language according to genres and contexts.” 741
In performance studies, speech act theory was also criticized for using idealized
speech situations which presumed clear-cut correlations between speech acts and the
forces they might signal. Bauman & Briggs (1990) emphasized that it is not merely
semantic properties and grammatical structure of a few sentences that produce illocutionary
forces, but several other formal and contextual elements of speech events:
Illocutionary forces can be conveyed by a host of elements from micro
to macro and, most importantly, by the interaction of such features.
The ethnography of communication, discourse analysis, and research
on performance have all contributed to shifting the focus of research
from isolated sentences and features to, in Austin’s terms, the total
speech act. 742
Illocutionary forces do not simply emerge from the mere pronouncement of a sentence
in a certain situation or context. There is set of interrelated textual and contextual
conditions that provide the infrastructure through which an utterance gains force
as a particular type of action. When dealing with religious language, the model of
speech act theory becomes even more complex. Unlike speech events created by human
participants in a here-and-now context, religious speech frequently involves
invisible agents and occurs in situations in which the ordinary face-to-face encounter
is suspended. Performances of religious speech display a tension between the transcendence
and the pragmatic present of linguistic practices, which allows otherwise
738
Kang 2006: 1.
739
Rumsey 1990: 352.
740
Kang 2006: 2. The “non-dualistist language ideology” among the Sikhs has been discussed by
Dusenbery 1992. See the discussion in Chapter 2.
741
Kang 2006: 17.
742
Bauman & Briggs 1990: 64.
463
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008