Department of social anthropology seminar with Anh Nga Longva

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Anh Nga Longva from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. She will present the following paper:

"Unspeakable 'I', unspeakable 'you'. Pronoun avoidance, selfhood, and the construction of the Vietnamese social world."

Abstract
Personal pronouns occupy such a central place in the way we speak, think, and communicate that it is difficult for us to imagine a language that does not make use of them. Yet this is the case with many non- Indo-European languages, some of which normatively proscribe the use of personal pronouns in most situations. In this paper I discuss the case of Vietnamese, focusing on the avoidance of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ in direct speech and on the prevailing use of kinship terms in their stead. The avoidance of ‘I’ is particularly interesting. In Western theories of identity, the ‘I’ is the basic building block of self-awareness, the prerequisite for the development of a distinct and stable personality. Why speakers of Vietnamese and several other East and Southeast Asian languages avoid the first person pronoun, what this avoidance tells us about their conception of selfhood, and how to interpret the use of kinship terms as pseudo-pronouns, are some of the questions I raise in this presentation. While the Vietnamese conception of selfhood and person reference system may appear highly unusual (‘exotic’), I suggest that they are so only when viewed in light of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, individual and society, self and the world. The type of selfhood conception we find among Vietnamese is neither unusual nor exotic when viewed from Mead’s interactionist perspective and from the phenomenological and semiotic approach represented by, among others, Charles S. Pierce and Milton Singer. My interpretation of the use of kinship terms as pronouns is inspired by studies on metaphors in everyday life speech, notably Lakoff and Johnson’s analysis of structural metaphors.


Bionote
Anh Nga Longva is Professor in Social Anthropology, UiB. Her work is mainly focused on political anthropology with the Middle East (Kuwait, Lebanon) as ethnographic region. She is now extending her research into the field of language, thought, and social change among Vietnamese, thus renewing with a theme she researched as a young anthropologist in the early 1980s.




All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee