Experiencing language

Abstract

This essay argues that psycho-cultural anthropologists addressing the relation of language to experience tend to focus on the symbolic property of language. This focus has led to a celebration of words as capturing public cultural meanings, but it has also generated disparagement of language as arbitrary, controlling and remote from a person’s ‘authentic’ thoughts and feelings. A part-modernist, part-Platonic transcendental sentiment lingers that the language-world divide is irretrievably expansive. This essay suggests that the incompleteness of language begs further consideration. Language’s inadequacy on the symbolic level is partly compensated by the additional capacity of language to be indexical, i.e. to bring into consciousness a realm of contextually relevant meanings, including the situated self. The essay promotes a phenomenological view of language in which ordinary enactments of language, i.e. utterances, are themselves modes of experiencing the world. In this perspective, the distinction between experience-near and experience-distant as conceptualized in anthropological scholarship misses the fundamental point that language, once in motion, and experience are conjoined.