“Knowing is belonging: Recognitional deixis and emergence of common ground in religious conversion”
Channel: Helsinki Collegium
Date: 2018-11-16

The international symposium "Politics of participation: Anthropological reflections on power and interaction" took place at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on October 18-19, 2018

Panel 1: Scales of Participation and Community (Un)Belonging
Chair: Anssi Peräkylä, Professor, Sociology, University of Helsinki

Maria Khachaturyan, Postdoctoral Researcher, Helsinki University Humanities Programme, University of Helsinki: “Knowing is belonging: recognitional deixis and emergence of common ground in religious conversion”

The paper explores the situated usage of recognitional deixis, a prominent feature of the religious register of the Catholic community of Mano, Guinea. By recognitional deixis is understood marking of referents as known and recognizable by the interlocutors (Himmelmann 1996), or belonging to the common ground of the interlocutors (Clark 1992). While deictic markers are known to be intrinsically tied to context and their usage is known to reflect a specific speaker-hearer-object configuration (Hanks 1990), I suggest reversing the indexical relationship and claim that instead of indexing contextual relationships (context presupposition), deictic markers rather project them in a performative fashion (context creation, Silverstein 1976; “switching” or “breakthrough”, Friedreich 1972).

In the study in question dealing with marking of common ground by recognitional deixis what gets projected is a presupposition of shared knowledge. Although, minimally, such projection could be accounted for in terms of presupposition accommodation (Lewis 1979), the argument could be pushed further. Indeed, because of the dialogic orientation of recognitional deixis, as a consequence of presupposition projection the speaker and the addressees emerge as knowledge-sharing co-insiders (Yurchak 2006). This, in turn, contributes to a performative creation of a community of co-insiders, similar to Anderson’s imagined communities (see also Silverstein 2003) – a religious community sharing religious knowledge (Asad 1993).

Performative emergence of community in speech, non-speech activities and metalinguistic reflections of these activities co-constitute one another. As a result, the speaker and the addressees emerge as co-participants. The paper, focusing on a specific case, provides tools for analysis of an understudied, but yet widespread grammatical category of recognitional deixis which can be helpful for scholars interested in how frameworks of co-participation emerge in discourse.