Ethical Management of Speech among Kazak Nomads in the Chinese Altai

Abstract

Grappling with cultural conceptions of what makes a good person and a bad person, this dissertation examines how one’s moral character is communicated through speech and other signs in everyday interaction among the Altai Kazaks. In particular, I highlight the Kazak nomads’ honorific speech as a powerful means through which they can invoke the morally loaded ideal of modesty and other related ethical categories. Relying primarily on participant observation, I conducted my fieldwork among Kazak nomads in the Altai Mountains of Xinjiang, China between 2012 and 2014. I analyzed the use of honorific/non-honorific alternants in varying contexts, together with their uptake or other consequences in discourse, as well as evaluative commentaries upon them. My analysis of the everyday interaction among the Altai Kazaks resulted in several findings. First, Kazak social relations are classed into those that require the use of honorifics and those that require non-honorific expressions; however, there are many “middle-range” relations in which both styles of communication are considered appropriate, allowing variation (by personality, mood, and social strategy) among different speakers in their use of deferential styles. These different types of social relations appear to be modeled on the traditional Kazak kinship structure, in which relative age, as well as the distinction between joking and avoidance relations, plays a significant role. Second, such stylistic variation is understood to be indicative of one’s ethical qualities, rather than reflecting one’s social-structural position. Perhaps due to the relatively simple grammatical paradigm of Kazak honorifics, the speaker’s use of honorific forms can reveal little about his or her sociological background. On the contrary, knowledge of all the grammatical forms in Kazak honorifics is considered to be attainable for every adult. Because everyone is supposed to know and control all the required linguistic forms, the speaker is held responsible for his or her linguistic choices, and thus subject to others’ evaluations with powerful moral loadings, such as “overbearing,” “humble”, “sycophantic,” “considerate,” “childish,” “patient,” “lacking discipline,” and the like. Moreover, this ethical dimension of one’s linguistic (and non-linguistic) choices becomes all the more apparent in the aforementioned middle-range relations, where the speaker has a choice between multiple pragmatically possible options. In my research, I found ample evidence of discourse that evaluates the agentive choices made through particular linguistic (and non-linguistic) forms in particular contexts. Among Kazak nomads in the Chinese Altai, the communicative style one chooses to use in various social contexts, especially in the middle-range relations, is viewed in moral, rather than sociological, terms. Third, underlying the Altai Kazaks’ variation in their communicative style and the evaluative discourse about it is the ethics of modesty. While studies of many other better known honorific systems have shown that the choice of “courteous” linguistic forms is often seen to reflect the speaker’s aristocratic ancestry or affinity with the royal court, my ethnographic research finds that in Altai Kazaks’ language ideology, the dominant cultural image of honorific speech is self-lowering ‘modesty,’ which includes such qualities as mildness, smallness, quietness, slowness, and maturity, while non-honorific speech is understood to express self-lifting ‘arrogance,’ which consists of harshness, largeness loudness, rapidity, and immaturity. I argue that the individual’s ethical concern in Altai Kazak honorific speech is focused on displaying the image of the modest person at the moment of interaction, rather than on merely fulfilling certain sociologically prescribed obligations.