Here in 2014 America, we say we have “free speech,” but, of course, we don’t. All the snarky posts on Facebook or Twitter may make it seem as if there are no rules, but try shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater and see what happens. No, wait–don’t do that! I hope I’m not breaking the rules just by discussing the rules!
Anyway, my point is that even here in snarky 2014 American, we all follow certain rules of discourse because without them we simply couldn’t communicate. Cavemen came up with the first rules controlling what we say, how we say it, and whom we can say it to, but because they never set those rules in stone, the rules vary widely from culture to culture and from time to time.
The Spirit Keeper shows the problems that can arise when people follow completely different rules of discourse. In 1747 Colonial America, Katie O’Toole’s conversation was bound by rules she assumed all people everywhere always had and always would follow. In Katie’s world, speakers of equal standing looked each other in the eye and spoke their minds, though her people generally did limit the right to speak, depending on things like social class, gender, age, and authority.
But Indian Nations in 1747 followed a completely different set of speaking rules. Native conversations generally offered everyone a chance to speak, but because privacy in communal societies can be hard to come by, many Native listeners showed respect by routinely averting their eyes. People like Syawa and Hector considered staring at someone to be extremely rude, even threatening, unless they knew that person intimately.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between the speaking habits of Katie and her friends is that while Colonial speakers considered conversation an art-form and felt obliged to chatter away whenever they were with other people, their indigenous counterparts were quite comfortable in companionable silence and tended to speak only when they had something significant to say.
A silly blog like this is hardly the place to do a comprehensive comparison of cultural rules of discourse, but I just wanted to point out certain differences do exist and I also wanted to note that the way our ancestors spoke was very different from our snark-filled speech of today. At the risk of sounding snarky myself, I must say history seems to be little more than an on-going record of huge misunderstandings, and, given the complex rules of conversation, the wonder is not that different groups of humans have communicated so badly, but that any of us have ever managed to communicate anything at all.
Y’know what I’m saying?
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