Discourse & Society http://das.sagepub.com The multiple calculi of meaning Justin B. Richland Discourse Society 2006; 17; 65 DOI: 10.1177/0957926505056672 The online version of this article can be found at: http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/65 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Discourse & Society can be found at: Email Alerts: http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://das.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. A RT I C L E 65 The multiple calculi of meaning Discourse & Society Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 17(1): 65–97 JUSTIN B. RICHLAND 10.1177/ 0957926505056672 U C I RV I N E A B S T R A C T . This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practices as the multiple calculi of meaning insofar as discourses of argumentation offer explicit moments by and through which members of a single community proffer competing interpretations of troubling acts and events. To support this claim, insights gained from J.L. Austin’s treatment of speech act infelicities and legal anthropology’s ‘trouble-case’ methodology are employed to inform an interaction-based analysis that explores how competing Hopi interpretive practices are constituted in courtroom discourses between parties to probate disputes before the Hopi Tribal Court. KEY WORDS: dispute, Hopi Indians, linguistic anthropology, meaning Introduction This article builds on linguistic anthropological investigations of processes of meaning-making conducted over the last three decades that have hinted at, but have yet to fully describe, the degree to which members of the speech communi- ties they study rely on multiple, complex and sometimes competing interpretive practices and ideologies. Such practices and ideologies, it is here argued, emerge in certain interactional contexts as the multiple calculi of meaning, worked up in the (sometimes explicit) contestation over the significance of particular acts and events. Specifically, it is claimed that because linguistic anthropologists engaged in this research have focused their work on an important refutation of John Searle’s version of Speech Act Theory, and/or challenge the centrality and universality Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 66 Discourse & Society 17(1) claimed for speaker intentions as the source of communicative meaning, they favored meaning-making practices where non-intentionalist theories of inter- pretation seemed more appropriate. Thus while this research has revealed the variety of interpretive practices that exist across speech communities around the world, what has never been fully explored from a linguistic anthropological perspective is the possibility that multiple, complex, and even competing calculi of meaning may operate within a single speech community, nor inquiry made into the communicative contexts in which these multiple meanings are made explicit. This article is an endeavor to take up those hints and allusions and develop them further. Thus I show that one context in which such multiplicity is often constituted is that of social dispute and conflict, where discourses of argumenta- tion reveal how members of a single community proffer competing interpretations of troubling acts and events (speech or otherwise) by recourse to distinct and sometimes competing practices and ideologies for calculating1 what is significant about them. Building on the insights of J.L. Austin’s treatment of speech act infelicities (1962/1975), and on legal anthropology’s ‘trouble-case’ methodology, (Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941), I show how competing meaning-making practices emerge in the dispute contexts of one speech community – specifically, in the talk between parties to probate disputes before the tribal courts of the Hopi Indian Tribe. Where these disputes are constituted in and through complex notions of intentionality and social normativity that ground both the Hopi discourses of custom and tradition and the Anglo-American juridical norms that inform con- temporary Hopi tribal jurisprudence, I suggest that conflict talk among the courtroom interlocutors turns on multiple and competing calculations of mean- ing that foreground different aspects of the intentions, conventions, and conse- quences surrounding the disputed property claims. Theories of meaning in speech act theory and the critiques from linguistic anthropology SPEECH ACT THEORY AS ‘ INSPIRATION ’ AND ‘ BUTT ’ OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY In the early 1970s numerous linguistic anthropologists began embarking on parallel inquiries into theories of meaning that would, over the next three decades, become one of the guiding themes of their subdiscipline (DuBois, 1993; Duranti, 1984, 1988, 1993a, 1993b; Keenan [Ochs], 1974; Kuipers, 1990; Mitchell-Kernan, 1972; Morgan, 1991; Ochs, 1982, 1984, 1988; Rosaldo, 1982) In large measure, this scholarship emerged both in the spirit of, and with the aim of refuting, the principles of Speech Act Theory proffered by John Searle (1969) and claims to the universality of intention-driven models of meaning-making.2 Indeed as Rosaldo (1982) writes in introducing her influential article, ‘Speech Act Theory is at once my inspiration and my butt’. (p. 198). Rosaldo and other linguistic anthropologists shared with Searle – and Austin (1962/1975) and Grice (1957, 1968, 1969) before him – in the recogni- Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 67 tion of a need for understanding linguistic phenomena in ways that move beyond the semantico-referentialist models of earlier language philosophy and move instead toward interpretations that attend to the complex contexts that both inform and are informed by instances of language-in-use. What both these ordinary language philosophers and these anthropologists recognized was the failure of grammatical and logical models of semantic meaning to account for the complexities recognizable in the meaning of language as communication. For the philosophers, this meant recognizing that many utterances – such as brides and grooms uttering ‘I do’ at the altar, or one friend saying ‘I bet you a buck it rains’ to another – bear a communicative value tied more to the actions performed by their expression than as truthful representations of a pre-existing reality. By devising a model of language that accounted for a fuller panoply of uses of language in everyday life, Searle and Austin (particularly) incorporated, but moved beyond, notions of linguistic meaning as some context-free reference or denotation. For them, grasping only this level of locutionary meaning would never be sufficient to understand the total pragmatic fact of that utterance. Instead all acts of speech have a force in and an effect on the world that are not epiphenomenal to their fundamental communicative significance. Consequently, their model of the speech act revealed how interpretation of an utterance turned not only on semantics, but equally on the detailed interplay of social convention, speaker intention, and audience reception and consequence that informed the utterance as a social act. A split would emerge, however, between Searle and Austin’s versions of Speech Act Theory when Searle would argue that his model could universally account for complexities of communicative meaning by recourse primarily to notions of speaker intentionality. For Searle, what makes a particular utterance communicable, and communicable of its particular meaning and illocutionary force is most centrally the intentions with which it is produced (Searle, 1983). Conventions and consequences associated with the context and social force of the speech act are only secondarily related to its significance. Thus he states, ‘The speech act will be satisfied if and only if the expressed psychological state is satisfied, and the conditions of satisfaction of speech act and expressed psycho- logical state are identical’ (Searle, 1983: 27). Indeed he would contend that the question of meaning is precisely the question of how intention is attributed to brute physical phenomena (phonemes, hand signals, marks on paper, etc.) making them vessels for signification and communication. Searle (1983) writes, ‘Meaning exists only where there is a distinction between Intentional content and the form of its externalization, and to ask for the meaning is to ask for an Intentional content that goes with the form of externalization’. (p. 28). It is on the grounds of Searle’s fronting of intentionality in speech act significance, and the degree to which he posits this as a universal quality of meaning-making everywhere, that linguistic anthropologists would themselves draw a line in analytic sands that they would claim their ethnographic data Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 68 Discourse & Society 17(1) would not allow them to cross. Marshalling evidence from the details of dis- course from such disparate speech communities as those of the Ilongot, African Americans, Kaluli, and Samoans, among others, these anthropologists argue for the existence, and even the prevalence of meaning-making practices and ide- ologies that take more measure of social consequence and convention than intentions when evaluating the significance of talk. Thus, several scholars claimed, Searle’s model of an intention-driven meaning proves little more than an agglomeration of intuitions informed by European and Euro-American folk theories of atomistic, individuated selves, as the sole bearers of ‘meaning-making’ capacities, rather than a valid description of the structures and practices of inter- pretation as they emerge in the details of actual communicative events. THE LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL CRITIQUES Rosaldo’s (1982) analysis of speech acts and theories of meaning among the Ilongot is perhaps one of the better-known challenges to Searle’s work. In it Rosaldo claims that Searle’s emphasis on speakers intentions as the central feature of meaning-making universally is the product of his reliance on western folk models of private selves of an individualistic personhood. Her evidence of this ‘folksiness’ rests in Searle’s insistence on using promising as the paradigmat- ic speech act form. ‘[B]y focusing on the promise’, Rosaldo writes, ‘[Searle] falls victim to the folk views that locate social meaning first in private persons – and slight the sense of situational constraint [ . . .]’ (Rosaldo, 1982: 212). Rosaldo backs her challenge by exploring various Ilongot interactions – including command interactions (Tuydek) among kin in domestic contexts and public verbal duels among male age-mates – where she claims the measure of the meaning of speech acts were made by interlocutors more in light of the social relations constituted by them than in any orientation to speaker’s intentions. ‘Thus’, she explains ‘kin are . . . the people who articulate their relations in mun- dane services and commands’ (Rosaldo, 1982: 210) and assertions in verbal duels are less significant as truth claims regarding headhunting accusations than as the media for participants to choose sides via negotiations over ‘who spoke out and claimed the privilege to reveal or hide a public secret’ (p. 214). It is by way of observations such as these that Rosaldo comes to state her most radical claim. That is, that Ilongot entirely lack the sense of intentional self as conceptualized in the ‘West’, one ‘continuous through time, a self whose actions can be judged in terms of sincerity, integrity, and commitment actually involved in his or her bygone pronouncements’ (Rosaldo, 1982: 218). And it is by virtue of this fundamental metaphysical difference, she contends, that Searle’s inten- tionality driven theory of meaning must ultimately fail as an account of any universal model of human interpretive practices. Thus she concludes that her Ilongot examples ‘. . . help display the problems that inhere in all attempts to con- strue action in universal and subjective terms, without regard for how societies and cultures shape our selves, our motives, and our activities (Rosaldo, 1982: 228). Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 69 Although other linguistic anthropologists critiquing Searle seem more reluctant than Rosaldo to posit a lack of unified selfhood in the metaphysics of the communities they study, they nonetheless share in her efforts to re-situate his theory of meaning, and its emphasis on intentionality, within the ideological contexts of western notions of person, morality and society. Thus both Duranti (1984, 1988, 1993a, 1993b) and Ochs (1982, 1984, 1988) find that the Samoan peoples they worked with, ‘typically see talk and interpretation as activities for the assignment of responsibility rather than as exercises in reading “others minds”’. (Ochs, 1984: 332). Duranti discovers this in his examination of the Samoan juridicopolitical speech event called the fono, where orators, speak- ing on behalf of village chiefs to announce future activities and events, are held responsible and chastised for misleading others if later the announced events do not come to pass. In the calculation of the meaning and significance of such speech acts, fono participants ‘start from the consequences, rather than the premises, of ones words,’ (Duranti, 1993a: 24) and orient more toward the public identities and the social relations that inhere between an orator and his referent and audience. Ochs (1984) argues for a similar dispreference for inquiries into speaker’s intentions in her examination of adult–child interaction, and the general lack among care-giving adults of the use of ‘expressed guesses’ as a strategy for requesting clarification of their young interlocutors’ utterances. Where explicit guessing appears ‘tied to the pursuit of speaker’s intention’, insofar as it pre- sumes a capacity among guessers to search the internal states of their interlocu- tors for what they ‘might’ or ‘must’ have intended to mean, Ochs’ observation of Samoan caregiver’s preference for ‘minimal grasp’ forms of clarification request – whereby the requester avoids such queries by either asking the child to repeat the utterance or they themselves display their incomplete reception by repeating only a portion of the child’s utterance (Ochs, 1984) – suggests, she claims, a minimized role that intentions play in Samoan calculations of utterance mean- ing in such contexts. It is in light of analysis of the details of these and other Samoan interactions, that both Ochs and Duranti agree that, contra Searle, ‘For Samoans, meaning is seen as the product of an interaction (words included) and not necessarily as something that is contained in someone’s mind’ (Duranti, 1993a: 41). Similarly, DuBois (1993) in his reconsideration of ethnographic data of divination practices from various African communities (Bascom, 1969, 1980; Bohannon, 1975; Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Mendonsa, 1982), examines the extent to which the social functionality of all of these practices turn on the capacity for social actors engaged in them to produce ‘intentionless meanings’ (DuBois, 1993). Thus when Azande turn to the benge poison oracle for assistance in making important but difficult life decisions, the opposing propositions that are posed (e.g. that a marriage should go forward or not) are deemed confirmed by the resultant death or continued life of a fowl forced to ingest the poison. But the confirmation that arrives is not one that comes backed by intentions – the Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 70 Discourse & Society 17(1) oracle is not understood as having a mind or personality that wills or means to have the certain message delivered. ‘It is a thing’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1937: 320), whose messages, DuBois suggests, are more akin to the kinds of readings of nat- ural phenomena and their patterns that are made via tools like Geiger counters or stethoscopes. Indeed, it is the very aleatory character of these practices, and the degree to which they simultaneously are ‘intention-suppressing’ but ‘within an interpretive matrix which allows attribution of significance . . . constituted as authoritative but apersonal validations of instantiated meanings’ (DuBois, 1993: 65) that makes them perfect devices for making tough human choices – choices that social actors would rather not bear a responsibility for having intended. As such, DuBois claims, such divination practices are exemplary of the kind of meaning-making practices that would be critically misunderstood in the framework of a Searlean, intention-driven model of Speech Act theory. As efforts designed primarily to counter Searle’s model, these studies offered compelling evidence that much meaning-making around the world gets done through theories and practices of interpretation that have little or nothing to do with searching out the intentions of interlocutors. As such they proved once again the important corrective that anthropological inquiry and ethnographic data can play in checking the claims to human universality made by scholars who do not reckon with the diversity of structure, practice and belief that consti- tute human culture and society, including their interpretive practices. But while these studies stand for the need to appreciate the multiplicity and complexity of human meaning-making activity across different speech com- munities, they only hint at the possibility of such multiplicity within speech communities. Indeed, in light of their orientation as refutations to Searle’s claims, in large measure these studies focused only on those discourses and speech contexts that provided evidence of the starkest contrast of interpretive practices to the Searlean speech act model. Importantly, some of these scholars readily recognized this analytic bias to their work, and announce the possibility of multiple, complex and even contradictory meaning-making practices operat- ing in the speech communities they studied. Thus Duranti (1993a) is emphatic in expressing that: . . . [M]y main goal in this paper is not to argue that for Samoans the recognition of the speaker’s intentions is not a legitimate route to understanding. I imagine that it could be demonstrated that there are contexts in which it is. My point is that it is not the only route and furthermore in some contexts the dispreferred one. (p. 44) Indeed, he even suggests that concerns with speaker intentions are differentially distributed along the spectrum of Samoan social hierarchies, such that a speaker or actor of higher social rank, especially high chiefs, can even be said to “own”, as it were, the meaning of his own words and expect others to comply with his own interpretation’ in attributions not regularly made of the actions of lower ranked Samoans (Duranti, 1988: 29). Yet this insight is never developed more completely. Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 71 Similarly Ochs is quick to dispel any dichotomy, like the one Rosaldo draws, in which personalist, intention-driven theories of meaning, characterize the West and antipersonalist sense-making prevails everywhere else (Ochs, 1984). She writes, ‘This distinction . . . is too simplistic [. . .]. The difference between societies lies in the contexts in which these two orientations prevail, the relative importance given to each of them, and the frequency with which these orienta- tions mark social interaction’ (Ochs, 1984: 336). DuBois (1993) too is careful to point out that his analysis of the intentionless meaning production central to divination does not at all ‘refute the role of intention in language use’ and that, ‘There may well be good reason to recognize at least some ways of speaking in some cultures that demand for their interpretation a reference to the intentions of speech actors. . .’ (p. 68). None of these scholars give full ear to the possibility of these other meaning- making practices, nor to the possibility that a range of such practices, intention driven and not, might be worked up by members in explicit contestation or competition for calculating the significance of the speech events and activities they do describe. Even further, as we saw earlier, Rosaldo explicitly rejects the possibility that, in at least some speech contexts, intentions and intentionality might enter into the mix when Ilongot work at constructing the significance of actions and events with which they are engaged. As a result, what has never been fully explored from a linguistic anthropolog- ical perspective, is the possibility that multiple, complex and perhaps even competing calculi of meaning may operate within a single speech community both within and across their contexts of interaction. The possibility of multiplicity of meaning: Theoretical and ethnographic precedents J. L . AUSTIN ’ S ANALYSIS OF INDETERMINACY IN SPEECH ACT INFELICITY The possibility of a multiplicity of interpretive practices does have its theoretical precedents in Speech Act Theory, albeit in Austin’s (1962/1975) formulation more than Searle’s (1969, 1983). It is most clearly revealed in Austin’s notion of the felicity conditions upon which the success of any speech act can be evaluat- ed. As alluded to earlier, Austin’s model provides that for a speech act to be suc- cessful, it requires not only proper intentions, but also the accomplishment of certain accepted conventional procedures, and its appreciation by interlocutors in light of its actual consequences and effects. A speech act will be ‘unhappy’ (unsuccessful) in conveying a certain force if any of these conditions – intentions, conventions, or consequences – are violated or unfulfilled. But by recognizing the role of these conditions in the mix of determining utterance significance, Austin admittedly opened the door to a degree of indeter- minacy in interpretation. He reveals this indeterminacy when he discusses how it is often easier to identify a particular speech act as unsuccessful than to pinpoint why it is unsuccessful. He offers an example of the naming of a ship, Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 72 Discourse & Society 17(1) asking what if some person in mid-twentieth century England, not chosen to name a ship, merely walked up to it, smashed the bottle dangling from it, and proclaimed ‘I name this shape the Mr. Stalin’. He explains (in a now quaintly his- torical way), that ‘We can all agree (1) that the ship was not thereby named; (2) that it is an infernal shame’. (Austin, 1962/1975: 23). But beyond this general agreement that the act was infelicitous, there need be little consensus as to what actually did happen. ‘One could say that I “went through a form of ” naming the vessel but that my “action” was “void” or “without effect” because I was not a proper person’, Austin continues, ‘but one could also and alternatively say that, where there is not even a pretence of capacity or colourable claim to it, then there is no accepted conventional procedure; it is a mockery, like marriage with a monkey’ (1962/1975: 23–24). This indeterminacy arises, Austin explains, because in fact, cases of infelicity are not ‘mutually exclusive’, insofar as ‘we can go wrong in two ways at once (we can insincerely promise a donkey to give it a carrot)’ and ‘more importantly’, that ‘ways of going wrong “shade into another” and “overlap” and the decisions between them is “arbitrary” in various ways’. (Austin, 1962/1975: 23). Where Austin’s model of the speech act thus admits of the fundamental inability to identify the particular felicity conditions not met in any given instance of failed illocution, is it possible that the model also suggests a funda- mental multiplicity in calculating the interpretation of any speech act, even suc- cessful ones? And that if we attempted to interrogate such a successful act, and plumb the depths of its social and cognitive circumstances, might we actually not find any singularly identifiable set of intentions, conventions, and consequences that could uncontroversially be called the ‘source’ of its meaning? His model provides for the possibility that all speech acts are susceptible to multiple and sometimes competing theories of interpretation that differentially foreground some elements of the conventions, intentions, and conditions that make them meaningful. And, in much the same way that Wittgenstein contemplated in his notion ‘language games’, where such indeterminacy among these multiple theories remains elided in some contexts of everyday speech, in others – namely interactions of explicit contestation such as those of conflict talk – the multiplic- ity and even intractability among these different theories becomes a strategic resource actively constructed by interlocutors striving to accrue to themselves contested material and symbolic resources that rest at the heart of the conflict. GOLDMAN ’ S ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE NOTIONS OF RESPONSIBILITY IN CONFLICT TALK Significantly, the possibility of such multiplicity of meaning-making has also been given ethnographic support in a study of legal language and interaction among the Huli of Papua New Guinea (Goldman, 1993). As part of his broader challenge to the mischaracterization in legal anthropology of many non- Western societies as lacking a concept of accidental, non-intentional injury (what he calls ‘the myth’ of Absolute Liability), Goldman argues that it is within Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 73 the context of dispute discourses that the multiple theories for interpreting events within a single speech community can be made explicit in ways not discernable in other speech contexts (Goldman, 1993). Significantly, he pursues this argument in part by critiquing Ochs’ work regarding theories of interpretation in Samoa. Specifically, Goldman suggests that what Ochs claims to be the central Samoan notion of responsibility attribution – amio, a notion she defines as ‘natural behavior’ bereft of any semantic loading of thought or intentionality – is actually far more equivocal and indeterminate. He cites Shore’s (1981) description of amio as ‘motivations’ to suggest that it ‘spans the meaning of indi- vidual will and motivation, as well as social consciousness and sociality’ (Goldman, 1993: 286). But Goldman goes further than merely muddying the notoriously murky waters of lexical translation, suggesting that it is just this kind of indeterminacy, and the competing efforts to impose one attribution of meaning and responsibility over another, that often lies at the heart of dispute interactions. In so doing he builds on one of the founding theoretical and methodological premises of the legal anthropological subfield, what Llwelleyn and Hoebel (1941) first dubbed the ‘trouble-case’ method. At its base, they claimed that, ‘. . . if there be a portion of a society’s life in which tensions of the culture come to an expression, in which the play of variant urges can be felt and seen . . . that portion of the life will con- centrate in the case of trouble or disturbance’ (Llwelleyn and Hoebel, 1941: 29). Following this perspective, Goldman suggests that the possibility of multiple attributions of responsibility, and the competing theories of interpretation that underlie them, are often best uncovered in the interactional contexts of ‘perspec- tival conflict’ (Goldman, 1993). Thus he reveals how, in the discourses of a Huli dispute over the immolation of a woman, and accusations of murder that arose there, there persists an ‘alchemy of accident’ (p. 273) that resides in a host of low-level pragmatic details3 that emerge despite a more overt ideology of absolute liability and an avoidance of inquiry into human intentions in responsibility attribution talk. Goldman suggests that what is key to understand- ing interpretation and meaning-making here is the pragmatic context of conflict and dispute within which the talk emerges. ‘The context provides these meaning’ (Goldman, 1993: 158) and ‘perspectival conflict is of the essence here . . . the viability of accident interpretation has always to be established and tested within the ambit of motivational enquires’ (p. 273). Goldman’s complete argument is too involved to reproduce here in its entirety, but by way of example, we can look at his exploration of the repeat occurrence in one case transcript of what he calls ‘morality adverbs’ (insofar as they bear on the attribution of jural responsibility) and their co-occurrence restrictions with certain transitive verbs. Goldman (1993: 273) recognizes that Huli entirely lacks purposive adverbials whose semantic loading might equate with English ‘deliber- ately’, ‘willfully’, or ‘intentionally’. But what was regularly revealed in the transcript of the immolation dispute was the repeated use by one of the disputants (and the Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 74 Discourse & Society 17(1) mediator) of adverbials of inadvertence (taba puwa) and accident (kogobo, mememe). Of particular significance for Goldman’s argument are the co-occurrence restrictions that militate against these adverbial phrases being felicitously used with certain transitive verb forms. One such form, Goldman discovers, is the Huli verb ‘burn’ – da in the intran- sitive, dela in the transitive. Goldman explains that dela is actually a construction of the da verb stem, combined with -la, a morpheme which always ‘intimates intentional, deliberate action which involved both aforethought and decision . . .’ (Goldman, 1993: 150). Beyond merely the presumption of agency, then, the causitive/transitive form dela implies an act of burning that is always deliberate. Consequently, accidentality adverbials like mememe cannot regularly co-occur with dela, insofar as saying in Huli, ‘She accidentally burnt the house’ would be awkward in the same way as saying ‘She accidentally built the house’ is strange in English. Thus Goldman explains, For verbs like dela (causative/transitive ‘burn’), to set alight is just to set alight inten- tionally, and it always presumes a volitional human agent in control [. . .]. In other instances, accidentality adverbs express a rebuttal of those normal conditions of presumption; but this is not an inference that can be made simpliciter from the absence of any ‘positive’ [purposive adverbial] around to wear the trousers. (Goldman, 1993: 118, quoting Austin, 1956) Indeed, notions of intentionality and accidentality emerge in such inexplicit ways in these disputes through such co-occurrence restrictions and other pragmatic phenomena (including usage patterns of contrafactuals, ergative case-markings, and reflexive pronouns), Goldman contends, that there is ‘nothing inconsistent about widespread observations of [. . .] reluctance to speculate on “mind”’ among the Huli (as well, he implies, among Samoans too), and a ‘cat- egorical assertion that “intentions” are axiomatic to [a people’s] jurisprudential ratiocination and discourse’ (Goldman, 1993). A valuable insight is thus suggested by Goldman’s work. And that is, that with regard to analyses of the role that evaluations of intentions, consequences and conventions play in the calculation of responsibility in a given society, certain sociolinguistic phenomena and events may offer insights not available or relevant in others. While Ochs may have admirably captured the details of responsibility talk in adult–child interaction, and accurately described the lack of orientation toward intentions in such contexts, we cannot presume that other Samoan speech events (where determining responsibility is an explicit goal of the activity there) operate in precisely the same way. And though it may often be the case that considerable parallels – and even mutual influences – exist across such intrasocietal communicative events, as Duranti (1993a) has in fact shown in his comparisons of Ochs’ data and his own analyses of fono speech,4 I do not think such parallels should be presumed for all societies. Calculations of responsibility and meaning in speech events where such are the public, institutional goal of the interaction thus may often be Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 75 informed by a very different set of ideologies and conventions affecting those cal- culations in ways not observable in interactions where such meaning-making practices are part of ‘what speakers are up to’, though not in any official or explicit way.5 I suggest that the calculation of the meaningfulness of speech acts and events may not involve a uniform calculus across a given speech community or society, but rather social actors may orient to notions of intention, convention, and con- sequence in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways, depending on the social context within which such calculation occurs. In this sense one might more correctly speak not of the notion of responsibility, but of responsibilities, within a single social group, and likewise, of the related notions of intentionalities, conven- tionalities, and consequentialities.6 To illustrate this with some concrete examples, I turn to the conflict talk that constitute property disputes before the tribal courts of the Hopi Indians. In so doing, I analyze how competing inquiries and representations of intentions, con- ventions and consequences constituted there sheds light on Hopi intentionality and the multiplicity of their meaning-making calculi. The multiplicities of meaning in Hopi property disputes THEORIES OF MEANING AMONG THE HOPI Given the long history of anthropological research among the Hopi (see Laird, 1977; Whiteley, 1998 for good reviews and bibliographies), it should be little sur- prise that Hopi notions of self and intentionality have received their share of scholarly attention as well (see Brandt, 1954; Thompson, 1950; Whiteley, 1988, 1998; Whorf, 1956). As most recently described by Whiteley, the Hopi notion of ‘Tunatya’, “intending,” “intention,” is the central concept in Hopi philosophy of action’ (Whiteley, 1998: 39). It is the centrality of Tunatya, along with the notions of pasiwni, ‘planning’, and natwani, ‘self-practice’ (Whiteley, 1998) that leads Whiteley to claim that Hopi possess a ‘triune principle of intentionalism’, an ideational complex ‘of what we might call ‘self’ and ‘mind’ that is both funda- mental to Hopi ontology and ‘foregrounded in Hopi discourse’ (Whiteley, 1998: 39). Whorf too describes the centrality of Tunatya (which he translates as ‘hope or hoping’) to Hopi metaphysics, when he writes: Every language contains terms that come to crystallize in themselves the basic pos- tulates of an unformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a people [. . .]. Such a term in Hopi is the word most often translated “hope” – tunatya [. . .]. The verb tunatya contains in its idea of hope something of our words “thought,” “desire,” and “cause,” . . . . it is the Hopi term for SUBJECTIVE. (Whorf, 1956: 61–62) Thus, Whiteley suggests, it is a recognition of Hopi tunatya and pasiwni, as they might be translated as ‘self-determination’, that explains why, in Hopi origin narratives the demigod Maasaw refuses to lead them, noting ‘that they could not Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 76 Discourse & Society 17(1) be led since they . . . already had their own intentions’(Whiteley, 1998: 40). It is also by virtue of this principle that Hopi explain the significance of ceremonial clowning. In certain public dances of Katsinam, Hopi ancestor spirits, men enact- ing the roles of sacred clowns (tsukut) engage in a morality play by which they ape various sorts of immoral acts, both entertaining and instructing/shaming their Hopi audiences about how and how not to behave. As the play unfolds, and the clowns’ behavior gets worse and worse, the tsukumongwi (clown chief) is seen engaging with Mongwu (Owl Katsina) in plans to punish the tsukut and start a new life. In this manner, clowns are said to represent the efforts and need for humans to ‘plan out life – again foregrounding conscious engagement in social action’. (Whiteley, 1998: 40). Finally, natwani, in perhaps a more empirical sense, may also refer to crops, children, or other fruits of labor, highlighting their significance as ‘worldly reflections of ones’ self-practice and conduct’ (Whiteley, 1998: 41). By providing this description, Whiteley, like Goldman, is not out to merely dis- prove shopworn models of western versus non-western notions of mind and self, where intentionality and inner states seem the sole purview of European and Euro-American thinking, and non-intentionalist conceptions characterize the rest. Clearly, his analysis does this. But he also more fundamentally challenges the very possibility of such an easy dichotomy, and in the process throws doubt on the idea that there always exists a clear line dividing intentions from conventions and consequences. For Whiteley is careful to claim that Hopi notions of intentionality are not isomorphic with the concepts of self of western secular humanism because these notions are situated within a metaphysics of action that also includes ‘supernat- ural agencies, cosmic forces, and fateful processes as well as goal oriented human pursuits’ (Whiteley, 1998: 42). Hopi concepts of social structure and convention are themselves ‘agential, ripe with intentional force, and events/eventings are the products of originary universal intendings.’ (Whiteley, 1998: 42). From western humanist perspectives such a world, full with an intentionality that is the ‘vital and causal aspect of the Cosmos’ (Whorf, 1956: 62), would seem to provide little space for the interpretation of actions as meaningful in light of the presence or absence of human desires. Where all is originally intended from the outset, would it ever seem necessary to calculate the meaning of events by recourse to inner states of social actors? Whence then do the notions of tunatya, pasiwni, and natwani, operate in Hopi metaphysical reflection? Whiteley explains that at the same time, Hopi equally see human intentions as always able to directly impinge on such structures and conventions. As such, he contends that ‘there are thus two intentionalisms in Hopi metaphysics and etiology’ (Whiteley, 1998: 43), what he calls the ‘meta-intentionalism’ of social structure and convention that grounds Hopi metaphysics, and another ‘more direct sense of intentional action by conscious agents’, that is more pragmatic in attributing individual motivations to actions (Whiteley, 1998: 43). He offers an explanation for their interrelationship: Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 77 Individual intentions, then, while the mark of conscious, agential selves, are ulti- mately not the private properties of rational–mechanical individual organisms, but are more fragments of individuated consciousness broken off from a great chain of intentional being. But if all, at the level of essential metanarrative, was intended, the manifesting–manifested trajectory is not a lockstep matching of event to structure. These individuated fragments of consciousness, granted subjectivity and life, have free will – particularly in their capacity for moral action – to perform acts adherent to models of the social good, or, conversely, to depart from this to further selfish interests. (Whiteley, 1998: 43) There remains, however, something fundamentally ambiguous here, at least for this (western humanist?) reader. For while Whiteley demonstrates how, as operating against a background of universal intentionality, Hopi notions of the intending self are not the same as ‘western’ liberal notions of the fully intending self, he also attempts to reserve for Hopi the possibility that such selves are also understood as having free will. Indeed, the latter does seem like an accurate description, even by virtue of my own experience of the repeatedly observed willingness of Hopi people to assign such negative occurrences such as the lack of rain, or the onset of illness, to the insincere or anti-social intentions of particular individuals. But Hopis also seemed perfectly able to interpret events as thoroughly devoid of intent or planning – what Goldman (1993) would certainly call accident. Whiteley himself alludes to this when he describes how: Often, with irony and cultural reflexivism, Hopis jokingly accuse each other (or me) of acting intentionally after an inadvertent or accidental occurrence. The awareness of an over-determining paradigm of intentionalist explanation such jokes reveal sug- gest a skepticism . . . and critical rationalism at work in everyday explanations too. (Whiteley, 1998: 40) Consequently, I would like to suggest that, while (at least) the two intention- alisms identified by Whiteley do in fact operate in Hopi metaphysics, they do not necessarily articulate in any fully systematic or non-conflicting way. Rather the two constitute independent and distinct metaphysical theories for explaining the significance of actions and events in the world that often, but not always, repose on each other. As such, the competing and conflicting grounds of these two theories may be hidden in an indeterminacy overlooked in the successful flow of most everyday Hopi interaction, but which in certain social contexts of conflict and dispute, can be strategically invoked by Hopi to perpetuate a quite stark juxtaposition of meanings and interpretations of actions and events. Furthermore, I argue pace Goldman (1993), and Llewellyn and Hoebel (1941) before him, that interaction in the Hopi legal arena is a unique site for observing the multiple calculi of Hopi meaning. As I shall reveal, this is in large partly due to the efforts of the court to strike a balance between the Anglo- American style juridical norms and practices that constitute much contemporary Hopi tribal law with local notions of Hopi custom and tradition that judges have also been mandated to consider and rely upon in resolving disputes. I do not Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 78 Discourse & Society 17(1) Intentionalist (a.) Non-intentionalist (conventions, Claims based on Hopi traditions are sometimes consequences) interpretations of a disputed event. disputed event. Ambiguously intentionalist/ Ambiguously non-intentionalist intentionalist/ non-intentionalist Intentionalist (b.) Non-intentionalist (conventions, Claims based on ‘Anglo’ style law are sometimes consequences) interpretations of a disputed event. disputed event. Ambiguously intentionalist/ Ambiguously non-intentionalist intentionalist/ non-intentionalist FIGURE 1. Calculations of meaning in Hopi property disputes suggest that what emerges in Hopi courtroom interactions is a breakdown of meaning-making practices that neatly aligns intention-driven theories of inter- pretation with those enacting ‘Anglo’ style legal claims, and conversely those making claims in Hopi tradition drawing on convention and consequence to press their interpretations of disputed events. Instead, and in light of the two Hopi notions of intentionality and how they figure both in their construction of tradition (or navoti ‘knowledge/teachings’) and in the conceptualization of ‘Anglo’ style legal discourses, I argue that Hopi legal actors construct several conflicting meaning-making practices in the adversarial interactions of the courtroom that sometimes rely on intentions, sometimes conventions and conse- quences, and sometimes a combination of these interpretive components in rather vivid moments of strategic interpretive calculations (see Figure 1). THE HOPI TRIBAL COURT, A BRIEF DESCRIPTION The Hopi Tribal and Appellate Courts constitute the judicial branch of Hopi Tribal Government, and were established by Hopi Tribal Ordinance 21 in 1972 to replace the Court of Indian Offenses operated under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The approximate 6500 Hopi living on their reservation in northeastern Arizona occupy 12 villages located on or around three mesas (U.S. Census, 2000). Until the 1930s, nine of these villages operated under autonomous village leadership and there existed no formal tribal organization or any tribal governance structure. Pursuant to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, Hopi villages were compelled by agents of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs to federate and in 1936, with the adoption of the Hopi Constitution, a representative Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 79 Hopi Tribal Council was convened to provide for tribal leadership over such ‘external’ matters as trade and commerce relations with the U.S. and several states, and intervillage law enforcement. However, many of the internal matters of village life remained under the purview of village leadership (By-Laws and Constitution of the Hopi Tribe, 1936). In large measure, Ordinance 21 relies heavily on the procedures of Anglo- American style adjudication when enumerating the operations of the Hopi Tribal Courts. Consequently, many of the basic processes and practices in the Hopi Tribal Court system appear very similar to the activities of many U.S. state and federal courts. Generally speaking, the Hopi tribal legal process is adversarial – litigants submit written briefs and present oral arguments at trial before the court. In oral arguments, litigants have the opportunity to present evidence, take witness testimony, cross-examine their opponents’ witnesses, and then provide closing arguments. Final decisions are made either by juries made up of members of the tribe, or by judges, and such decisions can be appealed to the Hopi Appellate Court upon the showing of some judicial error. All Hopi legal proceedings are heard in one of two courtrooms adjacent to the Hopi police headquarters, situated on a plot of land leased to the Hopi tribe by one of the villages, eight miles west of Keams Canyon on the Hopi Indian Reservation. The various participants in those proceedings are also notably similar to the players in Anglo-American courts. To sit on the Hopi judiciary, non-Hopis must have law degrees, while members of the Hopi tribe must have some legal training, but need not have gone to law school. Litigants have the right to represent themselves or retain counsel. Counsel need not have a law degree, nor be members of the tribe. Owing to prohibitions of cost and location, counsel is extremely difficult for parties to retain, litigants regularly represent themselves or retain one of several lay advocates located in the area whose pri- mary practice is representing clients in the Navajo, Hopi and other tribal courts in the area. Also present for most trial proceedings are a court clerk, a bailiff, and an audience composed of relatives of the parties, litigants waiting for their trials, and other court officials. At the same time that the Hopi Tribal Court employs these Anglo-American style adversarial roles, rules and procedures, other tribal legislation and case law require the Court to give a preferential place to Hopi customs, traditions and culture. In Resolution H-12-76, the Hopi Tribal Council mandated that ‘in decid- ing matters of both substance and procedure’, the Tribal Court give more ‘weight as precedent to the . . . customs, traditions and culture of the Hopi Tribe’ than to U.S. state and federal law (see Resolution, Hopi Tribe, H-12-76). The Hopi Appellate Court has recently reiterated this rule, writing in Hopi Indian Credit Association v. Thomas (AP-001-84, 1996), ‘The customs, traditions and culture of the Hopi Tribe deserve great respect in tribal courts, for even as the Hopi Tribal Council has merged laws and regulations into a form familiar to American legal scholars, the essence of our Hopi law as practiced, remain distinctly Hopi’ (AP-001-84, 1996: 4). Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 80 Discourse & Society 17(1) TRADITION AS MEANING - MAKING IN HOPI PROPERTY DISPUTES The courtroom interactions analyzed in this article come from approximately 30 hours of audio recordings of property dispute hearings before the Hopi Tribal Court collected by the Hopi court as part of its official record from 1995 to 2002. Additionally, interviews of Hopi tribal members (including legal professionals and lay members),7 Hopi tribal court archival research, and ethnographic obser- vation of Hopi courtroom proceedings were also conducted by the author over 27 months of fieldwork on the Hopi Reservation conducted since 1996, a period that included a 13-month stay from November 2001 to December 2002. A review of Hopi case file archives reveal that since 1980, 49 civil complaints concerning property were filed with the court. Property issues loom large in Hopi member’s concerns about law and order in their village communities. This is reflected in the Hopi Constitution, which when originally drafted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was designed in recognition of the degree to which Hopis in 1936 identified matters of property as an intensely local concern. Indeed, despite other major governmental reforms written into that Constitution, issues regard- ing probate and the assignment of village land were two of only four subject matter areas (along with family disputes and adoptions) reserved to the exclusive jurisdiction of what is generally referred to as the ‘traditional’ leadership of the nine separate Hopi villages (By-Laws and Constitution of the Hopi Tribe Article III, § 2 [1936]). This reservation is still recognized today, and property disputes that come before the Hopi tribal court are heard there only because the village leaders responsible for addressing the matter have waived that original jurisdiction. Thus the Hopis’ concerns regarding property remain deep. The research from which this study emerges is part of a larger project initiated after Hopi village leaders from across the Hopi reservation met with Hopi court officers and identi- fied disputes over property as their single greatest threat to the health and welfare of Hopi communities today. And a primary problem identified by tribal members regarding the resolution of these property conflicts is the difficulties they perceive in balancing property based claims on notions of Hopi culture and tradition with the Anglo-American style jurisprudence they see as characterizing contemporary Hopi tribal law. Consequently, it is not surprising that discourses of culture and tradition are a frequent and recurrent feature of both the written texts and oral arguments proffered by litigants, witnesses, lawyers and judges in Hopi property disputes. A review of the 49 property cases on file with the Hopi court, reveals that 33 include recurrent statements by one or more legal actors regarding rights to the property at issue, or requests for how the dispute should be resolved, that invoke some aspect of Hopi custom and tradition. And of the 12 hearings held before the court since 1995 for which audio-recordings were available, in only one did parties not argue a matter of Hopi tradition or culture.8 These figures mirror trends in other tribal courts across Indian Country in the United States. In a recent study of 359 published tribal court decisions from 1992 to 1998, of 56 Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 81 different tribal jurisdictions, opinions concerning property disputes included references to tribal customs and traditions more often than opinions concerning any other subject matter area (Barsh, 1999). Qualitatively, the instances of traditional talk that emerge in Hopi courtroom interactions reveal a wide diversity of form, content, and distribution of speaking rights. Thus statements of tradition are expressed by Hopis and non-Hopis, and by lay-persons, advocates, and judges, in both English and Hopi utterances. Furthermore, in some instances, tradition is sometimes constituted through explicit reference, whereas in others, it is indexed through talk about clan relations and ceremonial and other social obligations (Figure 1). (1) Referencing and indexing Hopi tradition in property hearings (a) A Hopi Advocate in opening arguments suggesting that principles of custom and tradition mandate property passing only to women (12 December 2001): 001 Since that evidence will favor my clients 002 it’s very likely that → 003 under Hopi custom and tradition that 004 they will succeed 005 on the merits of the case. (b) An ‘Anglo’ Advocate during direct examination pursuing an argument that her client rightfully inherited a plot of land from her father (22 March 1995): 001 Now it’s true, 002 isn’t it, → 003 that in Hopi tradition, 004 orchards are generally considered 005 to be the man’s property? (c) A Hopi judge taking testimony from a witness regarding the clan relations between a party and the grandfather she claims bequeathed her land, (29 December 1997): 001 Judge: And was she → 002 from the same clan 003 as the grandfather 004 that worked the orchard? 005 Witness: No 006 because you won’t be 007 the same clan as your grandpa, 008 you’d have to be the- 009 some others clan → 010 as you are aware at Hopi clanship. These examples reveal the regularity with which notions of Hopi tradition are invoked within the adversarial participation frameworks of opening arguments, witness examination and other genres of Hopi tribal court discourse. Moreover they suggest the extent to which Hopi and non-Hopi interlocutors are able to Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 82 Discourse & Society 17(1) construct these notions as articulating principles of proper behavior and social status – conventions, or the ‘meta-intentionalism’ of a manifesting social world, in Whiteley’s terms – against which the significance and meaningfulness of the actions and events at issue in these disputes can be evaluated. In these instances, the legal actors appear to be constructing tradition in ways that, at least on the surface take no measure of the inner states of particular social actors involved in the event or action under dispute. But in other moments within and across these disputes, concerns with the intentions of particular persons do seem to enter into the meaning-making cal- culations made through tradition based arguments. Thus consider the following exchange: (2) The intentionality of tradition (22 March 1995) 001 Attorney: Ahm (.) Louise, in your knowledge 002 ah (.) as a community member of Hotevilla, 003 and as a member of Hopi ah your entire life, 004 is that in line with -with the understanding 005 of how things work (and-) 007 Louise: I believe that was true because, 006 (.) 006 like I said, 007 our grandmother left Old Oraibi, 008 solely for the reason of remaining Hopi. → 009 She didn’t want the White Man’s Way. 010 She didn’t want any other way but the Hopi way. 011 And I believe that, 012 I believe that she would say that 013 (.) 014 because that was also her instructions to all of us. Notice in the construction of his question, the attorney employs a series of propositions at ll. 003–005 that attempt to frame the witness’ knowledge and understanding of the traditional principles she is testifying to as based on her in-group status as Hopi and village member ‘her entire life’. Using the proposition + tag question format in this way, the attorney works to constrain the witness toward the production of a response that indexes her claims to Hopi tradition as significant because of the social conventions of practice and belief that are known to all Hopi members of her village. But significantly, in ll. 009–014, the witness response ignores these constraints, instead formulating the truth-value of her claims as derived from the particular motivations, desires, and ‘instructions’ of her grandmother. In this light, tradition seems less the expression of con- ventional practices and values, and more the overt expression of the intentions of her esteemed elder. In another example the significance of Hopi tradition as the product of indi- vidual intentions is made even more explicit. The following statement was offered Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 83 by a man who claimed a home in dispute based on the grounds that his mother made an oral bequest to him before she died. (2) Tradition as intentions (27 December 1997) 001 Ned: That is Hopi tradition is- is speaking 002 and letting people know your intention 003 and your wishes. [. . .some lines omitted. . .] 013 I think that tradition is something 014 that a person puts together, 015 in their favor or mine, 016 that they know its time, 017 and they come forward with it. 018 And they speak it, 019 and tell us, 020 ‘This is what I want you, 021 my children, 022 to have’. How might we account for this apparent indeterminacy revealed in all these examples regarding the source of meaningfulness, and hence the meaning- making that gets accomplished, through Hopi courtroom discourses concerning tradition? Why is it the case that the interpretive practices that are constituted through these tradition discourses sometimes index issues of social convention and consequence, and other times seem to turn on the speaker’s concern with intentions? I would suggest that the concept of tradition, when properly under- stood from a Hopi perspective, is a notion that can be invoked to capture both the content of highly valued knowledge, and the equally significant communicative contexts in which such knowledge is transferred, and as such blurs divisions between the intentions, conventions and consequences that operate as the sources of the meaningfulness of tradition discourses for Hopi speakers. Navoti, the lexical term regularly employed by Hopis to refer to tradition, is also regularly translated as ‘teachings’. In its idealized form, navoti refers to, as Whiteley explains, ‘valued knowledge’ which ‘concerns the ability to influence, create or transform events in the world’ (Whiteley, 1998: 94) and which, in the idealized model of Hopi communicative practices, as with other Pueblos (Kroskrity, 1993; Ortiz, 1972), is transferred in moments by esteemed individuals to neophytes in highly secretive ritual practices to which only initiated members are allowed access. Indeed, navoti is a nominalization of the verb navota, ‘notice through the perceptions’, which includes the reception of knowledge via listen- ing and hearing. Studies of Hopi storytelling suggest that those genres that include information regarding the sacred histories of clan migration, and other sacred knowledge and the normative principles conveyed there, are distinguished by the repetitive use of the yaw quotative particle (‘it is said’), a marker that ‘tra- ditionalizes’ the story and its performance by indexing how the information Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 84 Discourse & Society 17(1) being conveyed reports the talk related at some prior communicative moment (Kroskrity, 1993; Shaul, 2002; Wiget, 1987). Thus I contend the Hopi notion of navoti, and hence ‘tradition’, captures a reference not just to the content conveyed through such ‘teachings’, but also the esoteric and exclusive processes and practices of those conveyances as well. Hopi concepts of tradition in this way mirror other notions that Whorf (1956) describes as capturing the ‘eventuating’ or ‘manifesting’ character of Hopi con- ceptualizations of the world, insofar as they include: equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental . . . or as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but . . . behind and within all the forms and appearances in nature . . . the essence and typical form of which is the striving of purposeful desire, intelligent in character toward manifestation. (pp. 59–60) Tradition is thus a notion that precisely straddles the dual intentionalisms described by Whiteley (1998) earlier, suggesting not just the insights regarding the manifesting, ‘meta-intentionalism’ of the world and its natural forces, but equally the intention filled moment in which that information is communicated. As such, I would contend that the notion of tradition as understood by these Hopi does not unambiguously refer only to social conventions as generalizable and decontextualized from the processes by which knowledge of such conven- tions were passed as ‘instructions’ from their elders. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that this information can be indexed as exclusively received through such moments of instruction, from their mothers, uncles, fathers. and others, that gives such information its traditional authority. Tradition from this perspective is thus a meaning-making practice through which Hopi legal actors can construct the significance of disputed events in light of both considerations of social conven- tion and individual intentions, in ways that sometimes, but not always, repose on each other. However, to properly reveal how this is the case in the context of Hopi property disputes, and hence capture the full spectrum of meaning-making multiplicity that emerges there – including the meaning-making that gets accomplished through Anglo-American legal notions – it is necessary to consider how such practices unfold in the adversarial interactions over the course of a single courtroom proceeding. To do that I turn to the details of a hearing that was held in the sum- mer of 2000. The multiplicities of meanings in a Hopi probate dispute The hearing in question concerned a challenge raised by a woman (renamed ‘Jean’ here) to the appointment of an administrator of the purported will of her adopted mother (‘Nellie’), who was recently deceased. Jean’s opponent ‘Dan’, the man named in the will as the administrator, was also adopted as a child by the decedent. Under the terms of the will in question, both parties were bequeathed Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 85 one of three homes controlled by Nellie. The home that Dan was promised, and which he would presumptively distribute to himself if appointed administrator, is the house that Jean was already occupying. Thus the main thrust of Jean’s challenge to Dan’s appointment as administra- tor of the will, and her challenge to the will itself, turns fundamentally on her desire to remain where she was living, rather than relocate. As we shall see, her claims, and Dan’s counterclaims, are pursued through arguments that draw on several competing theories of meaning that attempt to discern the significance of the testamentary document sometimes by querying the intentional states behind its production, sometimes by evaluating the conventions of Hopi property inheri- tance, and sometimes by alluding to the consequences that will result if the testamentary document is followed or ignored. Jean’s house was one of only two homes in her village of a type that Hopis’ call a ‘clan’ or ‘ceremonial home’ – a central feature of the corporate estate of Hopi’s matrilineally reckoned clans (Eggan, 1950; Titiev, 1944; Whiteley, 1988) and an ideological locus of women’s activity and authority in sustaining the clan and the village’s ritual cycle. Significantly, Hopi consultants informed me that it is possible to articulate certain foundational ‘principles’ of Hopi traditional prop- erty inheritance, the most common of these being that the use and occupation of clan homes pass from mothers to daughters (clan membership itself being reck- oned matrilineally) who assist with ceremonial participation and that men were never to be the recipients of clan homes. As it was regularly stated to me, ‘Men may build homes, but they never get homes’. By occupying the home where Kooyemsi (‘Mudhead katsinas’) come to announce the Niman ceremony (‘Homedance’ held in mid June), villagers gener- ally recognized Jean as the one who bore the primary responsibility for ritually greeting them when they emerge from the kivas, as well as for opening the home to non-resident clan and non-clan visitors during the two days of the dance itself. It was thus controversial to many of Jean’s fellow villagers when they heard that Nellie had apparently willed the home to her son Dan, an unmarried man, and furthermore not even a member of Nellie or Jean’s clan (Jean was the daughter of a fellow clanswoman of Nellie’s, Dan was her brother-in-law’s son). Less clear than the ‘principle’ of matrilineal inheritance of property, however, is the procedures by which Hopi recognize such transfers as successfully accom- plished. Some consultants and research suggest a model consistent with the corporate holding of property, where female and male clan leaders would get together to decide who among a decedent’s daughters was best deserving of the home. Others suggest nothing nearly so formal, noting that individuals seemed able to promise use rights to their property as they saw fit, with or without the presence of witnesses. Files on record with the Hopi Tribal Court reveal that since the 1940s, at least some Hopi committed their probate wishes to written documents and filed them with the Court of Indian Offenses. In both form and substance, the content of these documents support the claims of my consultants who reported that Hopi wishing to prepare wills would Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 86 Discourse & Society 17(1) do so by seeking the assistance of legal professionals either at the Court, in the Hopi legal aid offices, or from private practitioners in nearby off-reservation cities. Most often, these documents are prepared in English, typed on onion-skin or (later) white bond paper, and ‘signed’ by the testators and their witnesses with thumbprints. The text of these documents is usually perfunctory, starting with a paragraph employing the formulaic language of Anglo-American testamentary instruments (e.g. ‘I hereby bequeath . . .’ or ‘I, Nellie Karl, give to my son . . .’) and then enumerating the various parcels of property to be distributed, along with their intended recipient. As such, these documents bear the markings of being prepared with the pur- pose of meeting the principles of Anglo-American probate law. Where the ‘first principle’ of that law is ‘the freedom of testation’ or ‘the premise that an owner is entitled to dispose of his property as he pleases in death as in life’ (Langbein, 1975: 491) these documents are prepared in anticipation of the fact that they will be invoked in probate hearings that turn on the determination of ‘two broad issues of testamentary intent: did the decedent intend to make a will, and if so what are its terms’ (Langbein, 1975: 491). Given that the Hopi Tribe has no probate code of its own, it should come as little surprise that where these testa- mentary documents have been introduced in probate proceedings, Hopi judges have tended, at least initially, to evaluate them in light of these same principles. As such, it may already be possible to discern the competing lines of discourse along which talk of conventions, consequences and intentions get worked up in this dispute, and who stands to gain by interpreting the will according to them. But as we shall see, as with our earlier examples of Hopi tradition discourse, here too there is no neat division between the two interpretive frames proposed by the Hopi interlocutors, as Jean, Dan and the judge all proffer multiple and diffuse rationale for interpreting the speech act, drawing on these very different theories less in the development of some logical, stepwise argument and rather more like producing a patchwork display of possible intentions, conventions, and consequences, that might envelop the testamentary instrument and give it the general significance they each propose it bears. HOPI DISPUTE INTERACTION AND THE COMPETING THEORIES OF MEANING On the day of the hearing, present in the tribal courtroom were Jean, her daugh- ter Arlene (her co-complainant), Dan and his non-Hopi legal advocate, and several relatives of both parties and the decedent. Also present were the court clerk and bailiff, two Hopis from a different village than that of the parties. The judge presiding over the hearing is a Hopi woman from yet another village. After opening the proceedings by acknowledging the audience, and giving the two parties an opportunity to state their claims, the judge states the princi- ples that will guide her determination as to whether Dan should be named administrator of the estate, following the terms outlined in Nellie’s will. And indeed these principles turn on whether the will is a valid expression of Nellie’s testamentary intent. The judge says: Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 87 (4) Stating the Anglo-American legal principles of testamentary intent9 001 Judge: Right now 002 the will under- ah on its face 003 is a valid will 004 unless if you can show that 005 at the time this will was written 006 on April 15, 1999 007 you – Nellie was mentally incap-ah-could not understand 008 what the contents of the will was, 009 that she could not fully comprehend 010 or that she was not fully aware 011 of what was happening. As explicitly framed here, the judge establishes that documents presented to the court as expressions of a decedent’s testamentary intent are considered presumptively valid (ll. 001–003), unless those documents can be shown to somehow not be an expression of such intent (ll. 004–011). This foregrounding of intent and evaluations of its attribution in wills is, as we have seen, not entirely inconsistent with at least one type of Hopi intentionality. But where Hopi princi- ples of property holding and inheritance turn on moral and ideological evalua- tions of clan corporateness and ritual responsibility, and where evidence that Hopi individuals were ever entirely free to dispose of property (especially homes) is at best equivocal, this foregrounding of intent flattens what must be, and has always been, a much more complex, calculation of meaning. That this is the case is suggested by Dan’s testimony when he is then asked by the judge to explain ‘how [he] was to be appointed ahm as the administrator of the estate of [Nellie] . . . How that came about’. The judge appears to primarily be asking about the indices of Nellie’s intentional state on the day she actually wrote the will (e.g. Was Nellie of sound mind on that day?) and these facts are clearly in Dan’s favor, insofar as the will was witnessed by two disinterested, non- Hopi lawyers, each of which attested to Nellie’s soundness of mind on that day. But rather than testifying to these facts, Dan explains ‘how’ he came to be the named administrator in the will by describing his relationship with Nellie and how his dutiful execution of the responsibilities that attend to that relationship likely led to her trusting him to distribute her estate. He states: (5) Explaining ‘how’ he was appointed administrator of Nellie’s estate 001 Dan: Well I- like ah the letter said, 002 you know, 003 I call her ‘Mom’. 004 I grew up with he- both of -ehh husband and Nellie. [. . .some lines omitted. . .] 033 I worked the cattle, 034 worked the fields, 035 and everything else. 036 Same old thing. Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 88 Discourse & Society 17(1) 037 And hhh I guess 038 when you do things for people 039 they tend to look at ya and say, 040 ‘I think you deserve something.’ Dan’s testimony does not fully ignore the role that intentions play in the forma- tion of wills or the distribution of property. Indeed, his explanation of the terms of Nellie’s will turns precisely on an attribution of what Nellie may have thought when writing it, as he suggests at ll. 037–040. But note how references to her thoughts are reported as themselves constituted within habitual Hopi behaviors. Thus Dan initiates his formulation as an innocent speculation (l. 037 ‘I guess’) he casts his understanding of the motivations behind the will, as merely the habitual assessments (l. 039 ‘they tend to look at you and say’) of a generic set of human subjects – those ‘people’ who give gifts of property because of the boon of having good works done on their behalf. Implied in this statement are attribu- tions of Hopi conventions of morality and normativity in social relations as well as calculations of intent. Dan implies a set of obligations indexed by the fact that he calls Nellie ‘Mom’, norms and morals that Dan explicitly claims to have fulfilled through the care-taking he did for the cattle and the fields. Indeed what he did is exemplary of the gnomic behavior (l. 036 ‘same old thing’) that ideal Hopi sons engage in for their mothers. Thus what Dan hears the judge asking him to describe is not a recitation of the events of 15 April 1999 – not just proof that Nellie intended what was writ- ten on that day – but rather a request for some moral justification, according to the norms and expectations of Hopi social convention, that make meaningful the terms of the will which have the illocutionary force of appointing him adminis- trator. Even for Dan then, the party with most to gain by proving the testamen- tary validity of the will, the significance of that document cannot fully be accounted for by mere reference to the decedent’s intentions, but must also be measured in light of Hopi social convention – the very stuff of Whiteley’s second Hopi (meta)intentionality. Here then the two Hopi intentionalities Whiteley (1998) describes both emerge in Dan’s discourse, and they might be said to repose on each other. Indeed that is the very essence of Dan’s point. Nellie’s intentions regarding Dan are easily knowable as nothing more than the usual response to a son who has so dutifully attended to his mother, fulfilling that role as it has been intended to be played from the origins of Hopi social structure and practice. It is when Jean proffers her challenges to the validity of the will that the dis- tinctness of these calculi of Hopi meaning and interpretation are most starkly visible. At first Jean seems both willing and able to inquire into Nellie’s intentions at the time the will was written. Because she is not represented by an attorney, she is allowed to cross-examine Dan directly on these issues. And the following interaction transpires Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 89 (6) Jean’s ‘examination’ of Dan: Part I 001 Jean: But you di-But she is not in her right mind. 002 How do you know 003 she’s in her right mind? 004 Dan: Because I know the lady. 005 Jean: You know it don’t- 006 you don’t know the lady. 007 You say you do but you don’t. [. . .some lines omitted. . .] 030 Dan: You know, 031 because I work 032 and I take her here and there. 033 You know, 034 because she asked me to do it. 035 Jean: Yeah[ in return for what?= 036 Dan: [I’ll take off- 037 Jean: =In return for all this stuff? At the center of Jean’s questioning of Dan is a concern with intentional states, both of Nellie and Dan, at the time the will was written. Thus Jean starts with a direct challenge regarding Dan’s assessment of Nellie’s mental health, at l. 001. And in Jean’s ultimate turn (‘Yeah, in return for what? = In return for all this stuff ’) can only be understood as an accusation that Dan exerted a coercive influ- ence on Nellie to write the will, such that terms of the document must not be an expression of her free testamentary intent. But in her very next turn Jean makes a statement in which issues regarding Nellie’s intentions if alluded to at all, are only obliquely under consideration. The interaction continues (7) Jean’s ‘examination’ of Dan: Part II. 038 Dan: [(And I- 039 Jean: [ I thought 040 I was supposed to be the daughter. 041 I thought they adopted me. 042 How come I’m not getting anything 043 and you’re getting every[thing= 044 Dan: [No. If you- 045 Jean: and they haven’t even adopted you. 046 Dan: No. 047 The thing about it is, 048 they- she did give you 049 the house up top. 050 You and the girls. 051 Jean: But I want more than that. 052 Because I’m the one 053 that’s taking care of everything at the village. Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 90 Discourse & Society 17(1) The full rhetorical force of Jean’s statement that she ‘was supposed to be the daughter. I thought they adopted me’ (ll. 040–041) echoes much of the same concern for Hopi social convention as Dan’s claim that he calls Nellie ‘Mom’. By foregrounding kin relationships Jean is indexing the convention regarding the matrilineal inheritance of homes, and her expectation that she would receive one of Nellie’s homes upon her death. Indeed, her use of the demonstrative in the phrase ‘the daughter’ (rather than the possessive pronoun ‘her’ or the proper noun with possessive suffix ‘Nellie’s’), adds to the force of this statement as allud- ing to the gnomic, normative role of being a Hopi ‘daughter’ and the sets of duties and expectations that go along with it. And it is by virtue of this ‘supposed’ status that Jean expresses her incredulity in her complaint that she is ‘not getting anything’ (l. 042). Now it must be noted that allusions to Nellie’s testamentary intentions cannot be ruled out as somehow contributing to the theory of meaning Jean is proffering here. It seems possible to say, for example, that in reminding her audi- ence of the social conventions concerning her position as ‘the daughter’ of the decedent, Jean is casting doubt on the possibility that Nellie could have intended the terms of the purported will that give her residence to Dan. In this way, much like Dan did earlier, she may be appealing to shared notions of convention to afford an attribution of intention. But it is also possible that Jean may not have been implying any of this. Instead, she could be making a claim to the invalidity of the will that is entirely grounded in its violation of Hopi convention, irregardless of its representation of Nellie’s testamentary intent. Once again, then, we are confronted with an attribu- tion of meaning of the speech act in question – Nellie’s will – in which the two Hopi intentionalisms repose on each other. And it seems likely to remain indetermi- nate as to which, either, or both, of these intentionalities – and their concomitant intentions, conventions, and consequences – were ultimately implied by Jean. But the second of Jean’s two turns here (ll. 051–053: ‘But I want more than that. . .’) seems less equivocal in this regard. Here Jean reveals that she objects to the will in light of the terms that provide for Dan to take the clan home in which she was residing. And notably, she justifies this objection as grounded in the fact that she is the person ‘taking care of everything at the village’, a reference under- stood in the sociohistoric context of this dispute to her role as the clanswoman responsible for fulfilling the ceremonial responsibilities attached to the home. This is made even more explicit a few turns later, when the judge asks Jean directly to restate her objection, asking her, ‘Do you know why you do not wish to have Dan be named as the personal representative?’ (8) Jean’s response to the judge’s request to restate her objections 001 Jean: Hmm Yes. 002 He’ll just be- I- 003 for one thing- one- 004 the house that he’s getting is- that’s my house. Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 91 005 I- I’m the one that watching the Mudheads 006 that come around every year. 007 I’m the one that’s taking care of the Katsinas 008 that take part over there 009 and they come to the- go to the house 010 when something happens to them. 011 I’m the one that taking care of everything over there. 012 And that’s not a man’s job. 013 It’s supposed to be a lady’s job. 014 And also he’s a different clan. It is in these turns, I would contend, that we can observe Jean proposing a chal- lenge to Nellie’s will that is informed by a calculus of meaning which includes the conventions and (perhaps) consequences of the act, but with less concern for the intentions behind the will. Here, as before, Jean justifies her opposition to the will along lines readily recognizable as legitimate claims in light of Hopi conventions of traditional clan home inheritance, and the larger Hopi socio-ideological order which informs it and which it perpetuates. Jean claims, at ll. 005–011 that it is as the clanswoman responsible for all the ceremonial duties attached to the home in question (‘I’m the one that’s watching the Mudheads . . . I’m the one that’s doing everything over there’), that the home should go to her – just as ceremonial homes have always gone to women who show an initiative for bearing the responsibilities of ritual participation. Moreover, Jean seems to argue that whatever the outcome, the home should certainly not go to Dan. For it is by virtue of the sexual division of ceremonial labor (ll. 012–013 ‘And that’s not a man’s job . . .), and the division of certain ritual prerogatives among the different clans (l. 014 ‘and also he’s from a differ- ent clan’), that Dan is unfit according to Hopi traditions to perform the duties of the house. Implied in this is perhaps something of a veiled threat. Hopi listeners, particularly family and village members of which a few were present in the courtroom audience, may be inclined to contemplate what would happen if Dan were given the home. How would those responsibilities be carried out? Or would they at all? If not, and in light of the ideologies of letter-perfect attention to detail in Pueblo ritual performance (Kroskrity, 1993; Ortiz, 1972; Whiteley, 1998), would this ceremony have to cease? Would one of the last remaining clan homes in their village lose its significance? Although we cannot unambiguously show it here, all of these consequences may well have been implied by Jean in this state- ment, particularly in light of Hopi penchants for eschatological reasoning and commentary (Geertz, 1994; Whiteley, 1998). Thus it is for all these reasons, Jean explains, that she ‘deserves things too’, and one ‘thing’ in particular that she was not promised by the terms of Nellie’s will. But there is here no reference to the intentions that may have been behind the will. Nor can we read Jean’s statements regarding these conventions and con- sequences as attempting, as described earlier, to show that Nellie could not have intended to give the home to Dan. Here then we do not see the two Hopi inten- Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 92 Discourse & Society 17(1) tionalisms reposing on each other. Jean’s argument against the validity of the will is grounded in a theory of meaning entirely distinct from the theory implied in Dan’s, the judge’s, and even Jean’s own statements regarding the intentions informing the purported will. This theory may even be made in opposition to the former theory, insofar as Jean could be claiming a significance for the will irregardless of its value as an accurate expression of Nellie’s intent. Thus in this context, Whiteley’s intentionalisms – that of the individual, and that of the ever- manifesting, ‘agential’ social order – are revealed as two separate and distinct theories for interpreting actions and events. Conclusion My goal in this article has largely involved developing analyses that were made possible by the work of linguistic anthropologists who hinted at the likelihood of multiple meaning-making practices in the speech communities they studied, but who did not engage in any extended treatment and research into such multiplic- ities. To this end, I have taken insights from Austin’s models of speech act theory, particularly those regarding the fundamental indeterminacy that might charac- terize the location of sources of meaning, and coupled them with recognition from legal anthropologists that contexts of dispute and conflict provide a unique site for revealing competing cultural norms and practices, to both suggest and display how analysis of dispute interactions provide a good opportunity to reveal the multiple, distinct, and sometimes competing theories of meaning that are available to members of a single speech community. Where such multiplicity is often elided by the smooth flow of everyday interaction, it is in moments of conflict and contestation, and the degree to which such conflicts emerge around the indeterminate significance of an action or event, that very different and even competing calculations of meaning can be worked up by interactants for strate- gic rhetorical advantage in the heat of dispute resolution discourses. We have thus seen in Hopi courtroom interactions that discourses of Hopi tradition and Anglo-American law become the loci for an array of interpretive practices undertaken by parties to these adversarial proceedings. Thus examples were provided that revealed how notions of Hopi tradition straddle the two forms of intentionality that ground Hopi metaphysics and hence afford arguments that constitute a significance for disputed events either in light of social convention, or the specific intentions of esteemed elders, and often both. Then, to suggest how these get invoked for strategic purposes, an effort was made to explore how these practices get worked up over the course of a single property dispute. That analysis suggested at least three different meaning-making calculations being constituted by participants. The first was that of the judge, who worked to impose an interpretive frame on the dispute interaction that derives from Anglo- American notions concerning the significance of a will as a document expressing testamentary intent, and the ways in which such intent can be ascertained. The second was exemplified in Dan’s reasoning (but also employed by Jean), where Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 93 the conventions of a good Hopi son’s treatment of his mother is going to impel certain intentions in that woman to provide for him in her will. The third and final calculation, Jean’s, took no measure of intention but rather considered the significance of the will solely in the light of conventions of Hopi ceremonial and clan structure and practices, and the consequences to these orders should the terms of the purported will be followed. Insofar as in such conflict talk Hopi disputants are all oriented toward furthering their own interests through a pres- entation of their perspective on the disputed action, and insofar as Hopi judges are charged with having to decide in favor of one party or the other, it seems that the talk in such contexts becomes a uniquely suitable locus for investigating all the different and even incompatible ways single events and actions can be made meaningful – incompatibilities that in other, more overtly cooperative contexts of interaction, are necessarily overlooked and ignored. To make my own intentions at least a little less ambiguous, it is my hope that through this analysis new insights are provided into how the multiplicity that operates in so many aspects of social life is given a proper consideration in the details of meaning-making practice, an object of inquiry that has become a cornerstone of linguistic anthropological endeavor over the last 30 years. And insofar as an article about the multiplicity and complexity of communicative acts and events should approach some understanding about the multiplicity of mean- ings to which it may be susceptible, it is also hoped that this article shall stand at the heart of anthropological debates and disputes which it will, in the best of circumstances, spark in the future. AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S Research for and writing of this article was conducted with support from a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and a Predoctoral Research Grant from the UCLA Institute of American Cultures. The author would also like to thank Alessandro Duranti, Keith M.T.A. Murphy, Adrienne Lo and Laura Sterponi for their helpful and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. Any remaining faults are of course, the author’s alone. NOTES 1. Indeed, the coinage of the term calculi of meaning is used here in lieu of other more commonly used meaning-making monikers (evaluation, attribution, formulation, etc.) to foreground the degree to which the multiplicity of meaning-making practices considered here may be uniquely tied to contexts of disputation and rhetorical debate. In this regard, I follow the insights of institutional discourse and legal language scholars (Amsterdam and Bruner, 2000; Drew and Heritage, 1992) who argue that the talk that emerges within such discourses must always be analyzed in light of the goals of those institutions. As such, the meaning-making practices that emerge in contexts of dispute and debate may be strategically designed and explicitly articulated by inter- locutors for the purpose of pressing competing claims to material and symbolic resources. The degree to which such claims are known to be contested suggests that the multiple meaning-making practices proffered by contestants are specifically Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 94 Discourse & Society 17(1) calculated to maximally differentiate among the possible significances that can legiti- mately be construed for a single disputed event or action. It is for this reason that meaning-making practices discussed here are gathered under the rubric of calculi of meaning. 2. Challenges to speech act theory and intention-driven theories of interpretation have also been pursued by scholars outside linguistic anthropology, including researchers with interests in pragmatics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis (Heritage, 1984; Streeck, 1980; Verschueren, 1983). 3. Goldman provides examples of the ways in which Huli ergative case-markings, moral- ity adverbs and their co-occurrence restrictions with transitive verbs, and other metapragmatic forms together work a ‘system synergy’ (Goldman, 1993: 273) within Huli disputes to ‘produce an effect’ of accidentality ‘greater than the sum of its parts.’ 4. And in so doing, Duranti provides a rather sound rebuke to Goldman’s critiques, par- ticularly given the degree to which Ochs and Duranti conducted their fieldwork in Samoa together and invariably shared data and insights from their respective experi- ences that contributed to their perspectives on Samoan meaning-making practices. 5. Add to this the additional complexities, only recently recognized in anthropology, that processes of globalization and transnational forces can have on meaning-making in small and large-scale societies, and the possibilities that such forces differentially effect the dichotomized spheres of social life (public vs. private, national vs. local, even men’s vs. women’s) and the picture grows even more byzantine. 6. Of course, the argument proffered here for recognizing the multiplicity of meaning- making calculi should not be understood as a claim that all these calculi enjoy equal levels of legitimacy and authority within and across the speech contexts in which they are invoked. Indeed, one fruitful avenue for exploring the (re)production of hegemonic order within any speech community, would be to explore the metapragmatic and ideological processes by which some calculations are devalued as sources of the ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ meaning of events, and others are routinely elevated as such, and the dif- ferential distribution among members of the rights to (re)produce such calculations. At the same time, it is important to emphasize the extent to which the multiplicity described here is one that contemplates the possibility of multiple meaning-making calculi that co-exist within the range of what members perceive as in fact legitimate and possible meanings of a given social event, and which cannot be reconciled with each other in any easy fashion, but at the same time are not considered by members as infelicitous or otherwise far afield. 7. The interviewing conducted during this period did not regularly include discussions with Hopi litigants. The decision to forgo such interviews, which would have undoubt- edly made valuable contributions to this study, was based on several considerations. Perhaps most importantly, many of the cases analyzed here (including the case from which comes the judge–witness interaction given the most detailed analysis here) are still considered to be open matters before the tribal court. Because my research was conducted as part of a larger project initiated by the Hopi court and village communities, I was concerned (along with court officers) that my contact with litigants might be construed as ex parte communications from the court to the partic- ular party, communications that might be seen as unduly influencing the outcome of their litigation. For this reason, it was determined that the benefit of additional insight gained by such interviews would not outweigh the costs that might accrue to people still litigating and living through these property conflicts. 8. And this was in large part because the hearing was postponed to give the litigants an opportunity to settle out of court, which they did. Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.  Richland: The multiple calculi of meaning 95 9. Transcription conventions are as follows: Speakers are identified by their first name or title in the far left column. Note also the following conventions using a modified system developed by Jefferson and described in Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974): A hyphen or dash indicates that speech was suddenly cut off during or after the preceding word. ? A question mark indicates a marked rising pitch. . A period indicates marked falling pitch. [ Brackets mark the onset of portions of utterance that are spoken in overlap with other talk. The overlapping portions of talk are placed immediately above or below each other on the page. () Parentheses that enclose utterances indicate doubt about the accuracy of enclosed materials. Parentheses that enclose ?? indicate that something was said at that point, but it is not clear enough to transcribe. = Equal signs indicate speech that is linked to subsequent talk by the same speak- er, but which had to be split for transcript clarity. bold Bolded speech indicates increased volume. italics Italicized speech indicates emphasis of some sort, including slowed speech and pronunciation. REFERENCES Amsterdam, A.G. and Bruner, J. (2000) Minding the Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Austin, J.L. (1956) ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57: 1–30. Austin, J.L. (1975) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original published 1962.) Barsh, R. L. (1999) ‘Putting the Tribe in Tribal Courts: Possible? 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Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. JUSTIN B. RICHLAND is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD in anthropology from UCLA and his JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley. He has been a con- sultant and clerk to the Hopi Appellate Court since 1996. His research employs linguistic and legal anthropological approaches to investigate the legal and political modernities of indigenous peoples. A sample of his recent publications include: ‘What are you Going to do with the Village’s Knowledge?: Talking Tradition, Talking Law in Hopi Tribal Court’, Law and Society Review (2005) 16: 235–72 and (with S. Deer) Introduction to Tribal Legal Studies (Alta Mira Press, 2004). A D D R E S S : Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Social Ecology II, Irvine, CA 92697-7080, USA. [email: [email protected]] Downloaded from http://das.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 17, 2008 © 2006 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.