A Responsibility to Speak: The Discursive Orders of Christianity and Confucianism among the Jinghpo in Southwest China.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation uses the concept of discursive order to generalize a linguistic distinction introduced into Jinghpo language from two world religions,Christianity and Confucianism,and then shows how Jinghpo Christians in Yunnan today respond to both civilizing projects. Facing two incompatible dominant orders,Jinghpo Christians have a responsibility to evince a Christian prescriptive order when speaking in religious services,but the Confucianism subscriptive order when interacting with the state. The prescriptive order has an ideology of temporality that unfolds from front to back； the subscriptive order folds from back to front. Nonetheless,these ideological orders need to be represented and reproduced by sequentializing utterance events in real time of speaking,a linguistic practice that involves using deictic terms strategically. The analysis focuses especially on how Jinghpo speakers use two kinds of deictic terms,demonstratives and locatives,to immanently laminate utterances to create (dis)orderly sequences when they create and circulate ritual texts,such as sermon and folktales,under these two different discursive regimes. The results show that Jinghpo Christians know how to break down the dominant orders when obeying them.