Botenstäbe: Die Rekonstruktion eines indigenen australischen Systems zur Kommunikation über weite Entfernungen
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Over the course of the fellowship, the most important scientific advances that I achieved on message sticks concern their communicative pragmatics. Setting aside secondary commentaries, I isolated eyewitness descriptions of message stick interactions, as well as cases where message sticks were successfully interpreted by their recipients without an intermediary. This rich historical data allowed me to develop a robust theory of message stick pragmatics. In brief I sought to understand message sticks in terms of their illocutionary force (what are they doing socially, what intention are they signalling, what are they mandating in a given interaction?); and their informativeness (how are inferences constrained, what are the graphic and semantic conventions if any, and what determines or defines communicative success and failure in terms of the system as a whole?). What I found was that message stick communications are always used to coordinate, mandate or report on movements of people and resources. On certain occasions they are used for formalising political relations (securing an alliance, arranging marriage, declaring war etc.) which in turn usually entails movements of people and resources. Most message sticks are in fact announcements for the beginning of ceremony: especially initiation and mortuary rites. Some are about coordinating hunting teams. Others are requests or negotiations for specific resources such as tobacco and calico. Given the finite range of possible communication topics, inferences can be refined by the known kinship relationships between sender, messenger and recipient, and communicative props carried by the messenger. This means that range of possible meanings of an object is already constrained prior to the examination of the motifs inscribed on it. These motifs tend to represent named individuals, groups of people, objects, landmarks and numbers including units of time, days, months. The motifs are often multivalent, meaning that one sign has more than one conventional meaning depending on context. In some cases there is a defined reading order or orientation, but relations between motifs can also be diagrammatic especially when it comes to depictins of landscapes. The 19th-century debates over whether message sticks represented writing were highly speculative. My own analysis of rich data does not reveal any instances of ‘true’ writing on message sticks since they never record linguistic structure. However in functional terms message sticks are fine-tuned enough to reproduce the same outcome as writing: the accurate asynchronous transfer of information. The most significant surprise is that the use of message sticks is still remembered by a small number of senior Indigenous knowledge holders in Arnhem Land, despite the fact that they were last documented in 1955. Oral history research in this region will therefore allow the existing archival data to be corroborated or challenged. The fellowship resulted in a media collaboration with Wunyungar (Alwyn Doolan), a Gooreng Gooreng / Wakka Wakka man from Woorabinda in Central Queensland. In response to the action of Senator Lidia Thorpe bringing a message stick to the senate, we co-authored an explainer for The Conversation which resulted in 1.4k views: "What are message sticks? Senator Lidia Thorpe continues a long and powerful diplomatic tradition." The Conversation, 8 October. https://theconversation.com/what-are-message-sticks-senator-lidia-thorpecontinues-a-long-and-powerful-diplomatic-tradition-147674
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
- 2020. "Writing, graphic codes, and asynchronous communication." Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (2):727-743
Morin, Olivier, Piers Kelly, and James Winters
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12386) - 2020. "Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions." Journal of Material Culture 25 (2):133-152
Kelly, Piers
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183519858375) - 2020. "The Otomaung Alphabet of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea: Documenting a New Script by Long-Distance Correspondence in a Politically Sensitive Environment." Grapholinguistics in the 21st century, Paris, June 17-19, 2020
elly, Piers
- 2021. "The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems." Current Anthropology 62 (6)
Kelly, Piers, James Winters, Helena Miton, and Olivier Morin
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1086/717779) - 2022. The last language on earth. New York: Oxford University Press
Kelly, Piers
(Siehe online unter https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197509913.001.0001)
