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Asif Agha
Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

How does the value of any cultural phenomenon, once formulated, come to be socially shared? Who shares these values and who doesn't? One impediment in reasoning about these issues derives from a common preconception about cultural value, a view that treats culture as an exclusively mental phenomenon, and values as essentially ideas. On such a view, the assumption of shared value appears necessary (in explaining the regularities observed in social life), yet the precise nature and extent of such sharedness appears to lie beyond the pale of empirical study.

The paper proposes a rather different approach to this question, arguing that cultural values are the products of human activity, precipitated through the process of using palpable, materially expressed signs. Formulated in this way, questions of the social distribution of value can be formulated in terms of the circulation of material signs through society.

The discussion centers on a culturally valued accent of British English, nowadays called Received Pronunciation (or 'RP'). The first part of the paper discuss the processes by which contemporary forms of the accent are differentiated from the rest of the language, and acquire values which different populations of English speakers can come to recognize in the same way. The second part of the paper shows that discourses about acccent in 18th and 19th century Britain were instrumental in articulating the normative values of accent, and in circulating these values across particular trajectories in social space. The paper proposes a specific model for the circulation of discourse in society, involving two basic ideas: (1) any discursive event involves the exchange of messages between a 'speaker' and a 'hearer' of discourse; (2) when the hearer of a given message is, subsequently, the speaker of a message to another hearer, the two events are linked together in a discursive chain, thus making possible the circulation of messages across social space, and the transmission of values through the circulation of messages.