Communicative Power

Communicative forms and power are inextricably linked, and within global studies, analyses of communication provide a window into how power is created and maintained. Power is both exercised by the use of communicative forms and shaped by the norms of those communicative forms. Ideologies of gender, for example, infuse communicative forms from basic folktales to political documents that create and maintain institutions, communities, and nation-states.

Linguistics is the study of various aspects of language, including the lexicon, grammar, and semantics. The ethnography of communication involves the study of factors such as participants, setting, intentions, norms, and genres of particular speech events. A skilled political agent can use any and all of these factors to support his or her agenda. A United Nations speech will be directed to multiple audiences and will be heard in multiple languages. Samoan leaders at a traditional fono will use a specific variety of Samoan that is phonologically different from that used in churches, one that has different norms and expectations. Both English and Bangla speakers can employ specific grammatical forms that de-emphasize responsibility, for example, Ronald Reagan's phrase, “Mistakes were made.”

One example of the interplay between the use of specific forms and larger cultural systems is how communicative power is gendered. In the United States, many western European countries, and often elsewhere, the tradition has been that men speak in attention-grabbing monologues in public and women speak in participatory dialogues in private. When women do speak in public, studies have shown that they may be perceived as talking more even when they speak less than their male counterparts. Even when speaking styles are different, if males are in power, female speech is devalued. In the New Guinea village of Gapun, men pride themselves on their calm, deliberative speaking style while the kros is a low-status bilingual and obscenity-filled rant used by women. These rants are not without power, however, as the ranter may achieve what she wants by ranting.

Communication forms also have indirect power, socializing individuals into the general ideologies of a society, which of course have implications about who has access to power and resources. The most basic examples of this are stories such as the Anansi the Spider stories of Ghana and the Caribbean; Apache, Salish, and other Native American Coyote tales; and Western fairy tales. These stories are told and retold, taught to children, and where there is literacy, written down on paper and in other formats. Tales such as Cinderella are clearly recognizable as being gendered. The heroine sits by the fire, cleans up after her stepfamily, and endures her lot patiently. For this, she is rewarded with a visit from a fairy godmother, given a pretty dress and shoes, and given a handsome but characterless Prince Charming. Different versions have different twists—in American versions, Cinderella's step-family gets forgotten; in the French 17th-century Charles Perrault version, Cinderella finds husbands for her stepsisters; and in the haunting German version collected by Jacob Grimm, the stepsisters get their eyes pecked out by pigeons—but all contain similar messages about the role of women in society. Female power here is constructed as being an indirect power related to the authority and wealth of the men in their lives.

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