ABSTRACT

The last chapter ended with a question about what happens when people do not follow societal obligations and expectations concerning sharing, or other values and ways of doing. This is addressed in the following chapter, in which I examine informal ways of sanctioning deviant behaviour. Various indirect ways of speaking and not-speaking, ways of looking and bodily postures, may all indicate values and expectations concerning proper behaviour. I first focus on song and drum duels, which were a prominent means of dealing with conflicts in the olden days, arguing that some of their characteristics still feature prominently in people’s contemporary daily communicative practices. I then discuss a number of informal communicative social sanctions, which build upon particular conventions of approaching and keeping informed about others, such as ridicule and teasing, gossip, silence, and withdrawal. In the literature, informal social sanctions are often subsumed under the concept of ‘public opinion’. There are difficulties, however, in extending this concept to the East Greenland case, partly because words are not detachable but are rather extensions of a person. Likewise, communication does not build upon a fundamental distinction between public and private themes of conversation, nor does the East Greenlandic understanding of personhood separate and then juxtapose an ‘inner’ self and a public person.