ABSTRACT
Since Lévi-Strauss’s early major impact there has developed a now widespread anthropological view that words and actions are inseparably inscribed in each other: ‘language penetrates the social’ (Ardener 1982:12). However, to go back to the unstudied counterimplications of Tambiah’s (1968) pioneering analysis of the magical power of words, the claim that speech can stand alone in certain situations as autonomously efficacious and as having illocutionary effect (and so constituting action) obliges us also to consider the alternative possibility of a world of non-words or, at least, of actions which achieve their legitimacy through performance including speech only secondarily, if at all.
