Introduction

In the course of his discussion of discourse in the novel, Bakhtin (1981) points out that the social-historical fact of the “internal stratification” of language into dialects, jargons, and speech genres is the prerequisite for the stylistic “heteroglossia” of the modern polyphonic novel, in which authorial speech, narrator's speech, and the speech of characters enter into complex “interanimation.” Many of Bakhtin's specific analyses of literary techniques found in novelistic heteroglossia can be transferred to the anthropological study of language in its social context. In particular, in the novel as in social life, speech constantly takes as an object of reference or representation previous speech, as in direct and indirect quotation of the actual utterances of others. As Bakhtin notes,