Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Talk, Trust and Community

Don Brenneis
July 29, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Most of us are familiar with the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” This is a sound observation not only on child-rearing but on many other aspects of our lives, whether in the kind of face-to-face, ongoing villages in which the proverb developed or in the broader somewhat metaphoric villages which we often label as “community.” Community and the wealth of warmth, support, and possibility it affords have become salient themes for many of us. Perhaps it takes a village to nurture us fully as humans …

What, however, does it take to raise a village, whether literal or metaphorical? Villages — or communities — don’t just exist. They are made, restored, sustained, and, at times, lost, dependent as they are on the love, labor, concerns and delights of those who participate in them.

Today I want to draw briefly upon my anthropological work in two quite different “villages,” one literal, the other more metaphoric. The first is Bhatgaon, the settlement where I carried out research over a period of about 15 years in Fiji. Bhatgaon was a classic anthropological field site — ninety households living along a dirt road overlooking rice paddies and sugar cane fields. The other, more metaphoric kind of community I have studied is that of scientists and scholars doing peer review. This is the academic name for a process in which we evaluate research proposals submitted to federal funding agencies. We meet in Washington DC and discuss, evaluate, and make recommendations about proposed research. These recommendations shape not only individual careers but the future course of science and scholarship. There are few palm trees, coffee is drunk rapidly at the table than tea sipped over hours of local conversation, and Washington DC is considerably less glamorous — and relaxing — than rural Fiji.

These two quite disparate settings, however, had several key features in common. First, they were both communities in which “equality” was highly valued. Bhatgaon residents are the descendents of people who had emigrated from colonial India to Fiji as indentured laborers. Hindi-speaking Hindus, they share an often stated value that, “In the village, all are equal.” The strict hierarchy of caste so central to those north Indian villages that their ancestors had left (and with which I was generally familiar from my time in the Peace Corps), was considered irrelevant. All in the village — or at least all adult men — considered themselves to be on an equal footing. And what about the federal funding panels? The term “peer review” says it all. Not only were panelists evaluating the work of their peers (or those who would be their peers). They were also, in those moments of talk, debate, and discussion around the panel table, “being peers,” that is, shaping relations — and experiences — of equality.

Second, both Bhatgaon and the funding panels were, to use some of our local jargon, “sites under construction” While in the case of Bhatgaon there was a physical village, “community” only took shape as villagers, in an ongoing way, made it though talk and sociability — through hanging out, working together, resolving — or at least managing — conflicts — and sharing social pleasures and sorrows. While academics often talk about science and scholarship as “communities,” this term becomes real only in moments of collaboration and conversation; peer review panels were sites in which such communities are actually being built and become more and other than metaphoric.

Third, a central tool for such community building was language. This includes the apparently routine talk of conversation, the shared debating of issues of challenge and consequence, whether village conflicts or difficult funding decisions, and the combination of seriousness and play that made such talk possible. As a linguistic and social anthropologist I was — and am — fascinated by the complex relationships between talk and community. How can taking language seriously help us better understand human life? As a Unitarian Universalist — and as someone with my own personal values — I am also concerned with questions of how, in large part through talk, we can build and sustain communities of equals. If we truly value not only the chance to develop and express our own views but also to engage seriously and as equals with those of others and to work collaboratively together, how we “talk it through” is central: Talking the talk is a crucial part of walking the walk …

While Bhatgaon and peer review panels are very different sites, there are several strong similarities in how people talk in the two kinds of communities:

First is central role of humor, even in regard to quite serious matters. One National Science Foundation program officer, for example, recurrently used me and a colleague to stake out the boundaries of debate on funding panel. She knew that she could trust us, in most cases, to disagree — and to do so in an amiably joking manner. Humor, among other things, can make adversarial positions less hard and fast. It is often useful for defining the outer boundaries of debate and for creating a safe conversational space. It allows the possibility of retreat from extreme positions and therefore enables negotiation. It also allows the exploration of common ground.

Second, neither in Bhatgaon nor in DC did people express their views with total and unequivocal clarity. Rather, talk about difficult issues was often marked by indirectness, by the use of extensive analogies and stories, and by pointing to — rather than explicitly discussing — possible outcomes and consequences. In Bhatgaon I spent a great deal of time sitting with friends in the evening, drinking kava, and listening to local gossip. It was often difficult even to tell who was being gossiped about, as the alleged malefactors were frequently indicated by a vague gesture with the lips. In other, more formal kinds of talk — speechmaking at religious events, for example — the connections between what one appeared to be talking about and the real subject of the commentary were even more obscure — and not just for the anthropologist. On funding panels, a key element of being equals was displaying your willingness to listen to and be swayed by the views and reasoning of others — deliberations proceeded through triangulation, but among flexible rather than fixed points. I should also point out here that those of us participating in these panels varied a great deal in how we talked outside panel discussions. I tend, to use an idiom from my New Mexican youth, to sidle up to issues — telling possibly relevant stories, making oblique references, and the like (you’re getting an example of that this morning). This makes me a natural for panels — and I do get asked a lot … Other colleagues were, outside the peer review context, much more explicit and direct. We all tailored our talk to the situations in which we spoke.

I want to point out that such indirection usually meant that individuals did not tell others either “exactly what they meant” or, perhaps more important, “exactly” how they, the listeners, should understand what they had heard. One of the hallmarks of successful talk among equals — whether in these two sites or in other egalitarian communities such as the Pintupi people of western Australia studied by a good friend — is a profound respect for “interpretive autonomy.” One respects the independence and equality of one’s audience by letting them draw their own conclusions (as they will anyway). Telling someone exactly what you think — and what they should make of it — is rarely wholly effective and not very democratic.

But talk has both speaker and listeners — what about the listeners’ role? Close and active listening was central in both Bhatgaon and DC. Bhatgaon villagers and federal panelists alike paid a great deal of attention to the substance of that their colleagues were saying and to how they said it. You could rarely take what others said at face value. For example, tone of voice mattered. Several program officers at NSF frequently used the apparently formulaic statement, “I think I hear a consensus forming,” when nearing the end of particular discussions. This could be dismissed as — c’mon, enough already — but the program officers insisted that they indeed listened attentively for panelists beginning to speak in rhythm with each other, repeating phrases from previous speakers, and matching intonational contours. Consensus did have a sound. More generally, participants had a real investment in comprehending the intentions and messages of those with whom they were in conversation. Listening was far from a passive activity. Our society often uses the idiom of finding and giving “voice” as deeply liberating. We should speak out and help others do so. I want us to hear as well as well as to speak.

In keeping with the oblique spirit of my upbringing and of those with whom I have studied, as well as to honor your interpretive autonomy, I want to close with a suggestion. There might well be — or to use the New Mexican subjunctive, might could be — some analogies here to the complexities of our covenant and our community life. That we are committed to “listen to one another, […] acknowledge and address disagreements, and […] express our concerns” is central to our shared and ongoing building of this particular village. Perhaps, to use the participial form, we are always “villaging;” we can’t assume community as a given. Unitarian Universalists have been very good indeed at “speaking truth to power.” Finding truth with our peers by speaking, listening, and loving is also a worthy challenge.