Expressive style and culture: Individualism and group orientation contrasted

Abstract

ABSTRACT Herein I examine the parallel, contrasting analyses of expressive patterns proposed by Bernstein for language, by Lomax for song, and by my interpretation of the arts and cultures of two Melanesian societies. The general thesis of this paper is that expressive patterns are related to cultural patterns in systematic ways, and that analysis of societies in terms of a contrast between individualism and group orientation reveals and documents one of those ways. Description of social structures in relation to this contrast is old, but its extension to expressive patterns is recent in anthropology. I argue that this model accounts for fundamental structural distinctions which underlie cultural contrasts in expressive patterns. (Sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, Melanesia, anthropological linguistics, ethnography of speech, isomorphism of expressive forms and social structure)