Attack, Defense and Counter-Attack in the Inuit Duel Songs of Ammassalik
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Attack, Defense and Counter‑Attack in the Inuit Duel Songs of Ammassalik Christian Plantin1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This study is based on a corpus of duel songs from the traditional Ammassalik culture (Southeastern Greenland), published by the anthropologists P.-É. Victor and J. Robert-Lamblin. In this culture, the duel is a moment in the development of a quarrel, originating in a conflictual event; one of the partners challenges the other to a song duel. Our study focuses upon the basic argumentative strategies of defense and counter attack used to reject the accusation. The charges range from what may seem to us the most serious ones, to apparently the most frivolous. The defensive strategies range from serious replies to mere jokes, making fun of the opponent. Formally, the reproached action can be denied, or acknowledged and rejected on other grounds. The defendant often just counter-attacks, either by disqualifying the accuser, or by reversing the charge. The data shows that the duel song is not essentially a “court of assize”. Beyond its cathartic function, the duel is show given by the participants to a participating audience. Keywords Argument · Duel songs · Attack · Counter-attack · Stasis · Dialectical performance This paper deals with duel songs as an institutionalized argumentative genre practiced by the Ammassalik community, a part of the Inuit community. The duel opposes two individuals, an appellant, charging a defendant with some offense. The duel takes place in front of an audience, the community gathered for the show. Our study is based on a corpus of songs recorded by Paul-Émile Victor, a French anthropologist, during his first stays in Ammassalik in 1934–1935 and 1936–1937 (Victor et al. 1991).1 In the first and second section, duel songs are described as a 1
Henceforth, the reference (V., 1991) will be used to refer to Victor et al. (1991).
* Christian Plantin Christian.Plantin@univ‑lyon2.fr 1
Research Group ICAR Interactions, Corpora, Learning, Representations, CNRS - ENS de Lyon, Lyon, France
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moment in a highly contentious and possibly violent social multifunctional process. The second section shows that the set up of the duel, the issues dealt with, and, most of all, the sophisticated verbal development of antagonistic views, qualify the duel song encounter as a highly argumentative dialectical genre. Sections 3 and 4 focus on the defining moment of the situation, when the appellant lays the charge, and the defendant reacts to that charge.
1 Duel Songs in the Ammassalik Culture The Inuit domain extends from North and Northwestern Alaska to Greenland along the shores of the Western and Eastern Canadian Arctic. It includes 100,000 speakers, 57,000 of whom live in Greenland. The Ammassalik community lives in the Ammassalik district situated in Southeastern Greenland, slightly south of the polar circle. The official language of Greenland is West Greenlandic, Kitaamiisut; the language of the texts considered here is East Greenlandic
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