Transnational Obscenities : Rhetorical Space of Russian Unquotable Language "Mat": An Anthropological Study

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Other Title
  • 越境する悪態 : ロシア語の被検閲言語、マットの修辞的空間の人類学的考察
  • エッキョウ　スル　アクタイ　ロシアゴ　ノ　ヒケンエツ　ゲンゴ　マット　ノ　シュウジテキ　クウカン　ノ　ジンルイガクテキ　コウサツ

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the pragmatics of Russian obscene language, "mat", and to redefine its illocutionarｙ force by discovering the characteristics of the context it is used in. Mat is a distinct and extremely large layer outside generally permitted Russian language, layer that has penetrated languages of all members of the old Soviet State as well as Mongolia and China. Its use in the Soviet period as well as before it was strongly persecuted; mat in Russian massmedia as well as in science was completely nonexistent and even now scientific work on mat is still scarce. Mat is thought to have been used as ritual language in pre-Christian cults, so its use in daily Life was tabooed. Following the advent of Christianity, mat was condemned as a remnant of pagan beliefs. Today mat is generally thought to be a repressed rhetoric, used to express repressed feelings or simply to be a group of extremely strong (and so largely nor-translatable) swear-words. This common belief is also widely accepted in scientific papers. This paper analyses one interview of a Russian politician and several fragments of conversation of an ethnically mixed group of Latvian villagers and argues, that illocutionary force of mat should be completely reformulated. Far from being a mere expletive, mat constructs a unique rhetorical space, where participants in the conversation are completely equal as to their connection to the topic, where societal norms are excluded and where individuals, evidently stripped of their societal garments and rights engage in a game of complete unison or a battle of just as complete mutual negation.

Journal

  • 年報人間科学

    年報人間科学 27 33-53, 2006-03-31

    Sociology, Anthropology and Philosophy, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

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