Kalkal as a Relational Interactional Ritual: the Case of Kalkal in Dorehami
Journal Title: Journal of Researches in Linguistics - Year 2020, Vol 12, Issue 2
Abstract
Abstract Kalkal or kal andākhtan (lit. ‘throwing a kal’) is a ubiquitous culturally shared practice in the Iranian culture that has not yet caught the attention of linguists. In this research, conducted within the discipline of interpersonal pragmatics, and based on the analysis of 20 instances of kalkal in the reality TV talk show Dorehami, it has been shown that kalkal displays the features of relational interactional rituals as defined by Kádár (2013, 2017). Entertaining Kalkal is shown to be a recurrent performance with a schematic structure recognizable to cultural insiders with certain formal and functional features; it symbolically embodies the moral order of the situated interaction as well as the moral order of the larger institution and the Iranian culture that pre-allocate roles and resources to its participants; it is liminal in the sense that the participants go beyond the border between what is perceived to be ordinary and the extraordinary; finally, it arouses the emotions of its participants and audiences. Keywords: kalkal, ritual, moral order, Iranian culture, Dorehami Introduction When we think of a ritual what comes to the mind is often a highly formalized ceremony such as the initiation rites in tribal communities or the tea ceremony in the Japanese culture. Recent developments in interpersonal pragmatics, however, have shown that rituals are not limited to such contexts but are frequently practiced in everyday life (Kádár, 2013, 2017). One of the ubiquitous practices in the Iranian culture is kalkal which can be found in almost every situation from homes, schools and streets to the political arena. Literally, kal means ‘mountain goat’ and ‘a male quadruped, especially a cow’. It also means ‘excessive talk and futile argument’ (Anvari, 2001). Based on examples cited in Anvari (2001) and Dehkhoda (1998), the word kalkal has been in use in Persian since the 6th century A.H. (13th century A.D). Kalkal can be either verbal or non-verbal, for entertainment or serious. Despite the ubiquity of the practice, kalkal has not yet been subject to any linguistic analysis. The goal of the present study is to investigate the characteristics of entertaining kalkal in Dorehami ‘get-together’ (a popular talk show on Iranian national TV channel Nasim), as a relational interactional ritual. Materials and Method The data for this research are the video clips of twenty cases of kalkal in Dorehami between the host and his guests shared on the world wide web. That is, the researcher had no role in labelling a conversation as kalkal but relied solely on lay people’s understandings of the cultural practice. The downloaded kalkals were transcribed using a conversation analytic method (Sacks, et. al., 1978; Ten Have, 2007), and were analyzed for their schematic structure, and for their internal and external dynamics of the moral order (Garfinkel, 1967; Harré, 1987; Van Langenhove, 2017; Kádár and Haugh, 2013), i.e., they were analyzed against the background of the moral order established between the host and the guest in the episode and, against the moral order of the Iranian National TV and the Iranian culture in general, relying on both the researcher’s cultural insider knowledge and previous research. The analysis is based on Kádár’s (2017: 12) definition of relational interactional ritual as follows: “Ritual is a formalised and recurrent action, which is relationship forcing; that is, by operating, it reinforces/transforms interpersonal relationships. Ritual is realised as an embedded liminal (mini)performance, and this performance is bound to relational history (and related moral order), or historicity in general (and related moral order). Ritual is an emotively invested action, as anthropological research has shown.” In this definition, relational rituals are characterized by four features: they (i) are recurrent performances with schematic patterns or ‘sequences’ (Terkourafi and Kádár, 2017) recognizable to members of a community; (ii) symbolically embody the moral order of a community or larger social group; (iii) are liminal, i.e., “stick out from what is regarded as the ‘ordinary flow’ of interaction as ‘salient’ from the participants’ point of view” (Kádár, 2017: 7); (iv) are emotively invested. Discussion of Results and Conclusions Each of the 3 kalkals reported in the paper exemplify the most three common schematic structures as well as different functions of rituals, i.e., strengthening an already established relation, potentially destroying a relation, and establishing a closer relation. The first kalkal reported is between the host of Dorehami (also a director, producer, actor and singer) and a guest who is also a director, producer, actor and host in the equally popular TV show Khandevaneh and is over the guest’s skills and claims in chess. The two participants question each other’s skills in chess, trashtalk, and finally agree to participate in a tournament of 21 sets and publically announce the result. They both break the moral order of the TV and wider society by challenging, boasting and trashtalking but at the same time they follow the moral order by sticking to the norms of ta’arof, modesty and the use of honorifics (see Koutlaki, 2002, 2009; Izadi, 2015). In this kalkal, the schematic structure comprises an 8-time repetition of claim-rejection and challenge sequence, and the two display and strengthen a 26-year old relationship. In the second example, the host insists on eliciting an answer from the guest (a well-known actor) about love and the guest evades a straightforward answer. The question is challenging for the guest, and as he finally asserts, hinges on rumors about his second marriage with an actress much younger than himself. The sequence of question-evasion is repeated 9 times. The host violates the rights of the moral order by insisting on asking a question the guest twice directly asks him to skip. The guest also violates the values of the moral order by taking the role of host, and dramatically making fun of the host’s clothes (in order to change the topic). However, they both follow the moral order by sticking to the norms of ta’arof and use of honorifics. By shifting forms of address from distant to close they keep the balance of the relationship which has been endangered by the host’s insistence on a question potentially detrimental to the guest’s moral integrity and reputation. The third example is an instance of kalkal between the host and a younger singer that transforms their distant, formal relationship into a closer, more equal one—at least for the moment of kalkal and the rest of the talk. The talk starts and proceeds in a formal, distant style with profuse use of honorifics and second person plural pronouns and verb endings (see Beeman, 1986; Nanbakhsh, 2011). In response to a question about his greatest fear, the guest answers that he is afraid of being caught in an elevator, which is then picked as a topic for argument by the host, who thinks the fear is only imaginary. The argument-counterargument sequence is repeated 10 times (with actually no new evidence) until the guest argues that the fear is rooted in his personal experience and the host withdraws. However, in the middle of kalkal, the host’s address forms begin to vacillate between the formal plural and closer singular and the guest’s disagreement patterns change from dispreferred responses with token agreements and hesitations into direct disagreements with no mitigation or hedges, and both parties laugh more than before. Engaging in kalkal is beyond the rights of the moral order of the relationship established between the two (a point that the host indirectly mentions) but it changes their talking style from the deferential style adopted by the interlocuters before kalkal into a more equal one. The results indicate that kalkal is a relational ritual, in the sense of a recurrent performance that symbolically embodies the moral order, which sticks out from the rest of the talk by both having a schematic structure and representing a breach of the moral order (of the current talk and the larger society at large), and results in emotional arousal in both the participants and the audiences. The main element in the schematic structure of kalkal in the data was found to be the many repetitions of the same sequence of question-evasion, claims to competence-rejection, and argument-counterargument, which, as a recurrent practice, makes kalkal recognizable to cultural insiders. The fact that a very short part of a long conversation has been clipped and shared independently on the web displays its salience and liminality. But it is also liminal because for the moment of kalkal participants engage in breaching some of the norms established either during their interaction or ones already established in the wider culture, while at the same time following other norms, especially those of ta’arof and the use of honorifics. In a research on wedding ceremonies in Tehran using Kádár’s (2013, 2017) model, Koutlaki (2020) suggests that the feature ‘ostensivity’ be added to Kádár’s definition. The results of the present research suggest that instances of kalkal that were about topics already known to the audiences were obviously ostensible but others could not be established as such, although they were mini-performances in front of the audiences and viewers.
Authors and Affiliations
Seyed Mohammad Hosseini * Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Languages, Arak University, Iran m-hoseini@araku. ac. ir
Keywords
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- EP ID EP705257
- DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.22108/jrl.2021.128053.1567
- Views 38
- Downloads 0
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