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Situated Meaning: Inside and Outside in Japanese Self, Society, and Language. Edited by JANE M. BACHNIK and CHARLES J. QUINN, JR. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xix, 309 pp. $49.50 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
This important volume presents a richly layered compilation of linguistic and ethnographic analyses of Japanese culture and communicative practice delineated along the "deeply established orientational habit" (p. 40) of uchi/soto. It is part of what Donald L. Brenneis in the Foreword calls an "emerging regional discourse" (p. xi) among Pacific anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists that places issues of indexicality and social deixis at the center of cultural meaning. The overall purpose of Situated Meaning is to shift the analysis of Japanese social organization and interaction away from rigid notions of vertical structure abstracted from the shifting, negotiated dynamics of context (and contextualization), toward a more indexical understanding of social order delineated along the axial coordinates of inside/outside orientations. The collection succeeds admirably in its aim.
The wide range of social phenomena covered by the eight contributors on the single theme of inside/outside deixis offers a richly imbricated, multidisciplinary view of uchi/soto as a basic paradigm along which Japanese self, society, and language are organized. Bachnik's introduction articulates the central theoretical theme, which is then woven throughout the other contributions: social order is not only reflected but also in part constituted in the indexical practice of interaction.
In the second chapter, Quinn presents a comprehensive dictionary survey of semantic domains of uchi/soto evidence in the Japanese lexicon. Quinn argues that the orientational schemata of inside/outside reflects a perceptual "habitus," a patterned system of dispositions which index the "affinities and oppositions" (p. 64) of social behavior.
Patricia J. Wetzel's discussion of Japanese verbs of giving and receiving challenges implicit assumptions that an Indo-European grammatical person is evident in Japanese. Recognizing "uchi/soto as the central deictic...