Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics

by Niko Besnier

Although gossip is disapproved of across the world’s societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. Based on the author’s intimate ethnographic knowledge of Nukulaelae Atoll, Tuvalu, this work uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions―the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice―that are rarely wedded successfully.

Drawing on a broad range of theoretical resources, Niko Besnier approaches gossip from several angles. A detailed analysis of how Nukulaelae’s people structure their gossip interactions demonstrates that this structure reflects and contributes to the atoll’s political ideology, which wavers between a staunch egalitarianism and a need for hierarchy. His discussion then turns to narratives of specific events in which gossip played an important role in either enacting egalitarianism or reinforcing inequality. Embedding gossip in a broad range of communicative practices enables Besnier to develop a nuanced analysis of how gossip operates, demonstrating how it allows some to gain power while others suffer because of it. Throughout, he is particularly attentive to the ways in which anthropologists themselves are the subject and object of gossip, making his work a notable contribution to reflexive social science.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics will appeal to students and scholars of political, legal, linguistic, and psychological anthropology; social science methodology; communication, conflict, gender, and globalization studies; and Pacific Islands studies.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2009

Reviews

[Dann]

This is a really fascinating take on a practice that is usually maligned. Though I read this in a sociolinguistics class, I think it is better suited for a course on sociology, or even communication; and in any of those classes, it is as likely to spark conversation about the author and the writing of the book as it is the content. In the course that I read it, we talked a lot about the effect of the researcher on his subjects—how did their gossip change because an outsider was present? How did he influence the people he was trying to provide an impartial description of? These questions are especially important when the researcher is as much an outsider as Besnier was in the culture in which he spent time to write this book.

Even beyond the somewhat questionable claims of non-interference, I found this to be a great book. It is balanced—like so many try and fail to do—between the popular and the scholarly. In addition to being very interesting, and providing a lot to think about on an academic level, it is also fun to read. This is definitely something worth noting in a field that has a great deal of dry, uninteresting writing. Because of this, I feel that it's a suitable book for any university level.

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Miriam Rigby. Learn more about Miriam on the ACRL Insider blog.