"No, no, no .....!"

A few weeks ago I made my once-a-month trip to the barbershop. In Phnom Penh I have long gotten the necessaries done at a Thai-owned hotel. This time I went in the morning and found the place deserted except for the female (barbers? hair dressers? hair attendants?) slumped in the waiting room watching TV.

(The picture below shows how most Cambodians get their hair cut: en plein air!)

I was immediately directed down the basement hallway that led to the familiar three chairs, each in its own wooden cubicle fronted with a floor to ceiling curtain. I had never seen that room deserted, and as the young lady stepped aside to let me go in, I hesitated and looked at her. I stopped to see if she wanted me to sit in any particular chair. She remained standing aside with no expression and waited for me. So I moved to the center chair of the three, the only one I had ever used.

The one to the right had always been in use, curtain drawn. You would hear a young female voice, an older, louder male voice, rambling Khmer or Thai conversations, often long male monologues. On-going when I arrived they continued even as I finished. I wondered sometimes what went on behind that curtain. I had never seen the hidden customer. Today it was empty; the curtain hung open.

As I moved toward the familiar chair in the center, she starts saying, "No, no, no, no, no, ....." I stop in my tracks and quickly look at her. She physically pushes me to the right, continuing to say something that sounds somewhere between "No, No, No", and "Ne, Ne, Ne," but which to me is the sound of a mother admonishing her child for cutting up. I feel a strong bout of annoyance coming on.

As she sets me up for the haircut, I am steaming. "Why do you want me to sit in this chair?" I ask her. "Oh, the air-conditioner is on this side of the room, it is cooler." What I really want to ask: "if it was so damned important for me to sit in this chair, why didn't you direct me there from the beginning?" As you can see, I have some issues.

As an (overly excitable) American, that stream of sound was (felt) impolite. For a moment I felt that I was a child again, one who was caught doing something wrong. The next moment, I was annoyed, feeling that I was unecessarily criticized. I allowed annoyance to turn to anger.

Later, I took time to think about what was going on from her point of view. Most of the local clientelle are older men with money, Khmer and local Thai. They expect and are given favored treatment. That is how Asian hair salons are run (and lots of other places here).

She probably expected me to move immediately to take the best seat in the house, because a local would. When I did not, something else kicked in. She was given an opportunity to publicly provide me with a benefit that I would otherwise not have taken (had never had before, didn't know about in fact). In the hierarchical relationship she saw us in, being able to provide that benefit is also a kind of power for her, power over me, power to shape my situation in ways that benefit me and that (in her mind) should redound to her credit.

It was in fact little different from the content of hundreds of interactions I have seen over the years between politicians and country-folk, rich men and their entourages, city folks and villagers, restaurant customers and the staff. The relatively powerful are constantly being directed, led, , nudged, pushed: sit here, eat this, drink this, take this cushion, use this chair. It is how powerful people expect to be treated, it is how the less powerful show their place in the relationship, confirm their sub-ordination. They seek this dependency, a dependency that provides benefits no ordinary person would have access to. And benefits have to be given, how else can the powerful prove so openly that they are powerful except to provide benefits in return? (If they did not, maybe they are not as rich or as powerful as their behavior has claimed on their behalf?)

An element of theatre can always enter these encounters, in silly ways. They can be so great that (for example) this young lady might have acted exactly the same way, no matter which chair I took. If I had gone to the right, she might have directed me left. If, in the country-side I chose a banana, I might be "admonished" to take the mango, because it was "more sweet, or more fresh." This is no form of dishonesty, but a kind of social theatre that plays out to achieve important social or political ends, not the least of which is to confirm the integrity of the hierarchy, the relative positions of the participants. And the powerful play along, because their power is being brought out clearly for all to see.

Oh, and me? I am sitting there, angry, irrationally antagonized. But she was blameless in the situation. Early on, still hot, I was arrogant enough to explain to her how a westerner might "see" the situation (of course, I had to explain, couldn't stop myself from explaining). She was effusive in her apologies, so much so that I felt their authenticity. I knew that we had fallen out of this small set-piece of cultural theatre into something more fundamentally human and I felt ashamed.

Even from idiocy, something can be learned, or re-confirmed.

Very similar sounds can have very different meanings in different languages. (Many Cambodians know that while the sound "joy" means something like happiness in English, in Khmer it is the act of fornication and is used as a very common cry of surprise or mild annoyance. Joy!)

Nothing new here, nothing to write home about. Same sounds, different languages, different meanings. So what?

But more important is how this small anecdote, over-long in the telling, reminds us that words are tools, they don't just have meanings, they have uses. The question: What did she say? (i.e., What words in English would stand in for the Khmer that she used, so we could understand her meaning) does not exhaust what we need to know in order to translate a phrase from one language to another.

The use of the phrase "No, no, no ... " aims toward ends which are determined within the larger social setting. What can be done with language in Khmer society is what needs to be done: i.e. confirm power relationships, facilitate transitory or more permanent patterns of dependency.

One can think of thousands of concrete, non-linguistic examples that can metaphorically clarify the idea of language as a tool and the importance of context to ferreting out meaning (and intention). A piece of straw in the hand of a monkey might indicate lots of things, or nothing, but the reason for the straw in his hand when he is focused on an ant hill achieves a kind of useful clarity for we outside observers. We are brought into the situation easily as we understand the aim toward which the tool deployed is aimed.

The difficult thing about looking at language as a tool is that intentionality is much less visible than the ant hill and the edible ants it contains. While not completely invisible, intentionality is both central to understanding what a particular utterance might mean and cloaked (and is inaccessible to the extent that the social needs it aims to fill are not usual or available in the translator's own home culture). I would argue that the intentions that lie behind an utterance (and there can be many) are all of them social; they cannot be idosyncratic, they cannot be private. If there cannot be a private language, there cannot be a private linguistic (communicative) motivation. And if an utterance is to have the intended effect, its motivation-intention cannot be invisible to a hearer of the same home culture, though it may be frustratingly inaccessible to someone whose culture does not contain the same social goals toward which the utterance is aimed
(We need to set aside the problem of dishonesty; lying and other forms of dissimulation succeed to the extent that the speaker's aim is successfully cloaked. At first glance this is no trivial problem. At the same time there are tons of social aims that have to be visible to the intended hearer for it to succed - a mother who is trying to calm a crying baby, a boy friend trying to find the words to break up in the gentlest possible way, the heart-felt prayer to an invisible God, the examples are endless, and our focus here.)

If an utterance aims to diminish someone, that has to be visible, signaled in some way, otherwise the diminishment does not happen (unintended consequences aside, another weighty caveat), the deployment of linguistic means fails.

In the US, a "no, no, no, ..." can be a slightly annoyed, worried intervention by a mother driven by love even as she is driven to distraction, a signal from a teacher to a student that she still has not got it right, that, "no, this is how you do it", offered in a tone that need not be demeaning. It can be a means of diminishing a new worker who has not got the sequence of work right yet, a display of annoyance and criticism that can easily ride on an under-current of self-righteousness and a wish to humiliate.

Our point: our work to find "the meaning" of a particular bit of language that has been deployed, our wish to identify clearly what particular utterance in our language would be the suitable replacement in this context for this string of sounds, can so easily be overwhelmed by the mutiple emotional aspects of the usage on which we have focused.

But a starting point for trying to bridge from one culture to another (and back) has to be a focus on what is it that the language user aims to achieve, and that leads us to the need to understand what aims a given social structure and culture makes important, imperative.

(And those barbers? The one's who most Cambodians go to. They have no roof, but they stand on a carpet of hair!)

Photographic Postscript: I took these two pictures at the Nokor Temple complex in Kampong Cham on 15 November 2009. (Couldn't resist posting them!)

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