The multiple calculi of meaning

This article builds on investigations of practices of interpretation by linguistic anthropologists who, in their pursuit of challenges to Speech Act Theory, have alluded to but not yet fully explored how members of the same speech community make use of multiple, complex, and sometimes competing meaning-making practices within the same speech event. The argument is made that contexts of debate and dispute are ideal sites for analyzing such practices as the multiple calculi of meaning insofar as discourses of argumentation offer explicit moments by and through which members of a single community proffer competing interpretations of troubling acts and events. To support this claim, insights gained from J.L. Austin's treatment of speech act infelicities and legal anthropology's ‘trouble-case’ methodology are employed to inform an interaction-based analysis that explores how competing Hopi interpretive practices are constituted in courtroom discourses between parties to probate disputes before the Hopi Tribal Court.