On Characteristics of Traditional Intra-Communal Communication: Circassians of Turkey

Currently, there is not any specific anthropological work in the literature dealing with forms of intra-communal communica-tion among members of Circassian diaspora communities. The purpose of this study is to describe why socially and culturally caused communication forms have remained intact among the Circassians of Anatolia, and also to identify the functional characteristics of oral texts relating semantics of “speaking/silence”. Materials used in this research comprises of “classical” folklore texts and modern narratives, both representing “polysemy” of behavioral models. Carriers of the Circassian culture in diaspora consider themselves as practitioners of the patterns of the Circassian (Adyghe) etiquette, which, they think, is a specific type of lost knowledge marking out the Circassians from other peoples. Discourse analysis in combination with a functional-semiotic method makes it possible to show the characteristics and the structure of the implicit means of communication, and reveal mechanisms of the impact of a speaker (or silence) exerted on the listener, or in a wider sense, on a social situation. Ways of influence can in this case have several types of strategies, both verbal and non-verbal; for instance, a) speaking with the purpose of drawing an obvious parallel with the created social situation (with reference to an authoritative source, the real or folklore character); b) speaking is allegoric, “read” for devoted, “closed” for laymen, influencing a social situation indirectly, and c) the silence as the zero communicative act, meaning a high social context. The folk-genre structure of the texts investigated by us is non-uniform: historical legends (brought from the Caucasus with plots from lives of the military aristocracy), memorata (stories and memoirs from the history of the local diaspora community), steady paroemias and idioms occurring mainly in Uzunyaila local tradition. A special genre unites texts, which we designate by the term folklore reflective. These are the stereotypical reflections of traditional oral “classics” and memorata; “explaining” the historical reasons of the formation of the studied behavioral models; interpreting feudal aristocratic speaking/silence in terms of traditional moral and ethical codes of Adyghe Habze, either approving their humanistic value and predicting their relevance, or considering them as an anachronism