Publications

Publication details [#42641]

Wirtz, Kristina. 2005. “Where obscurity is a virtue”: The mystique of unintelligibility in Santería ritual. Language & Communication 25 (4) : 351–375.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

anthropology | intelligibility | metapragmatic term | religious language | ritual

Place, Publisher

Elsevier

Journal WWW

www.sciencedirect.com/

Annotation

This article examines how in two genres of Lucumí ritual speech in Cuban Santería, namely songs and possession trance speech, unintelligibility is produced and how it adds to meaningfulness.