Language, affect and the inculcation of social norms in the New Guinea Highlands and beyond Alan Rumsey Australian National University Culturalist accounts of emotion and morality have focused on how they are constructed and inculcated through particular, more or less culturally specific ways of talking about them. Both Bourdieu and recent affect theorists have opposed what they see as an overemphasis on lan- guage in such accounts. Here I argue that the dichotomy between the ‘verbal’ and the ‘non-ver- bal’ that is common to both is misconceived. A more useful distinction is between the level of referentially explicit talk about emotions and moral precepts, and the ways in which they are implicitly conveyed, both through non-referential aspects of discourse and through other, non- discursive aspects of social interaction. Ethnographic evidence for my argument is drawn from study of children’s language socialization in Highland Papua New Guinea. Keywords: non-verbal communication, pedagogy, Bourdieu, affect, subjectification INTRODUCTION What role is played by language and speech in the inculcation of norms and values? Here I will address that question on the basis of evidence from interactions between children and adults in Highland Papua New Guinea. As a point of departure I will consider some of the writings of Pierre Bourdieu on the question. I do so for three reasons. The first is that for anthropologists Bourdieu has been perhaps the most influential theorist of processes of social inculcation (or as he would have put it, of the reproduction of habitus). Secondly, Bourdieu’s specific focus on pedagogy is espe- cially relevant for my focus on child-adult interaction. Finally, even though Bourdieu’s practice theory is not universally accepted in all respects, its emphasis on embodiment as a crucial aspect of social life and sociocultural reproduction is widely accepted, and it is one that I agree with. But I disagree with some of the ways in which Bourdieu and many others have characterized the role of language and speech in these processes, and have developed their critiques of what they have seen as an overemphasis on lan- guage in other brands of social theory. Among those others are theorists identified with the recent ‘affective turn’ in social theory such as Massumi (2002), Stewart (2007) and Thrift (2008). Just as Bourdieu The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2015) 26, 349–364 doi:10.1111/taja.12157 © 2015 Australian Anthropological Society 349