Anthropos 85.1990: 455-473
Hlonipha and the Ambiguous Woman
Robert K. Herbert
Abstract. - The practice of “respect through avoidance” (hlo
nipha), widespread among the Nguni peoples, includes a per
vasive avoidance of personal names. The avoidance language
practiced by wives is different in important respects from
more general name taboos. This paper offers principled means
for distinguishing isihlonipho sabafazi (“women’s respect lan
guage”) from other avoidance languages on both purely lin
guistic and interactional grounds. An interpretation of this
avoidance is linked to the function of the personal name in
drawing attention to the speaker and to the social position
occupied by wives within the Nguni household, recognizing
two factors which impose hlonipha upon a wife, (a) her ritual
impurity as a menstruating woman and (b) her status as an
outsider, i.e., a threat to social harmony of the homestead. The
work concludes with some comparative remarks on the process
of name avoidance and taboo in S. Sotho and other societies.
[Nguni, name avoidance, respect behavior, women’s studies]
Robert K. Herbert, Ph. D.; Visiting Prof, of Linguistics at
Witwatersrand Univ. and Associate Prof, of Anthropology at
the State Univ. of New York at Binghamton. He has taught
previously at the universities of Aarhus, Warsaw, Calgary, and
Michigan State. - Publictions include: Language Universals,
Markedness Theory, and Natural Phonetic Processes (Berlin
1986); Sex-based Differences in Compliment Behavior (Lan
guage in Society, in press); Sociolinguistics and Psychopathol
ogy (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
1984).
1. Introduction
The prescriptions and proscriptions governing
everyday life, channeling performance behav
ior into acceptable and unacceptable manifesta
tions, are innumerable. While individual evalua
tive terms may differ from one situation (within
and cross-culturally) to another (e.g., correct/incor
rect, good/bad, acceptable/unacceptable, remark
able/unremarkable), such evaluative schemata for
social performance seem to be universal features
of cultural organization.
Ethnographic descriptions of the role played
by women in traditional southern African Bantu
speaking societies have detailed the socially infe
rior status of women and the numerous prohibi
tions governing the everyday life of these women.
particularly wives (e.g., Kuper 1982). 1 * Marriage
is patrilocal within southeastern Bantu societies,
and the code of behavior taught to young wives
upon arrival in their husband’s homestead is in-
dexical of the socially inferior status of the wife,
which status is reinforced with the daily practice
of this code. In this paper, I wish to consider
in particular the position of women within tra
ditional Nguni societies, which include the Zulu,
Xhosa, and Swazi as the major representatives,
with special attention to the role of language and
linguistic avoidances or taboos, often known as
hlonipha. Descriptions of hlonipha in the literature
are usually brief mentions of the practice, and they
are widely scattered in linguistic, ethnographic,
and other works. There is very little that is new
from an ethnographic descriptive point of view
here. Rather, a new interpretation is offered for
the linguistic practices associated with women; this
interpretation is linked to the position of women
generally in these societies, to the specific position
1 Two terminological notes: (1) “Bantu-speaking” is the term
used to refer to those societies characterized by the use
of Bantu languages, as opposed to Khoisan and non-in-
digenous European or Asian languages. By and large, the
groups referred to are South African Negroes, as opposed
to the Khoi (Hottentot) and San (Bushmen) populations.
The description is cumbersome, but the term “Bantu” as
an ethnographic label is offensive to those peoples to
whom it is applied, particularly within the Republic of
South Africa. (2) The term “inferior” as applied to the
social position of women is obviously a value-laden term,
reflecting what some researchers see as a male bias in
traditional ethnographic description. In this case, however,
the relative social positions of women and men involve not
only strict segregation of labor but also rights of inheritance,
property, etc. This position has occasionally, and loosely,
been described as “quite like that of slaves” (Laydevant
1952: 71), though this is a misrepresentation. The position
of women is more accurately described as that of “perpetual
minors” (Hammond-Tooke 1962; 68; Ngubane 1981: 91),
i.e., women are held in “perpetual guardianship” (Marwick
1940: 66) by males, first by their fathers and then their
husbands, eventually their sons.