> the gist is I treat the questions as "how might we be connected, what common > things might we share?"
If the Māori are like the Hawai'ians, they will even use a different verb to describe what their marae (invariable?) "is" to the one they'd use to describe what their job (variable) "is". The search for connection (playing the community card, not playing the authority card) reminds me of the Mennonite Game, played by a somewhat insular sect in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCmmrHK4HNk Normally it's win-win: one discovers connections in reciting genealogies and places, but it's also possible to "lose the Mennonite Game": teenagers occasionally discover that the attractive person they've just struck up a conversation with is a close relative. (similar to consulting the https://www.islendingabok.is/english , or is that just urban legend?) When I first emigrated here, I was told that local questions like "where are your grapes?" served a similar purpose to the Māori whakapapa, for people move around, especially to big cities, but their vineyards reveal where their ancestors once were. And similarly, I was told that if, in one of these villages, some grey-haired individual should ask whose son I was, "no one's" was the cromulent answer, the one I'd give even if I'd been born in that culture but 10 km away, for the question implicitly asks "which of the families (in this village) do you belong to" (as if, thinks this cosmopolitan foreigner, they aren't already all cousins in these villages anyway). Indeed, when I was FOB, I treated such questions as connection-seeking, and tried my best to lob the closest things I could in return, with the surprising-to-me-then results that it often paid off: "oh, you're from X? my $LANGUAGE teacher is from Y" resulted in discovering that my language teacher had also been my interlocutor's very first teacher, in 1st grade (which therefore explained many things to me about the didactic style :-) Anyway, that's a long-winded way to say that in anglophone cultures "what do you do" (like "how are you" in american english?) is probably not meant to be taken literally, and one has great freedom to answer the question that was implicitly asked. (in practice I say "IT", which most often means "I'm boring; let's talk about you") If we were to follow the Hawai'ians (and it sounds like the Māori have similar habits), we might make a game out of trying to answer in ways that convey essential invariant aspects of our life, instead of accidential varying aspects: furthermore this can be done either snarkily (IIRC Swanwick's elf says he doesn't do things, he is things: an inheritor, an investor, a philanthrope, etc.) or in a spirit of cameraderie ("I'm from a line of engineers: my grandfather drove a train, and my father and I are in software"). Finally, from the Pākehā NZ culture, there's also a more informal, less judgemental-sounding, way to ask "what do you do?", namely "so, what d'you do for a biscuit?". -Dave -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
