Life and Language Outside the Truth: On the Cultural Semantics of South Pacific Giaman

In European discourses, core distinctions have historically revolved around “truth v. lies”. These opposites reflect the moral, legal, and religious traditions of European languages, and as such they can be viewed as discourses and distinctions that are the products of a particular conceptual universe, rather than of a universally shared human way of thinking, knowing, and speaking. Taking a perspective from cultural semantics, this chapter explores what a linguistic worldview can look like when it has not been construed around this European conceptual pair. The chapter provides a case study on the South Pacific, using Bislama and its concept of giaman ‘fibbing, tricking’ as an example and an exemplar. As a postcolonial language variety, Bislama is based on a lexical surface consisting mainly of words of English origin, but with a conceptual universe associated with meanings that are not reflective of English, but of urban South Pacific life, cultural values, and local ethics.