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Gossip
GORDON P. D. INGRAM
Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
Anthropology has sometimes been derided (as
oen from within the discipline, with ironic
intent, as from outside the discipline, with hos-
tile intent) as the science of gossip. Behind the
supposed slur lies a serious methodological
point: an ethnography has probably never been
written whose pages do not preserve instances
of gossip—in the broad sense of informal talk
about an absent third party’s activities—by and
about individuals from the society being studied.
Clearly, composing a portrait of everyday life
in almost any community would be impossible
without listening to what, and who, people in that
community are talking about. Anthropology’s
reliance on gossip thus leads to three preliminary
conclusions. First, gossip has been investigated
in every society that anthropologists have visited.
ere are no well-known counterexamples of
societies where gossip is almost absent, so it
seems that indulging in informal conversations
about the activities of absent group members
is as good a candidate for a human universal
as any. Second, gossip is useful. e reliance
placed on it by ethnographers trying to rapidly
understand a community for academic purposes
is just a specialized instance of gossip’s general
value in integrating people into new social net-
works, teaching them social norms, and allowing
them to keep track of individuals with whom
they are no longer in direct personal contact.
ird,however,tocallsomeone“agossip”is
insulting. e point of the barb about the sci-
ence of gossip—even if meant ironically—is
that it might wound, because gossip is almost
everywhere seen as a frivolous, morally dubi-
ous, sometimes even malicious, activity. Even
though gossip is ubiquitous, it is feared and
despised in many societies and oen associated
with low-status subgroups (especially women).
Indeed, when they have considered gossip explic-
itly rather than just relying on it implicitly,
e International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.EditedbyHilaryCallan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
many anthropologists have focused on this “dark
side” of gossip—on its role as an instrument of
covert aggression and social competition rather
thanitsmoreinnocentfunctionofspreading
useful information about who is doing what
with whom.
Although gossip has been recorded every-
where, it has not been explicitly investigated as a
topic of anthropological interest in all societies,
making it dicult to identify cross-cultural simi-
larities and dierences. Early ethnographies that
contain extensive discussion of the role of gossip
or rumor in a particular social group—and that
were cited by Gluckman (1963) in his inuential
functionalist analysis of gossip—included works
on peasants in Trinidad and Haiti; the Navajo
Indians; rural Euro-American life in the Midwest;
the Makah Indians of the Pacic Northwest; and
a Welsh industrial village. Aer 1963, selected
book-length ethnographies that contained note-
worthy treatments of gossip included works on
Sarakatsani shepherds in Greece; blood feuds
in Montenegro; small-town life in Andalusia;
carnival traditions in Cádiz; lobster-shing com-
munities in Maine; informal systems of social
control among cattle ranchers in California; the
Tzotzil Indian community of Zinacantán in Mex-
ico; village politics in Papua New Guinea; and
rumors of supernatural assault by white colonials
on black Africans. Although this list is diverse,
there was a noticeable bias toward European and
North American societies. It is possible that this
simply reected local eects in terms of ethno-
graphers who were interested in a particular
anthropological theme and geographical area
going on to supervise students who then became
interested in the same theme and area. However,
in response to that suggestion it should be noted
that Gluckman, so inuential in the anthropolog-
ical study of gossip, was primarily an Africanist,
yet until the early 2000s there had been little
written (except in passing) on gossip in Africa. A
more theoretically interesting possibility is that
gossip is more common in periodically dispersed
groups—such as cattle ranchers, shepherds, or
shermen—that exist at the margins of a modern
state.
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2GOSSIP
e history of the anthropological study of
gossip can be broadly divided into four phases:
(1) early (pre-1960s) work, which saw gossip as
an interesting phenomenon to be discussed in
passing but rarely speculated on its fundamental
importance to the society being studied or on
its similarities and dierences to gossip in other
societies; (2) the 1960s, when a famous debate
took place between Gluckman (1963, 1968),
who put forward a social–functionalist analy-
sis of gossip, and Paine (1967), who favored a
more individualistic, social-process approach; (3)
the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, when
ethnographers either advocated one of these
two theoretical positions or tried in some way
to combine them; and (4) recent work since
the 1990s, based on the recognition that gossip is
universal and marked either by a neofunctionalist
model based on evolutionary science or on the
regional survey of the similarities and dierences
betweenpatternsofgossipindierentpartsof
the world.
Many passing mentions of gossip in pre-1960s
ethnographies were summarized by Gluckman
(1963) in a well-known review article. e debate
that followed the publication of this article
remains pivotal. Gluckman articulated a classic
functionalist position, asserting that gossip has
an important role in maintaining group cohesion.
He argued that the group-serving functions of
gossip are threefold. First, gossip helps to uphold
social norms, partly because the fear of nega-
tive gossip may deter individuals from violating
normsbutalsobecauseevaluativetalkabout
normshelpstoreinforcepeople’ssensethatthey
are part of a social group who share these norms.
Second, gossip is a kind of covert aggression,
fought out strictly behind the scenes in order
to maintain an outward show of harmony and
friendship. A third point, not so oen picked up
on by other writers, is that gossip can help with
the process of selecting a leader, enabling a group
to evaluate powerful people informally without
directly confronting them about their failures.
In a erce critique, Gluckman’s former student
Paine (1967) took issue mainly with the second
function of gossip: its use as a way of concealing
aggression. He claimed that his mentor’s argu-
ment contained a contradiction because gossip
was supposed simultaneously to preserve a sense
of group unity by enforcing norm adherence
and also to undermine that unity by providing a
means of within-group aggression. Paine argued
that gossip is better seen as a competitive activity
practiced for the benet of individuals rather than
groups. However, Gluckman’s (1968) reply did a
good job of rebutting this criticism. His key point
wasthatgossipisaformofindirect aggression. It
does, therefore, make sense that the expression of
aggressive impulses between individuals can help
to hold a society together because these impulses
are not openly expressed but are restrained and
controlled within the rule-bound cultural activ-
ity of gossip. Gossip may indeed be aggressive
behavior that serves the interests of individuals
but the rules by which that behavior is governed,
and which prescribe its indirectness, are cultural
rules that are imposed by the group as a whole
and serve the group’s collective interests.
isdebateleitsmarkonsubsequentanthro-
pological treatments of gossip, which oen tried
to present gossip as both an individual and a
collective activity. For instance, Haviland (1977)
argued that gossip among the Tzotzil-speaking
Indians of Zinacantán in Mexico focused on
normative rules, helping to reinforce in gossipers’
minds the consequences of breaking these rules.
In a topic-frequency analysis, he found that gos-
sip was dominated by subjects such as drunken
(mis)behavior, extraordinary wealth or poverty,
fallings-out between kinsfolk, judicial punish-
ment,divorce,andillicitsexualrelations.us
Haviland’s work seems to support the idea that
gossip is concerned with the reinforcement of
group norms; but he also emphasized that gossip
may be instrumental in furthering individual or
factional ends, as a form of aggression. In contrast
to this balanced approach, other ethnographers,
particularly in the 1980s, tended to focus more
on the covertly aggressive connotations of gossip,
arguing that previous anthropologists had tended
to overemphasize the social benets of gossip
rather than the emotions and motivations of the
individuals concerned.
In the twenty-rst century, ethnographers
have continued to investigate gossip in particular
locations but there has also been a new interest
in investigating the shared properties of gossip
across human societies. In the course of this,
some interesting connections have emerged
between gossip and witchcra, sparking the idea
that concerns about gossip and rumor are a
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GOSSIP 3
kind of historical successor to fears of witchcra
and sorcery. At one level, gossip and rumor
play an important role in processes that lead
to accusations of witchcra. In societies where
witchcraisseenasareal—anddangerously
counternormative—behavior, the activities of
witches may form a frequent topic of gossip, as
Haviland (1977) demonstrated. Witchcra accu-
sations, like negative gossip in general, may be
motivatedeitherbyagenuinefearoftheaccused
and distaste for their behavior or by a strategic
attempt to damage their reputation—whether
from envy, spite, or ambition.
At another level, however, gossip itself can
act in an oddly similar way to the ways in
which witchcra and sorcery are imagined to
act, owing to the ability of the gossip author
to strike anonymously and from a distance. To
use a modern example similar to one chosen by
Gluckman (1963), the anonymity of the writer
of an unsigned letter in a professional context,
containing accusations of wrongdoing against a
colleague, gives the writer aspects of a sorcerer,
the harmful eects of whose actions are evident
but whose identity is concealed. Moreover, nega-
tive gossip increases—and witchcra is believed
to increase—in social and historical contexts that
are characterized by high degrees of social tension
and ambiguity. A possible topic of future research
is the idea that fear of witchcra and sorcery, so
widespread in agrarian societies at a certain level
of political integration, is a kind of image of the
fear of malicious, anonymous gossip, refracted
through the lens of belief in supernatural agents.
And like other things that induce social fear,
gossip is a highly ambiguous behavior, oriented
either toward a pole of social integration or a pole
of aggression and social disruption.
Arguably the most theoretically grounded way
of investigating the general properties of gossip is
to analyze it in terms of its evolutionary costs and
benets. Since the 1990s there has been a rapid
growth in both experimental and observational
research on gossip from an evolutionary per-
spective. A particularly inuential writer in this
area has been Dunbar (1996), who elaborated a
theory of the evolutionary signicance of gossip
based on its functions in reinforcing intimacy
and excluding social deviants. Dunbar argued
that informal chat (gossip being his main example
of this) is analogous to the social grooming of
nonhuman primates. e use of verbal rather
than tactile grooming has enabled humans to live
in much larger groups than other primates, for
threemainreasons.First,languageallowsusto
converse with an audience of multiple individu-
als, making it more time ecient than one-to-one
grooming. Second, gossip allows us to keep in
contact with geographically dispersed networks
of kin members and friends via mutual contacts.
ird, negative gossip encourages intragroup
cooperation—which would otherwise become
impossible to enforce as groups grew larger—by
spreading information about the behavior of
norm violators. Dunbar’s argument helps to
provide a solid biological explanation for the
ambiguity of gossip. In any act of gossip, at least
threeindividualsareinvolved:gossiper,subject,
andaudience.Ifthegossipisaboutanormvio-
lator, it is in our genetic interests to be in the
audience (so that we can take precautions against
the violator) but not to be the subject. e gos-
siper’s interests are less clear: they are gambling
the potential benets of helping their audience
against the risks that derive from alienating the
gossip subject. is is essentially a more scien-
tic way of reframing Gluckman’s core insight:
human societies tend to be ambivalent about
gossip because it can both help and hurt our indi-
vidual and collective interests, encouraging norm
compliance but oen causing conict as well.
SEE ALSO: <DRAFT: Social Cohesion>;
Witchcra, Sorcery, and Magic; Functionalism; wbiea1915
wbiea2072
Norms Psychology; Gluckman, Max (1911–75) wbiea2103
wbiea2107
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Dunbar, Robin I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the
Evolution of Language. London: Faber & Faber.
Gluckman, Max. 1963. “Gossip and Scandal.” Current
Anthropology 4: 307–16.
Gluckman, Max. 1968. “Psychological, Sociological
and Anthropological Explanations of Witchcra and
Gossip: A Clarication.” Man (n.s.) 3: 20–34.
Goodman, Robert F., and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, eds. 1994.
Good Gossip. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Haviland, John B. 1977. Gossip, Reputation, and Knowl-
edge in Zinacantán.Chicago:UniversityofChicago
Press.
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4GOSSIP
Ingram, Gordon P. D. 2014. “From Hitting to Tattling to
Gossip: An Evolutionary Rationale for the Develop-
ment of Indirect Aggression.” Evolutionary Psychol-
ogy 12: 343–63.
Paine, Robert. 1967. “What is Gossip About? An Alter-
native Hypothesis.” Man (n.s.) 2: 278–85.
Stewart, Patricia J., and Andrew Strathern. 2004.
Witchcra, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip.Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversityPress.
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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book, but are required
for the online presentation of this book which will be published on Wiley’s own online publishing
platform.
Iftheabstractandkeywordsarenotpresentbelow,pleasetakethisopportunitytoaddthemnow.
e abstract should be a short paragraph of between 50 and 150 words in length and there should
be at least 3 keywords.
ABSTRACT
Gossip is a universal feature of all human societies but has not been systematically investigated
in all of them: ethnographies that have focused on gossip largely concern semidispersed groups
at the margins of modern European and North American societies. e anthropological study
of gossip can be divided into four historical phases: pre-1960s work, which tended to discuss
gossip only in passing; a debate in the 1960s between proponents of social–functionalist and
social-process approaches to gossip; the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, when ethnogra-
phers either advocated one of these two theoretical positions or tried to synthesize them; and
recent work based on the recognition that gossip is universal. Current theoretical innovations
include regional surveys of similarities and dierences in patterns of gossip and the resurgence
of a neofunctionalist model based on evolutionary science, in which gossip has adaptive value
in promoting group cooperation.
KEYWORDS
cooperation (political and economic); language; reputation; rumor; social control
