Reduplication and Reciprocity in Imagining Community: The Play of Tropes in a Rural Bangladeshi Moot

The trope of the "body politic" is reproduced in a Bengali popular court, or moot, not only through explicit submetaphors of that master metaphor but through a grammatical example of what Peirce called diagrammatic iconism. The iconism of reduplicated verbs with reciprocal meaning became pivotal in the metacommunicative negotiation of the agenda of a rural Bangladeshi moot. Such forms of iconicity analyzed here play traceable roles in particular imaginations of community and give us an opportunity to explore the accessibility of those imaginations to discursive consciousness. The article concludes that the tropes most powerfully shaping the discourse of the moot are those least accessible to metapragmatic consciousness, those that rhetorically contribute to the veiling of their own rhetoricity.