Speaking in the mirror of the other: Dialectics of intersubjectivity and temporality in Western Apache discourse

► We examine figurations of self and other across three Western Apache ways of speaking. ► These include: ‘speaking with names,’ ‘ch’idii (gossip) and b1’hadziih (oratory). ► We find positionings of self and other drawn by means of a temporalizing semiotics of relatedness. ► We propose a view of intersubjectivity articulating an anticipatory or subjunctive sociality. We explicate a Western Apache oratorial idiom, reflected upon as bá’hadziih, ‘speak for them’ as a complex intersubjective strategy for the negotiation of varying figurations of otherness. Bá’hadziih operates, we will argue, by limiting the otherness of an opposed family or clan by means of appeals to a temporalizing sociality. By way of establishing the ethnographic context of bá’hadziih we will also show how its action entails and is loosely entailed by different ways of speaking associated with bígońłzih, or ‘knowing’ and the moral boundaries of families. We will conclude that bá’hadziih deploys and obviates otherness by recasting it within what we define as an emergent, subjunctive sociality.