Is promising a human universal?

In the typology of speech acts proposed by Austin (1962) first and then further developed by Searle (1969, 1976), promising was a key example of a commissive – that is, a type of act whereby we commit to doing something (like the acts expressed by the English verbs commit, threaten, vow, pledge, offer, bid, warrant). Such commissives, as discussed in Chapter 2, have among their “felicity conditions” (for Austin) or “conditions of satisfaction” (for Searle) the speaker’s intention to do a number of things, namely, (a) carry out the act, (b) accept responsibility for such an act, (c) be under the obligation of doing it, and (d) convince the hearer that (a), (b), and (c) will be the case by using conventional language that will allow the hearer to fully understand what the speaker is up to.

The act of promising played an important role in Michelle Rosaldo’s (1982) argument that speech act theorists were Anglo- and Eurocentric. Her claim that among the Ilongots there was no notion of promise, or at least not in the sense of an act whose conditions of satisfaction are in the privacy of people’s mind or in their “psychological orientation” (1982: 212), was part of a more general trend in the anthropology of the late 1970s and early 1980s.