By Fokelien Kootstra
Postdoctoral researcher, Ghent University
Nobody likes a gossip, yet everyone has encountered gossip in their life, and likely even participated in it. Our intuitive familiarity with the genre makes the following passage from an Arabic letter written in Egypt, in the 10th/11th century AD (P.Berl.Arab II 81) immediately recognizable as gossip to the modern reader:
Send greetings […] to the lady, and tell her […] my lady, did you forget the housekeeper? And tell the lady: my lady, the things I might tell you of Umm Abū l-Qāsim. She said bad things about you, and she was disapproving of you, because a woman – who you know – news from her ceased to arrive. And news from you and your inquiries after her also ceased to arrive. And you know, my lady, that such talk is gossipy. When I talk to her, I would say: don’t you know how such talk goes? Is betrayal your goal? Who are you?! I know, an enemy! Since the day that she complained I have only seen her twice.
The gossip section takes up about half of the space of the letter. The letter starts out with a proclamation of how much she misses the addressee, followed by a short question about how the addressee is doing in the first nine lines. Following some greetings to several other people, we find the gossip passage above, which takes up the next twelve lines, then the letter seems to end with another list of greetings to more people and presumably, although the lines are damaged to the point of being unreadable, final greetings to the addressee to close the text.
Why would the sender of the letter spend so much of her writing on this piece of gossip, and one that was not even addressed to the person she ostensibly wants to share the gossip with?
The social function of gossip
We generally consider gossip as something negative. Gossip is seen as mean and divisive, and people who gossip will often distance themselves from it by describing what they are doing as ‘small talk’, ‘chitchat’, or even ‘nothing,’ when directly asked what they were talking about (Foster 2004, 88). Much of the research on gossip, however, uses a slightly broader definition, which includes not only talk expressing negative value judgements of a person who is not there, but also positive discussions of others. This widens the category of gossip to include social talk more generally.
When thus defined, researchers have recognized four main social functions of gossip: the gathering and exchange of social information, a form of entertainment, a way to informally communicate and enforce social norms within a group, which helps to create and strengthen group solidarity and potentially a sense of belonging (already outlined by Stirling 1956). Although the exact numbers differ, it has been shown that people spend a considerable proportion of their social interactions engaged in exchanging information about others or even outright gossiping (for example, Dunbar, Marriott, and Duncan 1997; Emler 1990; Slade 1997).
What is the sender trying to say?
The strong denouncement of the behavior of Umm Abū l-Qāsim by our sender clearly shows that gossip was judged negatively in tenth-century Egypt as well. She goes as far as to call Umm Abū l-Qāsim an ‘enemy’ of the addressee and accuses her of ‘betrayal’, on account of her gossiping. By doing so, she is clearly distancing herself from such unacceptable social behavior, and seemingly, even from the gossip herself. At the same time, she differentiates what she is doing from gossiping, she is just warning her friend. If she was merely concerned for her friend’s reputation, however, telling off Umm Abū l-Qāsim for her behavior would, surely, have sufficed. What is she really trying to tell her friend? To get a better grip on this, let’s have a look at what accusation is being made against the addressee.
Apparently, Umm Abū l-Qāsim has been going around saying that the lady in question stopped sending letters and inquiring after her well-being. From the sender’s reaction we gather that this was considered a terrible accusation. The contemporary equivalent of ghosting someone could lead to a bad reputation, or so the sender would have us believe. In this sense, the piece of gossip becomes a warning: Do not neglect me as you have neglected Umm Abū l-Qāsim, or people will say bad things about you. Read as a warning, it helps to make sense of the question the sender posed at the beginning of her address to the lady in question: ‘did you forget your housekeeper?’ It seems the sender was referring to herself and had not heard from her mistress in a while.
Gossip in context: The ‘you never write to me’ trope
Reading this section of the letter as a threat not to ignore the sender, connects this piece of gossip to a common topic in personal letters from this period. Besides the inclusion of greetings to the addressee and people around them, Arabic, as well as Greek letters, often contain requests to write back soon, in combination with expressions of longing and complaints of not having heard from the addressee in response to previous letters. This sender seems to have found a rather creative way of encouraging the addressee to write to her, but was expressing a very common, and likely instantly recognizable, complaint. Couching it in a piece of gossip about someone else, allowed her to voice her complaint indirectly to her employer, who clearly had social and economic power over the sender. It even allowed her to cast herself as virtuously protecting the reputation of her mistress.
Gossip in context: privacy and letter writing
As to why the sender would put such a message inside a letter that was ostensibly written to someone else, this may also have had something to do with the power imbalance between the sender and the addressee. Having a friend relay the message to her mistress for her might have been more socially acceptable than sending her mistress a letter directly. There are several examples in the Arabic papyri of letters in which senders petition people to intercede with more powerful individuals on their behalf. However, as Klaas Bentein’s blog post on ‘getting involved’ already pointed out, it was common for letters to contain greetings and messages to multiple people in the Greek context, and it is commonly assumed that letters were read out with the interested members of the household present. In the Arabic speaking context in the period that this letter was written, similar habits of communication involving letters were still common, so the reason may also have been one of convenience. Travel was not always easy, so combining messages to people who lived near each other saved time and effort.
It is passages like this in these historical letters, which feel immediately intimate and relatable, that remind us that even though the frameworks in which we operate and the formulae we use to express ourselves may have changed, some aspects of our social exchanges have remained remarkably similar.
References
Diem, W. 1997. Arabische Briefe Des 7. Bis 13. Jahrhunderts Aus Den Staatlichen Museen Berlin. Vol. 2 Arabische Urkunden. 2 vols. Documenta Arabica Antiqua, 4 Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Staatlichen Museen Berlin. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Dunbar, R.I.M., A. Marriott, and N.D.C. Duncan. 1997. “Human Conversational Behavior.” Human Nature 8: 231–46.
Emler, N. 1990. “A Social Psychology of Reputation.” European Review of Social Psychology 1: 171–93.
Foster, Eric, K. 2004. “Research on Gossip: Taxonomy, Methods, and Future Directions.” Review of General Psychology 8 (2): 78–99.
Slade, D. 1997. “Stories and Gossip in English: The Macro-Structure of Casual Talk.” Prospect 12: 43–71.
Stirling, R.B. 1956. “Some Psychological Mechanisms Operative in Gossip.” Social Forces 34: 262–67.