Wellness Beyond Words: Maya Compositions of Speech and Silence in Medical Care

4: The Roar on the Other Side of Speaking: Communicative Collogue, the Wordiness of Wordlessness

59 If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. —George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–1872) meaning in making silence With the initial application of the polyphonic approach to the crosscultural consultation in Nima’ discussed in the previous chapter, we have begun to explore what the reorganization of representations of speakers and speaking on the page can reveal about communicative interactions . This chapter carries the methodology further in our examination of the Nima’ consultation by exploring some of the forms of communicative action that lay on the other side of speaking, the overshadowed whispers and the silence of the collogue. Because speech in discourse and conversation analysis has been overwhelmingly equated with “presence ,” silences like those expressed by the wellness seeker in the centro de salud consultation have all too often been overlooked, depicted as “absence,” and explained away as disempowerment (for some notable exceptions, see Sansom 1983; Nwoye 1985; Philips 1985; Saville-Troike 1985).1 But the silences of full-fledged subjects must be spared the fate of “absence” and disempowerment if we are to understand them as full valued rather than as impoverished ways of interacting communicatively . The polyphonic score put forth in this study provides the graphic representation needed to observe and analyze what cannot be heard, providing a space for silence to emerge as “presence” on the other side of speaking. Following the interplay of interactants and interactions throughout the bars of the polyphonic score reveals the “presence” and “absence” 4 the roar on the other side of speaking Communicative Collogue, the Wordiness of Wordlessness 60 chapter 4 of silence, ebbing and flowing between speakers and speaking, filling and draining the communicative field. In this study silence and speaking are treated as interdependent communicative actions (see Jaworski 1993). The simultaneity of their counterpositioning produces meaning; the one owes its existence to the other, and each is only half of what makes communicative interaction possible. In communicative interactions , silence does not just happen or exist ontologically “out there” on its own; silence is made, its movement among speakers creates the meanings between their speaking. There is an entire language that has been developed by the field of linguistics to describe and analyze speech in communicative interactions , but the same cannot be said of silence as a communicative act (see Samarin 1965; Basso 1972; Bruneau 1973; Tannen and Saville-Troike 1985; Braithwaite 1990; Jaworski 1993; Gudykundst 2005). While we can and do speak of the momentary silence of pauses and hesitations (see Schegloff 1972; Chafe 1985) and the sociolinguistics of situational silence (Walker 1985), communicative interactions are overwhelmingly described from the view of speech. Therefore, in discourse analysis it is speech that interrupts, that takes turns, that manages the floor, that overlaps, that repairs, that presequences, that opens, that closes, and so forth (e.g., Schegloff 1968; Sacks et al. 1974; Levinson 1983). silence as “presence” and doing When silence is considered as a form of doing, as in the English transitive verb “to silence,” it is generally used to describe an agent (a subject) that does the “silencing” to a patient (a direct object). This is the world that our language and culture encodes and that conventional transcription and analysis reproduces; that is, a world where speech is “presence ” and “doing” and silence is “absence” and “not doing” (see Mentore 2004, 2005).2 We do not, then, frequently think of the “speechless” in communicative interactions as “making silence” because they are often absent from our transcriptions altogether (or at best relegated to an ethnographic description or annotation). And while it may be the case that with a transcript in hand we do not have to see precisely what is transpiring in an interaction to make sense of it, the sense that we make of it is necessarily influenced by who and what we see represented (or included) on the page. The Roar on the Other Side of Speaking 61 Now that we have a polyphonic score that allows us to “see” the inaudible making of silence by interactants as a kind of “presence,” how might we begin to categorize and analyze the relationships between silence and speaking in communication? Indeed, the thought of “seeing” silence in the making of interactions may seem foreign...