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6: Wellness Made Out of Words: Audiologue (Hearing Voices)
- University of New Mexico Press
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93 “answering” as a way of “asking” (eliciting illness narratives) Revisiting the polyphonic score of the dispensario consultation and the communicative contributions of the participants across the eighty-two bars suggests that information regarding the wellness seeker’s illness experience is not elicited (primarily) through the healer’s use of questions (see appendixes C and D). While interesting in and of itself, this observation gains new significance when we study the score and note that quantitatively, the wellness seeker speaks more frequently and for longer durations than any of the other participants in the dispensario consultation. As noted, this contrasts dramatically with the communicative practices and the quantity of speech used by the wellness seeker in the centro de salud consultation (see appendixes A and B). There are two rather obvious ways of approaching this variation. The first is to reduce the verbal activity of the dispensario (and the centro de salud) wellness seeker to phenomena explainable in terms of the idiosyncrasies of individual speakers (loquacious versus reticent). The second is to consider explanations for this variation that arise from implicating the cultural context of care and interrogating the interactions between the various participants in the encounter. This study pursues the latter approach. What is the role of an ajkun in a Maya intracultural therapeutic consultation and are there recognizable communicative and interactional practices that accompany this role that, when enacted (lived), fulfill the therapeutic expectations of other cultural actors? Many years ago, in conducting a linguistic anthropological analysis of Maya therapeutic care among the Tzeltal-speaking Maya of Tenejapa in Chiapas, Mexico, Duane Metzger and Gerald Williams discovered that 6 wellness made out of words Audiologue (HearingVoices) 94 chapter 6 during the course of the pulsing [diagnosing], the curer may carry on conversation with the family, the subject of conversation being unlimited, and the occasion not necessarily excluding jokes and laughter. If, during this conversation, the curer makes obvious attempts to elicit from the patient or the attending family the information which is properly forthcoming from pulsing, it is likely to be said that he is a /?ih¢’inal/ [“junior curer,” literally, “younger sibling curer”] and not a /b’ankilal/ [“master curer,” literally, “older brother curer”]. /te me ya sna? ya? yel k’ab’ale ma ya shohk’o/ “‘If he knew how to pulse, he would not ask questions,’ he said.” (1963:223)1 The links that Metzger and Williams observed nearly fifty years ago in Mexico between the culture of care and the communicative practices common to the roles of Maya healer, wellness seeker, and family both resemble and reveal much about the dispensario therapeutic interaction with which we are concerned here. logotherapy As we have observed in the centro de salud encounter, in the description of the Tzeltal interaction, and in the dispensario consultation, Maya curative interactions are polyphonic, co-opting multiple voices and pluralistic experiences in their composition.2 As an ajkun, Miriam’s communicative practices, like those of Tzeltal curers, were informed by a culture of care that has ways of speaking and interacting both proper and foreign to it. Being a theurgical herbalist meant that Miriam could ask (without being regarded negatively) some illness-related questions of both the wellness seeker and her companion. She was not, however , expected to divine the source of the problem but rather to evoke supernatural or divine agency and involve it in the remedial action (see B. Tedlock 1992b; Hart 2008). To accomplish this, Miriam instructed the wellness seeker as to how she should pray, saying: Qajawaxel Dios para que si katutzirik tambien y kata’ sachb’el amak la che re je la’ xab’ano pero chub’anik tu k’u la. (H:66) (You need to make your prayers, you ask our supreme Lord [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-30 02:21 GMT) Wellness Made Out of Words 95 God in order for you to be healed. Also, you ask for forgiveness of your sins that you have committed but do not just make prayer to do it.) The sociolinguistic expectations were that Miriam’s questions and communicative practices would contribute to a dialogic unfolding of the illness experience and ultimately to the emergence of a polyphonic retrospective diagnosis on which divine agency would take remedial action. Among K’iche’ peoples of Nima’ it may be said that if a healer knows how to facilitate healing she or he does not “get in the way” by asking too many questions or talking too...