Entangled Discourses

South-North Orders of Visibility

Caroline Kerfoot, Kenneth Hyltenstam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138192263
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317275725
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book uniquely explores the shifting structures of power and unexpected points of intersection – entanglements – at the nexus of North and South as a lens through which to examine the impact of global and local circuits of people, practices and ideas on linguistic, cultural and knowledge systems. The volume considers the entanglement of North and South on multiple levels in the contemporary and continuing effects of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, in the form of silenced or marginalized populations, such as refugees, immigrants, and other minoritised groups, and in the different orders of visibility that make some types of practices and knowledge more legitimate and therefore more visible. It uses a range of methodological and analytical frames to shed light on less visible histories, practices, identities, repertoires, and literacies, and offer new understandings for research and for language, health care, education, and other policies and practices.

The book brings together an exciting mix of voices of both established and new scholars in multilingualism and diversity from a range of social, political, and historical contexts and provides coverage of areas previously underrepresented in current research on multilingualism, globalization, and mobility, including Brazil, South Africa, Australia, East Timor, Wallis and Mayotte, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. This volume is key reading for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in multilingualism, globalisation, sociolinguistics, mobility and development studies, applied linguistics, and language and education policy.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Southern Perspectives

1 On the Margins of the Republic

Medical Encounters in a Postcolonial Setting and the Construction of Sociolinguistic Orders of Visibility

Valelia Muni Toke

Introduction

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‘French Overseas territories’ is a political and administrative category that encompasses a wide range of heterogeneous postcolonial cases—from places which have held penal colonies (French Guiana, New Caledonia)¹ to places that have been dominated by slavery (Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Réunion) and to ancient protectorates which have not been colonies of settlement (French Polynesia, Wallis-and-Futuna, Mayotte). These territories are now divided between départements on the one hand—an administrative status that matches the one of mainland France—and collectivités on the other hand, which have a hybrid administrative status: they keep local and traditional forms of governance alongside the French administration. This is the case of Wallis (South Pacific), on which this chapter focuses. The island² became been a French protectorate in 1842, and served as a military base for the American army during World War II. Its population is now ca. 8900 inhabitants. After a referendum in 1959, in which French citizenship was offered to inhabitants while preserving both the royalty and the influence of the Catholic Church—³ an option that received 100 percent of favourable votes from the population (Henningham 1992, 1995)—Wallis became a territoire d’Outre-mer (TOM) in 1961 and is now labelled as a collectivité d’Outre-mer (COM). In practice, an aristocratic regime that includes kings, ministers, and village chiefs⁴ decides land ownership issues (a conflictual question in postcolonial settings), while the French State keeps all executive power on all other domains (notably justice). Administration and public service such as schools and hospitals are run in French exclusively, although almost 25 percent of the population in Wallis declares itself non-French speaking according to the 2011 census. The vast majority of Wallisian children speak a Polynesian language, Faka’uvea,⁵ at home and start learning French when they go to school, from the age of three (Muni Toke 2012). The island thus stands as a case of State’s monolingual management that relies on the French Constitution, of which article number 2 says: ‘The language of the Republic is French’.

This chapter postulates that the contemporary political situation of the French Overseas territories provides a unique observatory to the sociolinguistic inquiry that concerns the politics of multilingualism and diversity in a globalizing world. Language and citizenship issues are often addressed from the perspective of migration (Moyer and Rojo 2007), which is definitely a valid one when it comes to French Overseas territories as well, especially because some of them receive significant incoming migration fluxes (French Guiana and Mayotte, for instance). But the particular question that these southern territories raise is the one of autochthony and indigeneity in a postcolonial era (Gausset, Kenrick, and Gibb 2011). Being politically dependent on a European metropole, yet displaying socio-economic characteristics of the so-called Southern countries, French Overseas territories allow the investigation of the fact that ‘there is much South in the North, much North in the South’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 127). In this sense, they stand on the margins of the Republic, geographically, politically, and socially: in all of them, indicators are alarming when compared to mainland France. Infant mortality is much higher than in metropolitan France (Cour des Comptes 2014),⁶ cost of living is significantly higher although unemployment is a major issue, which leads to social protests and feelings of despair (Gordien 2014), and school dropout is also worrisome (Doligé 2009). The ethnographic work that I present here takes health care settings in Wallis as privileged sites for observation and analysis of multilingual practices within the public service.

As Wallis has never been a colony of settlement, almost the totality of the population was born and raised on the island, or on the island of Futuna that is 250 kms away, or within Wallisian and Futunian families who migrated to metropolitan France or to New Caledonia (another French territory which is only a three-hours flight away). A minority of French expats lives on the island as well, mostly in order to run the administration and public service in general. In the 2011 census, approximately 90 percent of the population declared that Wallisian is the language that they use primarily at home. In this sense, it is irrelevant here to talk about minority (in the quantitative sense) languages or migrant languages (or even of urban settings, as these islands are small and entirely rural) as in many contexts where contemporary multilingualism is studied. What we deal with is rather a case of political minoritization of autochthonous languages through State’s actions—notably through the provision of public service (education, health care) in French only. The objective of this chapter is precisely to shed light on the way metropolitan State governance in postcolonial settings and institutional monolingualism creates locally an interpretative lens through which social positionalities get assessed within local economies of communication (Bourdieu 1977a; Bourdieu and Bensa 1985; Stroud 2007). I here understand economies of communication as situated and embodied interactions, discourses, and metapragmatics—they are sites that produce, reproduce, and impact socially significant discourses and practices; sites where indexicalities attached to social positionalities get reshuffled and renegotiated. This renegotiation praxis is not confined to the here and now of linguistic events but can rather be understood as organized in a scalar way (Blommaert 2007a; Collins and Slembrouck 2007; Herod and Wright 2002), articulating the level of individual interaction to the postcoloniality of the political regime in place. In the case of Wallis, the fact that care is provided by a hospital run by the French State (there is no private medical practice on the island) sets a particular frame for communication: health care is provided in a top-down movement, from the French State (all doctors are from metropolitan France) to the autochthonous, sometimes non-French speaking population, and competes directly with the local, traditional non-biomedical approaches to care.⁷ One thus needs to understand what is at stake in medical encounters in these particular settings, the hypothesis being that the State hospitals achieve a social task that goes beyond health care provision, as this task is embedded within politicized issues of racialization, legitimacy of (bio-)medical knowledge, and colonial history.

This chapter relies on fieldwork that I have undertaken since 2010 in Wallis,⁸ living mostly among families—and mostly with my own relatives, as my father is Wallisian and migrated as an adult to metropolitan France where I was born and raised. When in the field, I am therefore ethnically perceived by my interlocutors in various ways. I am a metropolitan researcher as I work for a French public research institute, but people who define themselves as Wallisians on the island alternatively refer to me as a ‘métisse’ (‘mixed-race’) and as a Wallisian, depending on how these categorizations and terms appear relevant in a particular conversational context. When categorized only from a phenotypical perspective, I am often seen as ‘White’ as well.⁹ My position in the field is therefore privileged, as I am granted access to many local private settings and conversations, and comforted into some sense of legitimacy regarding my presence on the island—but it is also sometimes uncomfortable in case of conflicts between local inhabitants and metropolitan State representatives, for instance, as both parts would claim my loyalty and expect me to understand and support them. In the data that follows, one should keep in mind that most of the patients see me as a Pacific Islander whom they explicitly want to help in her work by sharing their experience,¹⁰ when doctors would take various stances towards me, alternatively speaking to the metropolitan researcher (seeking closeness in the exchange) and to the Wallisian woman (usually praising quite artificially in my view, seemingly to please me, the ‘local culture’).

In what follows, after pointing out how the construction of ‘orders of visibility’ is related to the process of ‘seeing like a state’ (section 2), I take the case of the voices of patients who are perceived as indigenous in public health care settings in Wallis (section 3). They seem to remain largely inaudible, possibly because these patients are not expected to speak in the first place: they are often viewed by the French doctors as preferring to communicate through the gravity of silence—which would be a Polynesian cultural practice—or, in other cases, as being untrustworthy anyway. In a context where the French State representatives work along with the local aristocratic regime, I argue that this ethnicization of the bodies and voices might mirror the somehow ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Entanglement and Orders of Visibility
• Part I Southern Perspectives
• Part II South-North Entanglements
• Part III Northern Perspectives
• Part IV North-South Dynamics in Research and Knowledge Production
• A Postscript on the Postracial
• Contributors
• Appendix A: Transcription Key
• Index