English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives

Maria Grazia Guido

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781137583000
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Psicolinguistica

This book examines how trauma is experienced and narrated differently across languages and cultures, drawing on rich ethnographic case studies and a novel cognitive-linguistic approach to analyse the variations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) used in the narratives of West-African migrants and refugees in the course of intercultural encounters with Italian experts from domain-specific fields of discourse (including legal, medical, religious and cultural professionals). It examines the ways in which such experts interpret the migrants' trauma narratives by applying discourse conventions from within their communities of practice, as well as their own native linguacultural norms. It argues persuasively for the development of a 'hybrid ELF mode' of intercultural communication to be used by experts in charge of unequal encounters in specialized migration contexts that can accommodate different culture-bound categorizations of trauma. This timely and important work will appeal in particular to students and scholars of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, intercultural communication, pragmalinguistics, migration studies and healthcare communication.

© The Author(s) 2018

Maria Grazia GuidoEnglish as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narrativeshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Setting the Scene

Maria Grazia Guido¹

(1)

University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

Maria Grazia Guido

Keywords

Migrants’ trauma narrativesUnequal encountersTranscultural psychiatry

End Abstract

Is trauma a universal experience affecting exposed people in the same ways across cultures? And is its expression universally shared across languages? This book intends to answer these two crucial questions by challenging the consolidated assumption in the Western discourse of psychiatry that post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) can be reduced to universal categories of symptoms to be treated by applying universally accepted procedures, leading to therapeutic solutions that are valid throughout the world. Contrary to this view, this book intends to introduce a view of trauma that is differently experienced and expressed across different cultures and languages. The book, indeed, crucially addresses the issue of traumatic experiences that migrants and refugees from non-Western (in this case, African) countries need to narrate in the unfamiliar Western (Italian) environments in order to have access to specialized assistance, socio-political rights, and, ultimately, asylum.¹ Such experiences are, by their very nature, ‘displaced’ as migrants narrate them in the unfamiliar environments of the host country by means of their own respective variations of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Also, such variations are ‘displaced’ and ‘transidiomatic’ (Silverstein 1998) because they are employed in domain-specific situations of intercultural communication outside the original contexts of their use.²

Furthermore, this book will argue that so far, the specialized discourse conventions of the emerging discipline of Transcultural Psychiatry (cf. Kleinman 1977, 1981, 1988, 1995)—dealing with the effects of cultural diversity on PTSD—though recognizing the possibility of different ways of experiencing trauma in different cultures, has mostly accounted for such differences by trying to fit them into the categories established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and regularly published in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—5th Edition (last issue: APA 2013). Yet, such categories have been devised to reflect the impact of trauma on Western people (in particular, the US veterans of the Vietnam War, and more recently, of Middle Eastern conflicts), and to confirm the scientific terminology for single-trauma effects, but they are almost inadequate for the description of multiple effects of traumatic experiences on non-Western populations (Peltzer 1998)—effects that often include not simply the physical and psychological dimensions of the individual experience, but also the political and even supernatural levels of collective experience (cf. Devereux 1980; Nordstrom 1997; Swartz 1998; Nader et al. 1999).

This book, therefore, intends to introduce a novel approach to the cognitive-linguistic analysis of:

1. (a)
   the ways in which the traumatic experiences that West African migrants (i.e. the case-study subjects) underwent, principally in situations of war in their home countries—but that are often strengthened by new traumatic situations they have to cope with in the host country—are accounted for in the migrants’ narratives through the use of their respective ELF variations in the course of specialized encounters with Italian experts in various domain-specific fields of discourse (from legal to medical domains, to religious and cultural-recreational ones).
2. (b)
   the ways in which the Italian experts come to interpret the migrants’ trauma narratives by applying the domain-specific discourse conventions shared with their communities of practice, as well as the experts’ native linguacultural norms of usage transferred into their own ELF variations used during their interactions with migrants and refugees.³

The ethnographic case studies presented in the book enquire into, on the one hand, the two contact groups’ divergent native linguacultural features transferred into ELF and, on the other, the non-Western migrants’ ELF trauma narratives, examined in comparison with Western register conventions that regard the discourse of PTSD and which are identified in the experts’ ELF variations used in interactions. Such register conventions refer not simply to the domain of psychiatric discourse, but also to other specialized-discourse domains which, in such migration contexts, have to account for the effects of past traumatic experiences reflected in the structure of the migrants’ narratives. In this sense, post-traumatic effects can contribute even more to the perception on the part of the experts that the migrants’ reports diverge from the expected Western norms of interaction, thus causing miscommunication.

It will be demonstrated that the PTSD categories established by the APA, as well as the Western psychiatry-discourse conventions, do not account for the West African migrants’ trauma narratives that Western experts usually perceive as formally deviating and pragmatically inappropriate (cf. Mattingly 1998). These biased perceptions, indeed, are here assumed to be at the source of misunderstandings that—in such cases of unequal encounters where the status gap between the displaced migrants and the experts in charge of the interactions may be wide—can raise ethical issues regarding the possible lack of recognition of the migrants’ socio-political rights. It will be contended that such a misapprehension occurs not only because, in the migrants’ narratives, coherence and cohesion reflect the different typological features of their L1 transferred into the ELF that they use, but also because the migrants’ different cultures and values induce them to associate traumatic experiences principally to their efforts to solve socio-political and community issues, rather than to the achievement of individual well-being—the latter objective being, instead, at the core of Western psychiatry.

In this book, differences between Western specialized and non-Western (African) native trauma reports through ELF will be explored at the following levels of ‘deviation’:

1. 1.
   different culture-bound uses of epistemic and deontic modality (Chap. 3)
2. 2.
   two different L1 typologies in contact through ELF—that is transitivity versus ergativity (Chap. 4)
3. 3.
   two different culture-bound textual structures in conflict—that is specialized discourses with their generic conventions versus ethnopoetic patterns of native trauma narratives, representing two different culture-bound representations of trauma in the groups in contact of Western (Italian) experts and non-Western (African) migrants (Chap. 5)
4. 4.
   specialized lexis derived from the conventional discourse of psychiatry versus non-Western native idioms of distress transferred into the migrants’ own ELF variations (Chap. 6)
5. 5.
   different pragmalinguistic schemata in conflict in the field of legal advice to migrants and asylum seekers (Chap. 7)
6. 6.
   different sociopragmatic schemata in conflict in medical, religious, and cultural/recreational discourse domains (Chap. 8)

The recognition of such divergences in migrants’ trauma narratives is assumed to have an impact on Western experts in transcultural psychiatry, but also in a multiplicity of specialized contexts where migrants’ stressful and traumatizing experiences inform their ELF narratives in intercultural communication. This is meant to make Western experts in authority aware, on the one hand, of the need for reaching a mutual accommodation of the participants’ ELF variations in contact so as to protect the migrants’ identities in such unequal encounters, and on the other, of the possible alternative textualizations through ELF of the migrants’ different ways of conceptualizing, and then, of expressing trauma experiences. The ultimate aim, therefore, is the development of new hybrid ELF registers to be used in immigration procedures and in specialized encounters in immigration contexts in order to help participants overcome difficulties in accessing and accepting an alien discourse that, instead, should be negotiated in the course of the interaction. Furthermore, such a hybridization process would crucially open the discourse of transcultural psychiatry up to a novel accommodation of different c...