Transcribing Silence

Culture, Relationships, and Communication

Kristine L Muñoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315416557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Kristine Muñoz's volume of short narrative works-- autoethnographies and fictional stories—explore many dimensions of silence, a crucial but often overlooked communication phenomenon, one that drives much of everyday talk and relationships. Framed by an introductory essay that synthesizes research on silence and the unsaid, guides for reflection and expansion after each narrative, and a conclusion that ponders ethnographic writing, this volume is an essential work for those who study and teach interpersonal communication.

Part I

Autoethnographic narratives

Transcribing the unsaid

It is not true that the person who is silent says nothing.

Apache proverb

Robert Hopper wore a navy beret stepping off the plane. We smiled across the lobby, and then he looked down, self-conscious, maybe expecting shock at his appearance. I hoped there was no sign of that, having seen his shiny bald head at a conference a few months earlier. He was tall and lanky and had thinning hair the whole time I knew him, so being completely bald and even thinner wasn’t such an abrupt change as it might have been. The chemo erased even his eyebrows, though, a change I didn’t get used to.

He usually did comfortable, lingering hugs, but this one was almost perfunctory. I didn’t ask him “How ya doin’?”—a conventional greeting so mandatory that it goes by unnoticed most of the time. Then you notice it didn’t happen, and know that not asking means, somehow, please don’t tell me how you’re doing.

We went straight from the airport to my undergraduate class at the University of Iowa for his first guest lecture, and shifted to talk about that task right away.

“So this is intercultural communication, and it’s what, juniors and seniors?”

“Yep. We’ve covered the usual stuff, how cultural premises shape ideas of what’s real in the world, lenses that we use to evaluate what’s appropriate, bases for relationships, all of this hearable in communication practices, then shifted to specific communication practices—”

“Personal address.” We grinned at each other; personal address was the starting place for much of my scholarly work. What it means about the person, and the relationship, when a teacher insists that his undergraduates call him by his first name, Robert, instead of Dr. Hopper, in a place like University of Texas where faculty are always addressed as Doctor. What it means about the person when, having been Bob all his adult life, at age 36 wants to go back to his childhood name of Robert. I never got used to calling or referring to him as Robert—Bob was hard enough, when I was 19—so after that he was always Hopper to me. Awkward enough that mostly I avoided all terms of address.

“And the commands and requests, and now of course we’re on conversational practices, and that’s where you come in.”

“Got it. I have a video clip to start us off…”

His voice was still so him, something the chemo and the surgery hadn’t touched. I listened to the sounds more than the words, wanting to engrave every tone inside me where I could find and replay it whenever I needed him. The cornfields went by outside the window, still bare and brown in early April, and I wrapped his physical presence, less than an arm’s length away, closely around me.

He left the beret on when we got to class; I was ashamed to be relieved.

I had been planning how to introduce him to the undergraduate class for weeks, thinking about it constantly as I swam or drove or chopped vegetables; it was a moment I had dreamed of for literally years. The students were squirmy about the papers they were writing, due the next week. The assignment was to tape record some naturally-occurring conversation, then transcribe a few minutes of it and make a claim about culture based on the transcript. Their questions about transcription tumbled on and on:

“What if I’ve concentrated mostly just on the first five lines or so and then skipped down past this other part that’s kind of irrelevant and talked about the last maybe ten lines?”

“Put ‘10 lines omitted’ or however many it was in brackets in between the parts that you did use.”

“On the handout there’s this category for downward intonation, but I don’t see any symbol there; it looks like an empty box.”

“Yeah, that didn’t show up so well, it’s supposed to be a period.”

“So all punctuation is intonation, it isn’t at the ends of sentences the way it would usually be?”

“Right.”

“What are these numbers in parentheses again?”

“Pause length, measured by counting with the rhythm of the conversation, one thousand ONE, one thousand TWO …” I hoped they couldn’t hear my patience thinning in my voice; I was so eager to get to the introduction.

“I’m confused about these things to show when two people talk at the same time—”

“Brackets.”

“Right, where do they go?”

“In between the lines, or you can put them in the middle of the line wherever it happens—what’s up?” The students were smiling up past me. I turned around and Hopper was writing on the board, showing them where the brackets went. I finally paused to notice the moment: me impatient to say in words how important Hopper was to me and to the field of communication, when their serious questions about the assignment showed him that I was, after all, teaching them to pay careful attention to ordinary conversation. Their questions showed them struggling to get transcribing right, engaged with how hard it was to do that instead of dismissing the whole effort as silly: “What does it matter if someone is saying heeheehee or Hahaheeha, or how long the pause is between this utterance and that one?” Hopper was hearing in their questions his own meticulous attention to tiny details of everyday talk, hearing his passion for those details coming from students at another institution far from the one that he taught at for 27 years. I met him in 1978, his seventh year at UT.

Robert Hopper taught me to transcribe.

Conversation analysis is a discipline viewed as arcane even by many academics who make their living studying things no one else pays much attention to. Its data are often the most mundane conversations imaginable: Family dinner table conversation, dominated by talk about table manners and homework, is a huge favorite. The analysts who do it listen to audio tapes, and watch video recordings, in tiny moment-by-moment increments. They focus hours of attention, sometimes spread over weeks or months, on exchanges that took only a few seconds or a minute in real time, that almost always went by completely unnoticed by the people involved. Transcribing the words is the easy part, sometimes almost incidental to everything that follows that first step: intonation, pauses, inbreaths, overlaps between one speaker and another. Instead of asking, “What does this mean?” conversation analysts begin with questions like “What are these people doing? How are they getting it done?” The questions stay away from why are they doing it, on the assumption that we can never know any of those matters. All we can know is what they did, and how, and what happened next, and next.

It isn’t easy to make such work sound like something you would get excited about, but everyone has experienced the power of just those tiny details of talk. We know on some level—and this is true of speakers of every known language—that silence, even micro — pause silence, is deeply meaningful. It isn’t easy to teach people to transcribe conversations, partly because the technical details are numerous and difficult to master. The quality of the recordings you generally work from isn’t what you hear on television, or even over the telephone; the symbols that show precisely on a printed page what happened in a spoken and visual world are complicated. Worse than that, when you get people to listen to what is said so closely (while keeping them away from ideas about what people are “feeling” or “thinking” or what they “meant to say”), they become uncomfortable and self-conscious about their own messy talk. Poring over a half-second pause for hours takes you inexorably into the biggest, most important things we ever communicate, with or without words. I became haunted by the many ways to interpret those pauses, and what they might be leaving unsaid: Did you hesitate to say you loved me because you thought it was irrelevant or perilous to say that? Because you forgot, because you knew it went without saying? Or because you never loved me?

At last the questions from my class petered out, and I launched into the introduction I had dreamed for years of giving:

“By now you folks know I love to tell stories. Twenty years ago this very semester I was a sophomore in college, and my boyfriend at the time, whose name was Jim Bob, offered to introduce me to Robert Hopper, a connection that (as you see) is still very much in place to this day. Jim Bob was out of the picture about a week later.” The students giggled. “Hopper is, for better or worse, the reason I went into university teaching, so you have him to either thank or blame for your experience in this class.”

“Twenty years is a long time to learn from someone. There was a group of faculty and graduate students back then who got together most Saturday mornings to play basketball on a half court in one guy’s back yard. I was the only female among these weekend athletes, and I noticed, after awhile, a pattern in the humor: Every single week, at least once, when we were dividing up teams, someone would say ”shirts and skins“ and someone else would chime in ”Kristine’s on the skins.“ The students wince, knowing this is not entirely funny, wiser than I was at their age.

“Funny thing is I don’t remember who was making these jokes, but I do remember very clearly who it wasn’t. Robert Hopper has trained us all to hear the subtleties of language use that construct and reinforce gender roles, and it’s very exciting to have him here to share some of that with us today.”

It seemed wholly inadequate. I sat down drenched in sweat, and heard nothing he said for the first 20 minutes. It dawned on me, as the class went on and the sweat dried, that Hopper knew I loved him, and that on some level I knew he thought I was plenty smart. Planning the introduction so meticulously made me feel guilty to have gotten so fixated on explicitness—that nothing counts if it’s between the lines, that you can’t believe in people picking up on things without them being said. Words are, after all, just a small part of what people say when they talk to, and about, each other. There is meaning in silence, and in knowing someone for 20 years. It is nice to have occasions where you can put things into words, and it is a shame if someone drifts around or out of your life with no way of knowing that they were special to you, but you have to give people some credit for being able to pick that up some way other than in words.

Was it in learning to transcribe that I started to insist on saying things out loud?

Hopper taught me to be a feminist.

I was no good at basketball, or at any sport for that matter, but I was deeply interested in being part of that Saturday morning social scene. Graduate school was so different that way: faculty and students went out for beers, got together and played guitars and sang, played basketball. Hopper assured me it didn’t matter that I wasn’t any good, most of the others weren’t either (which I saw for myself when I went to play). I’d never been the only woman in a group before, and I watched and listened intently to figure out how to behave. I knew some of the others weren’t happy to have me there, and I finally asked Hopper if it was really OK.

“You do not need to ask permission,” he said evenly, and then his eyes crinkled a little. “It’s my basketball.” He and Rod Hart, the faculty member whose backyard had the half court, showed me a one-handed push shot, some zone defense, an eye fake. I learned how to throw elbows, how to get in the way when someone broke for the basket, how to shove with my hip and shoulder. I learned that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction Silence and the unsaid
• Part I Autoethnographic narratives
• Part II Fictional narratives
• Conclusion Breaking the silence: Teaching and learning ethnographic writing
• Appendix A very short list of favorite books on ethnographic writing
• Notes
• References
• Index