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, âdisplacedâ 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 âdisplacedâ and âtransidiomaticâ (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)âdealing with the effects of cultural diversity on PTSDâthough 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 Disordersâ5th 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)âeffects 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:
- (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 countriesâbut that are often strengthened by new traumatic situations they have to cope with in the host countryâare accounted for in the migrantsâ 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).
- (b)
the ways in which the Italian experts come to interpret the migrantsâ trauma narratives by applying the domain-specific discourse conventions shared with their communities of practice, as well as the expertsâ 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 groupsâ divergent native linguacultural features transferred into ELF and, on the other, the non-Western migrantsâ ELF trauma narratives, examined in comparison with Western register conventions that regard the discourse of PTSD and which are identified in the expertsâ
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 migrantsâ narratives. In this sense, post-traumatic effects can contribute even more to the perception on the part of the experts that the migrantsâ 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 migrantsâ 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 thatâin such cases of unequal encounters where the status gap between the displaced migrants and the experts in charge of the interactions may be wideâcan raise ethical issues regarding the possible lack of recognition of the migrantsâ socio-political rights. It will be contended that such a misapprehension occurs not only because, in the migrantsâ narratives, coherence and cohesion reflect the different typological features of their L1 transferred into the ELF that they use, but also because the migrantsâ 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-beingâthe 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 âdeviationâ:
- 1.
different culture-bound uses of epistemic and deontic modality (Chap. 3)
- 2.
two different L1 typologies in contact through ELFâthat is transitivity versus ergativity (Chap. 4)
- 3.
two different culture-bound textual structures in conflictâthat 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.
specialized lexis derived from the conventional discourse of psychiatry versus non-Western native idioms of distress transferred into the migrantsâ own ELF variations (Chap. 6)
- 5.
different pragmalinguistic schemata in conflict in the field of legal advice to migrants and asylum seekers (Chap. 7)
- 6.
different sociopragmatic schemata in conflict in medical, religious, and cultural/recreational discourse domains (Chap. 8)
The recognition of such divergences in migrantsâ trauma narratives is assumed to have an impact on Western experts in
transcultural psychiatry, but also in a multiplicity of specialized contexts where migrantsâ 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 participantsâ
ELF variations in contact so as to protect the migrantsâ identities in such unequal encounters, and on the other, of the possible alternative textualizations through ELF of the migrantsâ 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...