tommasosbriccoli@gmail.com

University of Siena, Italy

stefano.jacoviello@gmail.com

Abstract

This contribution draws on the interdisciplinary work carried out by an anthropologist (Tommaso Sbriccoli) and a semiotician (Stefano Jacoviello) on a contemporary category of subalterns in our societies: the migrants. Our presentation will follow a group of them, asylum seekers, through the procedure of claiming their status as refugees in Italy. In what follows, we will focus on voice both as a discursive category and as a textual clue and we will try to show how voice can be used as an analytical indicator of the efficacy of someone’s action. Searching for voice within the texture of discourse, we will thus construct a model to describe the actions, both enacted and suffered, by asylum seekers. As a result, we will be able to reflect on the relation between agency and subalternity and to the one, which runs in parallel, between subject, subjectivity and identity.

In this way, we hope that our work at the crossing of anthropology and semiotics will provide a set of analytical tools and a particular perspective to contribute to the debate on the relationship and possible collaborations between the two disciplines and on the meaning of action.

1. Introduction

Few years ago, in 2009, we found ourselves almost accidently talking in a pub about some interesting field materials Tommaso Sbriccoli had collected on asylum seekers from Bangladesh and Pakistan who were hosted in an emergency welcome centre in the south of Tuscany. This material comprised life stories, a detailed ethnography of the life in the camp, personal interviews to some of the asylum seekers, and various documents related to the procedure for claiming asylum, like transcripts of the asylum seekers’ interviews with the Territorial Commission, the institution responsible for granting asylum in the first stage of the procedure; a lawyer’s dossier for one of the Bangladeshi asylum seekers; the final decision by the Court of Appeal of Florence on his case. While discussing about this case, we realized that the different analytical tools and perspectives through which our two disciplines would have studied these materials could have been fruitfully paired in order to build the object of enquiry more consistently and reach a better understanding of it. We thus engaged in a collaboration that is still going on and from which two papers have come out so far (Sbriccoli & Jacoviello 2009, 2012). We think it is important to state here that in our approach the category of discourse can be considered as terrain of encounter for the two disciplinary analytical perspectives. This is so because, in Foucauldian terms (Foucault 1972b), discourse is the framework within which identities are established. Consequently, the process of identity constitution can be described by analysing the traces it leaves on the discursive level of texts (Greimas 1982; Greimas & Courtés 1979).

In what follows, we will focus on one specific issue which has been central in our analysis, that is, voice. In this way, we hope to show how the dialogue and active interdisciplinarity between semiotics and anthropology can bear interesting and valuable fruits, which would be otherwise unlikely obtained if each discipline worked independently on the same object.

2. Voice and subjectivities

Before we present our cases we deem necessary to make a distinction between two ways in which voice can be analytically understood and utilised.

The first refers to voice as speech, as an utterance which is ascribable to an empirical subject, or an individual. In this case, voice as speech works as a symptom and can be considered as a tangible document of an individual’s presence.

Differently, voice can be understood as a discursive effect that manifests subjectivity, in itself a discursive construction. Thus, voice is an emergence on the surface of discourse and refers to the subjectivities built within it. In this second meaning, the relation between voice and the individual is neither direct nor natural. On the contrary, it can be analytically reconstructed within discourse. Voice is conceived here both as trace and result of specific efficacious strategies.

These two meanings of voice can sometimes coincide, as in the case in which the individual manages to constitute and express her own subjectivity and act successfully within discourse through her own voice. Consequently, according to this double meaning, we see voice as pertaining both to the individual and to subjectivity (Benveniste 1966).

Though, voice is not always the expression of an individual, and subjectivities are always the discursive products of a series of combined sanctions depending on different epistemic instances. Furthermore, these epistemic instances reflect the positions of subjects and institutions competing for power in an often unbalanced way. By detecting voice and describing the operations it goes through within the legal procedures of two asylum claiming cases, we will try to show how subjectivity is produced and constituted within discourse, and the way it is related to individuality. Or, sometimes, the way this relation is denied.

3. On the border

The two cases we will discuss are those of S and C, two Hindu Bangladeshi men who arrived in Italy in 2008 and applied to be recognised as refugees on the basis of political and religious discrimination in their home country. We have presented and analysed their cases in two articles, respectively Sbriccoli & Jacoviello 2009 and Sbriccoli & Jacoviello 2012. We thus refer to these works for those readers who intend to get a complete idea of the cases.

S and C were both hosted at the Emergency Welcome Centre established in Follonica (South of Tuscany) through a financial agreement between Italian Government and a private-owned touristic camp[2]. In both applications, Tommaso Sbriccoli, because of his competence as an anthropologist of South Asia and of his knowledge of Hindi, helped the two men in preparing their interviews to the Territorial Commissions (TCs). TCs are chaired by an officer of prefecture and composed of a police officer, a representative of territorial institutions and a representative of UNHCR. Interviews of applicants should be carried out by all the members of the commission together, although often, in order to speed up the procedure, only one is present. Idiosyncrasies of individual officials are thus amplified. The risk of this happening increases if we consider that applicants almost never have the chance to hire a legal representative to support them in this context[3].

In his work as consultant to the asylum seekers, the anthropologist has collected their life stories. Engaged in a complex negotiation of their meaning, he has eventually translated their speech into a voice to be spoken before an audience, the Commission, provided with cultural categories different from the applicants’ ones. This process of translation inevitably implies also the reconstruction of the applicants’ subjectivities within the new discursive categories so as to faithfully portray their individuality. These portraits can be seen as the applicants’ introduction to the new country.

But, while their stories were quite similar[4], C easily obtained the status of refugee, while S’s claim was rejected and he had to appeal to a Civil Court. Why such a different outcome for two very similar applications? An analysis of the two interview transcripts will allow to understand this differential outcome and to develop our argument.

3.1. A subject’s voice

In the average, the transcripts of the Rome Territorial Commissions interviews we have had the chance to analyse are presented as a faithful translation of the applicants’ words. The presence of an interpreter, certified at the end of the document by a signature, guarantees the accuracy and veracity of its content. The texts show applicants’ translated words, in a regular font, interrupted here and there by questions written in italics. At first sight, the transcripts of C’s and S’s interviews might appear similar. Though, the successful one is much shorter, and the questions interspersed in between applicant’s narrative much less numerous. Here it will suffice to analyse the first few lines on C’s interview transcripts to make our point.

At the beginning of the interview the applicant points out that he finds it difficult to carry out the interview with a Muslim interpreter. He is told that the interpreter is a professional and that religion does not affect the way he performs his job. The applicant accepts to do the interview[5].

By asking the Commission for a different translator, C acknowledges and attributes to the one present a quality, his Muslim-ness, identified as different from that shared by both him and the interviewer. In this way, C neutralises his own specificity[6] as Hindu and implicitly defines himself as non-Muslim, an attribute shared with the interviewer. He thus draws a new border between the participants in this small social drama. According to Lotman’s perspective (2009, 2005), C locates himself at the centre of the semiosphere and determines his position as a-specific (see Lotman 1985 and 1994). This is the result of a translation of his own identity that enables him to cross the former border and find a new position in the new system. In many episodes of his journey to Italy and in the following events of his life that we recorded, C demonstrates his ability in managing a number of correlated systems of pertinence. Those planes of pertinence have a point in common: where their borders intersect. This is the place where C locates himself, as he can translate his diverse systematic determinations from one plane to the other and deal with a multidimensional identity.

Therefore, in this case, C places the translator outside the new system he organises: one in which he occupies the centre and the interviewer is welcomed. In modelling this new system, C affirms an axis defining an inside and outside. He does so by establishing an analogy between the oppositions Hindus–Muslims and Christians–Muslims and by taking advantage of the latter’s axiological values. In this way, he identifies the translator as the enemy. At the same time, C situates the interpreter-cum-enemy within their common place of origin, Bangladesh: that is, the country which has been the setting for his persecution because of his faith. Inside the interview room, the interpreter has thus become the real and present evidence (an exemplum) of the faraway situation C is about to narrate. Though the official re-establishes the guarantee of the Italian legal system – stating as he does that the religion of the interpreter is, in the venue of the hearing, not pertinent – the support for the effectiveness of C’s story nevertheless stands, as does its tangibility as evidence. The venue of the interview thus turns into the scene of a trial where C’s role changes from that of a witness to his own identity to that of a witness to someone else’s guilt. Through this strategy, he has been able to create a new subjectivity and a new position for himself on the discursive plane, reconfiguring all the relations within the trial. C has projected another epistemic stance which the officer can share with him. In this way, the officer is invited to assess, together with C, the guilt of Muslims understood as the Others.

Thanks to this trick, the interviewer can no longer neutralise C’s subjectivity and is forced instead to hear his voice: everything he says could, in fact, be distorted by the interpreter. C compels the Commission to listen to his speech. His story is no longer a set of clues to be verified, but is rather a narrative to be heard in its own terms.

This point clearly emerges if we compare C’s interview with transcripts of other applicants’ hearings, where usually asylum seekers’ voices appear as fragments emerging upon the surface of a text organised according to the norms and discursive style of the Commission’s officials. With C, however, voice occurs as authoritative answers that distinctly evince the subjectivity of the subject producing it.

Voice can be understood here at the same time as a means, an effect and a trace. A means to produce one’s own subjectivity. An emergence on the discursive plane attesting to an effective strategic action. A trace of the presence of an individual.

3.2. Voice as an object.

When we move from this transcript to the one of S’s interview, we can detect many differences. S’s testimony, although told in the first person, appears quite impersonal and focuses almost exclusively on issues related to his political and party affiliation. At one point, to the question on “reasons for leaving the country”, S answers:

for the above mentioned reasons, political problems – I have been attacked many times, even in my place of cult I’ve been threatened and money has been extorted from me [emphasis ours][7].

This answer nullifies the strategy of claiming asylum on the grounds of persecution for religious reasons. After the long discussions we had with S on the importance of focusing on the religious persecution he had suffered, this answer compromised his entire case. Nonetheless, the second part of the answer seems to show the attempt made by S in shifting the discussion towards a part of his narrative which had until then been completely disregarded. The reported answer, indeed, clearly mixes two opposite registers: the legal jargon interwoven with traces of S’s direct speech. Throughout the entire interview transcription, the applicant’s voice is often concealed by the Commission’s, which stands out in bureaucratic formulae difficult to ascribe to an applicant’s discursive style. In the analysis of the Commission’s interrogation we carried out elsewhere, we have detected a semiologic attitude on the side of the interviewer. This attitude works by falsifying a series of individual clues and neutralising applicants’ subjectivity. Its aim, in fact, is to demonstrate that the identity of the subject built within discourse does not belong to the narrating individual. Semiologic attitude is opposed to what we have defined as semiotic attitude, with which we will deal later in the article.

In this particular instance, the neutralization of the asylum seeker’s subjectivity is suddenly interrupted by an instance of heteroglossia, which reveals two heterophonic voices (Arnold 1998). This linguistic fracture in the text points to the presence of the speech of a subaltern individual, who tries to establish his subjectivity within discourse. Consequently, heteroglossia, as any other stylistic discontinuity, is a clue, or a window, that allows to open the text toward a double possible movement. On one side, it permits to start a process of reconstruction of this individual’s life, of his historical reality, and of his memory. This is, for instance, the way in which Carlo Ginzburg has utilized it in his work on Italian witchcraft (Ginzburg 1966, 1976, 1989)[8]. On the other side, it could trigger a work of analysis of the subject’s consciousness and his positioning in relation to the events narrated in the very transcript. In this case, principally, about the way he strives not to confirm the clear-cut division between politics and religion in his own story made by the interviewer. This perspective has been fruitfully developed by the School of Subaltern Studies in history and anthropology (see Guha 1982, 1983a, 1983b and Spivak 1988).

In the case just presented, applicant’s voice is assimilated by a ventriloquist interviewer and the fragmented speech highlighted by heteroglossia shows the denied identity between voice and individuality.

After the rejection, S contacted a lawyer to appeal the Commission’s decision in the Florence Civil Court. The lawyer’s file on S’s case is twenty pages long and, enacting a semiotic attitude, builds a complex narrative by rearticulating the facts that emerged in the Commission’s interview. The syntactic order, which arranges the evidence by causality, gives a new form to S’s life story and establishes the applicant’s subjectivity as objectified within the discourse. This objectifying process is achieved by the means of a complex system of narrative devices dealing with the constitution of S as a narrative subject. If compared to the Commission’s interview, where the attempt was to produce casuality and fragment applicant’s narrative, the lawyer’s file sets all the events on spatial and temporal dimensions, which allows him to express the aspects of S’s experiences. His movements configure a topography so that distances between visited places in Bangladesh become intelligible and come to form a topology (Greimas 1983): spatial articulation is related both to events and to the social relations of S in order to make explicit the reasons for his movements. In the lawyer’s narrative, S is constituted as an actor provided with a positive modal competence (being-able-not-to-do and knowing-how-not-to-do [see Greimas 1983]) that at the discursive level can be understood according to the thematic role and figurative traits related with |independence|. The lawyer acts in part as a humanist historian, producing S as an emblematic case, and makes also use of classical models, comparing for instance S’s travels to an Odyssey. Thus, the action of mise en discours ascribes the dimension of event to the narrated facts, setting the story as the place of convergence on which multiple points of view, experiences and related temporalities meet and cross (Foucault 2001; Jacoviello 2012).

During the last hearing, while S was telling his story to the judge, the lawyer pointed out the trembling hand of the applicant, treating it as a symptom of the fear still provoked by remembering the traumatic events which occurred.

With this key move, the discursive subjectivity which has been objectified in the lawyer’s file is re-attributed to the speaking subject, the one who shivers. Consequently, his speech expresses the subjectivity that has been constructed within discourse and manifested through voice (as effect). Therefore, the use of tremor as a symptom provides the verification of the coincidence between subjectivity and the individual: his voice is finally allowed to be listened to. This circularity, though, makes speech and voice as discursive effect overlap. In the very moment in which the subaltern is heard, thus, what he says cannot but correspond to the subjectivity already set for him[9].

In the judge’s final decision the historical and political background acquires a predominant position. According to the judge’s evaluation, the episodes to which S was subject are credible because Bangladesh is notorious for events such as these happening to Hindu citizens. The adequacy of S’s story to such a context has made possible the legal generalization that transformed S’s story into a prototypical case, which deserves international protection.

The applicant’s case and the knowledge of the objective evidence[10] concur therefore in producing a historical framework in which S’s story itself is finally projected. The historical context, in which the case of S is inserted, is reconstructed so as to be rendered pertinent to the features of the case itself. Through this circularity, legal decisions not only can be seen as “creators of fact” but also become creators of history. Moreover, within this epistemic process, S’s subjectivity assumes a historical dimension at the same time as it is reified in a category. The final verdict, ascribing what pertains to S’s individuality to the generality of a category, has overlapped, once and for all, the ‘voice of the law’ to that of the applicant. The judge’s decision is indeed the only written text analysed where S’s voice is presented in the form of direct speech quoted between quotation marks, in a process we would define of appropriation. By this device, the emerging of the voice produces the effect of a witness testifying the truth of the judge’s reconstruction.

4. Discursive effects and semiotic acts

By referring to our previous work on asylum seeking procedure in Italy, we have initially identified a double meaning of voice. On one side, voice as speech, and as such as directly related to an individual. On the other, voice as a discursive effect. Following from this assumption, we have analytically investigated the relation between voice and subjectivity on one side, and the one between subjectivity and the individual on the other side.

Within this kind of legal procedures, voice is almost never expression of an individuality. Voice and speech coincide only when the subject is able to directly intervene in the discursive production of the forms of his subjectivity, as in the case of C. Here, though, his very subalternity is put into question.

In the case of S, instead, subjectivity has been the object of many operations, thus producing different manifestations of voice. The one assimilated in the interrogation by the Commission and appeared as speech through heteroglossia. The one subsumed by the lawyer and then reattributed to the individual during the court hearing. Finally, the one appropriated by the judge in the decision.

Acting through voice can be understood not simply as a speech act – relating to its psychological effectiveness: it has to be considered as a semiotic act. As such, it influences the discursive forms of a society and gives shape to the way one can know the world and structure culture. Though, producing oneself autonomously within discourse is not the same as producing an autonomous subjectivity for oneself. As we have tried to demonstrate by comparing two apparently similar but structurally very different cases, it is only when a subject manages to autonomously produce at the discursive level a subjectivity endowed with a modal charge, a thematic role and a complex figurative role, that this very subjectivity manifests itself through voice and finds its way to be attributed to the subject’s individuality. In this case, rather than being forced to adhere to a subjectivity pre-set within the discursive and socio-legal categories of a society, as in the case of S, a subject acts in an efficacious way, as C did, so as to produce for himself a subjectivity that he can “handle”, being the result of translation processes he enacted in the first place. In fact, as our analysis has shown, in legal contexts as the one presented, we are dealing with forms of production of the Other based on translation processes. But, every translation entails also a part of oblivion.

In this paper, in adopting a discursive approach, we have combined our different competences in order to constantly verify the dialogue established between the documents analysed and the ethnography carried out. Throughout the entire analytical process we have therefore tackled the object of enquiry by continuously trying to fuse together the methodological and theoretical backgrounds of our respective disciplines, rather than by juxtaposing them. We hope the results of such work have demonstrated how productive this way of proceeding can be for both the disciplines and for a better understanding of the objects selected for enquiry.

Note [1]: A first version of this paper has been presented in March 2014 by the authors at the Queen Mary University of London at the workshop “How Historians Think”. We would like to thank Kim Wagner, convener of the workshop, and Carlo Ginzburg, Miri Rubin and John Arnold for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Tatsuma Padoan and Franciscu Sedda, conveners of the panel “The Sense of Action” at the AISS Conference 2014, and the other participants to the panel, for their useful comments on our work.

In order to comply with the requirements of Italian academia, which for the evaluation of co-authored works establish that authors have to make explicit what their specific contribution to an essay/book is, we have here to unnaturally divide what is the fruit of a real work of interdisciplinarity and co-writing. Therefore, abandoning ourselves to this spirit of calculations, and attributing each of us to himself half of the paper, we state that Tommaso Sbriccoli has written the first two sections, while Stefano Jacoviello has written the last two.

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