i

CULTURAL MEANINGS OF SILENCE

ii TALK ABOUT NON-TALK Discuss different cultural interpretations placed on silence in one or more culture/languages, drawing on the concepts and perspectives of this unit. Late 2003 found me in a remote community on the northernmost part of the coastline of Western Australia, Miwa country. In the square of a minute township I approached one of the several women there who had been staring at me from a distance. Curious, but unaware of particular protocols, I smilingly greeted her, introduced myself and ventured to ask the original names of local places around us. The woman looked shocked and confronted at this; she did not acknowledge me with eye contact although, as mentioned, she had been looking with some interest from across the square; nor did she speak to me at all. Blushing hotly, my fervent apology was blurted out before scramming. Feeling socially clumsy, even though I had tried to express myself as respectfully, politely and engagingly as possible, I felt then that the question, rather than my approach, must have been extremely rude. I hadn't theretofore had any trouble communicating with my local hosts, nor in informal social contexts in the city with diverse peoples from all over the continent - but it was here, when I had tried to approach someone in this community independent of my chaperones, that I felt I had really trodden on toes. In hindsight it becomes apparent that a stranger appearing in the centre of the community was a formally loaded occasion: that an introduction by my hosts explaining my presence and the intent behind my questions might have gone a long way towards manifesting the desired conversation. Such a direct approach and eye contact may well have been inappropriately confrontational; I never would have thought that despite this my questions may still have been in the process of being answered. Perhaps had I stated my curiosity, rather than asked a question, and sat in silence without the sense of expecting an answer I may well have received one, if only advising me who I should approach in the community about these matters. Most memorable is the experience of acute embarrassment, presumably shared. For my part this was because innocuous questions were met with utter silence and averted gaze. Both this kind of silence in the face of direct personal questioning and the effect of the embarrassment experienced in the exchange are central to the contexts of silence in this essay. While not a term per se, silence, in its active, eloquent, meaningful significance behaves somewhat like 'routine formulae' do; the ambiguous semantics of which Florian Coulmas outlines in 'Semantics of Routine Formulae' (2002). Like Coulmas' RFs, it is also rather difficult to explicate silences by way of compositional semantics: due to a certain

iii amount of 'transformative defectiveness' specific semantics are held in 'phatic' implications (Malinowski, 1923); are context dependent, and functional only if habitually used: The Wittgensteinian principle turns out to be fully applicable and valid in
this case: the meaning of RFs must be explained as functions of habitual usage. As they provide the verbal means for certain types of conventional action, their meanings are conditioned by the behaviour patterns of which they are an integrated part. The question of the meanings of RFs is thus transformed into the question of judgements of appropriateness of situated us[age] one has to acknowledge a shift towards the expressive side in the relation between descriptive and expressive aspects of meaning in RFs as compared with non-routinized expressions. The expressive aspects, so to speak, often dominate the descriptive aspects, and this is the very reason why putting the descriptive meaning of a formula into the garment of another language only very rarely yields an equivalent and well-formed expression of that language.

(Coulmas, 2002, p 241-242; my italics and square brackets). This alone seems justification enough for the use of cultural scripts in explicating values behind routine formulaic expressions, but what of silences? Explicating occurrences which are even more contextually based and nebulous than are verbal routine formulae makes for slippery work. One can, however, attempt to arrive at explications in semantic primes of words-that-refer-to-silence, or modes-of-silence. Because silence bears an inter-culturally shared quality of being laden with meta-linguistic value-significance, these words that are 'talk about non-talk' are as much vehicles of values as the manifest semantic 'weight' of the silences themselves. The difficulty exists of interpretations and judgements being subconsciously committed: a matter habitual; affirming a definitive sense of 'culture', and its values, as 'deep rooted social habit'. Diana Eades' exhaustive work untying snarled complexities of formal miscommunication (Eades, 1982: p76-78; 1994: p237-244, 1996 p 218-219; 2000: pp167181; Taylor, 1982), and my own blunder in a Miwa country formal situation exemplifies the pragmatic challenge. Cultural scripts attempt to represent the semantic nuances of these 'habits'. The self-repairing potential of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage is that its structural openness allows simplification of componential elements, theoretically providing an interculturally accessible discourse. Explication reaching for specifics faced with a semantically jarring componential line is easily recognised and, again theoretically, redressed as needed as cultural fluidity expresses itself in its terms (Wierzbicka, 2003; Goddard & Wierzbicka 2004).

iv An exploration of silence in modern Australian diasporic contexts reveals significant inherent inter-cultural values. These values are found to be marked both in the implications carried by specific silences, and in their semantic relationships with words which refer to them. Miscommunications based on specifically Western Anglo perspectives of 'silence and modes of observation' amplify a case for formal redress (Eades,1994: esp.pp240244, 1996:pp220-221, 2000:pp162-163 & 167, 2006:pp161-167; Taylor, 1982). Discourse with regard to silence as contextually and pragmatically 'part of conversation' rather than otherwise (Gardner and Mushin, 2009a; Gardner et al, 2009b), brings forth potentially dynamic prescriptives: the concept of Dadirri (Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann 2002), for example has, if not developed into a meme, over the last decade or so spread into multifarious disciplines retaining internationally significant applications (Atkinson, 2002; de Sousa and Rymarz, 2007; Goold and Usher, 2006; Kelly and O'Donnell, 2011; Rose, 2005; Tanner et al, 2004; The Advocate, 2011). The area where I live is known as Bundjalung country. The word closest to 'Dadirri' in meaning traditionally used here is gan'na: 'to hear, listen, feel, think, understand' (Atkinson, 2003). Roy Gordon, a native speaker and local translation expert, gives the spelling of this word as gan ngah and explains that it is a verbal root word that carries separate suffixes to represent nuances of 'to listen', 'to think', 'to know', and 'to understand'. He gives the derived form gan ngah leh as a nominal stem that carries suffixes to represent 'listening', 'thinking', 'knowing', and 'understanding'. He explains that the significant difficulty with Anglo transcriptions is that what are seen as separate concepts,ie listening, thinking, etc are not so in the case of gan ngah: "All of these words stem from that one meaning, that one cultural value". Not unlike the Japanese equivalent of western commercial sector 'closed' signs, which read as 'in preparation' (Yamada, 1997), these 'deep listening' concepts (Atkinson, 2003; Ungunmerr- Baumann 2002) refer to an active silence, 'sacred' space of pure observation, or 'state of openness' (Roy Gordon, personal communication, May 2012); rather than a passive and closed hiatus flanked by specialised linguistic and/or cultural activity (Yamada, 1997). An NSM explication of 'gan ngah' would combine the semantic primes in the mental/experiential predicates category under one allolex. It is explained as centred upon a dynamic nebulous core within the fact of basic awareness. It is related loosely to the Aglo term instinct but has a broader defintive connection to event-based knowledge. In a series of short clips of Yolgnu country interviews from August 2011 this conceptualisation is

v demonstratively echoed. Elders Djawa Yunupingu, (episode 10), explains the aspect of a logical event-based interconnectedness, and Mary Djakala, (episode 2), displays a rapt observation and attentiveness to her surrounds; both speak of their parents, grand-parents and ancestors equally involved in their instruction while growing up. Roy Gordon was at pains to explain to me that the nuances of the words where markedly unique from country to country for this conceptualisation. This is affirmed by the variety of significances shown in Atkinson's list of words and definitions in her 2003 presentation 'Social and emotional wellbeing: an Indigenous perspective' :
Ngangikurungkurr - dadirri - listening to one another in contemplative reciprocal relationships. Pitjantjatjara - kulini (listening), or kulin yuku (listening and wanting to listen) Gamilaraay - winangargurru- listening deep. Ghungulu - yimbanyiara - listening to elders. Bundjalung--ganna to hear, listen, feel, think, understand. Gunmbayngirr - junga-ngarraanga miinggi - hearing, learning, understanding, knowing from the heart.

The centrality of the Bundjalung term as a value as presented to me by Roy Gordon is implied in the work of Deborah Bird Rose, especially 'An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human' (2005) and 'To dance with time: A Victoria River Aboriginal study' (2000) in their outlining of concepts of "mutual benefit entanglement"(2005 p 299), "a metaphysics of pattern, benefit and connection" (2005 p295), of the relationship between "the ephemeral and the enduring (source)"(2000, p295), and the importance of the role of "sensuous information" (2000, p290). Brought into the context of attentiveness, of quietude and awareness, typically heady Rose passages like:

"The country is full of messages that call to people... nomadism is not usually a matter of being pushed from place to place as resources become scarce, but rather of being called from place to place as food comes into plenty (and in land claims across the Northern Territory from desert to islands people speak of nomadic travels as joyful engagements with plenty)... [these] ... people, like others, have stories of the hardships of drought and flood, and there are sites of refuge as well as stories of people who did not survive, but people speak of these events as exceptions. Mostly they speak and sing of sounds, smells, and colours, and of actions such as butterfly wings or fireflies. Sensuous information is a call to action, beckoning those who know what is happening."

(2000, p 290)

vi and

"Living things communicate by their sounds, their smells, their actions, the stinging bite of the march fly, the sight of flowers floating in the water. They also communicate by their non-presence. Events that occur to the same rhythm require intervals of non-occurrence. There are times when things do not happen, and it is the not-happening that makes it possible for the happening to have meaning. Thus, for example, the march flies announce that the crocs are laying their eggs; their bites are only remarkable because for a long time they have not been around at all. The beat of simultaneity is made possible by intervals of non-presence or pause. ... in this system it is not silent. The communicative events of country call people into interaction. People join the rhythms of time-place through their own returns and departures, their beats and intervals." (2000,p 291)

orient themselves solidly within the paradigm of gan gnah. Once inter-culturally realised, though, the signification of 'indigenous silence' is subject to diasporic generalisations: as Sarangi points out culture [is] a verb (1994, p 266) to attempt placement of such a concept within or without 'a culture' is to risk denial of the existence of active functions of culture, of process ( Wierzbicka, 2002: p423 & 2006; McKinnon-Dodd, 2011; Yunupingu & Djakala 2011; Rose, 2000: p 694-695; Veel, 2003: pp 152-157; Butler et al, 2009; Yi-Fu Tuan, 1991). Inter-cultural interpretation of silence and its nature seems to have undergone an entropic development; erratic reification can be reasonably expected to occur with any inoculation of long-incubated conceptualisations/values between previously isolated groups: a term thus vaguely conceptualised is abstract until clarified (Butler et al, 2009; Sharifian, 2010; Veel, 2003 pp 152-157).

Societies seem to naturally appropriate each other until a point is reached whereby terms accurately signify, or coin themselves over time. Pidgins, Creoles and other kinds of trade/sign languages form where meaning and sign-concept interact in rapidly adaptive semiotic interplay as new habits are borne. Culture extends itself and digests concepts quite organically. The variable applications and interpretations of the term 'dadirri' discussed and referenced here examples this kind of development.

vii

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From politics it was an easy step to silence. - Jane Austen