Monday, February 11th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302

The authentication of Sierra Leonean refugees

Competing ideologies of the acoustic characteristics of voice During the Sierra Leone civil war, 1991–2002, many European countries granted asylum to Sierra Leonean refugees. Those without documentation were given an opportunity to participate in a language analysis interview. There are many problems with the authentication process employed in these types of interviews (e.g., Eades 2010, Corcoran 2004). However, this paper focuses on the particular issue of competing ideologies associated with voice quality and prosody: relative breathiness, pitch, loudness, and tempo. From 2000­–2010, I contributed to assessments or counter-assessments in nearly fifty cases. European interviewers frequently admonished applicants to “speak up” in order to properly represent themselves. Applicants who spoke slowly using a lowered quiet breathy voice were identified as having something to hide or, at best, as rubes who did not understand how recording devices worked. In contrast to these Western assessments, I argue there are pan West African ideologies that associate these features with “good speech” (Obeng 2003: vii; Irvine 1973: 160­–­64, 1974; Yankah 1995) and, in particular for Sierra Leoneans, with positions of full Sierra Leonean citizenship in opposition to categories such as “stranger” (Dorjahn and Fyfe 1962). Supplementing previous work with current fieldwork with Sierra Leoneans living in the US, this paper presents acoustic analyses and ethnographic observation to contrast Sierra Leonean and Western ideologies concerning these characteristics of speech. Using Silverstein’s (1981) explication of the limits of awareness, I discuss how these ways of speaking have been taken up in naturalizing discourses and confound our ability to identify them as sites for potential misunderstanding.