Conducting Dissonance: Codeswitching and Differential Access to Context in the Belgian Asylum Process

Abstract

One of the major inequalities in the field of communication is inequality in access to particular contexts. Context and contextualization, as we have learned from Gumperz and his associates, is the key to understanding and misunderstanding in social interactions. Codeswitching, Gumperz convincingly demonstrated, was a powerful contextualization cue, something which framed and directed people’s interpretation of talk (Gumperz 1982a; Gumperz and Roberts 1991; Auer and Di Luzio 1992; Duranti and Goodwin 1992). Contextualization, we now know, is also not a purely ‘automatic’ or mechanical phenomenon; it is a social act that operates under the constraints of social life — power and inequality are always present. For example, Briggs (1997) has demonstrated how the circulation of discourse across contexts involves, creates and sustains power differences in the construction of a judicial ‘case’. Consequently, access to particular contextual spaces allowing particular forms of (authoritative) interpretation, such as for instance legal or judicial-procedural contexts, appears to be an object of inequality, and contexts (as means for interpretation) appear to be unevenly distributed resources in communication (Silverstein and Urban 1996b; Blommaert 2001a).