Robin Wooffitt

I think I got a bit too excited about Wooffitt's use of the "author/animator" distinction last time I read this, back in 2008 when I was just getting started on linguistics and everything sparkled; the original distinction is from Goffman and Wooffitt's interesting innovation is to apply it to the spirit and the medium in seances, where the spirit (if you believe in it) depends on the medium to speak for it and the medium depends on the spirit for his/her authority (making it much like Bourdieu's description of the role of the leader of a political party, ha!). And that is cool, but Wooffitt doesn't do a tonne with it (I went on to apply it to Allah and Muhammad in a paper I am fond of). Instead, he goes on to look at the specific discourse features the mediums use to make their performance plausible and shore up their own authoritativeness. Some are kind of obvious, like throwing out general things to see who bites and zero in, and sometimes Wooffitt spins his wheels a bit, but I still think this is a cute paper and the "three turns" (1. Medium asks question, 2. Sitter gives "minimal positive response," yes or yeah, 3. Medium immediately goes "oh yeah cos the spirit told me that.") And the subtle modulations ("Did he die in hospital? No? Well was he in hospital as a young man? Oh yes, that must be it. He says it was painful."), and the way the discourse is constructed as a Q/A to passivize the sitter, maintain the role of the medium as link and discourage the sitter from thinking too much about, like, "Why would my dead mom say that??" 'Sgood stuff. Discourse Studies.… (más)

Wooffitt selects Goffman’s author/animator distinction as a more apposite conceptual tool than the standard original/reporting speaker binary to understand the reaching into an inaccessible space by a reporting speaker to solicit active communication from a supernatural being, with obvious implications for the Islamic Deity/Prophet dynamic that I am writing about. Taking séances as his specific research site, Wooffitt notes the centrality of “the issue of scepticism” in supernatural speech report, since “even if the sitters are utterly convinced of the afterlife, and the possibility of communication with its denizens, any particular sitting occurs within a wider, sceptical cultural frame of reference” (353). Phrased in this way, the issue exposes a qualitative difference between the Qur’an and hadith: acceptance of the Qur’an as the verbatim word of God is a matter not of evidence, but of the obscure spiritual and psychological metrics of belief. Put up against Bakhtin, Wooffitt clarifies the nature of the stable RS “hotline” to the divine necessary to enable authoritative speech (and reap the political rewards). Discourse Studies 3/3.… (más)