South Africans assumed that the overthrow of the Nationalist government in the elections of 1994 would also bring economic and societal change for South Africa’s disadvantaged majority. Change has been slow, however, because massive problems of illiteracy complicate any attempt to assess what workers know—particularly in respect to the so-called ‘lost generation’ of workers who have had little formal education in any language following the 1976 Soweto riots.
In this paper, Sauer argues that the complexities of the South African context provide an opportunity for re-examining how we assess technoscientific understanding in the absence of commensurate language, education, identity, and experience. Drawing upon psycholinguistic analysis of speech and gesture, Sauer examines the effects of language, culture, and identity on fundamental processes of cognition: how we interpret sensory experience, name objects, use tools, depict spatial relationships, and interpret semantic meaning.
In this presentation, Sauer focuses on a critical problem in coal mine safety: Why does methane explode? Initial (1997) data suggested that workers did not seem to understand why methane [translated as Imbawula] exploded. In follow-up (2005) interviews, educated Zulu-speaking South Africans affirmed with striking confidence that ‘Imbawula [methane] does not burn.’ Analysis of subjects’ gestures reveals surprising conclusions about what educated (Ph.D.-level) and uneducated (less than fifth form) subjects know, what forms this knowledge takes, and how subjects represent their understandings in speech and gesture. This analysis also reveals important within-subject differences when subjects spoke more than one language.
As the present study suggests, individual processes of cognition take place within societal and institutional structures that influence both the interpretation and representation of sensory knowledge and experience. By revealing local understandings not visible in speech alone, research in multimodal communication can thus play a significant role in defining more generally what it means to be literate in a technoscientific culture.
