A world without words

Abstract

I appear in (and outside) the text of A World Without Words in several guises: as one of Goode's mentors at UCLA; as the co-author of an article (Pollner and Wickler, 1985) explicitly critiqued by Goode for using clinical assessments of families as a nonproblematic analytic resource; and as Goode's co-author of a subsequent article (Pollner and Goode, 1990) that considers our divergent treatment of the families of children bereft of conventional communicational competencies. My valuation of A World Without Words should be considered in light of this history, of course, but in reading the research in its current form I was taken anew by its breadth, depth, and significance. It delivers a penetrating, poignant, and reflexively sensitive study of the sightless and soundless worlds of children born with Rubella syndrome; the custodial, clinical, and familial response to these children; and the embodied foundations of intersubjectivity. Because of the panoply of concerns and the originality with which they are explored, the words of A World Without Words will (or should) be read by several audiences: families of children with Rubella and similar disorders; professionals treating children; practitioners of the human sciences; and, would that it were possible, the children themselves. For the human sciences, especially the family of perspectives concerned with meaning, interaction, and experience,^ World Without Words has special value. On the one hand, it realizes and exemplifies key initiatives underlying these approaches. On the other hand, it unsettles their conceptual and method? ological boundaries. In attempting to understand the worlds of children whose sensorium is so different from the subjects typically the focus of qualitative and ethnographic research, A World Without Words contributes to the rethink? ing and perhaps the revising of assumptions, concepts, and methods grounded in the world with words. I should like to indicate several boundary points of the latter that ,4 World Without Words variously transgresses and transforms.

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