Ethnography of Communication

Somayyeh Pedram GS31063

Approaches to research on language and culture from a sociocultural perspective

1. Ethnography of communication2. Interactional sociolinguistics3. Conversation analysis4. Discourse analysis5. Systemic functional linguistics6. Critical discourse analysis7. Linguistic ethnography8. Microgenetic approach

• Shared features of all the eight approaches

1. All studies of language are also studies of culture

2. Social activities are the units of analysis ; from one-word to larger cultural and historical activities

3. The data is generally qualitative, but in these approaches usually mix methods are used for collecting and analyzing data.

• Ethnography of communication(developed by Dell Hymes)

Objective: to describe the communicative habits shared by members of a community. Its central unit of analysis is the communicative event such as ceremonies, mealtimes, social gatherings, birthday parties.

The focus of ethnography of communication.

• The starting point is the ethnographic analysis of the communicative habits of a community in their totality, determining what count as communicative events, and as their components, and conceiving no communicative behavior as independent of the set framed by some setting or implicit question. The communicative event is thus central.

Hymes(1962: 13)

Situation The physical and temporal setting and its cultural definition, e.g., The living room in the grandparents' home might be a setting for a family story which may be told at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary.

Participants Speaker and audience. At the family reunion, an aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although not addressed, might also hear the narrative.

Ends Purposes, goals, and outcomes. The aunt may tell a story about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and honor the grandmother.

Acts Form, content and sequential arrangements. The aunt's story might begin as a response to a toast to the grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a sequence structured by the aunt. Finally, the group might applaud the tale and move onto another subject or activity.

Keys The tone underlying the event, whether it is humorous, serious or playful. The aunt might imitate the grandmother's voice and gestures in a playful way.

Instrumentalities Forms and styles of speech. The aunt might speak in a casual register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register and careful grammatically "standard" forms.

Norms Social rules governing the event and the participants' actions and reaction. In a playful story by the aunt, the norms might allow many audience interruptions and collaboration. A serious, formal story by the aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions as norms.

Genre The kind of speech act or event; gossiping, joking, interviewing. The aunt might tell a character anecdote about the grandmother for entertainment, or an exemplum as moral instruction.

What should researchers do when studying ethnography of communication?

1. Develop relationships of trust with group members: in order to have an in-group member’s understanding of the communicative event and its significance to the group.

2. Participant-observer: the researcher has social interaction with the group members while maintaining a degree of marginality between a strangeness and familiarity.

3. Gather multiple audio and video recordings of the event

4. Have notes of his experience of the event, his observations and the interviews with the participants, documents and written records.

Analysis of communicative event

1. Regularly occurring features important for accomplishment of the event should be noted.

2. Patterns are described

3. Conventional meanings of the patterns are interpreted ; how they are used by the participants (SPEAKING model).

4. The events are explained in light of the larger social, historical and political contexts they help to create.

Micro-ethnographies:Offer a detailed analysis of only one type of event or a single instance of an event which might be contrasted with a second type of event in another context.(Watson-Gegeo, 1997:138).

Case studies: Focus on behaviors or attributes of a single event or case (Duff,2007b; Roberts,2006).

Critical ethnographies: They take an ideologically sensitive orientation in their analysis (Canagarajah,1993:605). They address how the patterns and norms of an event accommodate to, contest or transform larger social structures such as power, social justice and discrimination.

Nexus analysis: is similar to critical ethnography in its ideology orientation, but it differs from all ethnographic approaches in that it takes social action rather than an event as its focal unit. The aim is to understand a specific problem in the action so that future actions can be shaped to effective positive change.

Quote 8.2“Nexus analysis begins where racism is enacted in the

experience of real social actors. Then, after some detailed analysis of these actions, the analysis probes outward into the histories of actors, resources, scenes, or settings across time and place-first into the past to see how the actions are constituted and into the future to work toward shaping future actions”.

Scollon and scollon(2007:619)

In ethnography of communication approach, because of the broad range, amount and type of data, it is easy for researchers to “get lost” in their data.

It is very important for the researchers to make clear how data were collected, including the specific sources and the examples used in the research report which reflect the entire corpus of data.