reflections on linguistic ethnography

Journal of Sociolinguistics 11/5, 2007: 689–695

Reflections on linguistic ethnography

Martyn HammersleyThe Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

In his opening article, Rampton portrays Linguistic Ethnography (LE) asconsisting of a broad range of work, sharing family resemblances and reflectingfeatures of the particular niche in which it has developed. The subsequent articlesexplore various issues and relationships relevant to LE. There is obviously muchthat could be said about these contributions, from many angles, but I will focuson just a few points here that seem of significance from my perspective: thenature of LE as an approach; realism versus constructionism; and the questionof methodological warrant.

THE IDENTITY OF LE

Rampton describes LE as a ‘site of encounter’ for ‘established lines ofresearch’, which include: interactional sociolinguistics; ‘new literacy studies’;critical discourse analysis; neo-Vygotskian research on language and cognitivedevelopment; and interpretive applied linguistics for language teaching. Atthe same time, he clearly sees it as more than just a site: it is an emergingorientation that has distinctive features, notably a concern with gaining analyticdistance on familiar surroundings, by contrast to the traditional anthropologicalconcern with trying to understand ‘the Other’. And he argues that thishas important consequences: it indicates an affinity with discourse analysisand post-structuralism, a rejection of the traditional anthropological idea of‘comprehensive ethnography’ in favour of ‘topic-oriented’ investigations, anda willingness to engage in practical and political interventions. Drawing onBernstein’s (1996) account of a shift within the organisation of academicknowledge from ‘singulars’ to ‘regions’, Rampton portrays LE as a newinterdisciplinary field.

There are some questions to be asked about this account, of course. It isundoubtedly the case that a variety of significant changes are taking place withinacademia at present. Rampton cites the discussions by Gibbons et al. (1994)and Strathern (2000), as well as that of Bernstein, but these accounts differfrom one another in both descriptive and evaluative terms. Furthermore, theirimplications for LE are debatable. We might ask: how new is the developmentof hybrid approaches? Did not sociolinguistics itself emerge in this way? And,

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going even further back, here is David Pocock writing in 1971 about the birthof social anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ‘The term“social anthropology” [. . .] combines two interests which correspond to thespeculative and the empirical approach’. He is referring here to Sociology andAnthropology respectively, and he suggests that social anthropology is ‘thecoming together of these two, and their mutual modification’ (Pocock 1971: 4).Later, commenting on the situation in the middle of the nineteenth century, hedescribes social anthropology as a ‘meeting place’ for these and other disciplines(Pocock 1971: 20). It is not hard to hear echoes of this in Rampton’s accountof LE.

Moreover, there are yet other ways of looking at the emergence of LE. Forexample, the continual invention of new approaches within the social sciencesin the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries could be interpreted aspart of a broader cultural phenomenon: an obsession with re-branding and re-launching, a kind of hyper-modernism. Whereas the first two interpretationsof LE, as a ‘region’ or an emerging discipline, offer it legitimacy, this third onemight stimulate questions about whether LE is anything more than a symbolicmove designed to colonise territory and gain resources. Equally, of course, wemight argue that new social forms, of any kind, along with rationales about howthey fit with fundamental changes in society, can be no more than discursiveconstructions!

Needless to say, neither acceptance of LE at face value nor cynical dismissalare in order. It is important to examine its rationale, to ask questions about itsnature, and its relationship with other approaches. For instance, how far and inwhat ways does it go beyond ‘the ethnography of communication’? And when it issuggested that one of the benefits of LE is to ‘tie down’ ethnography, we might askwhether ethnography needs this, and also what exactly is involved. Such tyingdown is reminiscent of critiques of ethnography by conversation analysts. Yet,LE does not seem to adopt the rigorous severity, as regards what can be inferredfrom data, characteristic of some leading practitioners of Conversation Analysis(CA). If what is implied by ‘tying down’ is a ‘grounding’ of ethnographic accountsin data, how does this differ from grounded theorising or thick description? Andwhat exactly are the linguistic resources that are to be used to facilitate thisrestraint? In the past, it was sometimes argued that linguistic analysis of talkis essential before any sociological conclusions can be drawn from it (see, forexample, Stubbs 1981). In the case of LE, though, it seems that the new resourcesoffered to ethnography are far from entirely ‘linguistic’, taking in Bakhtin andpost-structuralism. Moreover, as Rampton notes, there are conflicts among these,so we must also ask how the tensions are to be resolved.

Similar questions to those raised about LE can be asked about the ‘nexusanalysis’ outlined by Scollon and Scollon. Rampton emphasises that LE is oftencommitted to practical and political intervention, and this is clearly central tonexus analysis. The particular issues that arise here concern what is distinctiveabout this new approach as compared, for example, with previous forms of

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applied anthropology, and the various kinds of action research that have longbeen promoted within social science (see Kemmis 1988; Reason and Bradbury2006). Above all, how would the questions that have often been raised aboutthese other kinds of interventionist research be answered by advocates of LE andnexus analysis?1

REALISM VERSUS CONSTRUCTIONISM

Underlying all these questions are fundamental theoretical and methodologicalproblems that are relevant to the whole of the social sciences. Some of theserelate to the focus of social inquiry and the nature of the task involved. Wecan contrast two extremes here. First, there is what Tsitsipis calls positivism:the reification of social phenomena as objective entities. In using this term, hefollows now widespread usage, but what is being referred to is an orientation thatextends well beyond, and in some cases does not accurately represent, the stanceof researchers who have labelled themselves positivists, or who share much incommon with, say, logical positivism. Given this, and the fact that ‘positivism’has become little more than a term of abuse, I will use the (also by no meansunproblematic) term ‘realism’. From a realist point of view, the focus of socialinquiry is on objects (including people) in the social world that are taken to existand have characteristics independently of our accounts of them, and the aim is toexplain their behaviour in terms of causal relations. The relevant contrast here iswith what can be broadly termed constructionism. For constructionists, ratherthan social phenomena being treated as objects that exist in the world awaitingexplanation, they are now seen as part of a world that is constituted throughsense-making practices, of one kind or another. And the task of social inquirybecomes to study those sense-making practices. In its structuralist form, theargument was that socio-cultural phenomena are only meaningful because of thesymbolic systems used to generate them, so that the focus of inquiry became thosesystems and the differentiations they make. With the pragmatic turn towardsunderstanding language use as contextually variable, and as performative ratherthan merely referential, both the focus and the nature of the task has changedsomewhat. Nevertheless, the contrast with realism remains.

Now, it is of some importance for LE that ethnography has long been tornbetween realism and constructionism. And there are similar tensions betweenand within the other intellectual resources on which LE draws. For example,critical discourse analysis often has a predominantly realist orientation, whereasCA is predominantly constructionist, in the broad sense of that term being usedhere.2

Moreover, while these days realism is widely seen as having serious internaldifficulties, it is important to note that this is also true of constructionism. Indeed,Craib (1997) has argued that it amounts to a form of social psychosis. One ofthe problems is illustrated by Tsitsipis’s discussion of relationality. He points toa tendency to reify social phenomena on the part of social agents ‘when they


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confront social phenomena and collectivities as entities and not as products oftheir own agency’ (this issue: 627). Here, we must ask: in what sense does anyparticular individual (or any group or organisation) produce the social phenomenathat they confront? One answer to this is that it is the individual who makes senseof and gives meaning to those phenomena. While this may be true, it is not theindividual who gives existence to those phenomena. In other words, there is adifference between seeing a mirage or an illusion and seeing a real object, and,similarly, between constructing a fiction and aiming to produce an account ofwhat is actually the case. Moreover, this is a difference that we all acknowledgein our everyday activities and could not avoid acknowledging. So, we do not‘produce’ our surroundings, for the most part, by making sense of them. Nordo we produce them through our actions, either in the sense of consciouslyintending to bring them into existence, or even in the sense that our actionscause most of the features and the underlying tendencies of the world we confront.While Austin-type performatives and self-fulfilling processes do occur, these arenot characteristic of most human action. It seems to me that, in this respect,constructionists have sometimes tended towards a gross inflation of the idea ofperformativity.

The conflict between realism and constructionism arises most obviously if wecompare the articles by Sealey and Wetherell. The former raises questions aboutwhether ethnography is able to capture all that is relevant to sociolinguistic study.Moreover, she does this on the basis of a particular conception of what is involvedin social inquiry, one which derives from critical realism. She argues that LE is notcapable of discovering the social mechanisms that generate patterns of languageuse: because of its micro orientation and its emphasis on documenting participantperspectives.3 In addition, she points to inconsistencies in the application ofconstructionism: for example, that identities, such as those relating to ethnicity,are frequently declared to be fluid and to be emic in character, yet analysts also usethose categories themselves to identify or refer to participants (see also Woolgarand Pawluch 1985). There are deep problems here for both ethnography andconstructionism as well as issues about the relationship between them.

In her article, Wetherell portrays her own approach to Discursive Psychology(DP) as under challenge from two very different directions. One of these is theresurgence of a psycho-social approach that emphasises the role of factors that arenot discursive or linguistic in any straightforward sense; instead, they representsubterranean forces that shape and disrupt discourse. This is a realist challenge,in the sense of the term I have been using. And Wetherell’s response seems tome rather ambiguous: she certainly wants to study the sort of phenomena inwhich psycho-social researchers are interested, and this distances her from thosediscursive psychologists who align themselves with CA. However, she appears toinsist that this must be done through discourse analysis, and apparently retainsan explicit anti-realism. For me, both these aspects of her position are puzzling,though this is maybe because I am approaching the issue from a differentdirection.



I think Wetherell is right to resist a re-specification of the focus of inquiry in theway that is demanded by ethnomethodologically inspired CA – to the extent thatthis is presented as the only rigorous way to study social phenomena. However, itseems to me that her position implies more of a rapprochement with traditionalkinds of psychology and sociology than she is prepared to contemplate. Andthis rapprochement would need to take place at a methodological as well as atheoretical level. For example, in order to develop her analysis of the episodefrom Big Brother, so as to answer the questions that she raises, other datawould surely be required than the text of the programme: we would need tointerview Jade and other participants, and to observe them in a range of contexts.Furthermore, the analysis would have to extend beyond what is characteristic ofDP. Wetherell rightly emphasises that there is much to be gained by LE from DP,but in these respects I think DP could gain from LE, and from ethnography moregenerally.

METHODOLOGICAL WARRANT

This leads me to the third and final issue I want to mention here. In his article,Rampton stresses the methodological role of linguistics in ‘tying ethnographydown’. The implication is that without linguistics ethnographic accounts willbe speculative – the relationship here is similar to that indicated betweenanthropology and sociology by Pocock in the context of social anthropology.And this is also an issue that is central to the conversation analytic critique ofthe kind of DP practised by Wetherell. There are some fundamental issues hereabout what sort of warrant is required for us to accept knowledge claims astrue, until further notice. From the point of view of CA, it seems unlikely thatLE could provide any more secure warrant for its claims than is available toother kinds of ethnographic or linguistic work. But if, as I believe, the level ofmethodological severity CA demands is not required, there is then a question ofwhat would and would not be adequate evidence for the sorts of claims that LEmakes. What Rampton does not tell us, and what appears to be undetermined atpresent, is exactly what the distinctive practices of LE are as regards the use ofevidence.

CONCLUSION

I have argued that these articles raise some difficult questions that are quitegeneral in character: they concern what the human sciences can and cannotachieve, and how they should go about studying human action and institutions.Clearly, LE is by no means alone in facing them. However, the development of newapproaches can sometimes tend to obscure these problems – in the enthusiasm fornovelty and the associated dismissal of older ways of thinking. LE offers much, butthe challenge of resolving the conflict between realism and constructionism willneed to be tackled. Furthermore, in methodological terms, I believe that Sealey is


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correct in her insistence on the need for a catholic approach to the use of methods.Nor is this by any means alien to the spirit of ethnography, viewed in historicalperspective.

I have focused in this brief piece on questions and problems – because I believethese are important. However, I would not want to paint a gloomy picture of theprospects for LE. I think it could be of great benefit, both to various branches ofthe study of language or discourse and to the community of ethnographers. Itwill be interesting to see how its future unfolds.

NOTES

1. See, for example, the discussion and references in Hammersley 2004.2. ‘Predominantly’ is an important qualification, because there are competing

tendencies within both these approaches to discourse analysis. I have discussed theseapproaches in more detail elsewhere: see Hammersley 1997 and 2003.

3. It is worth noting, though, that there has been at least one attempt to placeethnography under the guidance of critical realism (Porter 1993), and manyethnographers are realists, in some sense of that term. They do not, for example, ignorethe role of the macro contexts in which the settings they investigate are located, nordo they restrict themselves to emic categories.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, Basil. 1996. ‘Pedagogizing knowledge: Studies in recontextualising’. InBasil Bernstein Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. London: Taylor and Francis.54–81.

Craib, Ian. 1997. Social constructionism as a social psychosis. Sociology 31: 1–15.Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott

and Martin Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage.Hammersley, Martyn. 1997. On the foundations of critical discourse analysis. Language

and Communication 17: 237–248.Hammersley, Martyn. 2003. Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: Methods

or paradigms? Discourse and Society 14: 751–781.Hammersley, Martyn. 2004. Action research: A contradiction in terms? Oxford Review

of Education 30: 165–181.Kemmis, Stephen. 1988. Action research. In John P. Keeves (ed.) Educational Research

Methodology and Measurement: An International Handbook. Oxford, U.K.: Pergamon.42–49.

Pocock, David. 1971. Social Anthropology. London: Sheed and Ward.Porter, Sam. 1993. Critical Realist Ethnography: The Case of Racism and

Professionalism in a Medical Setting. Sociology 27: 591–609.Reason, Peter and Hilary Bradbury (eds.). 2006. Handbook of Action Research. London:

Sage.Strathern, Marilyn. 2000. Afterword: Accountability . . . and ethnography. In Marilyn

Strathern (ed.) Audit Cultures. London: Routledge. 279–304.



Stubbs, Michael. 1981. Scratching the surface: Linguistic data in educational research.In Clem Adelman (ed.) Uttering, Muttering: Collecting, Using and Reporting Talk forSocial and Educational Research. London: Grant McIntyre. 114–133.

Woolgar, Stephen and Dorothy Pawluch. 1985. Ontological gerrymandering. SocialProblems 32: 214–227.

Address correspondence to:

Martyn HammersleyFELS

Level 3 Stuart Hall BuildingThe Open University

Walton HallMilton Keynes, MK7 6AA

United Kingdom

[email protected]


reflections on linguistic ethnography

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