Sanders1999
| Sanders1999 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Sanders1999 |
| Author(s) | Robert E. Sanders |
| Title | The Impossibility of a Culturally Contexted
Conversation Analysis: On Simultaneous, Distinct Types of Pragmatic Meaning |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Conversation Analysis, Ethnography of communication |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 1999 |
| Language | English |
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| Month | |
| Journal | Research in Language and Social Interaction |
| Volume | 32 |
| Number | 1-2 |
| Pages | 129-140 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1080/08351813.1999.9683616 |
| ISBN | |
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Abstract
There is a shared expectation that, ironically, seems to have created some tension between ethnographers of communication and conversation analysts. 1 The expectation is, as Moerman (1988, 1993) put it, that “culture’s being exists in interaction’s time” and conversely that “culture is the stuff, the substance, with which interaction is done” (1993, p. 94). Hence, ethnographers of communication, expecting that communal aspects of talk can be found and analytically foregrounded in the details of routine, everyday interaction—not just in special ritualized or ceremonial practices—tend to find work by conversation analysts sterile, to have missed what it is in the talk and interaction that makes it grounded and meaningful in the participants’ social world. This discontent often applies even to the work of those occasional conversation analysts who regard their work as having ethnographic import. Conversation analysts for their part, expecting that ethnographers can and should attend first and primarily to the particularities of interaction, fault ethnographers for not doing so—for relying too much instead on informants and other sources of evidence external to the interactions of interest to tell them what to focus on and what to make of it, and for aggregating details of talk and interaction according to their alleged communal meanings, not their recurrent, observable, form and sequential organization.
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