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have thought that fast. I want to suggest that you have to forget that completely. Don’t worry about how fast they’re thinking. First of all, don’t worry about whether they’re “thinking.” Just try to come to terms with how it is that the thing comes off. Because you’ll find that they can do these things. Just take any other area of natural science and see, for example, how fast molecules do things. And they don’t have very good brains. So just let the materials fall as they may. Look to see how it is that persons go about producing what they do produce. (Sacks 1992a: 11)

In this passage, Sacks is trying to free students from their prejudice about what constitutes an explanation of human behavior. But he is also hinting at a method of investigation that is reminiscent of the structuralist paradigm within linguistics, anthropology, and other social sciences (see chapters 2 and 6). In both cases, analysts look at the actions and try to leave out (or “bracket”) what they think the participants might be thinking. In both cases, there is an attempt to break the nineteenth-century division between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the hard or natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). In both cases, as we shall see more clearly below, there is a tendency to emphasize the context-indepen- dence of certain structures over their context-dependence and thus build a repertoire of mechanisms that can repeatedly do the same job regardless of the circumstances in which they are used. For a linguistic anthropologist the question always is: how do we know that it is the “same job” that is being done? This is an epistemological question that is related to the emic perspective on human interaction that characterizes the anthropological perspective (see chapter 6). It points to the different conceptualization of context that often divides formal approaches, conversation analysis included, from interpretive ones. More specifically, if we are not talking about individual preferences, what is the sociological status of the system that seems to guide such preferences? Are they to be conceived as included in the notion of culture? But if so, why is such a notion avoided in conversation analytical writings? I will return to this question at the end of the chapter.

8.3Conversation analysis and the “context” issue

Conversation analysts have uncovered a wealth of social behaviors that are potentially relevant for crosscultural comparison. Conversation analysts have repeatedly demonstrated that conversations are cooperative achievements, where one can see members working hard at coordinating their actions with those of their interlocutors. In isolating short sequences of talk, Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, and their colleagues have revealed new ways of studying what words

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do in interaction. The notion of preference is a powerful instrument for thinking about cultural expectations, values, and their reproduction. For these reasons and the centrality of talk in conversation analysts’ data and findings, one might expect an enthusiastic embracing of conversation analytical notions and methods by linguistic anthropologists. However, while sociolinguists, pragmaticians, and discourse analysts who are not trained or interested in ethnographic methods have often borrowed conversation-analytical terminology and methods for their work, with a few exceptions, linguistic anthropologists have been reluctant to employ conversation-analytical methods or take advantage of their findings. Some have even expressed open criticism of conversation analysis. An understanding of such criticism can help us better clarify the goals and methods of linguistic anthropology while making suggestions for a better integration across fields.

At the heart of the intellectual tension between conversation analysts and some linguistic anthropologists are what appear to be fundamental disagreements in analytical procedures and data collection. Most disagreements center around the issue of methods. Conversation analysts are accused of ignoring the cultural or historical “context” in which the interactions they analyze take place. An early attack along these lines can be found in the following passage, where, after a brief critique of a paper by T. Turner on performatives, Dell Hymes launches into a full-scale criticism of the entire school of conversation analysis (obliquely identified as “some sociologists”):

Some sociologists become so absorbed in words as to fail to renew their relation to actual contexts. Admittedly, it is fascinating to discover the richness of speech, coming from a disciplinary background that has neglected it; but it is a bit absurd to treat transcribed tapes of interaction as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. When a society is gone, we must glean all we can from texts that remain, and contrary to some opinion, such work is arduous, disciplined, and often revealing. But again, it is a bit absurd to invent an amateur philology to deal with the life outside one’s door. I have read elaborate analysis of verbal interaction that failed to consider the other aspects of verbal interaction to each other, attributing to complexities of words what may have depended on eye-contact; and imputations of intention and construal that neglected intonation (like many grammarians to be sure) and that failed to consult or consider the interpretations of the participants themselves.

(Hymes 1974a: 81)

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This passage is instructive because it contains the foundations of the three main problems many linguistic anthropologists and ethnographers see in the conversation analysis paradigm:

(i)a repeated disinterest in the “larger context,” for instance, where and when the exchanges being analyzed took place, and a disregard for non-verbal or gestural aspects of face-to-face communication;13

(ii)a rudimentary notion of what constitutes speech (as demonstrated by a transcription system that does not take full account of the prosodic features of spoken language);

(iii)a disregard for the interpretations that the participants themselves might provide of their own behavior.

Since I have already mentioned some of the reasons for (iii) above (e.g. speakers are often not aware of their own speech behavior) and have already discussed some of the limitations of the transcription conventions used by conversation analysts in chapter 5, I will here concentrate on (i) and some of its ramifications. Hymes’s first criticism is akin to what Goffman ([1976]1981: 32) later characterized as the “sins of noncontextuality,” that is, “the assumption that bits of conversation can be analyzed in their own right in some independence of what was occurring at the time and place.”14 It would presumably be “sinful” for Goffman and Hymes to discuss an adjacency pair like (9) above, here repeated as (30), without saying that A is a teacher and B is a student:

Without providing the contextual information that the questioner is a teacher, how would we account for the fact that a person is asking a question about something that she already knows? Similarly problematic would be a discussion of the other adjacency pairs. The exchange in (10), for example, is taken from a trial in the northern province of Nan in Thailand. A lawyer asks his client a question

13But see Goodwin (1979, 1981) on the fine interaction between eye gaze movements and turn construction (see section 8.3.2).

14Goffman had been Sacks’s teacher at Berkeley and undoubtedly had an influence on him in the early graduate years (Schegloff 1989: 194, 1992a: xxiii-xxiv), but he later became critical of Sacks’s approach to the study of conversation and refused to sign Sacks’s dissertation, which was eventually approved by a committee chaired by Aaron Cicourel (Schegloff 1992a: xxiii fn 18). Goffman’s relationship to conversation analysis is certainly made more complex by the apparent contradiction between his advocacy of the study of everyday behavior and his protracted disinterest in, if not aversion to, electronic recording of verbal interaction, as demonstrated, for instance, by his initial opposition to Marjorie Goodwin’s audio recording of children’s conversations (M.H. Goodwin, personal communication).

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which is meant to be for the judge who needs to record the information in a particular format: Title + Personal Name + Family Name (Moerman 1988: 58). This format, hence, is designed for a third party. Without knowing who the third party is or what the conventions are, we would not be able to make sense of the answer to the question.

The examples of greetings – in (7) and (8) – must be understood within the context of a range of possible greetings in the community. Since not everyone greets in the same way in either Italy or Kenya – and in fact Milton (1982) argues that greetings in Kenya are important strategies for defining one’s affiliation with a particular group within the same speech community–, how can we discuss greetings without reference to the relationship between the parties involved? The line of reasoning should be obvious by now: adjacency pairs (or any other unit proposed by conversation analysts) do not happen in a vacuum. Hence, their study must include the “context” in which they occur.

How have conversation analysts answered such criticism? Primarily in two ways. I will refer to them as (i) the autonomous claim and (ii) the relevance issue.

8.3.1The autonomous claim

The first type of rebuttal is a claim that turns the criticism about “noncontextuality” on its own head. Conversation analysts claim that what appears to be a problem to anthropologists and sociologists like Hymes and Goffman is in fact a strength of conversation analysis. This position is clearly articulated in the following programmatic statement made by Sacks in one of his lectures:

Now, what I’m going to be doing is taking small parts of a thing and building out from them, because small parts can be identified and worked on without regard to the larger thing they’re part of. And they can work in a variety of larger parts than the one they happen to be working in. I don’t do that just as a matter of simplicity, but ...

the image I have is of this machinery, where you would have some standardized gadget that you can stick in here and there and that can work in a variety of different machines. And you go through the warehouse picking them up to build some given thing you want to build. So these smaller components are first to be identified because they are components perhaps for lots of other tasks than the one they’re used in. (Sacks [1965] 1992a: 159)

This quote exposes what I have elsewhere called the “autonomous” quality of conversation analysis (Duranti 1988a: 223). Paradoxically, the stress on the autonomy of conversational mechanisms aligns conversation analysts with generative grammarians and other structuralist linguists who focus on grammar and

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ignore use (see chapter 6).15 As we saw earlier, however, the fact that a question will call for an answer, an assessment (preferably) for an agreement, and a greeting for another greeting is just a starting point. What researchers do with these observations depends on their creativity and the kinds of questions they are interested in. If the same interactional mechanisms can be used to do many different things, there are many different questions and issues that can (and should) be pursued – and Sacks’s brilliant lectures provide a wealth of such questions, albeit not always compelling solutions. The “autonomous” stand can thus be seen as a strategy for unveiling recurring conversational structures that can be later connected to “larger” or simply “different” contexts (Schegloff 1987 and 1992a). A few extensions of conversation analysts’ findings to communities outside of the United States have followed this assumption. This is the case with Michael Moerman’s (1977, 1988) research on Thai conversations, Niko Besnier’s (1989) account of self-initiated repair in Tuvaluan conversation, and Elinor Ochs’s discussion of the practice of “clarification” by Samoan caregivers (Ochs 1984, 1988: 130–43). All three studies, among others, are in fact mentioned by Schegloff (1987) as successful examples of conversation analytical concepts applied to crosscultural research.

When we look at these studies in some detail, we realize that the claims made in them crucially rely on extended ethnographic work among the people whose talk is being analyzed. In each case, ethnography provides important insights into the analysis of the repair mechanism, and shapes the kinds of questions asked by the researchers. Linguistic anthropologists analyzing repair mechanisms tend to be interested not only in how repairs are sequentially organized but also in what they accomplish for the participants as members of a particular community of speakers. Besnier (1989), for instance, analyzes how Tuvaluan speakers in Nukulaelae (Polynesia) “commonly withhold an essential piece of information or proffer an ambiguous or problematic reference at certain strategic locations in gossip interactions, thereby eliciting repair-initiation by the audience” (Besnier 1989: 325). An example is provided in (31) below, where speaker K’s utterance is framed by F as not providing sufficient information on whom K is talking about. This type of ambiguity is made possible by the grammatical structure of the language which, through so-called zero anaphora (see chapter 6), allows for a sentence to occur without a Subject.16

15This is a paradoxical similarity because of the contrast between conversation analysts’ insistence on looking only at actual conversation to build hypotheses about rule-gov- erned behavior and Chomsky’s skepticism toward such a methodology (see, for instance, Chomsky 1965, 1986). For a discussion of the differences between generative grammar and conversation analysis, see Bilmes (1988b).

16For a similar phenomenon in Italian conversations, see Testa (1991).

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and Inc come Comp Caus+fall with his fishing-loreinday this “An’ (he) comes along an’ starts to pontificate about his knowledge of fishing”

→F: = A ai?=

Foc who “Who?”

K:= Manono.

“Manono.”

(Besnier 1989: 325)

In similar situations analyzed by Goodwin (1987) in American English conversations, the interlocutors are expected to make explicit proposals about the identity of the missing or problematic material.

In contrast, Nukulaelae interlocutors refrain from providing possible identifications for the problematic material and instead initiate repair sequences that encourage the principal speaker to supply the problematic material. (Besnier 1989: 332)

This information-withholding routine is interesting to Besnier not only because of its sequential structure, but also because (i) it displays a tendency not to guess what the other speaker is thinking, and (ii) it tells us something about how the people in Nukulaelae organize the dissemination of information that might be problematic. The avoidance of guessing what another is saying seems related to a pan-Polynesian or perhaps Pan-Pacific resistance toward reading the mind of another person (Duranti 1988b, 1993b; Ochs 1984, 1988; Schieffelin 1986). The way in which information is disseminated shows a preference for sharing the responsibility for what is being revealed. This strategy is seen by Besnier as part of spontaneous gossip sessions between two people of the same gender who become the primary participants among a larger group of people. One of the effects of withholding information is that the teller of the story shares responsibility with the story’s primary recipient. Besnier suggests that revealing who said or did what is constructed by the participants as initiated by the primary recipient’s question. The audience becomes co-author (Duranti and Brenneis 1986). On the other hand, one might also speculate that the use of repair-initiators such as “who?” or “what?” forces the person who is gossiping to be more explicit and foreground information that otherwise might have been left as ambiguous or vague. This research links the discussion of repair to the issue of responsibility, a dimension of human interaction that used to be the preoccupation of legal

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anthropologists (Gluckman 1965, 1972; Nader 1969) and has recently become a rich area of investigation for linguistic anthropologists, given that evidence is so often produced by means of narrative accounts and reported speech (Hill and Irvine 1993).

What this example shows is that, although the structures analyzed by Besnier and other linguistic anthropologists are based upon and benefit from conversation analysts’ work, the goals of their research and the kinds of questions they ask about such structures are different. Such questions can only be asked when researchers have access to the wealth of information provided by ethnographic methods. One cannot speculate about what is known by the participants or the consequences of what is said without having lived in a community and having gained an understanding of local norms for sharing information and making claims about what is important and valuable.

The fact that conversation analysts (or other discourse analysts) often work in their own community or on linguistic material in their native language is often given as a justification for the lack of ethnographic methods. Prolonged partici- pant-observation is cast as a need only for those who want to analyze an “exotic”or different culture. But it is a myth that one needs ethnography only to study other cultures or people who speak a different language. The entire history of anthropology is based on the idea that there is important value, however limited, in becoming “professional strangers” (Agar 1980), that is, in placing ourselves in a world that we do not take for granted and try to understand from someone else’s point of view, engaging in the task of bracketing our prejudice and any previous knowledge. The fact that such a task is difficult and perhaps never fully realizable is not a reason to avoid it altogether. Although conversation analysts would agree on the need to suspend our judgment and our preconceived ideas about how speakers behave and why they do what they do, some of them also implicitly support the view that less work needs to be done when the subjects of our investigations are our neighbors or people who speak our dialect. However, an argument could be made that it is precisely in the study of our own culture that we, as members, are more likely to take things for granted and thus assume what should not be assumed. Finally, to the extent to which we recognize the need of ethnography in some cases,17 we cannot in principle rule it out in any case, given that we cannot know in advance when we will need the information that would be made available only through ethnographic research.

17Thus, in writing about Cicourel’s (1992) plea for the need of ethnography in making sense of how certain terms are used in a medical context, Schegloff admits that “[e]thnographic research may, of course, have been necessary to enable the analyst to recognize the sense and import of such terms as display the relevance of some aspect of context, or to recognize that seemingly ordinary words have such an import” (Schegloff 1992b: 223).

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