9

Units of participation

A common thread across the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth century has been the conceptualization of human behavior as a series of interacting and yet autonomous systems, each of which can be further divided into smaller and smaller components. As we saw in chapters 5 and 6, in linguistics this trend has meant the decomposition of human discourse into sentences, phrases, words, morphemes, phonemes, and distinctive features. This work has given us a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of human speech, its different layers, and some of the ways in which the different layers feed into each other, but it has not answered the question of how speakers manage to connect the smaller units of language to the larger entities such units participate in. The approaches discussed in the last two chapters are attempts to come to grips with this problem by connecting linguistic forms with either individual acts or sequences of acts. In this chapter, I will expand the discussion presented in those chapters by exploring other units of analysis. The running theme this time will be “participation.”

Participation – to be discussed here as both a dimension of human interaction and a perspective of analysis – is a concept that draws from a variety of schools within linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Sociolinguists have tended to focus on participation as an issue between the individual and larger reference groups or aggregates such as networks (Milroy 1980; Milroy and Milroy 1985) and speech communities (Hudson 1980; Labov 1966; Romaine 1982; Walters 1988). Linguistic anthropologists, on the other hand, have tended to study language as used in face-to-face interactions such as ceremonial exchanges, oratorical performances, narrative activities, jokes, and arguments. This difference in the object of inquiry is partly due to the different field conditions in which sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists participate, with the former usually working in large urban communities and the latter in smaller, typically rural communities. Although the concept of participation discussed in this chapter is an outcome of the latter type of research, its extension to other field conditions and research endeavors is a challenge that new generations of

280

9.1 The notion of activity in Vygotskian psychology

linguistic anthropologists working in urban settings should feel encouraged to take on.

As I have done in prior chapters, here I will briefly review the intellectual roots of the concepts introduced. I will also give some examples of the kinds of analyses that are possible within the framework established by the notion of “participation.” I will argue that to think in terms of units of participation helps us reconnect those aspects of language discussed in previous chapters with other, often forgotten, dimensions of the human experience, including the role played by the speakers’ bodies, the material resources that surround and are used by speakers, and the social institutions constituted by linguistic practices. To think about speakers as participants means then to move beyond speech and even beyond speech as action to include the fuller experience of what it means to be a member of a speech community. At the same time, participation is a dimension of speaking that has grammatical roots as well, as shown by the work on deixis and metalinguistic or metapragmatic frames. This chapter brings together these different dimensions of participation, which have so far been studied within separate research traditions. I will start with the notion of “activity” as used in Vygotskian psychology (section 9.1), and the notion of speech event (section 9.2), first in Jakobson’s and then in Hymes’s formulation. I will then discuss three related but different units of analysis that claim to take participation as the starting point for the study of face-to-face interaction (section 9.3). The deconstruction of the notions of “speaker” and “hearer” done by Goffman and other authors will allow us to enter the discussion of authorship, intentionality, and the joint construction of interpretation (section 9.4). I will then conclude the chapter by extending the context of analysis to the built environment and the use of the human body and vision in interaction (section 9.5). A study of face-to-face greetings will provide an example of the kind of integrated analysis that is possible by combining the focus on participation with the use of audio-visual documentation proposed in chapters 4 and 5.

9.1The notion of activity in Vygotskian psychology

Wittgenstein’s notion of language games (chapter 7) takes the notion of activity as central for the study of meaning. This is a major shift in the study of language as action because while it attempts to integrate language with action it also provides a way of thinking about larger frames within which language operates. Rather than starting from utterances, as speech act theorists do, Wittgenstein suggested starting from what people were actually doing together – remember the example of the use of nouns like block, pillar, slab, beam between a builder and his assistant at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations (see section 7.4).

Wittgenstein was not alone in thinking in terms of activities. A similar

281

Units of participation

approach was developed within Soviet psychology roughly around the same time.1 It began with Lev Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development as crucially implying mediated activity between a novice (e.g. a child) and an expert (an adult) (see section 2.1.4). After Vygotsky’s death, his ideas were elaborated by some of his disciples, A. N. Leontyev in particular, into what became known as activity theory. As discussed by Wertsch (1981), one of the basic issues that activity theory tries to address is the relationship between consciousness and the material world. For Soviet psychologists like Vygotsky, Leontyev, and Rubinshtein this question arises out of a theoretical position that was influenced by Marx and Engels’s discussion of ideology and Marx’s criticism of previous materialistic theories (see articles in Wertsch 1985a). In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx emphasizes the importance of maintaining a relationship between consciousness and humans’ sensual, practical activity in the world:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism ... is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism – but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

(Marx [1845] 1978: 143) (Emphasis in the original)

This position was transformed by Vygotsky and his colleagues into the question of how to develop a theory of the human mind that would take seriously the fact that thinking subjects do not just think, but they also move, build, touch, feel, and, above all, interact with other beings and material objects through both physical and semiotic activity. This perspective, which is often absent in North American cognitive psychology,2 is close to (and in some cases supported by) recent anthropological theories that treat culture as practices rather than simply patterns of thought (see chapter 2). In both cases, the issue is how to reconcile what appear to be individually controlled cognitive processes with interactionally achieved public performances where individuals are involved in producing a

1Although there seems to be no evidence of a direct link between Wittgenstein and the Soviet psychologists I am about to discuss, some indirect or mediated links exist. For one thing, Vygotsky read Bühler, who was in Austria at roughly the same time while Wittgenstein was meditating his “turn” (see chapter 7). Other connections are also possible. It would be safe to say that the idea of “activity” as a unit of analysis of mental and linguistic faculties was “around” in European intellectual and academic circles in the

1920s and 1930s.

2But see Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989), Rogoff (1990), Rogoff and Lave (1984), Wertsch (1985a, 1985b).

282

9.1 The notion of activity in Vygotskian psychology

joint activity that seems more than the mere sum of its parts. Vygotsky’s solution to this problem was to reverse the usual relationship between the individual and society. Rather than starting from the individual and thinking of joint activity as the sum of individual cognitive processes and actions, Vygotsky proposed a theory of development in which individual (or intrapsychological) faculties arise out of interactional (or interpsychological) processes. An example he gives is the development of pointing, which starts with the child’s unsuccessful attempt to reach for an object (see also Cassirer 1955: 181). The movement of the child’s arm becomes a communicative act (a sign) when the mother interprets it as a manifestation of the child’s attempt to do something.

Consequently, the primary meaning of that unsuccessful grasping movement is established by others. Only later, when the child can link his unsuccessful grasping movement to the objective situation as a whole, does he begin to understand this movement as pointing. At this juncture there occurs a change in that movement’s function: from an object-oriented movement it becomes a movement aimed at another person, a means of establishing relations. The grasping movement changes to the act of pointing. As a result of this change, the movement itself is then physically simplified, and what results is the form of pointing that we may call a true gesture.

(Vygotsky 1978: 56) (Emphasis in original)

Starting from this perspective, Leontyev extended Vygotsky’s work mainly in two ways. First, by taking an evolutionary perspective, Leontyev ([1959] 1981) proposes to think of consciousness as a human faculty that arose from human labor. Humans learned to coordinate their actions around a common goal that superseded and in some cases went against their individual needs. For example, in an organized hunt, the beater, instead of satisfying the immediate need to feed himself, must chase the prey away. This is a truly intellectual move.3 Leontyev believes that it is in the context of such complex activities that humans developed consciousness. Second, Leontyev expanded Vygotsky’s intuition about the importance of social interaction for cognitive development into a theory that took activity as the basic unit of analysis. Activity for Leontyev is a “unit of life for the material, corporeal subject” ([1975] 1979: 46). The function of activity is “to orient the subject in the world of objects” (ibid.).

This perspective includes dimensions of interaction that are crucial for the

3It should be pointed, however, that this move alone could not be the determining factor in the development of consciousness given that there are other animals who hunt in a group (e.g. wolves) and are thus capable of subordinating their individual goals to those of the group.

283