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allow us to see patterns we couldn’t see before. Participation as an analytical dimension becomes a powerful instrument for the study of the constitution of society, with its pre-established roles and statuses and its routine negotiation of such roles and statuses through communication. The recognition of participation as a contested ground where differentiation is not only possible but systematically achieved can also help us reconceptualize previously neutral terms like linguistic repertoire (see section 3.4):

What sociolinguists call the linguistic repertoire is a set of resources for the articulation of multiple memberships and forms of participation. And an individual’s ways of speaking in a particular community of practice are not simply a function of membership or participation in that community. A way of speaking in a community does not simply constitute a turning on of a community-specific linguistic switch, or the symbolic laying of claim to membership in that community, but a complex articulation of the individual forms of participation in that community with participation in other communities that are salient at the time. In turn, the linguistic practices of any given community of practice will be continually changing as a result of the many saliencies that come into play through its multiple members.

(Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992: 97)

The challenge, then, for linguistic anthropologists and other students of language as an instrument, carrier, and product of social relations is to test different units of analysis to find the one that allows us to make previously unseen or undocumented connections between the micro-level of face-to-face verbal interaction and the macro-level of institutional statuses, roles, and identities.

9.4Authorship, intentionality, and the joint construction of interpretation

The subtle distinctions and the examples discussed above not only imply that the categories “speaker” and “hearer” are too crude for linguistic analysis but also that the notion of authorship must be reconceptualized. If our starting point in analyzing speech is participation instead of individual speakers, we must reconsider what it means to encode and decode meaning. Individuals are of course involved in meaning-making, but the responsibility for the shape and content of messages shifts from individual speakers to particular types of participant frameworks. Once we enlarge the domain of investigation to include the social organization of how messages are collaboratively constructed and interpreted, we also need to move beyond traditional notions of language-mind relations. Empirical

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investigations show that many (if not all) of the acts that in the idealized world of intuitions and imagined interactions might be seen as the product of one individual, namely, the speaker, are in fact the collaborative work of several participants.24 This collaborative and collective nature of encoding and decoding messages is true not only of ritual encounters where a person speaks on behalf of another or on behalf of a group, but also of more ordinary speech events, where individuals seem to be speaking and acting for themselves.

Earlier accounts of narrative activities within conversation analysis (e.g. Sacks 1992b: 222ff; Jefferson 1978) identified fairly strict roles in the telling of stories in conversation. In particular, a distinction was typically made between teller and recipient of the story. The teller is the one who must introduce the story and get permission by the recipient(s) to go on. More recently, Jennifer Mandelbaum (1987) has drawn some more subtle distinctions in the participant frameworks found during storytelling. She distinguishes between teller-driven and recipientdriven stories. The former is a series of extended turns by one speaker interrupted by demonstrations of attentiveness by the recipients through various kinds of back channel signals (e.g. mhmh, really?). The latter is an activity in which “teller and recipient together work out what a storytelling is ‘about’ and how it is to be understood” (Mandelbaum 1987: 238). This distinction may not always work. In particular, the work on family narratives mentioned above shows that

The assignment of the roles of teller and audience, or teller and recipient, to whole narratives ultimately breaks down in conversational storytelling in which many participants construct the story. Particularly where storytelling includes close friends and family members, the telling can be widely distributed. Particularly in these cases it makes better sense to assign the roles of teller and audience/recipient turn-by-turn as the storytelling evolves. At one moment a participant may be teller and the next a recipient.

(Ochs 1997: 200)

In the study of family storytelling all family members present are considered co-tellers. A distinction is made, however, between an initial teller, the person who introduces the story, and other tellers, who contribute to the telling as the story proceeds. Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, and Smith (1992) show that co-narrators often re-script narratives and in so doing provide alternative explanations or framings of the narrated events – hence their argument that stories should be seen as “theories” and storytelling as “theory building.” Co-narrators might

24The term “collaborative” in this case should not be interpreted as implying an equal sharing of interpretive resources and interpretive rights (see, for instance, the discussion of byplay and “father-knows-best” above).

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bring in new information that implicitly challenges an initial version of a story or explicitly challenges an initial interpretation of events (Ochs et al. 1992: 59). For example in (15) below, although it was Lucy who introduced the story about a schoolmate who gets only one day of detention, it is her mother who continues the story illustrating Lucy’s psychological response to the offensive actions:

[a few lines left out]

Mother: (cuz Lucy) was really embarassed ((nodding yes, talking while eating))

(1.6)

Mother: (I mean you/Lucy really) would have like to kill the – the girl – huh?

Lucy: ((nods yes slowly, as she chews, fork in mouth))

[

Mother: (cuz) you were upset with her – ((speaking very fast)) But you were held back because you (thought) your school was goin’ to do it and the school didn’t do it and you feel upset

(Ochs et al. 1992: 47)

These data show that in actual conversation stories are co-authored by a number of speakers. Co-authorship might in fact be a much more widespread phenomenon (Duranti and Brenneis 1986). When we look at utterances from the point of view of the participant framework within which they occur, even speech acts that seem produced solely by one individual (e.g. making an offer, accusing, greeting, expressing an opinion, making a request) are in fact the cooperative effort by a number of participants, only some of whom (the ratified ones) see their behavior recognized as relevant. This means that at any given moment in social interaction, there are a number of potential and actual co-authors. Whether or not someone’s verbal or kinetic acts are recognized as contributing to what is being said and done depends on a number of factors, including local theories of authorship, intentionality, responsibility (Duranti 1993a, b; Heritage 1990/91;

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Hill and Irvine 1993; Mandelbaum 1993; Rosen 1995), and context-specific uses of the available perceptual resources. The question “whose voice is heard?” often translates into the question “whose voice counts?” (Lindstrom 1992). Ideology plays a bigger role than is usually realized in the organization of perception. This is true of the researcher’s theory of communication as well as of the the participants’. In traditional quantitative sociolinguistics, for instance, the interview is used as the main and often only speech event from which to gather data on speech patterns. When we look at the transcripts of data collected in this fashion we are often given the wrong impression that the speaker is engaged in a lengthy monologue whereas in fact the interviewer is constantly providing feedback and the interpretive frame for the answer to make sense. When these tapes are played, we may also hear that the voice of the interviewer is in the background (e.g. it is less loud and less clear). An important theoretical choice has been made to favor one individual speaker as the producer/author. Similarly, when we hear reports about what participants say went on in a particular setting

– e.g. in ethnographic interviews –, we must remember that within each situation there are locally accepted and locally acceptable theories of who speaks, on what topic, on behalf of whom, and to whom. Participants in a public meeting, for instance, might remember or be willing to remember or mention only portions of what the official speaker(s) said and may leave out the side comments, gasps, or silences of the audience which might be just as important.

The focus on units of participation contrasts with speech act theory’s traditional interest in individual speakers and their intentions (see section 7.1.2). Searle’s theory of communication not only privileges the speaker over other participants in the interpretive process, it also uses the notion of intentions in an unproblematic way. Intentions are discussed as something readily available to anyone’s reflections on the basis of introspection. This is true even of the notion of collective intentionality recently introduced by Searle (1990).

There is no question that, as semioticians have long been arguing (e.g. Morris 1938), for something to be a “sign” (see section 5.3), it needs to be a “sign for someone.” Puffs of air produced through someone’s mouth acquire a meaning, that is, can be the representation of some message, if there are people who can assign an interpretation to them. The question is where does such an interpretation come from? How is it assigned? Who or what is responsible for it? Searle believes that the source of representation, what makes it possible for something to be a sign and gives it content, is the human mind. Utterances can mean something because we have mental states. Such mental states are intentions (to do something) which can be externalized through speech (or other forms of human action). For Searle, this does not mean that we must consciously think before speaking “I am going to say X in order to achieve Y,” but that even when we

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speak spontaneously and apparently without premeditation, we are acting out intentions – Searle’s distinction between prior intentions and intentions in action is supposed to capture the difference between conscious and unconscious intentional action (Searle 1983: 84ff).

The problem with this theory is not the reliance on the human mind. Of course the mind is involved in anything we do, including and especially thinking and speaking. Nor is a problem the fact that intentions enter the discussion. Intentionality, as the property of human consciousness to focus on something, to be about something, is central to understanding human action. This was Franz Brentano’s original definition of intentionality, as Husserl reminds us:

We understand under Intentionality the unique peculiarity of experiences “to be the consciousness of something.” ... perceiving is the perceiving of something, maybe a thing; judging, the judging of a certain matter; valuation, the valuing of a value; wish, the wish for the content wished, and so on. (Husserl [1913]1931: 223)

When people engage in conversation or any other form of social intercourse, their interactions are definitely about something, in that sense there is intentionality in them. However, the use of intentions for explaining people’s behavior, speech included, runs into several problems when used as the paramount interpretive tool. There are two sorts of problems with the emphasis on intentions that characterize speech act theory: (i) participants do not always display orientation toward (or interest in) what others are intending; (ii) any reconstruction of participants’ intentions (included the reconstruction made by the analyst) must rely on information that is available in the context of the interaction.

As admitted by speech act theorists, intentions in order to be realized must rely on particular contextual (or felicity) conditions (see chapter 7), which are not a predefined set of features. The range of factors or dimensions that constitute context change in the course of the interaction and hence for the interpreters themselves, who routinely restrict or enlarge the relevant context (Goodwin and Duranti 1992). Time and space are part of any act of interpretation. This means that participants in a joint activity must on any given occasion rely on a number of features that they see as relevant to interpreting what is going on, what is likely to happen, and what to do next. Since no one can really read other people’s mind, guessing what others are up to or “mean” must crucially involve the interpretation of information that is outside the speaker’s mind. Thus, in the real world the locus of meaning and by implication the locus of interpretation is typically external, in publicly available behaviors, in already made symbols, and in the built environment we inhabit, use, and modify (see section 9.5). In other words, meaning is not only in people’s mind, it is also in routine actions –

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e.g. types of participant frameworks (see above) – and ready-to-use artifacts (e.g. houses, rooms, furniture, pencils, notebooks, computers, telephones, etc.) that allow us to interface with one another in particular ways. The idea that the meaning of the use of such routine courses of action and artifacts can be described as due to intentional states in the mind of the participants misses a crucial dimension of human action, namely, what Heidegger called the unobstrusiveness of the beings we encounter in everyday life.

We do not always and continually have explicit perception of the things surrounding us in a familiar environment, certainly not in such a way that we would be aware of them expressly as handy. It is precisely because an explicit awareness and assurance of their being at hand does not occur that we have them around us in a peculiar way, just as they are in themselves. In the indifferent imperturbability of our customary commerce with them, they become accessible precisely with regard to their unobtrusive presence. The presupposition for the possible equanimity of our dealing with things is, among others, the uninterrupted quality of that commerce. At the basis of this undisturbed imperturbability of our commerce with things, there lies a peculiar temporality which makes it possible to take a handy equipmental contexture in such a way that we lose ourselves in it. (Heidegger 1988: 309)

For social interaction to work, most of the time we must “lose ourselves in it.” When we stop to think about what is happening or what went wrong, we enter a particular type of monitoring of social action during which we can invoke a set of norms that explain what went wrong or what should have happened (Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984). This type of monitoring or reflexive activity is also what produces the kinds of interpretations of speakers’ intentions proposed by speech act theorists. The discourse of intentionality is thus intimately connected to a discourse of responsibility. This is true not only because intentions are typically reconstructed to assign responsibility for something that has been done, but also because in many contexts responsibility is one of the main criteria whereby an act is interpreted. Participants often do not ask themselves and each other “what did he mean?” but “what does this mean?” That is, once performed, an act is evaluated on the basis of its social consequences.25

25The issue of the role of intentionality in interpreting language has received much attention in the last two decades. In addition to the references already cited, see Apel (1991), Bogen (1987), De Mulder (1993), Dennett (1987), Derrida (1977[see Hoy 1986]), Du Bois (1993), Duranti (1988b, 1993a, b), Grice (1971), Hoy (1986), Leilich (1993), Lepore and Van Gulick (1991), Nuyts (1991, 1993, 1994), Searle (1983, 1986, 1990).

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In fact, in many societies, people do not believe that it is possible to get into “someone else’s mind” (Ortner 1979; Schieffelin 1986; Shore 1982). Discussing the issue of interpretation from a crosscultural perspective, Rosen (1995a: 1) writes:

... what might at first seem a wholly ideational issue [namely, interpretation] is, in fact, deeply entwined with the nature and distribution of power, the portrayal of events and the assessment of personhood, the relation of trust and deception, and the social assigning of moral and legal responsibility.

An anthropologically minded theory of interpretation must incorporate these intuitions about language and power or language and personhood, in the analysis of specific communicative acts. As we saw in chapter 7, Rosaldo and others argued that speech act theorists’ ideas about interpretation are influenced by western theories and practices, including existing beliefs about what a person is and how we can know about reality or influence other people’s thoughts and actions. Linguistic anthropologists see the reliance on mental states to explain what we mean by language as influenced by these beliefs. But there is more to it. I believe

– and in this I am very much in agreement with conversation analysts (see chapter 8) – that such an exclusive interest in speakers’ intentions is also due to methodological and analytical limitations. Searle, like many other philosophers, argues about language or social action starting from made-up situations based on his own intuitions on individually conceived acts. He typically discusses what an act or expression might mean in a generalized, that is, idealized context. It is only in such an idealized world that speakers produce utterances completely on their own, without having to reckon with their audience and without seeing their speech acquire meaning as part of a joint activity in which others help shape what is being said and what is being meant. When we examine the ways in which different participants enter the production of even the smallest utterance, we find that the responsibility for its interpretation is typically distributed across participants as well as material resources. Interpretation is social not simply because there must be publicly shared conventions, a point that Searle has no problems recognizing, but because the more we look at how people engage in interpretation, the more we realize that it is an activity that involves a range of publicly shared resources and products. Participants’ intentions are one of such resources and not always the most important one. The intentions of a speaker may or may not be what the recipient takes to be the relevant context for interpreting speech. I have argued this position in the past on the basis of linguistic and ethnographic material collected during my field work in Western Samoa. In Duranti (1988b, 1993b), I show that participants in political arenas such as the

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