A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication states from the outset that interpersonal communication is culturally specific, and argues that no society has the “right” way of communicating. Students are encouraged to reflect on their personal methods of communication and to be aware of intertextuality, that is, linkages between and betwixt material they read, as well as of the reflexivity of information they collect.
Informed by seven years of teaching and feedback received from students and faculty, the material is very practical and draws on experiences from students’ personal communicative situations. Articles used in the collection are drawn from diverse disciplines--linguistics, anthropology, folklore--and are international in their coverage. The collection highlights performance-based ethnography, an ethnography of speaking that brings to the fore the emergent nature of language use.
The book is in five parts, leading us from an introduction in which students are encouraged to challenge the ethnographic methods espoused by various writers and instructors, to readings that deal with ethnographic methodology and practice, the sociolinguistics of language and language use, communication within the group with the aim of constructing a group identity, and how interpersonal communication is used to create and maintain intra-institutional norms.
The collection is a student-user-friendly one, with introductory notes that prompt students on what to look out for in each section. It encourages students to find answers to questions of the form: how does the field develop and use its terminologies? how are these explicated in the materials presented? how similar or dissimilar is this from your own culture? These are questions students are expected to pay heed to as they read the articles; each instance of socially-organized communication has an intended function.
Many articles make commonplace activities seem exotic, while others talk of an “us” versus a “them,” contrasting emic and etic positions and thereby making it incumbent upon the ethnographer to study the culture of the target community to better appreciate its language and interpretive frames. Bauman espouses five principles that govern communication and communicative practices, and like many others, asks that in addition to knowing the specific social situations, we need to look more closely at what people actually say and do, in the Dell Hymes tradition.
Understanding the larger ethnographic contexts within which conversations occur is of major interest to another category of articles in the latter part of the reader. Articles in this category espouse individual identity construction within the larger community without sacrificing social cohesion,reminiscent of Grice’s Cooperative Principle, which states inter alia that humans need to respect each other’s face concerns in discourse situations, as well as Goffman’s seminal work on "face work" during social discourse.
Monaghan and Goodman have put together a rich course book for training would-be ethnographers. The book is a must-read, and I recommend it to both students and teachers of ethnography and ethnomethodology. Even if the brevity of the selected articles disappoints a reader who would have wanted more depth, they provide good practice material and also serve the useful purpose of motivating students to do further readings of the full-length works and engage in their own “thick descriptions” (as in Geertz) that come about as a result of close observation.
Works Cited.
Hymes, Dell. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Anthropology and Human Behavior, edited by T. Gladwin and W. Sturtevant, 13-53. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1962.
Grice, H.P. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 3:41-58. New York: Academic Press, 1975.
Goffman, Erving. "On Face Work. An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction." Psychiatry 18(1955):213-231. Reprinted in Communication in Face to Face Interaction, edited by J. Laver and S. Hutcheson, 319-346. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Geertz, Clifford. Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
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[Review length: 627 words • Review posted on April 5, 2007]