Page 37 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 15

these practices can be located in action by pursuing ethnographic investigations
that relate to specific communicative situations.

2. Ethnography of communication

The ethnography of communication approach introduced new perspective that
focused on how language functions in actual ethnographically documented
speech events, rather than on relations between community wide cultural norms
and linguistic structures abstracted from talk. Begun in the 1960s, the eth-
nography of communication provided the insight that culture was essentially a
communicative phenomenon, constituted through talk. It thus gave the impetus
for the emerging linguistic anthropology of the 1980s and onward (Duranti
2001). Although as anthropologists we also speak of culture in quite general
terms, we argue that we can study how culture works by observing or partici-
pating in a range of culturally distinct events. Building on the 1960s writings of
Dell Hymes and others, the Ethnography of Communication (Hymes 1974;
Gumperz and Hymes 1964, 1972; Bauman and Sherzer 1974) laid out an initial
program of comparative research on language use that combines participant eth-
nographic field work with linguistic analysis. Roman Jakobson’s notion of the
speech event was adopted as an intermediate level of analysis that provides
more access to the interpretive processes motivating participants’ actions.
Events are units of analysis in terms of which interpretive practices can be
examined in detail. At the same time, events are also valorized entities that fre-
quently enter into public sphere discussions about the event.
The early writings on speech events stimulated a great deal of comparative
ethnographic research in various parts of the world on the relevant underlying
cultural assumptions and structures of event performances, such as who could
participate, what topics could be discussed, and on the social norms governing
participation. Later on, as more empirical data became available, work began to
focus on in-depth interpretive examination of the discourse that constitutes the
event. The basic insight here is that the traditional analysts’ community-level
cultural categories neither demonstrably reflect what motivates account for
speakers’ actions ins everyday encounters. So far, however, most researchers
have been concerned with specifying what such implicit knowledge is, not with
how it enters into interpretations.
Examples of speech events typically described in the literature of the time
are ritual performances, ceremonies, or magical rites such as are found in small,
traditional, largely face-to-face societies, or encounters in urban minority
speech events and routines. Most of the everyday encounters that are part of
contemporary bureaucratic life, as many of the chapters in this volume demon-
strate, such as the job interviews, counseling sessions, committee meetings,