Ethnographers and discourse analysts have sometimes debated whether their respective approaches are complementary or oppositional. Here we focus on the single most significant disagreement in this area – between ethnographers and conversation analysts, the latter representing a highly influential approach to analysing spoken interaction.
Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis
Historically, ethnographers did not collect verbatim spoken interaction data from the people they studied; doing so was virtually impossible before the advent of the portable tape recorder. Where ethnographers focused on lan- guage at all, they almost always focused on ritualized and monologic forms. By the 1970s, however, ethnographic studies were being conducted which included spoken interaction; these were first undertaken in the ethnography of
communication framework (Hymes 1964), which sought to study the particular
linguistic practices of sociocultural groups. A related innovation was microeth-
nography, first developed as a methodological option in classroom ethnography
(Erickson 1992). Applying these approaches, ethnographers carried out major studies, including some which traced ‘at-risk’ students’ educational difficulties to their culturally based verbal interaction styles vis-à-vis tacit middle-class norms (e.g. Heath 1983).
Starting in the 1960s, a group of sociologists led by Harvey Sacks (e.g. Sacks et al. 1974) developed conversation analysis (CA) (see Wilkinson and Kitzinger this volume), seeking to discover principles of social organization within moment- to-moment social interaction rather than via externally imposed, ‘top-down’ concepts like culture and social class. They based their findings on the pains- taking analysis of detailed transcripts of conversations, and later other kinds of interaction. A central tenet of CA is that the emic structure of talk can only be determined from within the linguistic context of interaction, as reflected in interlocutors’ own responses to talk. That is, recourse to ‘transcript- extrinsic’ (Nelson 1994) information of the sort traditional ethnography gathers – for example, information not demonstrably relevant to participants in particular interactions – is ruled analytically out of court.
More specifically, conversation analysts and their allies critiqued ethno- graphic studies because they: (1) depended on a priori categories and assumed contextual influences – such as cultural norms, socio-institutional identities (e.g. doctor, female, working class) and local factors (e.g. past relationships among individuals) – to explain social behaviour, instead of basing their explanations directly on interactional data. In this view, CA portrayed social behaviour as dynamic, emergent and situated vis-à-vis the interactional contingencies of the moment, versus static ethnographic accounts; and (2) were based on question- able evidence, such as unsystematic, retrospective accounts of ethnographic observations and interviews of research participants regarding social practices which, albeit their own, they could not adequately explain because such prac- tices were tacit and unreflective – that is, ‘just the way things are’ (e.g. Maynard 1989; Schegloff 1992).
Ethnographers responded in various ways. First, they countered that conver- sational transcripts provide only partial information regarding the identities, social relationships, and contextual background needed to understand social behaviour – exactly the kind of information ethnography excels in collecting.
Second, they argued that CA’s emphasis on interactional structure led to arid accounts of social behaviour, wherein form was privileged at the expense of meaning. Third, they suggested that the long-term nature of ethnographic studies yielded knowledge of regularities in social behaviour which conversa- tion analysts, who tended to focus on single, momentary interactions, had no special access to (e.g. Cicourel 1992; Duranti 1997; Moerman 1988).
This debate has been partly resolved by the fact that there is now a sub- stantial history of combining these approaches in highly effective ways (e.g.
Goodwin 1990; Moerman 1988).1 In many senses the two approaches are highly
complementary: Each is strong where the other is weak. First, regarding what CA can contribute to ethnography, fine interactional detail provides valu- able material for sociocultural analysis, material which can complement data gathered through, for example, observations and interviews because “inter- action is central to the organization of culture as well as social organization” (Goodwin 1990: 1). Likewise, the ethnographic problem of attaining emicity is partly addressed by CA’s commitment to studying participants’ own orien- tations to the interactive behaviours of their interlocutors. Such evidence can be used to test ethnographic interpretations of what is ‘going on’ in the social lives of those being studied, since social life fundamentally involves interactive coordination.
Second, regarding what ethnography can contribute to CA,2 rich, longitu-
dinal descriptions of social life and language use among particular groups can flesh out fine-grained analysis of moment-by-moment verbal interac- tion. The same is true for more immediate contextual details, such as the pre-existing personal and social relationships between interlocutors, or the larger activities engaged in while talk is proceeding. Theoretical concepts such as social class, power and culture, properly used, can also help ana- lysts understand the complex sociocultural realities being studied. To sum up the convergent possibilities of ethnography and CA in particular, and ethnographic and discourse analysis in general, close description of the moment-by-moment constitution of social life in talk-in-interaction can both fundamentally enrich and be fundamentally enriched by broad descriptions of social behaviours, norms and values. From this perspective, incorporating discourse analysis and ethnography can only enhance the effectiveness of sociocultural description.