SISTEMA PARA TELEFONIA Y TRANSMISIÓN DE DATOS DONDE APLIQUE

In the last decade, researchers in the UK have formulated an ethnographic approach to the study of language and culture, dubbed linguistic ethnography (for overviews see, Copland and Creese 2015a; Copland, Shaw and Snell 2015). Linguistic ethnography is committed to a poststructuralist and anti-essentialist epistemology (Creese 2008: 229). It sees language, and semiosis in general, as social practice and not as an essentialised and autonomous system. Linguistic ethnography is institutionally linked to linguistics

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departments rather than to British social anthropology (Rampton 2007: 586, 602, n8), which perhaps leads linguistic ethnographic researchers to design research within objectivist epistemologies developed in linguistics. However, this is not to say that linguistic ethnography is not open to a multidisciplinary outlook. According to Rampton et al. (2004), Creese (2008), Tusting and Maybin (2007) and Rampton, Maybin and Roberts (2015), linguistic ethnography is inspired by a number of research traditions, which inform both its theory and its methodology. These traditions include Hymesian ethnography of communication and Gumperzian interactional sociolinguistics, North American linguistic anthropology, sociocultural linguistics, as well as on UK-based ethnographies, micro-ethnography, new literacy studies, critical discourse analysis, neo- Vygotskian approaches to language and cognition in the classroom, applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology of education. Linguistic ethnography flags up these research traditions in an “attempt to negotiate and articulate a distinctiveness” (Creese 2008: 238) and “to build a community and extend dialogue” (ibid.). This establishes linguistic ethnography as a comprehensive research programme with historical traditions, future directions, certain tools, typical research settings and mutual challenges.

In a highly idealised manner linguistic ethnography distinguishes between three processes of research: data collection, analysis and writing (see also Copland and Creese 2015a). For linguistic ethnography data analysis seems to be an epistemological necessity situated ‘between’ ethnography-as-fieldwork and ethnography-as-writing. Sometimes sociolinguistic researchers use the term ‘ethnography’ to refer solely to data collection processes: the observing, the participating and the interviewing (for

overviews of such a conceptualisation, see Levon 2013; Schilling 2013), but

ethnography is a compound. Thus in my conceptualisation I stress that the term does not only refer to my activity of data collection, but it also refers to my activity of writing. Writing takes place at all stages during the research process and it has various purposes that each require particular analytical and stylistic levels: field notes, transcriptions, sketches, consent forms, emails to colleagues and supervisors, draft chapters,

conference posters and papers, research notes and reports, journal publications, book chapters, finished theses, revised theses and published monographs. And all these writings have a tremendous effect on how and where one’s research (career) goes. Thus, as Bucholtz (2000) puts it in her discussion of the politics of transcribing oral discourse, ethnographies “are not transparent and unproblematic records of scientific research but are instead creative and politicised documents in which the researcher as author is fully implicated” (p. 1440). To critically reflect on my writing as author of this thesis

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therefore appears to me as inevitable in this ethnography. I will try to achieve this reflexivity by pluralising my locus of enunciation (discussed in Section 3.3.2 below).

In non-linguistic ethnography, such as social or cultural anthropology, the fieldwork engagement and the writing itself are analytical and anthropologists often do not necessarily see ‘analysis’ as a separate step in the research process (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 158). Linguists, however, on desks, in libraries and in front of

computers, sketch out a way to subject the data to several analytical filters, extracting structures and patterns that help them formulate hypotheses and metaphorical concepts that can explain the nature of the data they collected. Linguistic ethnography, then, inserts the linguistic analysis between the fieldwork and the writing up (we could therefore paradigmatically call it ethno-linguistic-graphy). Accordingly, the

epistemological and methodological kernel of linguistic ethnography lies in the attempt to combine ethnographic methods and linguistic methods and to overcome the

“fundamental tension between openness and systematicity that is inherent in integrating the two disciplines” (Shaw, Copland and Snell 2015: 8).

Tying ethnography down and opening linguistics up

To bring ethnography and linguistics closer together, Rampton et al. (2004) propose a transdisciplinary research strategy they call ‘tying ethnography down’ and ‘opening linguistics up.’ They see these as discipline internal “pulls” that are associated with the linguistic turn in the social sciences and the functional turn in linguistics (n6, p. 4). Juxtaposing ethnography and linguistics, they set out to say that culture is generally more encompassing than language and that the former cannot be as well codified as the latter (p. 3). In linguistics data collection and rules for analysis are usually more

standardised and taken for granted, whereas in ethnography the learning processes of the researcher in the field are themselves instructive for analysis (p. 4). Linguistics looks for structures and patterns of use, whereas ethnography uses rhetoric, narrative, vignettes “that are designed to provide the reader with some apprehension of the fullness and irreducibility of the ‘lived stuff’ from which the analyst has abstracted (cultural) structures” (ibid.).

Rampton et al. (2004) propose to understand these different methodologies and epistemologies as entering into a conversation with each other. They suggest doing ethnography with a more linguistically-inclined mind set (p. 4). They speak of (1) “pushing ethnography towards the analysis of clearly delimitable processes”, (2)

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impregnate local description with analytical frameworks drawn from outside” (ibid.). For doing linguistics, they envision a more ethnographic outlook, (4) “inviting reflexive sensitivity to the processes involved in the production of linguistic claims and to the potential importance of what gets left out” and (5) they also encourage a willingness to accept ‘experience’ as important in revising standardised falsification procedures (ibid.).

In my reading of Rampton et al. (2004), these are the five central implications for a linguistic ethnographic methodology:

1. Limit the ethnographic description to a specific speech event/communicative genre

2. Analyse and present a considerable amount of data fragments (“reported data”) 3. Enhance emic local descriptions with etic analytical tools

4. Ensure reflexivity in the process of fieldwork, analysis and presentation 5. Let human experience rule over scientific falsification

For the process of data collection, these guidelines suggest that (1) field notes and ethnographic observations need to include a detailed description of the communicative event which promises to inform the later analysis of recordings and transcripts; (2) scientific ideas about the reliability and validity of ethnographic fieldwork will have to be considered and developed; (3) participants’ own interpretations and

conceptualisations can be discovered and located by asking questions relevant to the academic world; (4) researchers should be aware that they co-construct the data they collect in the field, which has a number of ethical and methodical implications that will have to be addressed; (5) researchers should trust their ‘gut feeling’, their intuitions in following up stories and constellations that emerge from the fieldwork, and also not shy away from respecting their political and ethical convictions.

For data analysis the guidelines imply that researchers may (1) endorse a thorough contextualisation of the linguistic data that are being analysed; (2) ensure reliability and validity in the modelling of the analysis; (3) marry descriptive tools for studying culture with analytical tools for studying language in use; (4) iteratively adjust claims in light of more findings and (5) allow some kind of self-confidence in mistrusting scientific methods which lead to results that are somewhat against experience or feeling.

The process of writing then plays a major part in conveying these stipulations to readers in the written product. (1) The ethnographic descriptions have to be related directly to the analysis of linguistic data; (2) providing data extracts helps the reader to

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make the analysis transparent and falsifiable; it also makes sure that (3) emic categories and local descriptions can be empirically validated through etic findings of the analysis; (4) researchers can use rhetorical and stylistic strategies in their writing that lay open the actual methodical processes that lead to the claims being made so that (5) readers can engage with the topic on a more experiential level.

While linguistic methods are required to facilitate micro-analyses of audio and video recordings and transcripts (Rampton 2013), ethnography can work in the opposite direction and unravel the rigid scientism, objectivism and empiricism through thick descriptions (Geertz 1973) of social contexts (Copland and Creese 2015b: 173-176). I would like to contend that this thick description can best be achieved through reflexive and sincere writing strategies that account for complexity, rather than erase it

(Blommaert 2013a; 2016b; De Fina 2015b). Of course there is a vast, by now canonical literature on writing in ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988; Atkinson 1990; James, Hockey and Dawson 1997; Mignolo 2000; for discussions within

linguistics, see Canagarajah 2013; Blommaert 2013b). Rather than attempting to further theorise writing, in this thesis I am attempting to reflect on writing while writing; a strategy Canagarajah (2013) calls codemeshing. Before introducing the research participants I hailed for this project and discussing the data I elicited, let me briefly discuss codemeshing.

Pluralising my locus of enunciation

Linguistic ethnographic research is generally written for several different audiences (see also Rock 2015: 139-140): Linguists (or sociolinguists and communication researchers) might be interested in my study to find out about language use ‘itself’, e.g. the variation of dialects or the poetic dimensions of narrative and how this constructs or is

determined by social and cultural meaning. Social science scholars, anthropologists, funders and the interested general public may engage with my writing to learn about the cultural production of hip hop around the world or about India’s urban youth cultures. Research participants and their friends and their families, who have made the study possible and whose voices are represented here, are likely to be interested what the visiting ethnographer, who in some cases became a friend, has done with all the material they collaboratively created. Some of my participants, for instance, expressed an interest in viewing interview transcripts and photos I took. The different audiences of this project and linguistic ethnography’s transdisciplinary methodology requires a

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and Creese 2015c: 209-225). In this sense, my ‘own’ voice as a narrator of this thesis must be understood as polyphonic, reflecting what Duranti (1997: 94) characterises as a “sympathetic but detached” ethnographer. This pluralisation invites readers to construct multiple reading positions (Hodge and Kress 1993; Fowler 1996) for themselves and to look at the data I will present from various angles.

The pluralisation of my writing is an attempt to complicate my own locus of

enunciation, as Mignolo (2000) suggests. A locus of enunciation is a positionality from which one speaks, argues and persuades. The institutional locus that constrains and structures this piece of writing requires a specific language of precision and formality. It is an objectifying language, as Foucault (1970) finds, which attempts to erase

subjectivity and normalise empiricism, patterns, laws and coherence. Without

abandoning it entirely, postcolonial scholarship begins to develop strategies to subvert the rigidity of scientific language that is part and parcel of a continued hegemony of eurocentrism.

Canagarajah (2013) proposes to pluralise academic writing through codemeshing, a writing strategy of textual lamination that invites academics to follow their own translingual orientations. This translingual orientation requires mastering academic registers while also opening up alternative discourses (p. 113). Canagarajah exemplifies this by discussing the academic writing of the African-American scholar Smitherman. While Smitherman’s articles, which appear in top-ranking, peer-reviewed academic journals, are mostly written in a standard English academic register, she codemeshes by inserting linguistic resources associated with African-American English, for example lexical items such as “dissin”, “doggin” and “blessed out” (Canagarajah 2013: 117) and morpho-syntactical structures like “what else we gon do while we was waitin” (p. 119). Canagarajah argues that these codemeshes pluralise and perhaps ultimately transform academic writing by injecting a ‘community ethos’ or a ‘minority community voice’ into what is usually regarded as a conservative genre (see also Bartlett 2012, discussed in the previous chapter). Importantly, in order to be effective in the academy and publication industry, minority scholars have to use codemeshing carefully. As Canagarajah stresses throughout his discussion, to simply use the community voice wholesale and completely abandon standard academic registers would mean that codemeshing scholars would not be taken seriously as academics, their writing would be read as a parody and their articles and monographs would be turned down by ‘serious’ academic publishers.

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Smitherman, as well as her student Alim, change their loci of enunciation drastically by incorporating what is at first sight a non-objective language in their writing (Alim 2007; on ill-literacies as a critical pedagogical opportunity, see Alim 2011). By codemeshing they are subverting scientific, as well as eurocentric norms, and their writing is in that sense more accurate for the postcolonial project. As explained in the Glossary of terms at the beginning of this thesis, in my own writing I gesture at hip hop- inflected ways of knowing and feeling by using alternative spellings for the hip hop elements breakin, deejayin, writin, emceein and knowledge and overstandin. I also use ethnographic vignettes and autobiographical narrative (see Section 3.4.3 below) to give readers some sense of my lived-experiences as an ethnographer-participant, to locate my self as a polyphonic author in this piece of writing (on an illuminating discussion of ‘writing the self’ in ethnography, see Coffey 1999: 115-133). These writing strategies, I hope, begin to balance out my otherwise overly intellectualised ways of writing with which I hope to accumulate cultural as well as financial capital from the academic community.