4.2. Las campañas electorales de los tres principales partidos: PRI, PAN y PRD en el 2000
4.3.3. Una explicación desde el cambio poblacional y generacional
Esa Lehtinen
Chapter summary
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Conversation analysis is a method for the analysis of spoken interaction. It is particu-larly concerned with the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction and the inferential frameworks on which the participants of interaction rely.
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Conversation analysis was originated by Harvey Sacks in the 1960s. It is, most of all, infl uenced by the ethnomethodological sociology of Harold Garfi nkel.
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Conversation analysis can be used for the microanalytic study of various kinds of reli-gious speech events.
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The data in conversation analysis consist of video or audio recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. The analytical process typically includes transcription, initial analysis in order to fi nd a phenomenon of interest, assembling a collection of cases of the phenomenon, and a detailed comparative analysis of the cases in the collection.
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The main strength of conversation analysis is that it comes to terms with what actually happens in religious talk-in-interaction and explicates how the participants themselves interpret each others’ actions.
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Conversation analysis can be fruitfully combined with ethnographic methods.What is conversation analysis?
Conversation analysis (henceforth CA) is a method for the analysis of spoken interaction. It is, most of all, concerned with the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction (Schegloff 2007). That is, it seeks to explore how actions and turns of talk follow each other in a system-atic way.
An important case of sequential organization is the adjacency pair (Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Schegloff 2007). The adjacency pair is a term for a pair of turns that belong tightly together, such as question and answer, invitation and acceptance/rejection, greeting and greeting. When a speaker produces a fi rst pair part, e.g. a question, it is the normative obliga-tion of the next speaker to produce a second pair part that fi ts with the fi rst pair part. The normativity of the adjacency pair means that the next speaker can be held accountable for not
producing the second pair part. He/she may furnish a justifi cation or a justifi cation may be asked for by the speaker of the fi rst pair part.
CA studies have also shown how sequential organization may be constrained in a special way in institutional encounters (Drew and Heritage 1992: 37–42). Questions and answers often have institutional functions. This means, fi rst of all, that in many institutional encoun-ters (e.g. courtrooms), turns are pre-allocated, in that one party, usually the professional, asks questions and the other answers them. Second, in many institutions there is a special kind of a third turn attached to the adjacency pair, e.g. the teacher’s evaluative turn in classroom discourse.
There are three other important concepts that are closely connected to sequence organiza-tion: turn-taking, preference and repair. Turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974) is concerned with the question of how speaker change is accomplished in talk-in-interaction. Preference organization (Schegloff 2007) refers to social and structural features of actions. For example, an invitation may be either accepted or declined. Accepting is the socially preferred response, and declining is dis-preferred. Dis-preferred responses usually include, e.g. delays, mitiga-tions and justifi camitiga-tions. Repair organization (see Schegloff et al. 1977) refers to interactants’
methods for solving problems of hearing and understanding.
All of the foregoing can be seen as part of the ‘sequential order’ of interaction (Hutchby and Wooffi tt 1998). However, CA is also interested in the ‘inferential order’ of interaction. In insti-tutional encounters, in particular, there are specifi c ‘inferential frameworks’ at work (Drew and Heritage 1992). One way to analyze inferential frameworks is what Harvey Sacks (1992) called membership categorization analysis . For him, the starting point of membership categorization analysis was the idea that a person can be categorized in numerous ways. For example, a single person may be categorizable as a male, husband, father, middle-aged, white or Catholic. Thus, when a categorization is used in interaction, it is always a product of a choice.
Sacks wanted to fi nd out how categorizations are selected, used and understood in actual inter-action. Thus, he was interested in the situated use of cultural resources (Hester and Eglin 1997).
Theoretical background
Although CA is nowadays practised in a multitude of disciplines, e.g. linguistics, communica-tion studies, psychology and educacommunica-tion, originally it is rooted in sociology. It was originated by the sociologist Harvey Sacks in the 1960s. He was, most of all, infl uenced by the ethnometh-odological sociology of Harold Garfi nkel (1967; see Heritage 1984). There is not space here for a thorough description of ethnomethodology (henceforth EM). I will, however, introduce some aspects of EM that are particularly important for CA.
EM can be described as the procedural study of ordinary practical action. By ‘procedural’
I mean that action is investigated in its situated instances. As Garfi nkel (1967) says, people should not be thought of as cultural or psychological ‘dopes’, actors who blindly follow rules.
People do use different cultural resources in doing what they do, e.g. rules, habits and back-ground expectancies, but rules are never enough: each action is situated in a particular context, in which the actor her/himself makes the action intelligible. Garfi nkel also stresses the accountability of action. This means that when norms or routines are broken, an actor can be expected to produce a justifi cation; however, it also means that even when no norms are broken, actions are produced as accountable for the participants of the setting. They are accomplishments that rely on intersubjectivity between participants.
CA is also infl uenced by Erving Goffman’s idea of the ‘interaction order’ (see Heritage 2001). This meant, for Goffman (1967), that social interaction can be treated as an institution
itself, like other institutions such as family and religion. He recommended that interaction order should be approached through studying ‘syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present’. Goffman’s ‘syntax’ can be seen as a predecessor of CA’s focus on sequence organization.
Conversation analysis in religious studies
The main area of application for CA in religious studies is the microanalytic study of religious speech events. In any religious community there is a multitude of recurring speech events. If we take as an example a community that I have studied, Seventh-day Adventism, there are worship services, Bible study groups, youth meetings, religion lessons in Seventh-day Adventist schools, family worship, grace before meals, different forms of proselytizing, etc.
Any of these events could be analyzed with CA methods. So far, CA studies of a variety of religious speech events have been published: e.g. prayer in different Christian settings (Capps and Ochs 2002), Seventh-day Adventist Bible study (Lehtinen 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), Christian church services in Bosavi, New Guinea (Schieffelin 2007), Mormon proselytizing in the Czech Republic (Sherman 2007), student-teacher interviews in a Zen monastery (Buttny and Isbell 1991), and master-student dialogues in a Bektashi Muslim community (Trix 1999).
In addition, it is possible to apply CA to religious writings. An example is Person’s (1996) work on the book of Jonah. He examines how adjacency pairs are described in the biblical book.
In the following I will give two examples of CA studies of religion. The fi rst of them is on Mormon proselytizing (Sherman 2007), the second on Seventh-day Adventist Bible study (Lehtinen 2009c). They are different in that Sherman studies interaction between a repre-sentative of a religious group and an outsider, while Lehtinen studies religious in-group interaction.
Sherman (2007) has studied ‘fi rst-contact public proselyting situations’ of Mormon missionaries in the Czech Republic. These are situations where the missionaries approach strangers. As Sherman shows, there are many things the missionaries need to accomplish during a short exchange for it to be successful. The most important ones are: they need to initiate a conversation with a stranger, and they need to conduct that conversation in a way that makes it possible to establish further contact. The topic of faith need not necessarily be raised in the fi rst encounter. Sherman describes how the missionaries accomplish their task step by step.
In the following I will concentrate on two aspects of this task: initiating contact and category work in the beginning of the conversation. Box 2.2.1 (Sherman 2007: 79) illustrates a typical case of initiating contact on the street. Sherman bases his discussion on Harvey Sacks’ (1992) idea of different kinds of conversationalists. If, for example, two people are friends, they are, because of that, ‘proper conversationalists’. That is, they ‘have a right’ to talk to each other, and they usually begin their conversation with greetings. When, however, strangers meet, they are ‘non-proper conversationalists’, and they have a right to talk to each other only if they, or one of them, produces a ‘ticket’, a socially acceptable reason for a conversation. Such conversations, instead of beginning with greetings, begin with tickets. Thus, the missionary’s fi rst and actually quite diffi cult problem is to fi nd and produce a ticket that makes it possible for him to have a conversation with a stranger. He does so by producing a slightly ambivalent turn in which he asks the stranger whether he can speak with him. The recipient (line 2) shows that he or she interprets the missionary’s
initial turn as a pre-request and asks what the missionary ‘needs’. A pre-request (Schegloff 2007) is a turn that projects an upcoming request and asks the recipient for permission to produce it. The recipient grants permission on line 2. To have a request would, of course, constitute a ticket to talk to a stranger. However, on line 3, the missionary rejects this interpretation, and produces instead an identifi cation. It turns out (see line 9) that for the missionary the turn on line 1 is a pre-offer, not a pre-request. We can see, however, how producing a turn that is interpretable as a pre-request is suitable for his purposes: with it he gets the attention of the recipient and produces at least the appearance of having a ticket.
Box 2.2.1 Extract 1: Mormon proselytizing
01 M1: prosím vás mu˚ žu mluvit s vámi na chvilku?
excuse me, can I speak with you for a little while?
02 C7: no: co potrˇebujete?
yeah: what do you need?
03 M1: nic jenom my jsme tady jako dobrovolníci.
nothing; we’re just here as volunteers.
04 C7: no.
yeah.
05 M1: a tady my ucˇíme zdarma anglicˇ tinu.
and we teach English for free here.
06 C7: no.
yeah.
07 M1: a dnes my snažíme mluvit s lidmi o tom.
and today we’re trying to speak with people about it.
08 C7: no.
yeah.
09 M1: já nevím jestli máte zájem? nebo jestli znáte neˇkoho?
I don’t know if you’re interested, or if you know someone?
( Sherman 2007: 79–80; translation provided by Tamah Sherman )
The second issue that I want to point out in Sherman’s study is the use of categorizations. This can also be seen in Box 2.2.1. At the beginning of a conversation between strangers, the interlocutors need to come to an understanding of what they are to each other. This is impor-tant in determining whether the conversation is worth continuing. Thus, Sherman conducted a careful comparison of how the missionaries described themselves in their encounters with strangers. Her main fi nding is that there is a certain order in which the missionaries use categories (Sherman 2007: 128). They use vague categories before more specifi c ones, categ-ories that can be perceived as more agreeable before less agreeable ones, and familiar ones before less familiar ones. This can be seen in the extract in Box 2.2.1 where the missionary fi rst uses a vague category ‘volunteer’ (line 3), and only afterwards invokes the more specifi c category ‘English teacher’ through describing the activity ‘we teach English’ (line 5).
Also, the supposedly less agreeable religious categories like ‘missionary’ and ‘Mormon’ are not (yet) used.
My own study (Lehtinen 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c) was conducted on Seventh-day Adventist Bible study in Finland. Bible study in the Seventh-day Adventist church is part of every worship service. It is led by a ‘teacher’ (often a layperson). It is based on an international study book that contains the texts that should be read and commentary and questions on them. As interaction, the Bible study usually consists of rounds where a text is fi rst read or mentioned—the participants usually have a Bible with them and can thus see the verse even if it has just been mentioned; second, the participants discuss the text; and third, they apply the text into their own lives. The study concentrates on the second stage, on how the partici-pants of Bible study talk about the text. This can be done monologically by the teacher, or through a question-answer-comment format, with the teacher doing the questioning and commenting and the other participants the answering.
For a Seventh-day Adventist, it is self-evident, in a general sense, that the Bible is relevant for the believer, that it ‘speaks’ to her or him. The problem for the participant of the Bible study is that he or she confronts particular passages of the Bible, and she or he must fi nd, for each passage, how that particular passage is relevant. The study sought to explicate how this relevance was accomplished through talk by the participants of the Bible study. Thus, a conversation analytical treatise of Bible study, instead of interpreting the Bible text, analyzes talk about the text in its own right.
The main fi nding in the study is that already in the stage where the participants talk about the Bible text, they talk about it in a way that makes it relevant. They have methods for talking about the texts that make them ‘speak’. In the following I will give an example of these methods, that of noticing (see the second extract in Box 2.2.2). In the second extract (Box 2.2.2), the participants are talking about Nehemiah 5, in which Nehemiah reprimands the leaders of Israel for their exploitation of the people. Before the extract they have talked about how Nehemiah got angry. The extract consists of a simple sequence of actions. Hilma (the teacher) fi rst asks the participants to read a verse of the Bible. Reino then reads the verse (lines 5–10), and Hilma comments on the verse (lines 12–17). In that comment she uses a noticing. It is important to note that the commenting is made in the context of the previous turn in which the Bible verse is read.
In her turn Hilma uses the expression ajatelkaa ‘think about it’ (line 12) to draw attention to a part of a text that she presents as noticeable. The noticeable part is, in Finnish, a single word: harkittuani ‘after considering’ (line 14). She stresses it, for example, by saying it twice, lengthening sounds and raising the volume of her voice. Otherwise she just repeats part of the verse verbatim (lines 14–16, compare with lines 5–7). The important question is, however, why this particular word should be noticed in this verse. As Sacks (1992: 87–97) has shown, there is always a context-dependent reason for declaring that one has noticed something which has to do with the kinds of inferences the noticing makes available. In this case, to fi nd these inferences, we need to look at the surrounding context and draw on cultural resources.
First of all, in the text that has just been read, ‘considering’ is connected to ‘reprimanding’, it is done before the reprimanding. Second, the participants have just talked about how Nehemiah ‘got angry’: this issue has been given special attention. So the ‘considering’ is done between ‘getting angry’ and ‘reprimanding’. The importance of considering becomes under-standable in the context of conventions of getting angry and reprimanding that come into play in interpreting the biblical text. Both getting angry and reprimanding can be seen as morally delicate actions. Getting angry can entail, for example, losing control; reprimanding can be seen as rude and impolite. Most importantly, the rudeness and impoliteness of repri-manding is especially relevant when the one doing so is angry. Here we can see the moral relevance of the considering: it separates the anger from the reprimanding and thus speaks
against the possible implication that the reprimanding was done in an angry and a possibly uncontrolled state.
Thus, by drawing attention in her turn-at-talk to Nehemiah’s ‘considering’, Hilma makes his action morally understandable. This understandability is based on moral norms and conventions that are understandable to the participants, relevant in their world. Only by relying on those same conventions can the participants see why they should notice just this expression in just this story. The story can ‘speak’ to them by pointing out the way in which
Box 2.2.2 Extract 2: Seventh-day Adventist Bible study
See Box 2.2.4 for the meaning of the transcription symbols.
01 Hilma: (0.2) .hh Ja mitä hän teki (0.2) .hh And what did he do.
02 (2.5) ((Tuija and Lea raise their hands )) 03 Hilma: S e itsemäs j a e.
V e rse s e ven.
04 (9.0)
05 Reino: Ja harkittuani mielessäni tätä And after considering this matter
06 asiaa (.) minä nuhtelin y limyksiä, (0.8) ja in my mind (.) I reprimanded the n o bles, (0.8) and 07 esimiehiä ja sanoin h e ille .hh tehän
chiefs and said to th e m .hh why you
08 ↑k i skotte k o rkoa ↑kukiv ↑v e ljiltänne, (0.3) ↑pr a ctice u sury↑ each of you ↑on your br o thers, (0.3) 09 s i ttem minä panin toimeen s u u:ren k o kouksen]
then I arr a nged a b i :g ass e mbly 10 heitä v a staan.
ag a inst them.
11 (0.5)
12 Hilma: @N i i:n@. (0.4) & A jatelkaa hän (.) hän (.) @Y e :s@. (0.4) &Th i nk about it he (.) he (.) 13 s a notaan >minu e- (.) tämä että<& .h hän
it says >(-) (-)- (.) this that<& .h he
14 <h a rkittuan i > (0.6) HAR:: KITTUANI, (1.2)
< a fter cons i dering> (0.6) AFTER CON SI:: DERING, (1.2) 15 m i elessäni tätä asiaa (0.3) nuh: telin
this matter in my m i nd (0.3) I repri man: ded
16 ylimyksiä (.) >ja esimiehiä< = .h ↑onko tämä helppo the nobles (.) >and chiefs< = .h ↑ is this an easy 17 tehtävä.
task .
(Lehtinen 2009b)
Nehemiah’s action can provide moral guidance for them, offer an example for them to follow in similar circumstances: i.e. they should also ‘consider’ before ‘reprimanding’.
It can be said that in both the cases described above, the analysis explicates a problem that the participants of a religious group need to solve: how to initiate and continue a conversation with a stranger, and how to make a particular Bible text ‘speak’ through their talk-in-inter-action. Both these problems are, at least in retrospect, quite obvious to anyone who knows these religious groups. The main contribution of conversation analysis is, fi rst of all, to show how these problems are interactional and situational in nature: they consist of choices the participants continually need to make in particular sequential positions. Second, conversation analysis can uncover the interactional methods the participants of religious groups use to accomplish their religious task, answering the question of how religious tasks are accom-plished in practice.
Practical issues: How to do conversation analysis
The data in conversation analysis consist of recordings of so-called naturally occurring talk-in-interaction (Heritage 1984). This means that fi eld notes or interviews are not considered as suffi cient data. In CA the analysis needs to come to terms with minute details of actual talk, and such detail is diffi cult if not impossible to remember afterwards. Both audio and video recordings are used, but video recordings are preferred, since they can catch the non-verbal aspects of interaction. This type of recording data may create problems with access. There are religious groups among which it is impossible to obtain permission for recording. In these groups other methods need to be used.
Box 2.2.3 Steps to take in conversation analytical research • video or audio recording of data
• transcription
• ‘unmotivated’ search for a phenomenon • making a collection of cases
• ‘unmotivated’ search for a phenomenon • making a collection of cases