A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication Essential Readings

Jane E. Goodman is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. She is the author of Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video, and editor of Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. She served as course director of Interpersonal Communication in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University for three years.

Jennifer Meta Robinson is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. She is author of The Farmers' Market Book: Growing Food, Cultivating Community, editor of Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum, and editor of the Indiana University Press book series Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She has served as course director of Interpersonal Communication in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University since 2006.

Editors’ Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1
Jane E. Goodman, Jennifer Meta Robinson, and Leila Monaghan

Part I: Ethnographer’s Toolkit 7

1 Body Ritual among the Nacirema 9
Horace Miner

2 Culture Blends 12
Michael Agar

3 Culture: Can You Take It Anywhere? 24
Michael Agar

4 Five Principles 27
Richard Bauman

5 Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture 29
Clifford Geertz

6 Winking as Social Business 32
Jane E. Goodman

7 Speaking of Ethnography 34
Leila Monaghan

8 The Emergent Quality of Performance 38
Richard Bauman

9 Poetics, Play, Process, and Power: The Performative Turn in Anthropology 41
Dwight Conquergood

Part II: Applying the Ethnographer’s Toolkit 45

10 Greetings in the Desert 47
Ibrahim Ag Youssouf, Allen D. Grimshaw, and Charles S. Bird

11 Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers 60
Richard Bauman

12 “To Give Up on Words”: Silence in Western Apache Culture 73
Keith Basso

13 Saying Hello in a Digital World: Emergent Performance and Social Competence 84
Jennifer Meta Robinson

14 Writing Cousin Joe: Choice and Control Over Orthographic Representation in a Blues Singer’s Autobiography 93
Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer

15 And Then She Texted Me: Entextualization and the End of Relationships 110
Ilana Gershon

16 The License: Poetics, Power, and the Uncanny 120
Susan Lepselter

Part III: Ethnography of Talk: From Language Form to Social Solidarity 133

17 The Triangle of Linguistic Structure 135
Robin Tolmach Lakoff

18 The Grammar of Politics and the Politics of Grammar: From Bangladesh to the United States 141
James Wilce

19 Conversations: The Link between Words and the World 152
Leila Monaghan

20 Conversational Signals and Devices 157
Deborah Tannen

21 A Cultural Approach to Male–Female Miscommunication 168
Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker

22 “Put Down that Paper and Talk to Me!”: Rapport-talk and Report-talk 186
Deborah Tannen

23 Talking Text and Talking Back: “My BFF Jill” from Boob Tube to YouTube 199
Graham M. Jones and Bambi B. Schieffelin

24 On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-Up Comedy 220
Susan Seizer

25 Swearing as a Function of Gender in the Language of Midwestern American College Students 233
Thomas E. Murray

Part IV: Communication and Social Groups: The Work of Belonging 243

26 Ethnography of Communication 245
Donal Carbaugh

27 Encounters 249
Erving Goffman

28 Symbols of Category Membership 255
Penelope Eckert

29 Word Up: Social Meanings of Slang in California Youth Culture 274
Mary Bucholtz

30 Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls 298
Rachel Simmons

31 Sporting Formulae in New Zealand English: Two Models of Male Solidarity 315
Koenraad Kuiper

32 Inner-City Teens and Face-Work: Avoiding Violence and Maintaining Honor 324
Robert Garot

33 From Websites to Wal-Mart: Youth, Identity Work, and the Queering of Boundary Publics in Small Town, USA 347
Mary L. Gray

34 “If I’m Lyin, I’m Flyin”: The Game of Insult in Black Language 356
Geneva Smitherman

Part V: Interpersonal Communication in Institutional Settings: Structure, Agency, and the Exercise of Power 365

35 Power and the Language of Men 367
Scott Fabius Kiesling

36 Linguistic Ideology and Praxis in US Law School Classrooms 385
Elizabeth Mertz

37 Participant Structures and Communicative Competence: Warm Springs Children in Community and Classroom 395
Susan U. Philips

38 Footing 412
Erving Goffman

39 “An Association for the 21st Century”: Performance and Social Change among Berbers in Paris 416
Jane E. Goodman

40 Signing 429
Leila Monaghan

41 Variation in Sign Languages 433
Barbara LeMaster and Leila Monaghan

42 The Founding of Two Deaf Churches: The Interplay of Deaf and Christian Identities 438
Leila Monaghan

Appendix I: Read This First: How to Read and Present on Complex Texts 455

Appendix II: Ethnography Assignments 462

Source Acknowledgments 468

Index 473

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