Methods for the Ethnography of Communication

Language in Use in Schools and Communities

Judith Kaplan-Weinger, Char Ullman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136341236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Methods for the Ethnography of Communication is a guide to conducting ethnographic research in classroom and community settings that introduces students to the field of ethnography of communication, and takes them through the recursive and nonlinear cycle of ethnographic research. Drawing on the mnemonic that Hymes used to develop the Ethnography of SPEAKING, the authors introduce the innovative CULTURES framework to provide a helpful structure for moving through the complex process of collecting and analyzing ethnographic data and addresses the larger "how-to" questions that students struggle with when undertaking ethnographic research. Exercises and activities help students make the connection between communicative events, acts, and situations and ways of studying them ethnographically. Integrating a primary focus on language in use within an ethnographic framework makes this book an invaluable core text for courses on ethnography of communication and related areas in a variety of disciplines.

1
Making the Familiar Strange, Making the Strange Familiar

“Welcome to this class.” These are words your professor may have uttered or will utter on your first day in the class that is using this text. Settling into a new classroom is a common experience, open to causing enthusiasm or angst, wonder or dread, boredom or indifference. And your feelings may not be one or the other (i.e., binaries) but a complicated mixture of these emotions.

Thinking Together

As you entered the classroom, you were met with images and sounds that were probably familiar to you.

1. What are some of those images? Sounds?
2. Why are they familiar to you?

It is also possible that you were met with images and sounds that were unfamiliar to you.

1. What are some of those images? Sounds?
2. Why are they unfamiliar to you?

While you may be thinking of classrooms where you have been a student in the past, we are asking you, first, to explain what you see and hear in this classroom. Then, you will analyze those sensory experiences in relation to your own personal history.

Faced with this collection of the known and unknown, you likely felt at least a bit unsettled. That feeling, of course, may have been below your consciousness. Maybe you felt it only in the decision you needed to make about what desk or chair to sit in, or what to say, if anything, to the people sitting near you. It may also have been about what language or what style of language to use to address the people around you.

Thinking Together

1. Are you someone who talks to people you don’t know?
2. Do you initiate conversations, or do you wait until someone talks to you?
3. If you do initiate conversations, how do you do that?

There will be classmates who introduce themselves to each other, and those who don’t. There will be those who talk and participate, and those who do not. There may be people who are reading this text in English and speaking with you in English, but who use other languages most of the time.

In the United States, we often chalk this up to individual differences, by focusing on personality traits such as confidence/shyness or extroversion/introversion. Indeed, our particular traits impact how we act in different situations. However, there are multiple factors that influence our behavior.

Globalized Worlds

We live in a globalized world today. That means that people and nations are more connected than ever before, whether it is through transportation, technology, or both. Most people make use of a variety of cultural systems in their everyday lives. It is this idea of cultures that we will explore throughout this text.

The concept of culture has been central to the fields of anthropology, linguistics, education, and communication studies, but none of these disciplines has ownership of the idea of culture. Business people talk about marketing to different cultural groups; physicians discuss cultural competence in delivering health care; educators practice culturally relevant pedagogy; and the list goes on and on. If you still go to a physical library, the GN section (using the Library of Congress system) is filled with book after book that grapples with what culture is and even whether it even exists at all. If you Google the word culture you will be looking at links for days (including information on how to make yogurt). Even though culture is a fundamental concept in the social sciences and in education, there is no longer clear agreement on just what it is.

Up until 1980 or so, scholars thought about culture as a structure that existed outside of the individual, that firmly governed human behavior, and that never changed. There has been a revolution in how people think about culture since then. Now, it is more likely for people to think about culture(s) in the plural and to think about them as processual.

Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti (2005) encourage us to see culture as the practices we engage in every day. Culture is “what it is that people do and what they say about what they do” (p. 40).

Henze and Hauser (1999) note seven characteristics of the contemporary concept of culture:

1. Culture is not bounded for most people who live in urban areas. While there are Indigenous people whose communities are composed of people almost exclusively from the same background and who live in remote areas, most people in urban areas throughout the world live in relationship to people from different backgrounds. Culture is more fluid than bounded.
2. Cultural groups vary a lot. There are many ways to be a member of a group. There is more than one way to be Mexican or to be Jewish or to be gay, or to be Jewish, Mexican, and gay. No one person holds all the knowledge for her group. The things we know depend on many things, such as our age, gender, class, sexuality, religion, ability, and many other aspects of identity. Our histories are also a part of what it means to be a member of a cultural group.
3. Cultures are constantly changing. We construct our cultural knowledge and practices all the time, so they are not static. Your grandmother and grandfather may share your cultural background, but you might have very different ways of being a woman or a man, or of engaging in your cultural practices, than they do. Think about the way many people in their 60s talk and dress. It is often very different from people in their 20s.
4. Cultural knowledge is often below our consciousness. Many times we do what we do and think what we think because that is how we were socialized in our families and our communities. That is, people modeled behaviors for us, and we were either rewarded for learning to do things “correctly” or punished for doing things “wrong”. Eventually, we learned to become members of different cultural groups, and those behaviors and beliefs got to be second nature.
5. Cultural knowledge impacts how we interpret the world around us. Some theorists think that having common ways of understanding or interpreting the world around us is the most important part of culture. Consider this: An 11-month-old toddler takes a toy truck away from her five-year-old brother and hits him with it. Her brother is injured and starts to bleed. In European-American cultures, it is common to take the toy away from the toddler and get the toddler to understand that she has hurt her brother. There is a belief that the rules of the adult world apply equally to this newcomer to the planet. In Mayan cultures, it is common to let the toddler do what she does. One-year-old newcomers are not expected to follow adult rules, because there is a belief that toddlers cannot do things on purpose or understand that they have hurt someone else yet (Mosier and Rogoff, 2003). These are examples of shared cultural interpretations.
6. Culture is in our everyday practices. If you think about the previous scene with the toddler, culture is in the ways people behave. Do you take the toy away, or do you let the toddler play with it? Culture is in our lived experiences, our cultural practices. This is an example of the idea that culture is processual (Gonzalez, 2008), and not just in that shared interpretation.
7. Culture(s) give us certain positions and biases. All of us experience the world through our memberships in cultural groups. If you were raised by human beings, then you learned to be a member of at least one cultural group. If you were not raised by human beings, well, you probably aren’t reading this book. Think about what the world looks like through the lens of a camera. What you can see depends on where you are standing.

Your teacher may have started today’s class with an activity to help you and your classmates get to know one another. In the field of education, these activities are called icebreakers.

Thinking Together

1. What is the ice that needs to be broken in a classroom?
2. Why do teachers want to break that ice?
3. Why is it important that students break that ice?

Just like authentic ice, the ice that exists among members of a community can be hard and slippery to navigate. We can stumble or fall on the ice, and we can even slip through the ice. But we can also glide. This metaphor helps us realize that joining a new community can be challenging for everyone. Yet, at the same time, breaking the ice—the coldness that causes us to feel separate from one another—can help remove much of the challenge so that we—students together, and instructor and students together—can collectively create an environment that best eases teaching and learning and, therefore, best lays down the tracks for us all to reach our educational goals.

Building community is important in most situations. Sometimes communities form on their own. That is typically what occurs in a classroom community. None of us is new to a classroom environment, although we may never have shared the very same classroom with anyone who is now in our class. And we may have been in classrooms in the past that are very different from this one. In many classrooms, students raise their hands to get the teacher to call on them, right? In the Mexican state of Sonora, students do that too, but in many public schools there, it is still the tradition to stand when you give your answer to the class. Regardless of the kind of school settings that are part of our personal histories, we bring what we know from those earlier classrooms with us into this classroom. If we have shared a prior class with a current classmate, some of what we know and some of what we expect to occur in this class will be based on that prior experience, too.

Learning to Look

1. What do you expect of this classroom?
2. What is here?
3. How will it be used?
4. Who is here?
5. What will they do?
6. How will you interact with them?

Building Schema

What you have just talked about is reflective of the kind of knowledge you bring with you to every place you go and everything you do. Your mind is full of expectations based on the prior experiences you have. This knowledge is your schema—the background knowledge you have that leads you to construct a framework for seeing, organizing, and making sense of what is in your world. You most often call upon your schema without thought. In other words, your schema kicks in or is activated when you enter into a situation that you have had some previous experience with. There is no specific amount of experience—no time length, no number of interactions—you need in order for your knowledge to accumulate and your schema to be ready to guide you through new experiences.

For example, Char is from the United States but has lived in Mexico and in Ecuador. While there are markets where people barter in the United States, she had never been to one until she went to Merida, Yucatán, Mexico. Buying fruits and vegetables at an open-air Mexican market is different from buying them at a grocery store in the United States, where the prices are set. Here are some of the schema she developed to shop at a Mexican market:

• Have a general idea of what things cost.
• Bring your own bags.
• If you want bargains, go to the market right before it closes for the day. You may not find something specific you are looking for, but often the vendors will give you something extra, because they do not want to carry a lot of produce home.
• Bring cash.
• Make sure you have small bills. If you bargain for something and say you have only a certain amount of money, you are exposed as a liar if you present a large bill. Also, the vendor may not have change.
• If you want to get a good deal, organize your cash so that the small bills are visible and the large bills are not.
• If you see something you were looking for and it is ripe, do not outwardly express excitement about it. Vendors will charge you more if they think you really want it.
• The first price that the vendor gives is often inflated, because you are expected to bargain.
• Bargain. Going to the market is not just a way to buy food but also a way of being social.
• You can ask to taste something.
• If you do not think the produce is fresh, or if you think the price is too high, it is OK to say so and walk to the next stall. Sometimes the vendor will run after you and give you a better price.
• You cannot return anything.

Char did not learn these things after her first visit to the market. It took five or six visits and conversations with Mexican friends.

Thinking Together

1. Is the schema she described one that you share?
2. What is your schema for buying fruits and vegetables?

The greater your prior knowledge, the more accurate your expectations are likely to be, and the more comfortable this new experience will end up being. It may be so comfortable, in fact, that you take no notice of it at all. Everything and everyone in the classroom may feel ‘just right’ to you, allowing you to move on to focusing on what you are there to learn. On the contrary, some things and some people may seem unusual to you, violate your expectations, and even, possibly, disrupt your learning. How possible is it, though, that everything and everyone will be new to you? Probably not too possible. Even if much is new and unexpected, your schema will quickly allow you to compensate and provide you with enough background to get through at least the first day. As you do, your mind will be aching for more information and devouring all that comes its way. All that is new will be quite noticeable to you and, unless you turn away, will settle in with your previous experiences to further expand your schema and, in turn, provide that needed foundation for understanding your community. The sociologist C. Wright Mills was famous for saying, although some credit the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (pen name Novalis) as the originator, that the social scientist’s job was to “make the strange familiar and make the familiar strange”. That is, he wanted researchers to question their assumptions about things that they saw and heard every day, in the same way that they questioned things that they had not seen and heard every day.

Communities

We’ve so far used the classroom as our example community. There are many more communities you are a member of as well. Think about some of your other communities. At one time, you were a new member, and since that first day of membership, you have continued to build knowledge of and comfort within that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Making the Familiar Strange, Making the Strange Familiar
• 2 Linguistic Anthropology + Sociolinguistics = The Ethnography of Communication
• 3 Using Social Theory
• 4 A Framework for Doing the Ethnography of Communication
• 5 Compile Your Knowledge
• 6 Undertake Observation, Interviewing, and Artifact Collection
• 7 Locate Patterns
• 8 Trace Practices
• 9 Understand Ideologies
• 10 Review with Participants
• 11 Evaluate and Interpret
• 12 Share Implications
• Index