A. History
of Ethnography
Ethnography was found by Dell Hymes, he is best known for his
founding role in the ethnography of communication. Hymes proposed the term ‘ethnography of
speaking’, later amended to ‘ethnography of communication’, to describe a new approach to
understanding language in use (Hymes, 1962, 1964). In doing this,
Hymes
aimed to move away from considering speech as an abstract model and toward investigating the diversity of
speech as it is encountered in ethnographic fieldwork. Essentially, Hymes argues:
…that the study of
language must concern itself with describing and analyzing the ability of the native speakers to use
language for communication in real situations (communicative
competence) rather than limiting itself to describing the potential ability of the ideal speaker/listener to
produce grammatically correct sentences (linguistic competence). Speakers of a language
in particular communities are able to communicate with
each other in a manner which is not only correct but also appropriate to the
sociocultural context.
This ability involves a shared knowledge of the linguistic code as well as of the socio-cultural rules, norms
and values which guide the conduct and interpretation of speech and other channels of communication
in a community … The ethnography of
communication
... is concerned with the questions of what a person knows about appropriate patterns of language
use in his or her community and how he or she learns about it. (Farah, 1998: 125).
.
B. What
Ethnography is?
Ethnography
(from Greek ethnos "folk, people" and grapho "to write"). It means that ethnography is a
field of study which is concerned primarily with the description and analysis
of culture, and linguistics is a field concerned, among other things, with the
description and analysis of language codes. In addition, ethnographic designs are qualitative
research procedures for describing, analyzing, and interpreting a
culture-sharing group’s shared patterns of behavior, beliefs, and language that
develop over time.
C. Varieties
Of Talk
There are
some researcher in Ethnography that talk about varieties:
·
Marshall (1961)
·
Basso (1972)
·
Fox
(1974)
·
Reisman
(1974)
·
Frake (1964)
It
is instructive to look at some of the ways in which various people in the world use talk, or sometimes the absence
of talk, i.e., silence, to communicate.
Marshall (1961) Marshall has indicated how the Kung have
certain customs which help them either to avoid or reduce friction and
hostility within bands and between bands.
According to Marshall, speech among the !Kung helps to
maintain peaceful social relationships by allowing people to keep in touch with
one another about how they are thinking and feeling.
Basso (1972) The Western Apache of
East-Central Arizona choose to be silent when there is a strong possibility
that such uncertainty exists. They are
silent on ‘meeting strangers’ whether these are fellow
Western Apache or complete outsiders; and strangers,
too, are expected to be silent.
Fox (1974) Fox (1974) has described how the Roti
consider talk one of the great pleasures of life - not just idle chatter, but
disputing, arguing, showing off various verbal skills, and, in general,
indulging in verbal activity.' Silence is interpreted as a sign of some kind of
distress, possibly confusion or dejection. So social encounters are
talk-filled.
Reisman (1974) In Antigua, people speak because they
must assert themselves through language. They do not consider as interruptions
behavior that we would consider being either interruptive or even disruptive. Reisman
says that in Antigua ‘ to enter a conversation one must assert one’s presence
rather than participate in something formalized as an exchange.
Frake (1964) Subanun of the Philippines, who employ
certain kinds of speech in drinking encounters. Such encounters are very important
for gaining prestige for resolving disputes. Frake (1964) has described how to
talk, what he calls ‘drinking talk’, proceeds in such encounters, from the
initial invitation to partake of drink, to the selection of proper topics for
discussion as drinking proceeds competitively, and finally to displays of
verbal art that accompany heavy, ‘successful’ drinking.
D. When
we conduct ethnography?
We conduct
an ethnography when we study of a group provides understanding of a large
issue. We also conduct an ethnography when we have a culture-sharing group to
study. Ethnography can provide a detailed day-to-day picture of events, such as
the thoughts, and activities of a search committee hiring a new principal
(Wolcott, 1974, 1944). We conduct an ethnography when we have long-term access
to this culture-sharing group so that we can build a detailed record of their
behaviors and beliefs over time.
E.
Etnography
of speaking
The
object of study Hymes proposes for linguistics is ‘ways of speaking’ (Hymes
1989). Hymes (1974) has proposed an
ethnographic framework which takes into account the
various factors that are involved in speaking. An ethnography of a
communicative event
is a description of all the factors that are relevant in understanding how that particular communicative
event achieves its objectives. For convenience, Hymes
uses the word SPEAKING as an acronym for the various factors he deems to be relevant. We will now
consider these factors one by one.
(S) Setting and Scene
|
Example
|
|
Setting refers to the time
and place. (the concrete physical circumstances in which speech takes place).
|
The living room in the
grandparents' home might be a setting for a family story.
|
|
Scene refers to the abstract
psychological setting, or the cultural definition of the occasion.
|
The family story may be told
at a reunion celebrating the grandparents' anniversary. At times, the family
would be festive and playful; at other times, serious and commemorative.
|
(P) Participant
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
- participant identity including personal
Characteristics
such
as age and sex, social status, relationship with each other;
|
At the family reunion, an
aunt might tell a story to the young female relatives, but males, although
not addressed, might also hear the narrative.
|
(E) end
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
Purposes, goals, and
outcomes.
|
The aunt may tell a story
about the grandmother to entertain the audience, teach the young women, and
honor the grandmother.
|
(A) Act
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
- refers to the actual form
and order of the event.
|
The aunt's story might begin as a response to
a toast to the grandmother. The story's plot and development would have a
sequence structured by the aunt. Possibly there would be a collaborative
interruption during the telling. Finally, the group might applaud the tale
and move onto another subject or activity.
|
(K) Key
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
Key refers to the tone,
manner, or spirit in which a particular message is conveyed: light-hearted,
serious, precise, pedantic, mocking, sarcastic, pompous, and so on.
|
The aunt might imitate the grandmother's
voice and gestures in a playful way, or she might address the group in a
serious voice emphasizing the sincerity and respect of the praise the story
expresses.
|
(I)
Instrumentalities
or the linguistic code
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
Instrumentalities refers to the choice of
channel, (e.g., oral, written, or telegraphic).
|
The aunt might speak in a casual
register with many dialect features or might use a more formal register and
careful grammatically "standard" forms.
|
|
actual forms of speech employed, such as
the language, dialect, code, or register that is chosen.
|
(N) Norms
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
Norms
of Interaction refers to the specific behaviors
and properties that attach to speaking
|
In
a playful story by the aunt, the norms might allow many audience
interruptions and collaboration, or possibly those interruptions might be
limited to participation by older females. A serious, formal story by the
aunt might call for attention to her and no interruptions.
|
|
Norms
of Interpretation how
these [behaviors] may be viewed by someone who does not share them, e.g.,
loudness, silence, gaze return, and so on.
|
(G) Genre
|
EXAMPLE
|
|
Genre refers to category of event .
(e.g. poems, proverbs, riddles, sermons, prayers, lectures, and
editorials.)
|
. The aunt might tell a character anecdote about the grandmother
for entertainment, or an exemplum as moral instruction.
|
Ultimately,
this list of components of speech acts is meant to explore and explain human,
social purposes in language. Like all
taxonomies, the SPEAKING grid is not an end in itself, but rather a means: ‘the formal analysis of
speaking is a means to the understanding of human purposes and needs, and their satisfaction’
(Hymes, 1972b: 70), as well as a way of understanding how language works.
F. Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is
that branch of sociology which is concerned, among other things, with talk viewed in
this way. Ethnomethodology is
a branch of the social science which is concerned with exploring how
people interact with the world and make sense of reality. Leither (1980, p. 5)
states, ’the aim of ethnomethodology is to study the processes of sense making
(idealizing and formulizing).
Fairclough
(1989, p. 9): Ethnomethodologists
investigate the production and interpretation of everyday action
as skilled
accomplishments of social factors, and they are interested in conversation as one particularly pervasive
instance of skilled social action.
Ethnomethodologists
are interested in such matters as how people interact, solve common problems, maintain social
contacts, perform routine activities, and show that
they know what is going on around them
and communicate that knowledge to
others.
Ethnomethodologists
adopt what is called a phenomenological view of the world; that is, the world is
something that people must constantly keep creating and sustaining for themselves. In
this view, language plays a very significant role in
that creating and sustaining. Ethnomethodologists regard ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningful activity’ as something
people accomplish when they interact socially. They
focus on what people must do to make sense of the world around them, and not on what scientists do in
trying to explain natural phenomena. Since
much
of human interaction is actually verbal interaction, they have focused much of their attention on how
people use language in their relationships to one another.
They have also focused on how in that use of language people employ what ethnomethodologists call commonsense
knowledge and practical reasoning.
Commonsense
knowledge refers to a variety of things. It is the understandings,recipes,
maxims, and definitions that we employ in daily living as we go about doing things, e.g., knowing that
thunder usually accompanies lightning; knowing how
houses are usually laid out and lived in; knowing how to make a telephone call; knowing that bus
drivers do not take cheques; knowing that there are
‘types’ of people, objects, and events, e.g., students and professors,
classrooms and
libraries, and lectures and laboratory sessions. These types help us to classify and categorize what is
‘out there’ and guide us in interpreting what happens
out there.
Commonsense
knowledge also tells us that the world exists as a factual object. There is a world ‘out there’
independent of our particular existence; moreover, it is a world which others as well
as ourselves experience, and we all experience it
in much the same way. That world is also a consistent world. Situations and events in it not only occur, they
re-occur. Things do not change much from day
to
day. Knowledge acquired yesterday and the day before is still valid today and will be valid tomorrow. We can take
that world for granted, for our experience
tells
us it is there and so apparently does the experience of others. Philosophers may question that reality, and
psychologists may wonder how we can ever make contact
with what may be out there, but our experience of ordinary living raises none of the same doubts in us.
However, at any one time only bits and pieces of
what is out there are relevant to our immediate concerns. We are not required to deal with everything all at
once; rather, we must ignore what is irrelevant and focus on what is immediately at
issue.
Practical
reasoning refers to the way in which people make use of their
commonsenseknowledge and to how they employ that knowledge in their conduct of everyday life: what they assume;
what they never question; how they select
matters
to deal with; and how they make the various bits and pieces of commonsense knowledge fit together in social
encounters so as to maintain ‘normal’
appearances.
It is quite different from logical thinking or the formation and testing of scientific hypotheses,
both of which we usually learn in formal settings and
have very specialized goals.
practical
reasoning is not the same kind of thing as
scientific
reasoning. People do not think through the problems of everyday life the same way that trained
scientists go about solving problems. Scribner (1977), for example, surveyed a number of
pieces of research that looked at how people
in
different parts of the world reason. Evidently, people with very little or no formal education rely entirely on
their own experience in solving problems and
do
not, or cannot, employ ‘logical’ thinking.
For
example, a number of people in
a rural tribe in Liberia in West Africa were presented with the following problem:
All
people who own houses pay a house tax.
Boima
does not pay a house tax.
Does
Boima own a house?
The
problem proved too difficult for many of the people asked, or, if they did manage to solve it, they could not
explain their reasoning. If they said, for
example,
that Boima did not own a house, they might offer the explanation that it was because he was too poor to
pay a house tax. This is not, of course, how
the
above logical problem works, but is instead a practical commonsense
interpretation of
the material contained within it and of the people’s own experience with house-owning and taxes, that
is, with the realities of daily living.
REFERENCES
Wardhaugh, Ronald, 2006, An
Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Australia: Blackwell Publishing.
Troike, Muriel Saville,2 003, The
Ethnography of Communication, Germany: Blackwell Publishing.
Johnstone, Barbara, William M. Marcellino, Dell Hymes and the Ethnography of Communication, Pittsburgh: Selected Works.
http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrbaldw/372/Ethnography.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Hymes
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