Ethnography

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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