Ethnography of Communication

This article addresses Rachel’s Tomb as a site of heightened ritual activity and pilgrimage, whose popularity increased during the latter years of the British Mandate in Palestine, and whose role and meaning as a symbolic public site have been transformed. We examine how a set of meanings has been established at the site at the particular historic moment, converging local and national meanings, on the one hand, with religious, heritage and touristic meanings, on the other. Our approach is integrative, and we situate our inquiry by addressing three main conceptual points: the first is the site’s geo-physical characteristics, by which we refer to its functionality in terms of location, accessibility, and mobility, as well as in terms of the site’s size and material characteristics. The second point concerns the agentive interventions of the site’s renowned shamash, Shlomo Eliyahu Freimann, and the crucial role that he played in transforming the site’s collective function and public status. The third point concerns a corpus of documents, most of which were written in situ, that center around the site’s impressive visitor books, filled with numerous notations. Study of these documents suggests a hybrid genre that is part of the site’s changing discursive ecology.

Practical in focus, grounded in social interaction, and written in a strong narrative style replete with concrete examples, Intercultural Communication: Pathways to Better Interactions provides readers with an examination of diverse cultural practices that can be used to support successful communication.

Author David Boromisza-Habashi's approach is grounded in theory, yet relevant and highly accessible for students. Using vivid and relatable anecdotes, he deftly explores the primary challenge of effective intercultural communication in our globalized world: the ability to properly coordinate interactions to achieve shared meaning.

The vital importance of understanding cultural communication, and how it relates to being a responsible member of society, is stressed throughout the book. The weaving of scholarly work and everyday encounters highlights the role of inquiry as not just an academic endeavor but as an everyday practice. Strategies for coordinating intercultural encounters in the real world encourage readers to take action and recognize that this work and learning doesn't end when the course ends. Rather, it is a process, one that should be an ongoing part of their lives.

The pragmatic, thought-provoking approach of this book is timely, useful, and relevant. Intercultural Communication: Pathways to Better Interactions is the ideal textbook for students of intercultural communication who wish to create and foster meaningful social interactions.

https://titles.cognella.com/intercultural-communication-9781516596201

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.

Le volume traite de la médiation des savoirs sur le langage et l’appréhende sous deux aspects. D’une part, le volume propose quelques pistes pour mieux comprendre ce qu’engage de fabriquer des savoirs sur le langage lorsque la relation entre linguistes et public investigué est celle d’une attention mutuelle des deux parties plutôt que celle d’une position surplombante de l’une sur l’autre. D’autre part, il présente certaines manières par lesquelles les savoirs construits en sciences du langage sont diffusés par les linguistes auprès du public, qu’il soit professionnel ou ‘profane’, sans prétentions à en épuiser l’inventaire.

Le choix d’articuler ces deux aspects s’explique d’abord par le fait que la médiation des savoirs sur le langage, au contraire peut-être de nos a priori, ne s’observe pas seulement au moment de la communication, de la vulgarisation ou de la transposition des résultats mais tout au long du processus de recherche. Dans un cas comme dans l’autre, se réunissent autour de l’objet langage des instances aux positions épistémiques et sociales différenciées. L’articulation de questionnements relatifs à la fabrication et à la diffusion des savoirs sur le langage répond également à la préoccupation de sortir la recherche de sa tour d’ivoire pour en envisager les implications. Dans la perspective d’une science aux prises avec le monde social, et dans le prolongement d'une réflexion sur la co-construction des connaissances, la médiation des savoirs apparait comme une des conditions, un des moyens et une des finalités incontournables de la recherche.

Casting Gender puts forward a vision of theatre, storytelling, and the performance of the everyday function within the lived spaces of its performers and audiences, asking how women artists/scholars embody meaning, carry social value, and constitute possible identities. Drawing on scholarship in intercultural communication, performance studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies, this collection of new, critically informed research advances our understanding of how theater works as intercultural communication and as a vehicle for change. Casting Gender offers varied locations and sites of research, highlighting the rich diversity of women’s cultural identities, roles, and societal positions. This book moves beyond the western-centered nature of intercultural performance and intercultural communication theory and practice by creating a forum for nonwestern voices.

Review:

"...Lengel and Warren have looked into the future and seen where the next significant social transformative movements will come from… No other work brings together the important issues surrounding women’s creative practices across diverse performance media in such wide geographical and cultural settings. ‘Casting Gender’ is a unique, groundbreaking volume exploring women’s creativity, subjectivity, and national and cultural identity during a century of rapid social transformation."

-- Professor Dawn Chatty, Dulverton Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford.

This article introduces the concept of academic social space as a useful construct to understand and interpret the academic language socialization of individuals in English second language academic spaces. Academic social space builds on the concepts of community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and production of space (Lefebvre, 1991). The article then reports on a study that adopted the notion of academic social space to examine the language socialization of one international student in a tertiary institute in New Zealand. Data about this case from various sources including diaries, interviews, class observations, field notes, institutional documents, and video/audio recordings of classroom interactions are presented. The analysis of findings from this study showed the student displayed three differential participation patterns in the three social spaces in which he was engaged. He presented himself as an active participant in his English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course, a silent participant in the first mainstream social space, and a changing silent-active participant respectively in the classroom and online domains of his second mainstream social space. The findings also showed that the concept of academic social space enables thick description (Geertz, 1973) about the language socialization experiences of additional language learners in tertiary contexts. Understanding the various aspects of social space enables researchers, educators, policy makers, and teachers to revisit their notion of space by considering it as an active, dynamic, and organic participant in the learning process of second language learners.

In this paper, I discuss and contrast the manner in which the notion of indeterminacy is theorised in contemporary sociolinguistics and integrational linguistics.
To appear in Adrian Pablé (Ed.). (forthcoming) Critical Humanist Perspectives: The Integrational Turn in the Philosophy of Language and Communication. Routledge.

Culture in Rhetoric is our attempt at providing an innovative look at the relationship between rhetoric and the ethnography of communication. Our interest in exploring this relationship evolved over years of study in these two sub-disciplines where identification through communication was at the root of the communities we study. Historically, ethnography and rhetoric have been explored as separate areas within our discipline of communication studies. Rather than looking at these areas of study as distinct strands our book argues that rhetoric extends beyond the study of public discourse to include those moments of identification that are used in a situated, social and cultural way. The idea that individuals use situated rhetoric to accomplish communal identification even at the risk of multiple interpretations from others is the main problem we address in our book.

To engage readers in this problem we present case studies exploring argumentation through speaking and silence over the use of Native American land, asynchronous communication active in a the cultural frames of a CBS 60 Minutes episode, identity and communication at a Jewish havurah, optimal forms of communicative conduct in Britain, and the changes in education communication of a North American College. We present the position that the context, form and meaning of these situated instances of communication provide a foundation upon which to analyze the communication dynamics of cultural identity.

Our hope is this book will appeal to professors and scholars of rhetoric, ethnography of communication, discourse analysis, and those interested in the communication of the specific cultural groups addressed in the book (Finnish, Jewish, British, Native American and American). While those interested in communication and culture will also have much to explore and consider through reading our text.

Esta tese de doutorado coloca em questão os autorretratos digitais comumente nomeados enquanto “selfies” como práticas que revelam diferentes modos de experimentação cotidiana. O objetivo principal, portanto, é seguir a experiência relacionada à produção de fotografias digitais chamadas selfies. O direcionamento para a pesquisa não está na investigação do caráter imagético da selfie, ou na exploração de redes sociotécnicas associadas ao dispositivo fotográfico, mas em sua constituição enquanto prática – cotidiana, situada e em constante transformação através da experiência. A partir de um diálogo com o empirismo radical de William James, apresenta-se o problema em termos de suas consequências práticas: O que constitui, em termos práticos, fazer uma selfie? Quais as diferenças localizadas produzidas ao se pensar na selfie não como um tipo de imagem, mas como uma prática? Ou seja: através de quais processos a prática de selfie se constrói em um cotidiano fotográfico? São essas questões, conjuntamente com uma proposta de seguir a experiência, que guiam a construção de uma investigação realizada enquanto uma etnografia diante da prática de selfie. Dessa forma, traça- se um modo de seguir a experiência que se desenvolve no rastreamento das diferenças práticas, em um caráter processual de propagação e conexão a partir de novas experiências, e na constituição de um trajeto a ser seguido. O ponto de partida para a investigação localiza-se em uma praça, na qual começa-se a observar e interagir – considerando os espaços geográficos e digitais como um contínuo ambiente de observação – com diferentes práticas de selfie. A partir dessas primeiras observações, as possibilidades de novos caminhos passam a ser delineados, e começa-se a acompanhar o cotidiano fotográfico de diferentes pessoas que se tornam, aos poucos, personagens etnográficos. Essa trajetória, de seguir a experiência conjuntamente com os personagens, demonstra uma prática de selfie que se constrói nas diferenciações cotidianas e modos de experimentação que passam pelas maneiras através das quais se desenvolvem: negociações entre vergonha e visibilidade; co-construção de práticas através de performatividades algorítmicas; possibilidades conversacionais em práticas material- discursivas; e modulações da intimidade em experiências afetivas. Aponta-se, ainda, que esses modos são transpassados por um trajeto de aprendizagem de relatar a si mesmo, através do qual a selfie vai se constituindo enquanto prática. É nesse sentido, em conjunto com as particularidades da prática cotidiana de selfie apresentadas em cada capítulo, que se propõe (e experimenta-se) uma tomada de posição investigativa baseada na experiência – e, através dela, argumenta-se e chama-se atenção para a necessidade de aprender a articular modos possíveis para segui-la levando em consideração as produções de diferença práticas.

Telling stories is one of the fundamental things we do as humans. Yet in scholarship, stories considered to be “traditional”, such as myths, folk tales, and epics, have often been analyzed separately from the narratives of personal experience that we all tell on a daily basis. In Storytelling as Narrative Practice, editors Elizabeth Falconi and Kathryn Graber argue that storytelling is best understood by erasing this analytic divide. Chapter authors carefully examine language use in-situ, drawing on in-depth knowledge gained from long-term fieldwork, to present rich and nuanced analyses of storytelling-as-narrative-practice across a diverse range of global contexts. Each chapter takes a holistic ethnographic approach to show the practices, processes, and social consequences of telling stories.

Resumen
La presente investigación documental explora las definiciones de lengua (i.e., ontologías de la lengua) que han surgido en la Sociolingüística. En particular, se examinan tres tipos de estudios sociolingüísticos: la Lingüística Laboviana (e.g., 1972), la Etnografía de la Comunicación (Gumperz y Hymes, 1964) y el Análisis Conversacional (Sacks, 1992). Antes de analizar dichos estudios sociolingüísticos, se expone la ontología de la lengua desarrollada por Chomsky (1986) la cual sirve como punto de referencia para contrastar las tres diferentes ontologías. Seguido de esto, se presenta la ontología de la lengua formulada por Labov (1977), se discute la crítica que ha recibido y se examinan algunas propuestas que apuntan a la integración de factores sociales con la estructura lingüística. Con respecto a la Etnografía de la Comunicación, se expone su ontología de la lengua (Hymes, 1974, 1986) en conjunto con una ontología de la cultura (Sapir, 1921; Hymes, 1972) y se da una explicación de la relación entre lengua y cultura. En cuanto al Análisis Conversacional, se examina su ontología de la lengua (Ochs, Schegloff y Thompson, 1996), su método para el estudio lingüístico y se ilustra cómo la gramática es vista como un recurso interaccional. La sección final de este análisis propone que para la Sociolingüística la lengua es una entidad enteramente social y funcional, i.e., la lengua transmite significados sociales, refleja el orden social y expresa la identidad de los hablantes.
Publicado en inglés en la revista  Linguistik Online, 83(4) http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.83.3788

Ethnography online  as an ethnographic division is often critically treated because it allows researchers to investigate a culture without having face to face contact (Hine 2008:259). It is moreover sometimes seen as inferior to traditional ethnography because much of the data collection occurs passively. But even though some researchers argue that online and offline world should be regarded as separated, ethnography online is not condemned to be conducted totally on the Internet, but rather almost naturally expands to related offline contexts. Accordingly, it offers many possibilities to understand a culture’s beliefs, values, norms, social practices, and behavior in online and offline correlations. There are “complex connections between online and offline social spaces [and a] key challenge for the future is to develop forms of ethnography that take seriously the social reality of online settings, whilst also exploring their embedding within everyday life” (Hine 2008: 258). In this respect, in the following, I will discuss why ethnography in and on online environments is a meaningful approach. I want to critically reflect on advantages and disadvantages of ethnography online and in particular consider how useful and appropriate a pure online observation is, compared to other ethnographic methods which might also be extended to the offline world. For this discussion I will take the example of my brief study of two female German YouTubers who are publishing videos concerning their everyday activities about beauty, fashion and ‘do it yourself’ on the online video community YouTube. One of the women I merely observed online via watching her videos, the other one agreed to additionally answer some questions in a personal interview via video call. Because consequently, I obtained information from both informants via different research methods, I want to critically discuss whether my research findings are anyway comparable. For reasons of simplification and for the flow of reading, I will use the male form of a word when actually gendering would be necessary.

... the editorial team at the Oakland Tribune, Janine Warner at The Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald, Éamonn Ó Dónaill and Fionnuala MacAodha at ... I am extremely grateful to those who read later-stage versions of chapters: John Damaso, John Diaz, Ann Joski, and Phil Murray. ...

Using an ethnography of speaking approach, this article discusses the ideological aspects of language practices, as they are played out in a traditional Yupik (Eskimo) village in Chukotka, in the Far East of the Russian Federation. The article shows how local linguistic practices and language choices of individual speakers intersect with purist language ideologies, which frame certain beliefs about languages and ways of speaking, making them appear more normal and appropriate than others. Placing the " work of speaking " within the context of cross-cultural dynamics and purist language economies, this article challenges the basic assumption of linguistic purism about language and identity being intertwined.

Mexican food in Taiwan is relatively new and unknown, people in Taiwan learn about it either from media, personal travel experiences, local restaurants or occasional events. However, menus available at these restaurants differ from the original food made in Mexico in terms of ingredients and taste. These differences are important in order to preserve Mexican identity. In this study, semi-structured interviews with Mexican food producers in Taiwan were conducted to better understand the role of food in cultural integration. The people interviewed expressed concern for having their food present as a way to preserve their cultural heritage as part of the process of integration to Taiwanese society. Authenticity for these people is a matter of also preserving their identity and not merely a marketing strategy. Authenticity and cultural appropriation are discussed in the literature review to better understand the testimony of interviewees. Culture shock and semiotics are also brought into the discussion as a theoretical background to raise the discussion on the possibility of treating food as a communicative device to interpret it as a cultural identity marker.

Cet article présente une recherche sur l'organisation sociale des appels publics aux services d'urgence et se concentre sur la fonction constitutive de la conversation au cours de l'«appel au secours». Les auteurs examinent comment ces sujets de conversation peuvent eux-mêmes devenir problématiques pour les interlocuteurs.

Our research is an ethnographic, historical inquiry into the origins and impact of CanCon, Canadian Content broadcasting policy that has profoundly influenced the Canadian music landscape since the mid 1960s, as well as a critical discussion of the viability of a protectionist cultural policy in the age of a digitally connected global village. To support our stance, we interview an eyewitness to the era that birthed the policy and make theoretical connections to emerging notions of the global Creative Economy (Venturelli, 2000). The United Nations (UNCTAD, 2011) has recently reported that creativity, knowledge, and access to information—referred to as the Creative Economy—are powerful engines for promoting global economic growth and development. Musicians, music technologies, music producers, and music products are at the heart of the engine now recognized as the Creative Economy. Our research enables us to reveal (1) the kinds of discussions and considerations that were in the minds of policy innovators during the conceptual development and implementation of CanCon, (2) information regarding the initiators, developers, and stake holders at various “tables” and levels for these discussions, (3) how some believe these laws effected and changed the music-cultural landscape in Canada over the past 40 years, (4) the “Canadian impact” on music culture beyond Canada’s boundaries, and (5) whether the digital world has changed the landscape in terms of the efficacy of current, national music culture policy.

Ces dernières années, dans le domaine de la participation citoyenne aux politiques de la ville, bon nombre de chercheurs en philosophie politique et en sciences sociales ont plaidé pour un décentrement du discours et de l’argumentation, pour une communication démocratique plus « inclusive », plus « sensible », davantage en prise sur les environnements, sur les dimensions expérientielle et matérielle des problèmes urbains. Le message semble avoir été reçu. Visites de groupes dans les quartiers, reportages vidéo ou photo, expositions de dessins, jeux de construction, fonds de cartes à recouvrir d’icônes et de gommettes autocollantes, ateliers visant à imaginer « la ville de ses rêves », activités de théâtre-action, jeux de rôle et jeux de plateau, etc., sont en effet devenus des incontournables de la « boîte à outils » des professionnels de la participation. Dans cet article, plutôt que de nous intéresser aux différents « outils » dans leurs spécificités, nous voudrions interroger plus généralement la prolifération des méthodes cadrant les contributions citoyennes dans le domaine de l’image ou de l’imagination, et repliant la parole ordinaire dans ses fonctions d’ostension et de figuration, c’est-à-dire dans ses fonctions « indexiques » et « iconiques » (Charles Sanders Peirce). L’hypothèse qui nous guide est celle-ci : en lieu et place d’un enrichissement des processus de communication, on assisterait plutôt à un véritable « tournant sémiotique » dans les pratiques de démocratie participative ; un tournant à travers lequel l’image profane en viendrait peu à peu à se substituer au discours citoyen et à éluder, avec lui, les prétentions d’articulation, de problématisation, de synthèse et de généralisation chez les « participants ordinaires ».

Taboo can be characterized as being concerned with behavior which is believed to be supernaturally forbidden or regarded as immoral or improper. Taboo, in language, is associated with things which are not said, and in particular with words and expressions which are not used. This paper is concerned with a sociolinguistic analysis of taboo phenomenon in Moroccan society. In other words, it tries to combine societal and situational factors together to see how they influence taboo. Taboo words are examined and explained in their sociocultural and communicational contexts. In other words, they are treated as dynamic phenomenon in the Moroccan society. For this reason, the paper suggests a contextual framework for the analysis of taboo words in Moroccan culture. It discusses the creation, violations and the use of euphemism for taboo language. A questionnaire survey is administered to a random population sample of 200 adult Moroccan respondents to elicit their views and attitudes on the use of taboo words and on strategies they adopt to use euphemistic devices. The findings reveal a close correlation between the use of taboo words and euphemism and their contexts of use. These findings indicate that the use of linguistic taboo and euphemism differ from one individual to another depending on their age, gender, educational background and the context of use. General conclusions and discussion are drawn to encourage future studies on taboo as a cultural and linguistic phenomenon.

The purpose of the research presented in this article is to advance a culturally informed theory of political terminology, with special attention to essentially contested political terms. The article proposes that a comprehensive theory of political terminology must account for participants’ reasons for engaging in essential contestation. In the case of essentially contested concepts, the reason for engagement is concern with moral trouble in the speech community. Through a culturally oriented discourse analysis of a call-in exchange on Hungarian state radio the article demonstrates that the use of the essentially contested term gyuulöletbeszéd (‘hate speech’) emerges as a response to multiple norm violations, and serves the purpose of oppositional membering and redress.

Over the past decade, a new branch of sociolinguistics called Linguistic Landscape Studies (LLS) has emerged, as an attempt to produce accurate and detailed inventories of urban multilingualism. LLS investigate the presence of publicly visible bits of written language: billboards, road and safety signs, shop signs, graffiti and all sorts of other inscriptions in the public space, both professionally produced and grassroots. LLS offer considerable potential as a first-line sociolinguistic diagnostic of particular areas; they can at the very least protect researchers from major errors; they compel sociolinguists to pay more attention to literacy; and they compel towards historicizing sociolinguistic analysis, at least when certain conditions are met. In what follows, we shall apply the tools of LLS to a particular space, the Rabot neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium. We shall use these tools in a particular way, however, and before engaging with the neighborhood we briefly sketch our own approach to LLS.

Ph.D.-thesis accounting for mediated modes of visiting at the museum of natural history, Naturama, Denmark.

Mobile phone cameras, exercise pamphlets and dress-up animal costumes shape museum visits. The three very different mobile, mediating technologies play a central role when visitors relate to a museum exhibition. When these mobile, mediating technologies link visitors and the exhibition, they simultaneously create their own distorted version of the exhibition and conjure three very different versions of the visitor.

Actor network theory (ANT) and related post-Ant studies invorm the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out at a museum of natural history. The analyses show how mobile, mediating technologies, visitors and exhibition are intertwined during museum visits. This leads to an understanding of the museum visit as consisting of multipe, mediated modes of visiting.

Each technology mediates a mode of visiting and as visitors shift between mediated modes of visiting, they shift between multiple exhibition realities.

Melodias, M.C. (2019). Netflix and the Filipino: the Story of the de Leon Family (Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis). College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City.

This thesis is a case study on the social uses of video-on-demand platforms, namely Netflix, and the role it plays in the Filipino family. With the de Leon family as the subject of this study, it reconstructed Lull’s Social Uses of TV into that of Netflix. Furthermore, it contextualized the observed social uses of Netflix into the Filipino culture using Enriquez’ Filipino Value Structure, as well as his levels and modes of social interaction. With the use of ethnography, four social uses of Netflix were observed from the family: namely, communication facilitation, affiliation/avoidance, social learning, and competence/dominance. Under these social uses, various themes were observed that reflected the family’s dynamics and relationships. Furthermore, these themes also reflected the Filipino values which were present in the family.

Over the course of this study, the researcher inferred that Netflix has, in some instances, brought the family closer to one another. However, for those that do not use the platform, Netflix becomes the reason for their alienation. In studying Netflix, further insight was gained from the Filipino audience, specifically, from the Filipino family. Furthermore, the researcher hopes that this opens up new avenues for research into the family and new media delivery platforms.

Anthropology and linguistics share a common intellectual origin in 19th Century scholarship. The impetus that prompted the earliest archaeologists to look for civilizational origins in Greece, early folklorists to look for the origins of culture in folktales and common memory, and the first armchair cultural anthropologist to look for the origins of human customs through comparison of groups of human beings also prompted the earliest linguistic inquiries.

This essay traces the relationship between the development of anthropology and linguistics down to modern times including the development of sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, culture and communication, pragmatics, metapragmatics and other mainstay topics in linguistic anthropology

This handbook brings together 26 ethnographic research
reports from around the world about communication. The
studies explore 13 languages from 17 countries across 6
continents. Together, the studies examine, through cultural
analyses, communication practices in cross-cultural
perspective. In doing so, and as a global community of
scholars, the studies explore the diversity in ways
communication is understood around the world, examine
specific cultural traditions in the study of communication,
and thus inform readers about the range of ways
communication is understood around the world.