Ethnography of Communication

"The study of style in speech had difficulty becoming established in
traditional linguistics because of a tendency of linguists to ignore the social and contextual data which it is possible to observe in conjunction with stylistic variation. As Hymes (1964, 1971), Ervin-Tripp (1964, 1969), Fishman (1972) and other sociolinguists have pointed out repeatedly in recent years, when ethnographic data concerning participants and contextual elements are included in a description of speech, patterns of stylistic variation can be shown to emerge with a great degree of regularity.

In my own studies of Persian stylistic variation I have adopted the
following set of working assumptions:

1. Whereas 'speech style' considered without regard to participants or context of interaction may appear irregular and idiosyncratic, all linguistic variation in interaction can be seen as structured and regular when seen in its full ethnographic context (cf. Hymes 1964).

2. Style is that set of formal variations in speech which is sensitive to contextual variation in interaction events. Thus, by corollary, the
meaning of stylistic speech variation parallels the meaning of the
interaction event which encompasses it.

3. Just as particular formal morphological variations can be shown to indicate particular variations in grammatical function, so can particular stylistic variations be shown to indicate particular variations of the functions and meanings of culturally designated elements within the interaction context. Thus one kind of formal variation in language corresponds to 'internal' formal grammatical structures and the other kind of formal variation, designated here as style, corresponds to shifts in elements within 'external' contextual structures.

4. Thus because stylistic shifts covary with the contextual elements of interaction, stylistic variation may be seen as having two functions:

    a. indexical - reflecting the perceived reality of
the interaction situation.

    b. conative - being used strategically to impose a definition of
the elements of the interaction event on participants. "

The abundance of the references to the past in the present causes some theoretical problems. In other words, usually analysing different manifestations of the past in e.g. computers games, Hollywood films and so on to much attention is paid only on content (what is presented). Formal aspects of each film, computer game and so on are omitted. I want to explore this problem a little bit in this short text by taking as an example a historical re-enactment movement of the Viking Age.

Archaeologists have been interested in Hollywood films for a number of decades. Initially, their attention was focused on cinema’s misperception of the practice of archaeology and the subject under study (the past). Every film is, to use a Hegelian distinction, a story in itself, presenting a  more or less coherent story. At the same time, each film is for itself: a meta-film (meta-story) which reflects on and encapsulates the context within which it was made. In this paper these two levels of cinema are scrutinised in relation to How to Train Your Dragon (2010), an animation about Vikings and dragons. The paper aims to show how the (imaginable) past is used to both mask and stage tensions of contemporary politics. 

One of the recently most popular ways of experiencing the past is time travelling. It is ‘an experience and social practice in the present that evokes a past (or future) reality’ (Holtorf 2009: 33). In this article, I mainly discuss the political aspect of time travelling. I focus on cinema as a medium which closely links archaeology with the time travel phenomenon. Two Oscars galas, of 2010 and 2012, are scrutinised as case studies. The text is a political intervention to start dreaming dangerously, to contribute as an archaeologist to the critique of the utopia of capitalism (see also Hernando 2005: 75).

"The paper discusses the role of material culture for historical
re-enactors of the Viking Age. Three issues are
analysed: (a) the clothing and accessories worn by a
typical contemporary warrior, craftsman and woman
of the Viking times and the range of goods available
for purchase at historical re-enactment markets, (b)
the active and transformative aspect of material culture
for present-day Vikings, (c) the paradox of how
mirroring the material past by historical re-enactors is
actually a deeply ahistorical category. The main conclusion
of this study is that historical re-enactment of
the Viking Age is essentially about material culture.
The paper is based on observations made during the
Viking Week that took place at the Museum of Foteviken
(Sweden) on 24–30 June 2013."

"Communication in archaeology is not only about dual dialogue and understanding each other. Communication is a form of establishing and maintaining social relations as well. Some
scholars highlighted this aspect of language, calling it a phatic function of communication. Based on this concept, I claim that the crucial aspect of communication between society and archaeology actually might lie in a non-communicative aspect of communication (language) itself. To back up this thesis I rely on my own research into archaeological open-air museums and historical re-enactment events which took place in Poland in 2011-2012."

"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 "

As the Council of Europe is shifting its traditional focus on learning European languages towards emphasizing the importance of speaking other languages of the wider world, an increasing number of schools are offering Mandarin as part of their official curriculum in the United Kingdom. This is being financially supported by transnational/inter-institutional networks headed by Confucius Institutes and linked to the Hanban in the People’s Republic of China. In addition, learning of this language is being legitimised by appealing to discourses of “social cohesion” and “internationalism”. This article draws from a sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in a London secondary school located in a working-class area. This school converted itself into a Language Specialist School teaching Mandarin because of difficulties in recruiting the institutionally required minimum number of students for being entitled receive public educational funding. In the framework of a partnership with Confucius Institute, which requires its affiliated schools to ensure success rate of students learning Mandarin meets a given ratio, this paper takes a closer look at the resulting local uncertainties, with focus on everyday discursive practices of “collusion” (McDermott & Tylbor 1986) through which teachers and students create a sense of smooth language learning environment even when the majority of the students have difficulties in achieving outcome targets.

"General Description
OSEA Heritage Ethnography Field School provides training in ethnographic field work and research methods.  The program is open to undergraduate and graduate students in any social science and humanities field, as well as to post-baccalaurates.  Participants enroll in two courses.  The core seminar provides an anthropological approach and the analytical foundations for understanding and investigating heritage in local and global contexts.  The ethnographic methods and fieldwork practicum consists of three components.  One unit is an intensive introduction to spoken Maya langauge for use in the conduct of fieldwork.  The second unit is a classroom seminar in which ethnographic methods are presented and discussed.  The goal is for students to design practical research projects on heritage issue in the Maya communities in the region of Chichén Itzá.  The third component is the fieldwork practicum in which students actually conduct the ethnographic research they have designed.  The fieldwork is closely supervised and punctuated with participation in a fieldwork forum or workshop in which students discuss their sucesses and difficulties and a student “conference” presentation of their research results.  Participants can choose to do ethographic projects with a traditional research agenda or as an applied/action-based research.  Projects are designed as individual fieldwork or as collaborative research articulated to the ongoing investigation of heritage and tourism development in the Pisté-Chichén Itzá socioeconomic microregion.
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