In "Discourse-Centered Methods", I found several ideas quite striking. While the theory about cultur and self construction through speech and "signifying acts" seemed really intriguing, I could not see how to apply such thought to my research. The examples where discourse centered methods were used seemed to occur in more traditional anthropological research sites: distant lands populated by people quite foreign to the researchers. While I would like to look at how accent and code shifting may be important in "interactive performance of identity".
I cannot say that I fully understand the following excerpt:
"When...persons are viewed instead as causally empowered embodied agents with unique powers and capacities for making meaning, discursive practices emerge as the means by which social action, cultural knowledge, and social institutions are achieved and enacted."
From the "Structured Interviewing and Questionnaire Construction" reading, I hope to apply a few pointers. The question format seems most prescient (e.g. combining open-ended and rating questions, choosing words exactly, making comparisons between certain groups to elicit more detailed responses). I do not think that I will have much time to do an extensive "general information" questioning session. Might I be able to apply this structure to individuals, though? Through the course of the interview, I intend to move from broad to more exact questions, adapting questions as I go along according to what I hear and see. Based on the first reading, it seems a good idea to note body language while informants respond to questions.
Most applicable to my intended method of questioning, the "Person-Centered Interviewing and Observation" article had some good pointers and contextual notes. Its recognition of the need to be ready to move away from the "mechanical" or "cookbook" instructions was also comforting. I have taken special note of the need to treat the interviewee as both "informant" and "respondent".
On the whole, the articles were a bit dry but still intriguing because their topics were relatively foreign to me.
Hi again,
ReplyDeleteI think, in some ways, focusing on discourse, language as social practice might make sense for you. The linguistic space of the clinic brings together several kinds of discourses (medical, business/managerial/administrative/efficiency, every day, English/Spanish, etc) so there is value in paying attention to how people move between them, how they use them to construct authority, justify their actions, build relationships and relate to each other, etc. An easy one is to pay attention to status, another to humor :)
The first quote: refers to that tension that most ethnographic work is tryign to explore, that between the social (structured, supra) and the individual (agential). So thinking of individuals as agents that can direct their actions in order to achieve particular goals makes studying the social use of language valuable, since it reveals how social roles, how institutions are constructed and enacted etc
The structured interview chapter is a bit more than most anthropologists do and that kind of work is appropriate for certain contexts. For the purposes of this class, most of the work we are going to do is exploratory, sketching out the terrain and imagining how a full ethnography would look like.