ethnography of communication
Ethnography of communication | Mike McDonald | May 4th, 2003
In reading various books about the ethnography of communication, I've been struck by how many seemingly authoritative statements are made that do not accord with what I know, or think I know. For example, in McKay and Hornberger's Sociolinguistics and Language Learning, on p. 361, Saville-Troike claims that to speakers of Japanese, the sentences "John baked that cake. That cake was baked by John." have different meanings, since "the second would imply that the agent did a bad job." My Japanese wife agrees with me that this is not the case.
Similarly, in "The Ethnography of Communication", on p. 111, the same author states that the relative elevation of chairs is a salient feature of communicative setting in Japan. Again, my wife and I cannot think of any instances where this would normally be true. In fact, misleading statements concerning communities I have some knowledge of are so frequent that I tend to distrust everything I read in this field.
I mention this because some of the premises of the ethnography of communication seem so shaky. I know from experience that living a year or two in a community, even when you immerse yourself, is not going to give you more than the most rudimentary sense of what's going on, or what it's like to be a member of that community. The whole idea of participant observation strikes me as a bit like pretending to be a child so that you can observe children more impartially. Your chosen group of children may stop paying attention to your affectation after a while, but they will not think of you as a child, you will not become a child, and many of your observations will be coloured by the oddity of your situation.
Another problem I have is with the idea of a speech community. Despite all the qualifications about subgroups and the dynamic nature of communities, writers still seem to treat them as rather monolithic entities. I remember Keith's comment in Unit 1 of the IIC module that to be a member of a community, one must share the normative system of the group. He went on to say that, since he disapproves of racist and sexist jokes, he does not share the norms of one of the groups he participates in, and is therefore not fully a member of that group. That got me thinking: suppose we took some other criterion instead of racism and sexism, such as political affiliation.
Would all the members of the group have to share the same politics to be considered members of the group? If you took a dozen criteria such as religion, politics, sexual preference, hobbies, and so on, I'm sure you'd find that there WAS no "normative system". Every attempt I've ever read that's tried to pin down what the Japanese are like, or what it means to be English, or whatever, has been to a greater or lesser extent a failure. It's a bit like the story of the blind men and the elephant: each describes the part he can feel as if it were the whole beast.
I suppose that shouldn't stop people from trying to analyse society, but I think it should make us think carefully about how seriously to treat the results.
Mike McDonald
(with a little time on my hands in Golden Week)
with 
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