30.4050, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Blommaert (2018)

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Subject: 30.4050, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Blommaert (2018)

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Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 10:53:15
From: Xiaofang Yao [monica.yao66 at gmail.com]
Subject: Dialogues with Ethnography

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-134.html

AUTHOR: Jan  Blommaert
TITLE: Dialogues with Ethnography
SUBTITLE: Notes on Classics, and How I Read Them
SERIES TITLE: Encounters
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Xiaofang Yao, University of Melbourne

SUMMARY

Jan Blommaert’s newly published volume aims to engage the readers in
‘dialogues with ethnography’. Throughout thirteen chapters, the author offers
a critical reading of classic thinkers including Hymes, Scollon, Bourdieu and
Bakhtin, and persuasively argues that ethnography should be viewed as a
theoretical perspective rather than simply a research method. 

Chapter 1 begins by situating ethnography in current debates of language and
society. Ethnography finds its roots in Hymes’ linguistic anthropology and is
epistemologically grounded in humanism and functionalism. Based on the idea of
ethnography as a theory, Blommaert urges us to view language as a resource
that is deployed by human beings and contextualized in sociocultural,
political and emotional environments. Due to the importance of ‘situatedness’
(p. 6), linguistic forms should be understood in terms of their social
functions, modes of operation, relations with other linguistic acts and wider
patterns of communication. The role of ethnography in this undertaking of
sociolinguistics is to potentially counter the hegemonic imagination about the
attributed functions of linguistic resources, by way of observing and
examining the historicized process in which forms are enregistered with
functions.

Chapter 2, 3 and 4 offer a read on Hymes. The author follows Hymes’ line of
thought and conceives ethnography as an epistemology which concerns with
‘language as socially and culturally conditioned form of human behavior
subject to constraints and developments that cannot be predicted a priori but
need to be established empirically’ (p. 35). Specifically, Chapter 2 is
intended to be an obituary where the author briefly notes the richness and
complexity of Hymes’ intellectual legacy. One important insight in the work of
Hymes is that language needs to be viewed as a sociolinguistic system by
reference to the concept of repertoires, that is, ‘the totality of linguistic
forms regularly employed in the course of socially significant interaction’
(Gumpertz, 1964, p. 137). Due to the uneven distribution of linguistic
resources, these repertoires of individuals are unequal in nature, and their
functions are dependent on contextual employment rather than a priori
assessment. These features thus necessitate an ethnographic inspection of
language use as embedded in larger social patterns. 

In Chapter 3, the author takes up the interest in the critical and democratic
nature of ethnography. Based on his reading, ethnography is anti-hegemony in
two senses: first, it problematizes established norms and expectations with
real linguistic practices and behaviors; and second, it is deeply rooted in
the lived experience of people and gives voice to those who are otherwise
silenced. This discussion of an emancipatory agenda is continued in the second
half of Chapter 3 and the entire Chapter 4, with special attention given to
Hymes’ ethnopoetic theory and analysis. Ethnopoetics is a method of text
recording that seeks to reconstruct the cultural patterns and experiences in
narratives through poetic lines, verses and stanzas. It is built on the three
universal principles pertaining to spoken narratives: (1) narratives consist
of ‘lines and relations between lines’ (p. 30); (2) formal equivalence can be
established between lines; (3) such aesthetic organization connects the
narrative to the implicit cultural forms belonging to the repertoire of
cultural community. At the end of this chapter, the author illustrates how
affective aspects and cultural functionality of an anecdote can be made
visible by critically retranslating an interview excerpt with ethnopoetic
techniques.

Chapter 5 argues for the idea of ‘history born out of ethnography’ (p. 56) by
focusing on the construction of voice in grassroots historiography. The author
provides a lengthy analysis of positionality in the handwritten narrative
created by a Congolese painter, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. To construct the voice
of a historian, Tshibumba deployed a complex set of the linguistic, generic,
stylistic resources and relocated them to new referential and indexical
frames. Such instruments of writing have helped Tshibumba to emphasize
‘factuality, detachment and seriousness’ (p. 53) in the narrative and to
perform an elite historian identity. Importantly, the historical narrative
presented was a reconstruction of the ethnographic interactions between
Tshibumba and the ethnographer Johannes Fabian. Tshibumba also draws on
varying sources of history, including the historian's personal experience,
official Belgian colonial history, and Congolese mass media. These findings
point to the necessity of an ethnographic lens to identify the voice, the
genesis, structure and constraints that frame and are framed by historical
texts.

Chapter 6 and 7 bring in new perspectives from linguistic landscape studies
(Shohamy, 2015) and introduce the reader to the foundational works of the
Scollons. Chapter 6 draws our attention to three important elements in Scollon
and Scollon’s (2004) Nexus Analysis: historical body, discourses in place and
interaction order. It is believed that participants bring in their real bodies
in any synchronic moment of social action. The movements and positions of
their bodies are organized around normative patterns of conduct and become an
embodiment of cultural meanings, through the historical process of
‘enskilment’ (p. 69). The space, on the other hand, is an actor in
sociolinguistic processes that ‘imposes its rules, possibilities and
restrictions on communication’ (p. 70) in a spatial arena. The emplacement, or
the actual semiotic process that results from the specific location of signs
in the material world, has implications for ownership of the place and
legitimate use of the place (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). The space is thus
historical because discourses in place are rooted in the history of social and
spatial arrangements in the society. The interaction order of actual
communicative conduct in fact emerges from the moment when the historical body
enters the historical space. The author then illustrates the triadic framework
of nexus analysis with the action of Zebra crossing, unpacking the ‘semiotic
assemblage’ (Pennycook, 2017, p. 10) based on his ethnographic knowledge of
Antwerp, Belgium. 

Chapter 7 focuses on theories of social semiotics (van Leeuwen, 2005) and
geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and argues for a materialist theory of
signs in public space. From an ethnographic perspective, signs may be viewed
as semiotic objects which shape and are shaped by processes of production and
consumption. Using examples of a traffic sign in London Chinatown and a
handwritten Chinese sign in Antwerp, the author illustrates the ways in which
an analysis of the semiotic scope, the spatial scope, the demarcation, the
historical space and the visual repertoire could inform the sociolinguistic
developments in the society. Based on systematic observations, Blommaert
arrives at two powerful statements about public space. First, space is
dynamic, stratified and polycentric, and therefore the spatial emplacement of
signs is reflective of social structure. Second, signs demarcate places and
define identities; as people move through the space, these demarcations are
subsequently experienced, contested and negotiated. Together, these two
chapters demonstrate that the uptake of Nexus Analysis and Geosemiotics would
help avoid the problem of synchrony in ethnography and refocus our attention
‘on bodies as repositories of histories of experience, and on space as
historically organized, ordered and patterned’ (p. 76).

Chapter 8 orients us to the methodological loop in Pierre Bourdieu’s work.
Bourdieu essentially focuses on the ways in which individuals and communities
are conditioned by the historical and social environments. There has been a
marked shift in his positionality from one that views the observed subject as
‘an object of structuralist analysis’ (p. 89), to one that recognizes the
emergence of knowledge from intersubjective engagement. As a result, Bourdieu
employs both a symbolic interactionist approach and a historicizing
perspective to examine the ways in which sociolinguistic interactions
articulate power relations. This represents a welcoming methodological loop of
ethnography and statistics, underpinned by his historicized lens and pursuit
of empirical generalization. Importantly, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and
Agha’s notion of register are conceptually interconnected, both attending to
the emergence of norms out of intersubjective social interaction. This
insight, as the author conceives, would instill an ethnographic impetus into
Bourdieu’s work on the theory of socialized humanity, by forging a link
between actual social practices and generalized dispositions within specific
fields. 

Chapter 9 argues for a triangulation of surveys and ethnographies in the study
of complex, mobile and dynamic sociocultural environments. Informed by
Cicourel’s idea of ecological validity, the author suggests that researchers
must establish ethnographically ‘the specific universes of meaning and
interpretation that individual people use in handling survey questions’ (p.
102). This insight problematizes the methodological premise of interviewing,
as questions containing the same linguistic patterns can have an entirely
different indexical meanings in the sociocultural context. Meanwhile,
indexicals are not completely random but appear to be ordered and
conventionalized into registers, so that people are able to recognize the
signs in interactional encounters through implicit agreement on communicative
orders (Silverstein, 2003). It is in Blommaert’s view that ethnographic
exploration of these orders of indexicality are indispensable in any form of
research that uses human interaction. He thus proposes to constantly perform
validity checking by combining unstructured interviews, diary methods and
statistical insights.

In Chapter 10, Blommaert questions the data sharing practice in discourse
analysis where decontextualized interaction datasets are shared among scholars
without historical, cultural and sociological backgrounds. Contrasting an
ethnographic viewpoint with the conversation-analyst viewpoint of
interactional data, he succinctly points out that fieldwork interviews are
historically contingent, and transcripts are a selective textual
representation of the interviews. As conversation analysts transform
interviews into transcripts, the data has been decontextualized and
recontextualized into another form of representation of reality, subject to
traditions of data-formulating practices. The chapter also notes that
conversation analysis has treated background information as unquestionable and
stand-alone facts, whereas ethnographers grant equal validity to the process
of fieldwork and see it inseparable from the products of fieldwork. This
epistemological divide explains why data sharing is not a neutral but an
‘entextualization’ practice in discourse analysis, charged with assumptions,
indexicalities and agendas (p. 119). 

Turning again to theory, Chapter 11 focuses on the concepts of chronotopes and
scales as important aspects of ethnographic contextualization. The author
challenges the distinction between micro and macro levels of context in
studies of language and society. He argues that interactions may not be
centered on intentionally produced and organized denotational meanings, since
the notion of indexicality has usefully pointed to the historical dimension of
communicative behaviors. Meanings should instead be viewed as value-loaded,
historical and contextualized, in line with Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope and
Braudel’s concept of scale. Chronotope and scale serve as two dimensions of
context and contextualization: chronotope provides the time-space frames
necessary for invoking socioculturally ordered meaning potentials whereas
scales define the scope of accessibility and understandability of these
invoked conventions and resources for participants. From an ethnographic
perspective, the contexts of discourse need to be adequately available and
accessible to make communication successful. 

Chapter 12 is a book review of Marxism and Urban Culture. The Chapter briefly
summarizes Marx’s conceptual concern with the distinction between exchange
value inside market and use value outside market and Lefebvre’s uptake of
Marxist humanism in his view of the urban as an instrument of capitalist
power. Blommaert then challenges the book’s assumption that urban images are
produced by stereotyped cultural objects. In an effort the de-stereotype the
urban and the culture, he instead argues that culture is the enactment of
socially patterned meanings, dispersed over mundane events and practices which
could occur in urban, peri-urban, rural or even virtual spaces.
Wrapping up the discussion in Chapter 13, Blommaert underscores that
ethnography addresses complexity by way of giving voice to the perspectives of
participants, understanding micro-level interactions as both unique and
socially structured, and recognizing the reflexive nature of knowledge. He
advocates the view of ethnography as a general theoretical outlook as opposed
to the ethnographic methods such as participant observation and interviews. By
drawing upon the many well-grounded theories and methodologies already in the
study of language and society, we would further benefit from the theoretical
and historical thinking offered by ethnography.

EVALUATION

Overall, the collection offers an intellectually engaging and
thought-provoking discussion of ethnography as theory. Through his clearly
articulated analysis and reflection, Blommaert provides the reader with a more
accessible reading of the foundational works in the field of sociolinguistics.
That said, the book is at times preoccupied with debates over difficult
concepts, without giving concrete examples. While the book deals with an
admirable range of topics pertaining to the issues of language and society,
readers would likely feel a lack of coherence among the chapters. For example,
towards the end of the book are a book review and a concluding commentary to a
special issue. These stand-alone chapters require much more contextualization
before readers can follow the argument. These minor omissions aside, as
ethnography is gaining momentum in the era of globalization, superdiversity
and complexity, Blommaert’s ‘Dialogues with Ethnography’ is a welcome addition
to the field of sociolinguistic ethnography, and a must-have for experienced
readers who take an avid theoretical interest in ethnography. 

REFERENCES

Gumperz, John J. 1964. Linguistic and Social Interaction in Two Communities.
American Anthropologist, 66(6), 137-153. 

Pennycook, Alastair. 2017. Translanguaging and semiotic assemblages.
International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), 269–282.

Scollon, Ron. & Scollon, Suzie W. 2003. Discourses in place: Language in the
material world. London: Routledge.

Scollon, Ron. & Scollon, Suzie W. 2004. Nexus analysis: Discourse and the
emerging internet. London: Routledge. 

Shohamy, Elana. 2015. LL research as expanding language and language policy.
Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal (LL), 1(1–2), 152–171.

Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of
sociolinguistic life. Language & communication, 23(3-4), 193-229.

van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing social semiotics. London, New York:
Routledge.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Xiaofang Yao is a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne. Her research
interests include linguistic landscape, social semiotics and materialist
ethnography. She is currently researching the material narration of nostalgia,
power and identity in the linguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in
Victoria, Australia.





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