[Ethnocomm] e-seminar

[David Boromisza-Habashi]

If I may switch hats for a moment and participate in the conversation, I would like to join those who have expressed an appreciation for Wendy's emphasis on process as a theoretical upshot of Tamar's essay. Indeed, if we take Tamar's call for the study of "situated improvisational practice" seriously we cannot not shift our analytic attention from what Leeds-Hurwitz et al (1995) call programs (well-established, widely recognized, historically transmitted ideals of meaningful communicative practice endowed with moral force) to performance (the situated, and often partial and unpredictable, enactments of programs). Following the lead of these scholars we will find our attention shift from competence to performance, from structure to agency, from (meaning) systems to (speech) events, and from stability to transformation.

In my view, both essays bring into relief the emergent quality of culture. This quality is also present in Lydia's description of the improvisational character of conversations among three members of small farming communities, and in Saskia's traveling codes that take root in various speech communities, although sometimes their capacity to take root is questionable (Witteborn, 2010). Emergence implies the gradual appearance of coherence or meaning. What Tamar and Wendy are teaching me is that a focus on process and emergence necessitates "listening to" (to borrow a phrase from Gerry) not only coherence but incoherence as well.

The study of incoherence does not mean seeking out social moments marked by the lack of shared understanding; rather it prompts us to appreciate that both coherence and incoherence can be detected at various levels of analysis. Take Deborah Cameron's (2004) description of what she calls communication culture, a system of beliefs about the importance of communication, its relation to social problems, and the possibility of distinguishing right from wrong ways of communicating. The beliefs (or premises) she is able to distill from British communication training manuals and skills assessments are perfectly coherent, however, their translation into standards and actual evaluations of performance are vague, almost meaningless. I have seen something similar in my study of Hungarian citizens' assessments of political communication: a co-existence of coherent premises, an only partially coherent ideal of "communication," partially coherent standards derived from the ideal, and coherent assessments.

The study of improvisation and process means capturing culture at various stages of emergence, which entails describing and analyzing coherence, or the lack thereof, at various levels of analysis (interaction, symbols, standards, ideals, premises). Culture does not emerge as a solid block, rather its emergence begins with certain "harbingers" - a shift in everyday conversational patterns here, the growing popularity of a set of beliefs there - signaling the possibility of a coming shift in local ways of speaking and attendant ways of experiencing the world.

References

Cameron, D. (2004). Communication culture: Issues for health and social care. In S. Barett, C. Komaromy, M. Robb, & A. Rogers (Eds.), Communication, relationships and care: A reader (pp. 63-73). London: Routledge.

Leeds-Hurwitz, W., Sigman, S. J., & Sullivan, S. J. (1995). Social communication theory: Communication structures and performed invocations, a revision of Scheflen's notion of programs. In S. J. Sigman (Ed.), The consequentiality of communication (pp. 163-204). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Witteborn, S. (2010). The role of transnational NGOs in promoting global citizenship and globalizing communication practices. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10(4), 358-372. doi:10.1080/14708477.2010.497556


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David Boromisza-Habashi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder
http://colorado.academia.edu/DavidBoromiszaHabashi

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