[Ethnocomm] Ethno-comm e-seminar, decoding, etc.

[Donal Carbaugh]

Greetings Colleagues,

 

What a wonderful and rich set of materials to read through, mull over, and
add to our current discussions. Thanks to David Boromisza-Habashi for his
organizing acumen, Tamar Katriel and Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz for their detailed
comments, to Lydia Reinig, Saskia Witteborn, Gerry Philipsen, Trudy Milburn,
David, Kristine Munoz, and Kris Acheson-Clair for their posts and all of you
lurking out there for being involved! Like you, I have enjoyed and
benefitted from this discussion.

 

I am struck by Kris's and Trudy's comments, dancing at the borders of
disciplines. While there, misunderstandings can easily develop, political
agendas erupt, territories defended, but also untilled intellectual soil can
be found. Hymes with Gumperz built EC explicitly at the borders of
anthropology and linguistics, implicitly at rhetoric and communication. But
it can be difficult ground to hold! I have always felt tied to multiple
disciplines since I was an undergraduate with degrees in Anthropology,
Sociology, and Communication. I have also felt EC is a wonderful place to be
in order to "speak" to the same. Some years ago (1993), in a review in
American Anthropologist, I cast EC as a "discipline with interdisciplinary
relevance" and still feel that way (v. 93, p. 737). 

 

In an ICA handbook of largely EC studies to be published later this summer,
chapters range from scholars in - using the department names of
contributors' affiliations - Applied Linguistics, Arabic Studies, Chinese
Linguistics, Communication, Cultural Discourse Studies, Education, English,
Folklore, International English, Journalism, Linguistics, Media &
Communication Studies, Medical Humanities, Political Science, and
Translation Studies. I am not sure what exactly to infer from the list. It
indicates EC inflected scholars are housed in many different academic
departments with each seeing some value in EC, perhaps a very good sign for
us as we move forward. Given Tamar's, Wendy's, and Kristine's comments
concerning materiality, interdisciplinarity, technology/f2f, it is nice to
point-out that the assembled chapters discuss various media (including cell
phones, social media, radio, television) as sites as well as various means
of F2F communication. 

 

Like Kris, I would be interested in seeing recent works we have produced
perhaps as part of interdisciplinary teams and, if published, where so. That
would give another indication of where some of us are headed. A team of
scholars in Communication, Engineering, and Linguistics studying car-talk
has recently published works in communication journals and also in the top
journal in Ergonomic theory (Theoretical Issues in Ergonomic Science). There
are surely others with similar examples and we would benefit from hearing
about them.

 

Like Kris and Trudy, I have also heard others from non-Communication
disciplines (Anthropology and Linguistics are examples I would give) who
think of EC within a time-warped-frame of "the mid-70s." We have developed a
bit since then (!) and can help others understand that, especially if we
help each other know what has indeed been done. David's annual bibliography
on this site is a potent aid in identifying this sort of development. A
project-based list might be helpful as well. Others?

 

The exchange so far has also invited me to think further about several
concepts while focusing reflection upon actual "moments" of communication
practice. Chief among those concepts is the set, "code, coding, encoding,
precoding, decoding" and what that set means. The words are used as we know
differently in different literatures, media studies, sociology, etc. Since
Stuart Hall's early work (1973), the encoding-decoding model has been
popular in media studies, including its critique and revision (Wren-Lewis,
1983; Lewis, 1991). Hall's 4-part, production, circulation, use,
reproduction model of the process is well-known. I have resisted it - in
terms of media studies a resistant reading - as such a model, as similarly
in production and reception studies, as it becomes easily housed in a
version of a sender-receiver model, not a very sophisticated view of
communication itself. I am mindful of Dell Hymes' explicit point in
formulating the SPEAKING model (the 1980 version) where he discusses how
"Participant" is a better concept, treating actors as participants in
events, rather than starting with individual actions of a sender-hearer or
sending-receiving, or of individuals as composers and interpreters of
messages. Some literatures still struggle conceptually, I fear, in moving
fundamental units of analysis from individuals to social processes or forms.
This is a bit reminiscent of James Carey's discussion of 1979 as well in
urging conceptions of communication from acts of transmission to ritual
events. In other words, our moves conceptually beyond the sender-receiver
model to a constitutive view of communication moments are needed. Unlike the
received view of encoding/decoding, a focus on "moments of communication
practice" or performance-in-interaction help do this, I think. The interview
of Robert Craig by David is one highly instructive read with this issue in
view (Boromisza-Habashi, 2013).

 

Gerry Philipsen's profoundly heuristic "speech codes theory" has helped and
will continue to help us move further along various fruitful paths. Codes
and coding practices provide a theoretical and experiential position from
which complexities and perplexities (echoing David's comments about
coherence/incoherence) in communication practices can be explored. Indeed,
as the late British sociologist of education, a scholar partly inspiring 

Gerry's codes theory, Basil Bernstein pointed out, "codes are culturally
determined positioning devices" (1991, p. 371). We have much to offer from
this view of codes about the consequentiality of communication, about coding
communication. Lydia's field report reminds us, as does Bernstein, about
class and locale, rural and urban moments and movements of communication
practice, and what each brings into view as a form of social life.
Inevitably active in such moments, we know, are meanings concerning
identity, relating, feeling, as Lydia mentions. Coding involves momentary
meaning-making, bids at cohering and developing that which is before us,
where and who we are. Our views can complement and extend much of media
theory in this regard.

 

The concept of coding, in other ways, has been defined as "converting
information from one communication system or form or code into another."
This idea invites us to ask how codes are active in moving from one
system/form to another. This could help us address at least some issues of
temporality, of movement, of transitioning from one place to another, rural
to urban and back again, technical to/from political, etc. An in-progress
dissertation at UMass by Nimrod Shavit is examining how computer coders
manipulate codes, among other things, to program better versions of civic,
democratic life. This sort of work demonstrates a transitional quality of
codes and may prove quite valuable in connecting materiality of technology
and embodied action to socio-political processes as well as cultural
variation.

 

This connects nicely with Saskia's attentiveness to spatiality, place,
locale. Some readers of this board may be aware of Tema Milstein's (2011)
works concerning the ways communication mediates relations between peoples
and places, including how the expressive moments or performance of pointing
and naming connect people to nature.  Others, Eric Morgan and Trudy Milburn
in particular have worked similarly in developing EC studies of culturally
distinctive means of dwelling in places with trees, water, and nature's
resources (e.g., Gilberts and Milburn, 2011; Morgan, 2003, 2007).

 

Gerry's view of "cultural communication" has given us concepts to track
movement from codes to conversation, within and between codes, and
communities since its early formulations: "Cultural communication is the
process by which a code is realized and negotiated in the communal
conversation" (Philipsen, 1990, p. 249). Not only the realization of a code,
he writes, but its conversational uses, not only structure but process, not
only meanings shared but perplexities unshared. Coding, precoding, encoding,
decoding, writ large, spiritually in the wind and materially in the
technology, all are in view in our EC community, in its various moments.
There is much here I wish I could include, but I have gone on too long
already. I feel lucky and blessed to be part of this! 

 

References

 

Bernstein, Basil. (1981). Codes, modalities, and the process of cultural
reproduction: A model. Language in Society, 10, 327-363.

 

Boromisza-Habashi, David. (2013). Which way is forward in communication
theorizing: An interview with Robert T. Craig. Communication Theory, 23,
417-432.

 

Gilbertz, Susan and Trudy Milburn. (2011). Citizen Discourse on Contaminated
Water, Superfund Cleanups, and Landscape Restoration: (Re)making Milltown,
Montana. Cambria Press.

 

Hall, Stuart. (1973). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.
Birmingham, England: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham,
507-17.

 

Lewis, Justin. (1991). The ideological octopus. Routledge.

 

Milstein, T. (2011). Nature identification: The power of pointing and
naming. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 5(1),
3-24.

 

Milstein, T.,  Anguiano, C., Sandoval, J., Chen, Y., and Dickinson, E.
(2011). Communicating a "new" environmental vernacular: A sense of
relations-in-place. Communication Monographs, 78 (4), 486-510.

 

Morgan, E. (2003). Discourses of water: A framework for the study of
environmental communication. Applied Environmental Education and
Communication, 2(3), 153-159.

 

Morgan, E. (2007). Regional communication and sense of place surrounding the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In B. C. Taylor, W. J. Kinsella, S. P. Depoe &
M.S. Metzler (Eds.), Nuclear legacies: Communication, controversy, and the
U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

 

Philipsen, Gerry. (1987). The prospect for cultural communication. In L.
Kincaid (ed.),     Communication Theory: Eastern and Western perspectives
(pp. 245-254). New York: Academic Press.

 

Philipsen, Gerry. (1989). Speech and the Communal Function in Four Cultures.
International and Intercultural Communication Annual, 13, 79-92.

 

Philipsen, Gerry. (1992). Speaking Culturally. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.

 

Philipsen, G. (1997). A theory of speech codes. In G. Philipsen and T.
Albrecht (Eds.), Developing communication theories (pp. 119-156). Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.

 

Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. Gudykunst and B. Mody
(eds.), Handbook            of International and Intercultural Communication
(pp. 51-67). Sage.

 

Wren-Lewis, Justin. (1983). The encoding/decoding model: criticisms and
redevelopments for research on decoding, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 5,
1983, pp. 179-197.

 

 

 

Professor of Communication

Department of Communication

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Amherst, MA 01003  USA

 

 

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