5.3

5.3 Ethnography of communication

Ethnographers are anthropologists who write detailed accounts of how a given people, generally non-Western, goes about its culturally standardized daily and seasonal activities. One of the most pervasive activities of man is, of course, communication. Ethnographers have been quick to grasp this point, although it has been only in recent years that specific attention has been paid to the ethnography of communication. Basically, they treat such concepts as role, status, social identities, and social relationships as communicative symbols which are signaled in the act of speaking in order to interpret a message in a particular context, one must have knowledge of the social values associated with the activities, social categories, an social relationships implied in the message. For example, while some societies place a great deal of value on verbal abilities, others admire silence. Thus, the Paliyans of southern India speak very little and generally not at all after age forty. Talkative people are regarded as abnormal and offensive (Farb 1974:143).
The ethnographer of communication focuses on how people actually talk, that is, what happens in a conversation, a speech, a telling of a joke, or any other speech event. This approach has overlapped with that of social psychologists studying social interaction in small groups and with the work of the ethnomethodologists. The ethnographers of communication have stressed the notion of communicative competence, the speaker’s knowledge of sociolinguistic rules: when to use a particular variety or style, when to be silent, and the use of linguistic forms appropriate to the situation. They are not interested in an abstract idealized speaker-hearer in actual speakers in socially an linguistically heterogeneous communities. They are concerned not only with what they know, but with what they actually say.
This approach involves the systematic description of communicative behavior as culturally standardized, viewed in the socio cultural context within which it occurs. All such patterns of behavior and their interpretation are taken to be problematic and to be established by empirical means. We investigate the communicative activities within the context of a given community or social network. Languages and their varieties are simply part of the resources upon which the members draw. Not only may the same linguistic means be made to serve various ends, but the same communicative ends may be served by different linguistic means. To untangle the interrelations, we have to examine the community’s cultural values and beliefs, social institutions, roles, history, and ecology.
What elsewhere in this book is called “speech event” is referred to by Hymes as a “communication event,” even though the latter is really a broader act, including the use of gesture as well as the transmission of language through writing or mechanical means. The starting point, as least, of the ethnography of communication is the description of specific communicative acts in specific cultures in terms of a predetermined frame of reference with which to guide the analysis. The frame of reference which Hymes (1974b:10) has devised for the ethnographic analysis of a communicative event is a follows;
(1) the various kinds of participants in communicative events-senders and receivers, addressers and addressees, interpreters and spokesmen, and the like; (2) the various available channels, and their modes of use, speaking, writing, printing, drumming, blowing witless, singing, face and body motion as visually perceived, smelling, tasting, and tactile sensation; (3) the various codes shared by various participants, linguistic, paralinguistic, kinetic, musical, interpretive, interaction; and other; (4) the settings (including other communication) in which communication is permitted, enjoined, encouraged, abridged; (5) the forms of message, and their genres ranging verbally from single morpheme sentences to the patterns and diacritics of sonnets, sermons, salesmen’s pitches, and any other organized routines and styles; (6) the attitudes and contents that a message may convey and be about; (7) the events them selves, their characters as wholes-all these must be identified in an adequate way.”
This and similar frames of reference have been used to analyze ceremonies, sermons, verbal dueling, conversations, code switching, etc. In various societies. Bauman and Sherzer (1974) point out that the available scholarly literature considers, for the most part, the ways that languages and their uses are the same, rather than recognizing that there are differences in the purposes to which speech is put and the way it is organized for these purposes. Speech communities are inherently heterogeneous. There are different speech varieties available to its members, norms for speaking which vary from one segment of the community to another. Definition of speech community is fairly easy when one is dealing with the kinds of units which anthropologists study, such as villages, tribes, small preindustrial towns, etc, but the ethnographers of communication have been somewhat evasive concerning the identification of speech community in the large, modern, complex, industrialized societies.
As pointed out elsewhere, a speech community is an aggregate of people sharing at least one linguistic vanity, as well as a body of sociolinguistic rules concerning the use of the varieties in their repertoire. People can share sociolinguistic, that is, speaking, rules without necessarily sharing a particular linguistic variety. When speaking rules are being shared among contiguous language, we may speak of this as a speech area. For example, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and southem Germany form such a speech area since they share norms as to greetings, acceptable topics, and what is said next in conversation, even though most speakers do not know the other languages (Hymes 1972d:54-55).