Talk And Practical Epistemology: The Social Life of Knowledge in a Caribbean Community

Talk and Practical Epistemology

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

Talk and Practical Epistemology The social life of knowledge

Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey

in a Caribbean community

University of Southern Denmark

Herman Parret Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Jack Sidnell

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

University of Lyon 2

Jean Caron

Claudia de Lemos

Université de Poitiers

University of Campinas, Brazil

Robyn Carston

Marina Sbisà

University College London

University of Trieste

Bruce Fraser

Emanuel Schegloff

Boston University

University of California at Los Angeles

Thorstein Fretheim

Deborah Schiffrin

University of Trondheim

Georgetown University

John Heritage

Paul O. Takahara

University of California at Los Angeles

Kansai Gaidai University

Susan Herring

Sandra Thompson

University of Texas at Arlington

University of California at Santa Barbara

Masako K. Hiraga

Teun A. Van Dijk

St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

David Holdcroft

Richard J. Watts

University of Leeds

University of Berne

University of Toronto

Sachiko Ide Japan Women’s University

Volume 142 Talk and Practical Epistemology: The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community by Jack Sidnell

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

vii

What is a transcript?

xi

Chapter 1 Malinowski’s complaint

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jack Sidnell Talk and Practical Epistemology : The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community / Jack Sidnell. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 142) Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

1

Chapter 2 Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

19

Chapter 3 The village

53

Chapter 4 The vernacular

75

Chapter 5 Answering questions: A genealogy

83

Chapter 6 Uncertainty and expertise in advice

107

Chapter 7 Cultivated ignorance

131

Chapter 8 Reminiscing local history

151

Chapter 9 Policing knowledge

171

isbn 90 272 5385 4 (Hb; alk. paper)

© 2005 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 10 Conclusion: Knowledge, belief and action

187

Appendix Conversation analysis: Glossary and guide to the literature

207

Notes References

223 239

Acknowledgements

I remember well a hot day in June 1994 when I first met Gopal. He called to me as I was walking along the public road and asked what I was doing in the village of 700. When I said I had come to learn Creolese, Gopal and the men with whom he was chatting at the time laughed and wondered why anybody would come from Canada to do that. His curiosity piqued perhaps, Gopal invited me to dinner (we had shrimps which Satya cooked perfectly) at his house and later that evening he took me along to a religious ceremony. From that point on, people in the village knew who I was and knew that Gopal was my sponsor. I became a member of an extended family group and was welcomed into people’s homes. I can only suppose that Gopal’s introduction made all this possible and so it is he that I must thank first and foremost. I thank all the villagers of Callander for welcoming me into their homes, for teaching me Creolese and for accepting me as one of their own. For both looking after me and sticking by me through adversity Seeta, Kavita, Kumar, Gobin, Ashan, Shana, Fasia, Bat, Papso, Isha, Shanka, Kay, Pank, Tuss, Nancy and John deserve special mention. Support for the research reported in this book has come from many sources. As a graduate student I received funding for fieldwork from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Since 1997 I have received funding from Northwestern University, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Connaught Committee. Chapter 9 was originally presented at the Center for Language, Interaction and Culture (CLIC) at UCLA in 1997. For comments at that time, I thank Asif Agha, Sandro Duranti, John Heritage, Chuck and Candy Goodwin, Elinor Ochs, Manny Schegloff. A somewhat revised version was presented at Northwestern in 1998. For comments on that occasion I thank Bill Hanks. Chapter 6 was first presented in the Department of Anthropology colloquium series at the University of Toronto in 2001. For their comments at that time I thank Josh Barker, Hy van Luong and Bonnie McElhinny. For their comments on the manuscript I thank Chuck Goodwin, Elizabeth Keating and Frederico Rossano.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

I would like to thank both Andreas Jucker and Isja Conen for their editorial work and helpful comments on the manuscript. At the University of Toronto I received training from Hy van Luong. I thank Hy for his tireless support, guidance and teaching. I also thank Bonnie McElhinny whose classes on language and gender inspired some of the arguments made in this book. During 1997–1998 I was a visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. This was an extremely exciting period for me and it prompted a significant change of course in my own research. Before arriving at UCLA I had begun to read in the area of conversation analysis – especially the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin. In 1996 I had met Candy at the AAA and she had given me some encouragement on a paper I presented which was very much indebted to her work in He-Said-She-Said. By the time I arrived at UCLA I was strongly primed for conversation analysis and Candy suggested that I take Manny Schegloff ’s classes while I was there for the year. After the first few weeks of Manny’s class I began to rethink almost everything I had done as a graduate student. I became, and remain, a student of conversation analysis. Over the next seven years I struggled with the question of how I might use conversation analysis in anthropological and ethnographic research. I made various stabs at this – some more successful than others. It was only three or four years ago, after several aborted attempts – that I hit upon the approach developed in this book. I owe a huge debt to Manny for his teaching, his encouragement and the example of his own research. He has always been supportive and incredibly generous with his time. Besides Manny, Chuck and Candy, I also thank Sandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs and Ignasi Clemente for their support and encouragement at UCLA. Since leaving UCLA in 1998 I have returned several times for the Conversation Analysis Advanced Summer Institute. I have learnt a great deal from Manny, John Heritage and Gene Lerner in that context as well as from the other students. From my time at Northwestern I thank Bill Murphy, Tim Earle, Cynthia Robin, Thom McDade, Jane Guyer and especially Bill Hanks for intellectual support and friendship. It was in part, my reading of Lambek’s 1993 book Knowledge and Practice which inspired the approach developed in the following pages. Many of the ideas presented in Chapters 1 and 10 of this book developed out of conversations I had with Michael in the context of a graduate seminar which we co-taught in 2003. I’d also like to thank Shaylih Muehlmann, Jude Fokwang, Sarah Gould and Mark Reczkiewicz for many stimulating discussions about practice and rationality.

Acknowledgements

My understanding of Wittgenstein has been shaped by conversations with Jack Canfield. In 2001, I participated in a seminar he led in the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto. I thank Jack and the other students in that class for many extremely engaging discussions. I could not ask for a more supportive and loving family. I thank my parents as well as my mother-in-law Dee and sister Anne for in various ways supporting my work. I thank my mother especially for reading an early draft of this book – her copy-editing has made it infinitely more readable. Allison and Sula accompanied me to the field in 1995 under difficult circumstances. I would not have been accepted into the community had they not been with me – to say that they were well-liked in the village is an enormous understatement. Since 1995, Allison has contributed countless observations to my research and challenged me to better develop my own analysis. She has influenced my understanding of every piece of data and accompanying argument in this book. Sula and Ginger have been a source of constant inspiration, laughter and joy. This book is dedicated to them.

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What is a transcript?

This book is centrally concerned with the analysis of audio-recorded conversations. In order to present the data in a way that preserves those aspects of the talk which are most relevant to the analysis while at the same time allowing the reader to follow the action in the talk with relative ease, I have adopted a two column transcriptional system which employs a combination of phonemic transcription and speech delivery symbols developed within conversation analysis. The two-column format has been chosen over a three row format, with interlineal, morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, to make the transcripts more readable. The transcripts presented in this book are the imperfect product of several years of revision. They have played different roles at various stages in the research process. Soon after they were recorded an initial, quite broad and rough, transcription was made without a translating gloss. These served as mnemonic guides to the recordings. In the early stages of analysis these same transcripts provided a way to keep track off what has actually happening in the recordings. In terms of the analysis, the transcript has never substituted for the recording. Over successive listenings, the transcripts became more detailed and gradually came to capture more and more of the nuances of the talk which they, however inadequately, represent. Finally, for the book I have checked the transcripts against the recordings again in an effort to catch further details of the talk and errors in the transcription. In the context of the book they must substitute for the recordings since the reader cannot have direct access to the corpus of recordings upon which they are based. This is a clearly imperfect solution – without recourse to the recordings the reader has to take on faith that what I transcribed is actually on the tape. While not ideal, the is certainly not unusual in the social sciences. As a way of introducing the mode of presenting data I have selected the following example from the book. This fragment is taken from a recording which lasts about two hours. It consists of talk among adult members of a single family, a friend and neighbor, a customer of the store adjoining the family house and the ethnographer to a limited extent. In the extract presented, BM has just

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

1. Numbers are assigned to each line of the transcript so as to permit references to particular places in the talk in the text. 2. Pseudonyms have been assigned to each member of the community – these are used consistently throughout the text. Names are abbreviated in transcripts. 3. Superscripted zeros indicate that the talk contained within them or following them was produced with decreased amplitude (e.g. o mhm). 4. Underlining is used to indicate stress or emphasis – a combination of amplitude and pitch. This is marked at the beginning of the syllable which is emphasized. Underlining is extended across several letters to indicate greater emphasis (so gud, or gud). 5. When there is no interval between adjacent utterances, the second being latched immediately to the first (without overlapping it), the utterances are linked together with equal signs. The equal signs are also used to link different parts of a single speaker’s utterance when those parts constitute a continuous flow of speech that has been carried over to another line, by transcript design, to accommodate an intervening interruption. 6. In these transcripts, punctuation is used to mark not conventional grammatical units but, rather, characteristics of speech delivery. a. A period indicates a stopping fall in tone, not necessarily the end of a sentence. b. A comma indicates a continuing intonation, not necessarily between clauses of sentences. c. A question mark indicates a rising inflection, not necessarily a question. d. A single dash indicates a halting, abrupt cutoff, or, when multiple dashes hyphenate the syllables of a word or connect strings of words, the stream of talk so marked has a stammering quality. e. Marked rising and falling shifts in intonation are indicated by upward and downward pointing arrows immediately prior to the rise or fall. f. Capital letters are used to indicate an utterance, or part thereof, that is spoken much louder than the surrounding talk. g. Audible aspirations (hhh) and inhalations (o hhh) are inserted in the speech where they occur. These are often realized as recognizable laughter. h. Double parentheses are used to enclose a description of details of the conversational scene, or various characterizations of the talk.

What is a transcript?

i.

When part of an utterance is delivered at a pace quicker than the surrounding talk, it is indicated by being enclosed between ‘less than’ signs.

7. Where the creole includes idiomatic expressions or phrasal collocations which are otherwise difficult to parse an exegetical comment is provided in a footnote. For example, “GC glad fo is an idiomatic expression more or less equivalent to English, ‘happy about’.” 8. When intervals in the stream of talk occur, they are timed in tenths of a second and inserted within parentheses, either within or between turns. 9. A colon indicates an extension of the sound or syllable it follows. Additional colons prolong the stretch. 10. An arrow after the speaker identification or line number and before the GC transcription indicates that the turn so marked is a focus of the analysis presented in the text. 11. Turns starting simultaneously are linked together with left-hand brackets. When overlapping utterances do not start simultaneously, the point at which an ongoing utterance is joined by another is marked with lefthand brackets, linking an ongoing turn with an overlapping utterance at the point where overlap begins. The point where overlapping utterances stop overlapping is marked with right-hand brackets (in some but not all cases).

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Chapter 1

Malinowski’s complaint

Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Section 139) The true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life. (Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Section 127)

Introduction In Callander, most of the heavy labour is done in the morning, leaving the people free to spend the afternoon in some shady place away from the heat of the midday sun. The Kitar family home, which is also a shop, is a comfortable spot at such times. Aside from the occasional customer in search of boards or nails or cement, the afternoon is usually quiet. Asma, the eldest of five sisters, runs the shop while Farah cooks. Shama and her brother Bat, the only one of four brothers to live at the family home, help out here and there with the shop but spend most of their time tending extensive gardens of shallot. In the afternoon, the family relaxes under the covered part of the yard which lies behind a massive pile of lumber. On such an afternoon, Papso a neighbour and close family friend came to visit. The conversation touched on many topics: the events of the morning, the state of the village water pump, a broken fence. Consideration of a short fragment from this conversation will bring into focus many of the themes and issues which are pursued in the following chapters. At the same time, this consideration will introduce the analytic framework within which the themes are to be examined. Fragment 1.1 (59a II): Sha = Shama, Fa = Farah, Pa = Papso 1 2 3 4

Sha: ye:s Bat, yu noo wa Chobii see::? Bat: wa Sha: hou Zarii: ron am

Yes Bat You know what Chubby said? What? that Zari chased him

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

til a lai:n wid kotla: [s [a bai [( ) Fa: [oo raa:s Sha: oo gaad.= =Chobii ge=ii big gonz an Zarii kyan ron [am a lain Fa: [( ) Sha: wid ko(h)tla(hh)s? Pa: [( ) Sha: [dis manin Chobii tel mi den=mi=se=wel ye::s bodii oo gaad.=wa yu gu duu Bat:

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

to the line with a cutlass. that guy Oh raas Oh god. Chubby’s got his big guns and Zari can chase him to the line with cutlass? This morning Chubby told me then I said, well yes buddy oh god. What can you do?

Talk-in-interaction The word ‘talk’ has a vernacular and untechnical ring to it when compared with such possible alternatives as “discourse,” or even “language.” Appearances in this case are, however, deceptive. The phenomena we refer to by the term “talk,” while quite varied are highly organized and frequently amenable to formal analysis. One of the key early insights of conversation analysis (CA) was that talk occurs as a temporally unfolding series of turns-at-talk. This basic yet key insight distinguishes CA from most if not all other approaches to language in the social and human sciences. As Garfinkel (1967) noted in his studies, people make sense of some particular utterance by seeing it as a part of a larger whole, which includes both what has preceded it and what they anticipate is to come. Each utterance, and the components of which it is composed, is thus treated as inherently indexical. According to Garfinkel, understandings are in this sense sufficient for all practical purposes, at a given point in the temporally unfolding course of an activity and are revisable in light of later evidence. Consider in this respect the first few lines of the fragment. It is immediately apparent that Shama and Bat are taking turns at speaking. Moreover, by posing a question of Bat in her turn, Shama selects him as the next speaker. The format of the question is something that we will have reason to consider in some detail later. For now we can simply observe that Shama is here questioning what Bat knows. By including in the question some specification of the particulars (what Chubby said) this question checks the newsworthiness of a projected telling. That is to say, this turn checks whether “what Chubby said” (however that is understood) might be news for the turn’s recipient – Bat. At the conclusion of the turn, Shama stops speaking thus allowing Bat to provide

a response. When Shama starts speaking again in line 4 she picks up where she had left off rather than starting again. Shama has asked Bat a question and the design of the turn suggests that an appropriate response would consist of, or at least include, a “yes” or a “no.” However, Bat’s answer, which Shama treats as perfectly adequate, includes neither. What is happening here? How has Bat discovered that what is required of him is not what, on the face of it, Shama’s turn calls for, but instead another question? We can easily imagine a context in which Shama’s “Do you know what Chubby said?” would be properly answered with a “yes” or “no”. Here, however, Shama has recognizably initiated something with this question. Given the absence of prior talk about Chubby it would be hard for Bat to know which of Chubby’s particular “sayings” Shama is invoking here. In other words, in attempting to understand what Shama is doing, one of the resources that Bat has available to him is the talk that preceded the thing that he must now respond to. Here, where there appears to be nothing relevant in the immediately prior talk, Bat can see that this is not a continuation of what has come before but rather the start of something new. Bat displays just such an understanding of the talk in his answer. By responding with “what?”, Bat shows that he hears this question as foreshadowing or prefacing the telling of what Chubby said. And by responding with “what?”, Bat invites the telling of that news. So, as Garfinkel suggested, Bat makes sense of Shama’s talk by considering it in the light of what has come before and what he anticipates is next to come. In the analyses presented in the following chapters we will be centrally pre-occupied with this dual prospective-retrospective orientation exhibited in the participants’ conduct. Analyzing talk-in-interaction requires that, as much as possible, we see it from the position in which it was encountered by the participants. It makes no sense, in analyzing a turn-at-talk, to look and see what happened thirty seconds, five minutes, or two days later. For the one who produced that turn whatever happened later hadn’t happened yet. We are aided in our study of talk-in-interaction by the possibility of making recordings which can be replayed, transcribed and examined many times. All the conversations which are analyzed in this book were recorded and examined in this way. Although this allows access to the temporally unfolding character of talk, it cannot capture the fully embodied quality of action. Recent work clearly indicates that talk-in-interaction consists of more than vocalizations, and that action is built out of an array of resources including gaze and gesture as well as aspects of the material surround. Because the recordings examined in this book were made with an audio-tape recorder they do not capture this

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

richness of the life-world. However, the records of talk provide a sufficient, if not all encompassing and complete, basis for the analysis of interaction. As Bat knows, when Shama asked this question she was proposing to tell a story. Stories, like descriptions, seem to provide evidence for one of our most deeply held beliefs about language – that it is a device for representing the world. As Wittgenstein suggested, this view forms a pervasive and persuasive philosophical picture which underlies most approaches to language in philosophy and the social sciences. We are so committed to this view that it is often difficult for us as analysts to see the action for which the story or the description was the vehicle even if this is completely obvious to the participants. As Schegloff (1997a: 97) reminds us, people tell stories to do something – “to complain, to boast, to inform, to alert, to tease, to explain or excuse or justify, or to provide for an interactional environment in whose course or context or interstices such actions and interactional inflections can be accomplished.” Certainly, in this case, Shama’s story is designed to entertain. By inserting laugh tokens into the word “cutlass” she marks this word in particular as encapsulating the irony she wishes to convey. But there is more to this telling than entertainment. Shama, Bat and Zari collectively garden their shallot gardens on land they rent from neighbours and friends. Chubby is the owner of several cows which he takes out to graze on an adjoining plot. It is well-known that cows love shallots and Chubby’s cows frequently find their way into the gardens adjoining their pasture. This story was told after one such incident which led to a dispute between Zari and Chubby. Shama’s story reports Chubby’s complaint but at the same time characterizes it as suspect and it thus becomes a vehicle for her own complaint. In this respect, it is no coincidence that Shama selects Bat as the recipient for her story. This story has a certain relevance for Bat, who like Shama must deal with Chubby on a daily basis, that it lacks for the other co-participants. Moreover, the shared circumstances that make this story particularly relevant for Bat also provide a basis for his understanding the complaint which is embedded in it. After all, Chubby might have encountered Bat and not Shama in the gardens and lodged his complaint about Zarii with him. Talk is not then an unorganized jumble or random assortment of individual intentions. Rather, it is highly organized by and for the participants who produce it. So far, two aspects of that organization have been touched upon. First, in producing talk, participants orient to its unavoidable temporality. This is seen in the prospective-retrospective orientation which participants adopt with respect to any particular point in an unfolding course of talk. Secondly, it is not sufficient to treat talk as a representation of the world outside it (or for that matter a representation of speakers’ inner states). Talk is a vehicle for

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

action in the world and it is organized as collaboratively produced courses of public conduct.

Practical epistemology The branch of philosophy known as epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and justification – their defining features, sources and limits. Epistemology is a highly technical field, home to many of the most fundamental and contentious issues in philosophy such as the nature of truth, reality and the human mind. At the same time, epistemology necessarily maintains a connection to the world of practical activity and epistemological arguments frequently involve descriptions of possible ordinary situations. On the standard analysis, knowledge is justified true belief. A proposition only constitutes knowledge when each of the conditions implied by such a definition are met. If, for instance, I believe that Wittgenstein was born in Austria but believe this without any philosophically-recognized justification – that is, if my belief is based not on evidence but on the fact that, for instance, someone I dislike says he was born in Amsterdam – this cannot form the basis of knowledge despite its being true. As Gettier (1963) famously demonstrated, however, there are problems with this “standard analysis” of knowledge as justified true belief. Suppose, then, that Paul sees Mary’s twin sister, Emma, borrowing John’s bicycle the day after Mary borrowed and subsequently returned it. If Paul now believes that Mary borrowed John’s bicycle that belief is both true and justified on the basis of visual evidence. However, while Paul’s belief is now true and justified he believes it for the wrong reason and thus, according to Gettier, it cannot constitute knowledge. The epistemological issues that constitute the focus of this book are strikingly different from those that concern philosophers such as Gettier. In fact, the situation that exists between Paul, John, Mary and Emma in this example highlights, by means of contrast, what I mean by practical in the phrase “practical epistemology.” There are several respects in which this is the case. First, knowledge in this and other philosophical examples is largely conceived of as a property of an individual. My analysis however seeks to describe a social distribution and organization of knowledge. Secondly, in this example the criterion for deciding what counts as knowledge is not endogenous to this situation, rather it is assumed to operate trans-situationally as a consistent standard. Finally, and related to the second point, such examples fail to convey the in-situ, action-shaping orientations of the participants. There is little sense of what, in

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

this particular situation, will count as knowledge for the participants or what methods they might use to distinguish between truth and falsity. While use of the term epistemology clearly indicates a concern for the traditional topics within the “theory of knowledge,” the term practical is included to indicate that such topics are to be examined as they arise for participants within interactional encounters – within the details of practical situations. The concern for traditional topics in epistemology then is tempered and shaped by the contingencies, not of imagined examples, but of actual situations and contexts of action. To some extent, then, this book contributes to, and draws upon, the recent turn to “practice” in anthropology, sociology and philosophy. In anthropology, “practice theory” emerged in the late 1970s. Between 1976 and 1984 three major figures in anthropology published statements on practice. In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins (1976) opposes practice to the irreducible logic of culture (conceived in structuralist terms) arguing against cultural ecologists who see culture as the product of a practical interaction with environmental conditions and functionalists (Malinowski is the major villain in this story) who assume a baseline of calculative rationality – the homo economicus of methodological individualism. For Sahlins both forms of reduction miss the Boasian point that the environment (physical, biological, social etc.) and practical advantage (indeed, ‘practical’ in the first instance) are always understood in the terms laid down by a cognitive set: a culture (so see the rather odd schematics provided on page 70). Sahlins, rightly argues that such a view makes anthropology beholden to psychology, with an ahistorical, timeless conception of human nature coming to hold the reins of human social life. With his persuasive argument for the irreducibility of culture/structure, Sahlins positions himself as the inheritor of Boas’ essentially Kantian ideas. Sahlins’ arguments form the backdrop of contemporary debates in anthropology and certainly much of what is taken for granted in this book has its source in Sahlins and the tradition for which he is a powerful voice. However, the reduction of practice to “calculative rationality” is deeply problematic. Since the appearance of Culture and Practical Reason, some of the most important developments in anthropology have emerged from an increasing awareness of the importance of practice. Linguistic Anthropology with its emphasis on recordings of actual events, has played a particularly important role in this respect (see Bauman & Sherzer 1974; Hanks 1996; Duranti 1997; Silverstein & Urban 1996). Moreover, quite contrary to Sahlins’ arguments, it is within practice-based approaches that the notion of calculative rationality as the basis of human conduct has been most thoroughly historicized, denaturalized and critiqued (see Callon 1998). Callon, for instance, asks

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

what organization of practices allow for the emergence of calculative rationality in particular contexts going on to argue that this is not to be found in nature, in psychology, or in culture or institutions but rather in the particular configuration of heterogeneous constituents brought together in a network. Callon seeks to denaturalize rationality by asking under what conditions it is possible. He argues that, in order to become calculative, agencies must be “equipped” and that “this equipment is neither all in the brains of human beings nor all in their socio-cultural frames or institutions.” In Culture and Practical Reason, Sahlins anticipates some of the main themes of contemporary practice approaches before rejecting them. He recalls, for instance, Malinowski’s “imponderabilia of everyday life” and the “hardly ever-formulated spontaneous line of conduct.” Sahlins suggests that for Malinowski “the natural, impulsive code” prevails “over the conventional” and that “in the end, the cultural form submits to the ‘spontaneous’ praxis.” Although Malinowski can be read in a number of different ways, the interpretation Sahlins gives here, obscures a central point in his argument. When the anthropologist relies entirely on post-hoc interviewing, he records a local idealization, a series of speculations and reflections which are contingently and quite problematically related to the social practices which they purport to describe. To mistake this record for some super-organic culture within which the natives are presumed to operate is based on a faulty notion of language as (solely) a representational code (one which, of course, structuralists are more than a little prone to assume). Malinowski’s complaint is worth repeating in its entirety (1926: 120–121). It is not difficult to see also, why Anthropology fixed upon one side of the question, why it presented the rigid but fictitious doctrine of native law as the whole truth. For this doctrine represents the intellectual, overt, fully conventionalized aspect of the native attitude, the one set into clear statements, into definite legal formulae. When the native is asked what he would do in such and such a case, he answers what he should do; he lays down the pattern of best possible conduct. When he acts as informant to a field-anthropologist, it costs him nothing to retail the ideal of the law. His sentiments, his propensities, his bias, his self-indulgences as well as tolerance of others’ lapses, he reserves for his behaviour in real life. And even then, though he acts thus, he would be unwilling to admit often even to himself, that he ever acts below the standard of the law. The other side, the natural impulsive code of conduct, the evasions, the compromises and non-legal usages are revealed only to the fieldworker, who observes native life directly, registers facts, lives at such close quarters with his ‘material’ as to understand not only their language and

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

their statements, but also the hidden motives of behaviour, and the hardly ever formulated spontaneous line of conduct.1

Malinowski in fact anticipated here a central aspect of contemporary practice approaches: human conduct is not determined by, nor reducible to, a representation of it. Not only does Sahlins fail to recognize this, his reduction of practice to instrumentalism obscures a whole range of important themes: situated judgment (as opposed to calculation), situated evaluations of the rationality of an action or practice, understanding, the indexical character of linguistic expressions, training and instruction. These are central problems for any adequate account of human practice but they simply have no place in Sahlins’ argument. Ortner’s (1984) influential and widely read “Theory in Anthropology since the sixties” described the rise and demise of a number of warring anthropological approaches before turning to characterize practice theory as an emerging point of possible consensus – holding out the promise of integration and synthesis while at the same time offering new possibilities for clarification as well as greater attention to aspects of social life which remained only dimly visible under the lens of previous approaches. Thus, unlike Sahlins, Ortner advocates a version of practice theory. That these were the early days of practice theory in anthropology is clear at various points in Ortner’s article. In the first place, it is not at all clear from what Ortner writes what a practice, let alone a ‘practiceapproach’, consists in. At one point Ortner suggests that the “study of practice is the study of all forms of human action, but from a particular – political – angle” and later she defines a practice as “anything people do.” Ortner puzzles over the question of how to conceptualize the “actor” or, as she puts it, “the acting units.” She writes (1984: 149), “most practice anthropology to date takes the units to be individual actors, whether actual historical individuals, or social types (“women,” commoners,” “workers,” “junior siblings,” etcetera). The analyst takes these people and their doings as the reference point for understanding a particular unfolding of events, and/or for understanding the processes involved in the reproduction of change of some set of structural features.”2 Ortner goes on to note a parallel set of questions with regard to time. “Some authors (. . .) treat action in terms of relatively ad hoc decision making, and/or relatively short-term ‘moves.”’ Others, she suggests, (1984: 150) “conceptualize action in terms of plans that are more long range than a single move.” Ortner’s concerns here reveal that hers is a proto-practice approach – one with strong links to the voluntarism of Talcott Parsons. Thus, the use of concepts such as “the actor”, “the system,” “structure,” leads Ortner back into

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

just the old thicket of theoretical problems which, it was hoped, the practice approach might help to clear out of the way. The use of a term such as “actor,” for instance, implies that there is something basic and held in common across each case of action, between, for example, driving a bus, chopping wood, participating in a conversation, writing a short story, cooking dinner, playing cards etc.. From the perspective of Ortnerian proto-practice theory and Parsonian voluntarism, each of these, have in common the feature of involving a trans-situational agent, a social actor who carries with it, into any context, a “capacity” for action – an occult quality which, in contemporary theory, has become the master concept of “agency”.3 Wittgenstein’s (1953: §66) concept of family resemblance offers an alternate way of conceptualizing the relations between practices. This is a linking not by characteristics or traits which are shared by all but by a series or network of resemblances. Just as members of a family will share some features but not all with other members of that family and just as putting two members of a family side-by-side will highlight those features they share – so it is with human practices (or games – see Wittgenstein 1953: §68; Suter 1990).4 So, for instance, chopping wood and driving a bus are activities with well-defined and more or less singular ends (i.e. the production of wood that will easily burn in a fire place of certain dimensions, the picking up and dropping off of people along a specified route). This may also be true of giving a speech (persuading members of the audience to vote for the speaker) but is less obviously true of participating in a conversation (although, under some other formulation the same activity might well be understood as having a singular end). What is the singular ‘end’ or ‘goal’ of playing a game of chess, visiting an art gallery, or making dinner together comparable to the production of firewood in the previous example?5 Making a speech and holding a conversation are both accomplished through the use of language as is the writing of a short story however the first two are likely to involve the use of spoken language whereas the latter, by definition, does not. The problems which beset the voluntaristic theory of action and Ortnerian proto-practice theory are avoided. So, for instance, the question of the “acting unit” is only a problem if one attempts to answer it in some trans-situational way, from a perspective outside the activity.6 We might begin instead with the simple observation that a basic way in which human practices are organized is in terms of the possibilities for participation which they provide. If we ask, for instance, what is the “acting unit” in a courtroom context, we find our answer in the very organization of courtroom activities. To some extent then judges are individual actors although that “individuality”, if you will, is strongly

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constrained by precedent and other features of legal practice. Juries, however, are collectives – their “collective” character being an essential aspect of their character as a jury. Why is that the case? Simply because they could not do the things that juries do if they did not consist of collections of individuals – i.e. deliberation. Similar arguments can of course be made about time. Time in the courtroom does not exist independently of courtroom activities. Rather, one of the basic ways in which courtroom activities are organized is in just such temporal terms. And of course anthropologists have long noted that one of the things that makes a ritual a ritual, and makes it the ritual that it is, is a method for calibrating time. Sacks notes in an early lecture that “one of the ways that you make a setting out of some course of activities, is by beginning to develop things like time in it” (1995 I: 521). What, then, of agency? As that term is typically understood – a capacity for action – this is also, to a large extent, a function of the particular practice within which it is inevitably embedded and ultimately what we are dealing with here is another case of family resemblance. A judge is one kind of agent in a courtroom, a witness another. It would, I think, be a mistake to suggest that their capacity for action in the courtroom derived from some feature external to that setting – so, for instance, the fact that the witness is the premier of the province and the lawyer holds no political office does not change the fact that the witness’ capacity to act in this context is constrained by the requirement to “talk in response to the lawyer’s question” (see Sidnell 2004). To be polemic about it, we might say that there are no “social actors” only brides and grooms, witnesses and lawyers, judges and juries, speakers and hearers. A practice approach will be concerned to discover the way in which the participants are organized for, within and by this practice, what possibilities for action that organization provides for, what temporal organization it confers or establishes. In this way we avoid the typical conundrums of the theory of action and its variants – conundrums so well rehearsed they hardly warrant a mention here – structure and action, subjective and objective, individual and collective. In sum, we may perhaps adapt slightly Wittgenstein’s remark from §337 of the Philosophical Investigations: if the techniques of chess did not exist, I could not intend to put you into check mate. Bourdieu’s (1977) Outline of A Theory of Practice is seen by many as the most sophisticated variant of 1970s practice theory. In the opening chapter of the book, Bourdieu presented a devastating critique of both the objectivism inherent in structuralist analyses and the subjectivism characteristic of phenomenological approaches. This chapter concluded with an incisive, Wittgenstein-inspired, attack on the anthropological account of action as “ex-

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

ecution”. Bourdieu’s refusal to reduce action to objectivizing models or structures, to insist upon the corporeal, embodied, contingent, unformalizable, indexical character of practice elaborates what was only a whisper in Malinowski and anticipates one of the most important features of contemporary work (see Stern 2003 for an overview). At the same time, Bourdieu’s account of practice is in many ways at odds with current work which tends to draw more on Wittgenstein and Heidegger than on the French tradition of social theory to which Bourdieu is primarily oriented. For one thing, Bourdieu is concerned in a basic way with theory – he never actually questions the relevance, necessity or possibility of doing theory. But this is exactly what contemporary work has, drawing heavily on Wittgenstein, Ryle and others, put into question. In the following chapters, I argue for the centrality of practice(s) in the organization of knowledge. With Bourdieu (1977) and other practice theorists I argue against individualist accounts, which link the identity of particular actions to properties of the individuals who perform them – i.e. supposedly discrete and inner mental states such as intentions, wishes and desires. Instead, I suggest, along with the practice theorists and the analytic philosophers such as Ryle and Austin, that actions must be examined in relation to the socially organized practices which provide for their intelligibility. A wave of the hand, for instance, counts as a greeting only within an organized set of greeting practices. Bourdieu’s invocation of practice is motivated in part by a reluctance to over-intellectualize the social – by a recognition that there is something basically corporeal, embodied, situated about acting in the world. Bourdieu (1977: 2), for instance, writes: So long as he remains unaware of the limits inherent in his point of view on the object, the anthropologist is condemned to adopt unwittingly for his own use the representation of action which is forced on agents or groups when they lack practical mastery of a highly valued competence and have to provide themselves with an explicit and at least semi-formalized substitute for it in the form of a repertoire of rules. . . It is significant that “culture” is sometimes described as a map; it is the analogy which occurs to an outsider who has to find his way around in a foreign landscape and who compensates for his lack of practical mastery, the prerogative of the native, by the use of a model of all possible routes.

Theories of practice are, then, opposed to a “representationalism” which attempts to explain human behaviour by reference to a set of representations whether these are based in human psychology and cognition on the one hand, or, on the other, some version of the super-organic such as social structure or

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culture. Arguing against the former version of representationalist theorizing, Ryle (1971[1946]: 212) wrote: The prevailing doctrine . . . holds: (1) that intelligence is a special faculty, the exercises of which are those specific internal acts which are called acts of thinking, namely, the operations of considering propositions; (2) that practical activities merit their titles ‘intelligent’, ‘clever’, and the rest only because they are accompanied by some such internal acts of considering propositions (and particularly ‘regulative’ propositions). That is to say, doing things is never itself an exercise of intelligence, but is, at best a process introduced and somehow steered by some ulterior act of theorising. (It is also assumed that theorising is not a sort of doing, as if ‘internal doing’ contained some contradiction.) To explain how thinking affects the course of practice, one or more gobetween faculties are postulated which are, by definition, incapable of considering regulative propositions, yet are, by definition, competent correctly to execute them.

In contrast, Ryle proposed that . . .intelligence is directly exercised as well in some practical performances as in some theoretical performances and that an intelligent performance need incorporate no ‘shadow-act’ of contemplating regulative propositions. Hence there is no gap between intelligence and practice corresponding to the familiar gap between theory and practice. There is no need, therefore, to postulate any Janus-headed go-between faculty, which shall be both amenable to theory and influential over practice.

Both Sacks and Garfinkel argued in a similar away against the various forms of representationalism which dominated the social sciences of the late 60s and 70s. Specifically, an early concern for the temporal character of action led Sacks and Garfinkel to confront the representationalist assumptions of traditional social science.7 When he wrote his dissertation in the 1950s, Garfinkel found the then current theoretical approaches completely lacking an account of time. Heritage (1984b: 108) summarizes Garfinkel’s sense of the literature: “the role of time as an essential component in the unfolding succession of ‘here-andnow’ reconstitutions of the actors’ circumstances is ignored. Instead time is treated . . . as, to use Garfinkel’s expression, a ‘fat moment’.” The failure to see action as necessarily situated and unfolding in time had major consequences for the shape of social theory. Not only did it obscure a crucial and constitutive feature of action, it also led to the construction of abstract, trans-situational, perduring, cognitive ‘models’ which were understood to ‘explain’ human action. Sacks (1995 Vol. I: 11) warned his students of the tendency to adopt such a view and thereby limit analysis:

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

When people start to analyze social phenomena, if it looks like things occur with the sort of immediacy we find in some of these exchanges, then, if you have to make an elaborate analysis of it – that is to say, show that they did something as involved as some of the things I have proposed – then you figure that they couldn’t have thought that fast. I want to suggest that you have to forget that completely. Don’t worry about how fast they’re thinking. First of all, don’t worry about whether they’re ‘thinking.’ Just try to come to terms with how it is that the thing comes off. Because you’ll find that they can do these things. Just take any other area of natural science and see, for example, how fast molecules do things. And they don’t have very good brains. So just let the materials fall as they may. Look to see how it is that persons go about producing what they do produce.

Sacks’ tongue-in-cheek warning is Rylean in the sense that it describes problems that arise when actions are assumed to be accompanied by, and causally related to, inner mental processes called ‘thinking’ or, more recently, ‘cognition’. In later lectures and in a paper jointly authored with Garfinkel (1970), Sacks made the point that members need not be able to “formulate” the setting and activities in which they are engaged in order to behave “in an orderly fashion.” Sacks (1995 Vol. I: 516–517) suggests that, if we’re going to suppose that in order for persons to behave in an orderly fashion, say, in the course of their conversations or in the course of any of their activities, one set of things that have to be involved is that they’re always able, say, to formulate their role relationships and systematically invoke their consequences, then we’d be wrong.8

In this way, Sacks refuses to allow the orderliness of human activities to depend on a mental representation or, in Ryle’s words, a “ghost in the machine.” For Garfinkel and Sacks the reflexively accountable and orderly organization of human activities is, as they say, “incarnate” and not the result of imposed structures or models which are external to and separate from the relevant situational particulars.9 Consider, for instance, a game as Goffman, Garfinkel, Wittgenstein all do at various points in their writings. Upon watching a game being played, one is presented with a range of possible formulations of the activity one is witnessing: for instance, playing a game, loosing, sulking, wasting time, just getting through it, entertaining the child, having some fun, taking a break from work, spending some time with Jane, procrastinating, etc. etc. The orderliness of the activity is not dependent on the availability of any such formulation. In fact, we could well imagine a case in which no formulation was available for instance, in a case where a group of children begin to do

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something but its status as ‘a game’ has not been formulated. Moreover, two participants might well have different understandings of what they are doing without that leading to problems in the organization of the activity – think, then, of an adult and a child playing a game, for the child the game is played “for fun” but for the adult the game is played “to distract the child.” The orderliness is rather the product of an organization of participation: a distribution of turns (or whatever), a limited number of possible and recognizable game-relevant actions, their relation to one another (one throws a ball, the other fails to catch it, he is seen as having missed it). Formulations of the activity are invoked to accomplish something – they become a part of the very activity which they describe. So, for instance, “It’s just a game” is a reprimand to a sore loser! This is not simply a description but a vehicle for doing something in that activity. Wittgenstein remarks along these lines (1960[1958]: 25): In practice we very rarely use language as (. . .) a calculus. For not only do we not think of the rule of usage – of definitions, etc. – while using language, but when we are asked to give such rules, in most cases we aren’t able to do so. We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them. To suppose that there must be would be like supposing that whenever children play with a ball they play a game according to strict rules.10

The rejection of representations (rules, structures, formulations) as a possible source of order raises a question – what then does account for the regularity of our practices? For Bourdieu, the regularity of practices (and much more besides) is explained by habitus: an internalized set of structures that serve to “generate practices, perceptions, and attitudes which are regular without being consciously coordinated or governed by any ‘rule”’ (Throop & Murphy 2002: 186–187). This generative potential is not then, in the first instance, a cognitive something. Rather, the durable and transposable dispositions of the habitus are built directly into the body (inculcated) through its engagement with the world. Here Bourdieu talks of a “practical mimesis” which allows schemes to pass directly from “practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness” (ibid.: 187) and which results in a body hexis – a “collection of ways in which our bodies are conditioned to habitually stand, speak, walk, and move” (ibid.: 188). This is an important point of difference between Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the accounts of practice upon which I draw and to which I attempt to contribute in this book. While in both there is a rejection of representations

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

(and a refusal to privilege the theoretical over the practical), for Bourdieu this rejection is not accompanied by a reconceptualization of mind. That is to say, Bourdieu’s rejection of representationalism does not lead him to rethink intelligence and reason as practices but rather to assert the priority of the body- of the nonconscious. In contrast, Ryle’s rejection of representationalism leads him to reconceptualize mind as a situated order of intersecting, yet incommensurate, public practices.11 Bourdieu’s concept of practice leads him to emphasize what Ryle would term “habit” as opposed to “intelligent capacities.” Ryle (1949: 42–43) writes: The distinction between habits and intelligent capacities can be illustrated by reference to the parallel distinction between the methods used for inculcating the two sorts of second nature. We build up habits by drill, but we build up intelligent capacities by training. Drill (a conditioning) consists in the imposition of repetitions. The recruit learns to slop arms by repeatedly going through the same motions by numbers. The child learns the alphabet and the multiplication tables in the same way. The practices are not learned until the pupil’s responses to his cues are automatic until, he can ‘do them in his sleep,’ as it is revealingly put. Training, on the other hand, though it embodies plenty of sheer drill, does not consist of drill. It involves the stimulation by criticism and example of the pupil’s own judgment. He learns how to do things thinking what he is doing, so that every operation performed is itself a new lesson to him how to perform better. The soldier who was merely drilled to slope arms correctly has to be trained to be proficient in marksmanship and map-reading. Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it. We do not expect the soldier to be able to read maps ‘in his sleep.’

It is likely that a complex phenomenon such as human language incorporates both habit and intelligent capacities. However, one can easily see how much accounts of it will diverge depending which aspect is emphasized. The distinctiveness of the approach I am advocating can perhaps best be seen in terms of the role which rules are to play. Whereas conventional social scientists typically understand rules as quasi-causal, for conversation analysts and ethnomethodologists rules are a constitutive feature of some activity in so far as they are used and oriented to by a setting’s members. Although he himself is a philosopher, Searle (1984: 46) captures the view of conventional social science with particular clarity and bluntness arguing that, “to say that I am obeying the rule is to say that the meaning of that rule, that is, its semantic content, plays some kind of causal role in the production of what I actually do.” In a penetrating and incisive discussion of this idea, Button notes that human action, such as that done in and through language, is often seen as the

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product of a mental machinery of rules. He characterizes the conventional view as follows (1990: 77–78): Human beings have internalized the rules which generate language. People do not need to know these internal mental rules under whose auspices their language construction is determined. The understanding of rules that this entails is causal. X is done because of the rule. The rule stands behind the action, it accounts for its production, and structures the form the action takes.

Button goes on to compare this view with the one advocated by conversation analysts. Conversation analysis displays: that the rules involved in the organisation of turn-taking for conversation are not part of a mental machinery of rules that stand outside of actual occasions of activity; that they are not algorithms; that they are not sets of instructions; that they are not programs of human thought; that they are not the cause of human action. Rules are oriented to features of action; they are contextual, situated practices of use. (Button 1990: 82)

And elsewhere: the relevance of rules for a person’s conduct is displayed and preserved in their actual conduct. There is a distinction then between rules that people can be shown to orient to, and rules that are said to be an interior mental machinery. On the latter understanding, rules stand behind action, on the former, rules are embedded within the action. (Button 1990: 78)12

“Practical” should, then, also be understood as pointing to the ordinary and pervasive orientations and concerns of the people whose epistemology and knowledge is being studied. Unlike philosophical writing in epistemology this book is not concerned with what constitutes certain knowledge independently of the standards members themselves use in distinguishing between fact and fancy, reliable and unreliable testimony, insight and illusion. The epistemology we are concerned with is not the one we should necessarily ourselves adopt in approaching philosophical problems but, rather, the one that people actually employ in the course of their everyday lives. Thus, with Garfinkel, I will argue that the rational properties of these practical activities cannot be adequately assessed or even described “using a rule or a standard obtained outside actual settings within which such properties are recognized, used, produced, and talked about by settings’ members” (Garfinkel 1967: 33). How does all this bear on Shama’s story? What epistemic issues are implicated here for the participants? Notice that there are two events described here. On the one hand, there is an event in which Zari chases Chubby to the line

Chapter 1. Malinowski’s complaint

with a cutlass. For convenience, call this E1 . Secondly there is an event in which Chubby tells E1 to Shama and Shama expresses an alignment with Chubby saying at line 16–17 “yes buddy, oh god, what can you do” – call this E2 .13 These two events are not treated as epistemic equivalents. Note in the first place, that Shama qualifies Chubby’s account of E1 by explicitly marking it as something he said. She might have prefaced this with, “you know what happened to Chubby?” or “You know what Zarii did?” and that would have conferred an altogether different epistemic status to the events. We shall see that, in the village, knowledge based on first-hand access as a witness or participant (as opposed to knowledge based on testimony) is routinely treated as impervious to doubt. Chubby’s account to Shama is grounded in such first hand access – it was, after all, he who has been chased, or so the story goes. But when Shama tells Bat what Chubby said, the epistemic grounds of Chubby’s account shift dramatically. Shama impugns this account by juxtaposing what Chubby said with what everybody knows to be the case with respect to Chubby. “Chubby’s got his big guns and Zari can chase him to the line with a cutlass.” The incongruity here invites skepticism a display of which is elicited through the insertion of laugh tokens in the word “cutlass.” Compare now the epistemic status of Shama’s own account. Shama says “this morning Chubby told me then I said, well yes buddy, oh god. What can you do?” In this way, Shama places herself in the events she is describing and thus displays the epistemic grounding of the report in first-hand access as a participant. And we want to see that Shama describes herself as acting with some insincerity. In a turn which recalls Sacks’ ‘everybody has to lie,’ Shama reports taking up an alignment with Chubby even after she has just impugned his testimony. In this way she suggests that the talk between Chubby and herself should not be taken at face-value. Shama’s reported response casts Chubby’s talk as a complaint which calls for, indeed demands, alignment from its recipient and not so much as a straightforward account of what happened. Shama’s “yes buddy, oh god. What can you do?” is the vehicle for expressing alignment and, at the same time, a way of closing down the activity. This book has three interlocking objectives. First, using conversation analysis as an ethnographic method, it seeks to access the local social organization of knowledge as this is revealed in the talk of mundane activities. The selection of particular activities for analysis – advising, story-telling, question and answer sequences – reflects an overarching concern with practical epistemology as a feature the social world. While the specifically conversational organization of these activities is not unique to this ethnographic setting, the particular configuration of knowledge which they articulate and make visible is. While

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illuminating the particulars of an ethnographic setting, I believe the demonstration has implications which are quite general. In these pages I present a way of doing ethnography through close attention to the details of talk. This method might then be fruitfully applied to other settings. Secondly and relatedly the book contains an argument about the crosscultural and cross-linguistic relevance of conversation analysis. It has been suggested on several occasions that the relevance of conversation analysis is limited by the restricted scope of the materials to which it has been applied. Although in fact conversation analysis has been used in the analysis of Thai–Lue, Japanese, Korean, German, Dutch and other languages, it is frequently suggested that it is incapable of providing an adequate account of languages other than English. The analyses presented in this book embody an argument against such a view. Thirdly, as has already been adumbrated, the book develops certain arguments which bear upon the massive turn to practice(s) in social theory. In addition to Wittgenstein who has played an obviously significant, indeed pivotal, role in this movement, I draw upon certain figures who have received decidedly less attention but nevertheless offer significant insight: Ryle, Sacks, Garfinkel, Austin. Perhaps more importantly, I argue that conversation analysis already embodies a practice account consistent in important respects with recent developments in this area. Thus, conversation analysis offers a powerful description of social life without at the same time elaborating a generalizing theory divorced from the situated particulars being investigated.

Chapter 2

Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Introduction The relevance of conversation analysis to the study of talk-in-interaction has been demonstrated many times, but what does conversation analysis have to offer anthropology? In the present and following chapters, I will argue that anthropologists can use the methodology and analytic techniques of conversation analysis to gain entry to the worlds of the people they study.1 Careful examination of what people actually said to one another in the course of their ordinary activities reveals a kind of social organization that remains inaccessible to other anthropological approaches. An analytic focus on such matters as turn-taking, turn-formatting and the sequential organization of action provides a route into the structures of activity and significance that constitute the life-worlds of a society’s members. This book has not, then, been written as a contribution to conversation analysis per se. CA is an approach to language and social interaction distinguished by its rigorous methodology, an emphasis on the use of collections, and a commitment to studying language as it is deployed in the situated activities of everyday life. The goal of CA is to arrive at significant generalizations about the ways in which talk-in-interaction, and human action more generally, is organized as an accountable matter by and for those who produce it (see Goodwin & Heritage 1990). Over the past thirty years practitioners have steadily accumulated a large body of findings: actions have been identified and described and the organizational logic of these actions has been revealed through detailed examination and analysis of collections of instances. Although, in the course of building such collections, conversation analysts examine particular instances in detail, the instances are collected in the service of the collection which is then used to make generalizations about the organization of talk-ininteraction. Ethnography is a strikingly different undertaking. Rather than build collections of instances in order to arrive at significant generalizations, ethnographers are concerned to provide a way into another world – one that is often

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unfamiliar to the reader. The goal of ethnography, or at least the kind that is pursued in this book, is to describe singular instances of situated activity in such a way that readers have access to the practices out of which those activities were built. In so doing, the ethnographer attends to the features of actual situations as they were encountered by the participants. In this respect, my ethnography and my use of CA are perfectly compatible, for conversation analysts are not concerned to build models of social action but rather examine the details of talk-in-interaction in order to recover the orientations, methods and practices of everyday life. My aim in the following pages is to show that these perspectives complement one another. In the specific case to be examined, each approach serves to illuminate a particular aspect of the social organization of knowledge. At the same time, attention to the connections between ethnography and conversation analysis may help to elaborate a more satisfactory relation between linguistic analysis and social theory. The specific focus of the book, then, is knowledge, or what I have termed, “practical epistemology.” The setting, in an untechnical sense, is a single village in rural Guyana inhabited by about 700 people all of whom identify themselves as East Indian.2 In most contexts these villagers speak a variety of Caribbean English Creole which they call Creolese (see Chapter 4). The remainder of this chapter sketches out the particular problematic of the rest of the book: how to study the social organization of knowledge through close attention to the ways in which people speak to one another. Three approaches are considered through an examination of a number of exemplary studies.

Linguistic anthropology Linguistic anthropologists have long been concerned with the core issues examined in the present work. This is most obvious in a long-standing interest in so-called evidentials but is also apparent in work that examines such phenomena as stance, footing and reported speech. It is impossible to detail all the intersections between this tradition of inquiry and the present work. Instead, in the following I plot out the general directions in which these issues have been pursued by linguistic anthropologists and indicate some significant differences between those approaches developed within linguistic anthropology and the one developed in this book.

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Evidentiality and epistemic stance The term ‘evidential’ was apparently first used, in linguistics, by Franz Boas. In his Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages, Boas discusses an example sentence, “The man is sick,” and its nearest equivalents in Kwakiutl. Boas writes, “in case the speaker had not seen the sick person himself, he would have to express whether he knows by hearsay or by evidence that the person is sick, or whether he has dreamed it” (1911a: 43). In his description of Kwakiutl, Boas discusses “suffixes expressing subjective relation” including those which express the “source of subjective knowledge as by hearsay, or by a dream” (1911b: 443) and later “suffixes denoting the source of information” (1911b: 496).3 The ambiguity here between a definition of evidentiality as marking the “source of knowledge” on the one hand and as marking “the speaker’s certainty or lack thereof ” on the other remains unresolved and reemerges in many, if not all, contemporary studies. While evidentials were often noted in passing in descriptive grammars, up until the 1980s there were few if any attempts to give this phenomenon (or cluster of related phenomena) a unified treatment.4 This changed with publication of Chafe and Nichols co-edited volume entitled Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. In their introduction to the volume, Chafe and Nichols write, “Languages typically provide a repertoire of devices for conveying (. . .) attitudes towards knowledge” (1986: vii). This foreshadows at least three important features of the contributions to the volume and much subsequent work in the area. First, with a few exceptions, evidentiality is conceptualised as a linguistic device through which speaker’s attitudes are conveyed – that is, and as the subtitle of the volume suggests, the issue is treated as a matter of “coding.” Secondly, contributors to the Chafe and Nichols volume extended the range of phenomena discussed under the rubric of “evidentiality” beyond the morphologically well-defined grammatical paradigms of a few languages to include a “repertoire” of heterogeneous elements. Thirdly, the term ‘evidentiality’ was used to designate both those elements that conveyed “source of knowledge” and those that conveyed something about “speaker (un)certainty.” In more recent work the notion of “coding” has been problematized and a number of alternative accounts developed. In the following I will discuss two ways in which the relationship between use (speaker, utterance) and system (the linguistic resources of a language) have been conceptualised. In the work of Mushin (2001) and Agha (2002) evidentiality is related to the more inclusive, second-order theoretical concept of epistemic stance.5 In contrast, Haviland

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(1987) and Fox (2001) examine the use of evidentials in relation to particular sequential and interactional contexts of use. Both Mushin and Agha begin by noting that evidential forms exhibit a great deal of variability. In this respect Agha observes that these forms occur in many lexico-grammatical classes (verbal affixes, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, spatial deictics, sentence final particles etc.), that they may mark either source of knowledge or speaker’s certainty, and that they interact in a variety of ways with co-occurring categories to “yield a range of composite effects.”6 For instance, they interact with the so-called “illocutionary force” of the utterance to index “speaker’s perspective in assertions, addressee’s in questions.” Finally, Agha suggests that their use results in “interpersonal effects” which are “notionally distinct from evidence” (indexing, for instance, speaker affect, alignment, politeness etc.). Noting the variability of “native speaker glosses” for evidential forms (see Hanks 1990) and, thus suggesting that the forms themselves are relatively indeterminate and meaningful only via a dynamical relation to their contexts of use, Agha develops a notion of epistemic stance as “evaluations that anchor textpropositions onto interactional frameworks.” Thus, in Agha’s elegant scheme, epistemic stance is the product of a relation between an Origo (the participant framework of speaker, addressee, or both invoked via the evaluation), an Evaluation (the type of epistemic evaluation involved, e.g. source of knowledge, (un)certainty), and an Object (the denotational segment evaluated). Mushin’s concept of epistemic stance is rather different. Mushin (2001: 52) writes “when verbally representing a piece of knowledge, speakers necessarily take a stand on how they acquired the information, how they know it. This stand is their epistemological stance towards the information. Epistemological stance is thus a part of the construal of information, operating in conjunction with other necessary parts. . . As a conceptual structure, epistemological stance is independent of linguistic form and may be expressed by any of grammatical, lexical or paraphrastic means” (2001: 52–53). Mushin then goes on to develop a “hypothetical non-exhaustive list of some different types of epistemological stances.” She distinguishes, for instance, stances which are “experiential,” “inferential,” “reportive,” “factual,” and “imaginative” (see Mushin 2001: 58–79). Mushin suggests that these stances are universal “in the sense that speakers of all languages have the ability to represent them as part of their construal of states of affairs.” However, the “contexts in which these stances are actually adopted is predicted to vary significantly cross-linguistically.”

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Rather than relate evidential forms to a concept of epistemic stance both Haviland (1987) and Fox (2001) look to the particular sequential and interactional contexts in which these forms are used. Haviland begins by noting that “ethnographers, like everyone else, normally meet words in the quotidian contexts of their everyday lives, where, at least in principle, we should be able to overcome our idealizations to see the richness, rather than the poverty, of language structure.” He goes on to note, “we find that languages not only permit the expression of, but also grammaticalize, aspects of daily life that we have not often been trained to detect” (1987: 343). Haviland then examines evidentials within particular contexts of activity focusing specifically on fights and disagreements. He notes that many of these forms cannot be properly analysed as the product of a single, isolated speaker. So for instance the Tzotzil clausefinal particle yu’van which may be glossed as ‘of course’ or ‘nonetheless’ has a “contradictory tone” and is “logically tied to what conversation analysts call ‘seconds’ – turns that follow and are in some sense shaped by preceding turns” (1987: 349). Haviland explains that yu’van often “means, ‘indeed, despite what you have said (or implied)”’ and “‘you should have known it already!”’ On the basis of such an analysis, Haviland is led to suggest, “Doubt and hearsay may be individually expressed, but with agreement and disagreement it takes two to tango.” Haviland’s position then is that analyses based on examples abstracted from the texture of interaction are of limited use since these forms take their meaning and sense from their dynamic relation to the context in which they are deployed. “Evidentials help keep the fences in place and in good repair, partitioning the world of who is in a position to know, who has the right to know, who can even claim to know about, the crucial facts of a situation” (1987: 351). In her approach to evidentiality, Fox draws extensively on certain ideas developed within conversation analysis. The goal, as she puts it, is to “demonstrate that it is the social meanings of authority, responsibility, and entitlement that are indexed by evidential marking in English conversation” (2001: 167). For Fox, “evidential” is a broad category incorporating a range of linguistic phenomena from the tightly grammaticalized forms of Wintu which form a morphological class to the varied ways in which speakers of English mark “source of knowledge” in conversation. Fox gives the following examples from English:7 It looks like rain The soup looks delicious The door must have opened itself I hear you’re getting married

[visual evidence for prediction] [visual evidence] [Inference from visual evidence] [Hearsay evidence]

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Fox’s paper extends previous research in several ways. Perhaps most importantly, she does not focus solely on cases of explicit evidential marking but includes also what she calls zero-marked utterances. Fox explains, “an utterance was considered to be zero marked for evidentiality if: (1) it could be analyzed as making a claim, and (2) it did not exhibit any of the markers. . .” (2001: 172). An example of a zero-marked utterance in this framework is “the soup is good.”8 Fox shows that for any of the categories of information source conveyed by evidential marking native speakers of English can, and do on occasion, use zero evidential marking. “So the question that arises is: if speakers have a choice, in some sense, about whether to use zero-marking or an overt marker, when do they use the zero marker, and when do they use an overt marker?” (2001: 182).9 Through an examination of particular examples of marked and unmarked utterances in conversation, Fox suggests that evidential marking is both “responsive to and constructive of the relationship between speaker and recipients,” and “responsive to and constructive of the precise sequential location” in which the utterance is produced (2001: 185). Although Fox’s analysis draws on several fragments of conversation, we can here consider only one of these. The following fragment, Fox remarks, “is taken from a conversation . . . during dinner at the home of Beth and her husband, John, and their two young children, Terry and Richard. Their guests, Ann and Don, have brought Chinese food for dinner. When this segment begins, Terry who is perhaps two or three years old, is standing on his chair; his mother, Beth, is standing to his right, serving food. Ann, a guest, is off-camera when the segment begins; she comes into view just before Beth asks her to pour milk, and at this moment she is standing to Terry’s left.” To recap then, Terry is a small child of about three years, Beth his mother and Ann a family friend.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Beth: Beth: Beth: Ann: Beth: Beth:

((Terry hands Beth a tube of soy sauce)) ((Beth opens it, and places it on a plate near Terry)) ((Terry picks it up and holds it. Some of it spills)) Terry (1.2) () (2.0) ((to Ann)): Y-you pour uhh hh! (0.2) [a milk for him?= [(Could you pour a milk?) =Yeah. For Terry and Richard.

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

(0.2) ([) [In this cup? (2.1) Terry: (Mommy) I poured it Mommy, (0.4) ( ): Mmhm? (0.2) Ann: → I see you poured it on your napkin. (3.0) Beth: Okay Ter put that in here. Beth: Ann:

Fox glosses the action as follows: Beth is orchestrating the preparations for dinner (. . .). At the beginning of the segment, Terry hands Beth a small tube of what appears to be soy sauce. Beth takes the tube, opens it, and puts it on a plate near Terry. Terry picks up the tube and holds it. Almost immediately some of the soy sauce spills and Beth says “Terry” (with what could be described as exasperated and complaining prosody. . .). Ann now approaches the table and Beth asks her to pour milk. Ann reaches across the table away from Terry to get a glass in which to pour the milk. Terry at this moment turns towards his mother (and away from Ann) and says “(Mommy) I poured it Mommy.” Beth produces no response (unless the “Mmhm?” is hers, for which I find no evidence), and Ann produces the utterance in question: “I see you poured it on your napkin.” Terry then looks down at his napkin, and Beth turns towards him – after completing one round of “dishing out soup” – and says “Okay Ter put that in here,” during which she moves his hand and the tube of soy sauce and places the tube on the plate.

Ann, then, has apparently seen a blotch on Terry’s napkin – the trace of a spill. After Terry says to his mother, Beth, “I poured it mommy,” Ann, the family friend, says to Terry, “I see you poured it on your napkin.” Fox suggests that the inclusion of “I see. . .” marks this as an inference from visual evidence. On the face of it at least, it seems as though Ann might have said this without such an evidential framing – that is, the utterance might have been, in Fox’s terms, zero-marked. Fox asks, “why does Ann use an overt evidential marker?” Before attempting to answer this question, Fox makes the following observations about Terry’s utterance that provides the immediate sequential context for Ann’s evidentially marked turn.

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1. Terry’s utterance selects Mom (Beth) to speak next. 2. It reports an event that is sanctionable, by a particular class of people, i.e. ‘parents.’ 3. It is an announcement – an utterance that has as its socially appropriate pair-part an evaluation of the thing announced (Terasaki 2004[1976]). On the basis of these observations, Fox suggests that it is “a delicate matter for Ann to respond to Terry’s utterance, inasmuch as she is not the person addressed by the utterance and she is not a member of the class of people who are usually ‘authorized’ to handle such matters.” She (2001: 184) concludes that, by her use of the evidential “I see. . .”, Ann, distances herself from the authority to make statements and evaluations about the behavior of another’s child, and from responsibility for attending fully to the child as well as from entitlement to make the claim (. . .) while still responding to the child and validating the child’s utterance.

She goes on, It is thus the particular sequential location in which Ann speaks and its potential delicacy with regard to matters of authority, responsibility and entitlement, which, I claim, leads Ann to mark the utterance with an overt evidential marker.

I have spent some time outlining Fox’s approach for two reasons. First, it illustrates one way to apply conversation analysis to some of the issues with which I am concerned in this book. Secondly, although congruent with the framework advocated in following chapters in many respects, it diverges from the perspective adopted here in one basic and crucial way. A consideration of this divergence will bring into focus the differences between my approach and that developed in the work of many linguists and linguistic anthropologists. Let us go back and consider what is involved in Fox’s notion of zeromarking. Fox notes that one of the criteria for deciding whether an utterance was “zero-marked” involved determining if “it could be analyzed as making a claim.” From the perspective adopted in this book the characterization of some turn-at-talk as making a claim, in addition to all the other things it may be doing, and the related assumption that evidential marking somehow modifies that claim is inherently problematic. Of course, it is this basic premise that there is a definable class of claim-making utterances that warrants the procedure of isolating so-called “evidentials” and treating them as a category of linguistic elements that modify what in speech act theory is called the “locution” of the utterance.10 But, many of the turns analysed and discussed in the course of

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

I You

poured Verb spilled

it

[Mommy]

it

[on your napkin]

Figure 2.1 Next-turn correction via lexical replacement within a syntactic frame

Fox’s paper are not, in any straightforward way, ‘claims’ or ‘statements.’ A claim presupposes contention. One does not claim that someone has spilled soup on their napkin except in the specific situation where this possibility has been put in question – in, for example, a court case where the stain might constitute evidence. One makes scientific claims, claims to land, legal claims etc. There is a “logical” or “depth” grammar to this word which is evidenced in our everyday uses of it. The notion of “evidential marking” is intimately related to the conception of the relevant turns as claims. For once we consider that the turns in question may not in fact be making claims but rather implementing a range of quite distinct actions the idea that evidential marking is optional – in the sense of being extrinsic to the action being accomplished and simply modifying it – becomes difficult to sustain. Consider again then the example of Ann, Beth and Terry. By framing her turn with “I see. . .” Ann is not simply distancing herself from a claim to authority but transforming the action being accomplished. In saying “I see. . .” Ann is doing an explicit noticing – one that by virtue of being introduced by “I see. . .” invites co-present others – (e.g. Beth) – to orient to the visible thing noticed. That is, to do their own noticing of it. In his first lecture from the Winter term of 1969, Sacks remarks that a noticing may target something that belongs to the turn’s recipient, for instance “you’ve got a hole in your shoe.” This relation of possession gives the speaker someone to talk to about that thing, someone the speaker can figure will talk back. Now although in this case the recipient selected overtly by the talk is Terry (and it is his napkin) we have a basis for suggesting that it is recipient-designed for Beth as the person most clearly tied to the object of the noticing – the napkin, her son and his actions. In contrast, “You spilled it on your napkin” is, in this sequential context, hearable as correcting the action-formulation contained in Terry’s announcement. One common way of doing such correction in second position is by maintaining the syntactic frame of the targeted turn while replacing specific items within it (see Schegloff, Sacks, & Jefferson 1977; Goodwin 1983, 1990).

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Such a turn, is hearable not just as “setting the facts straight” (via correction) but as doing a put-down, complaint or reprimand. On this analysis, the problem for Ann is not one of claiming or disclaiming authority or entitlement per se but rather one of producing an action that is appropriate to her membership in the category “family-friend.” This example then illustrates an important point of difference between the perspective developed in this book and that which is characteristic of even the closely related approach of Fox for instance. Fox begins by isolating a ‘class’ of linguistic objects and is then faced with the task, in the course of doing the analysis, of re-embedding the particular forms examined back into their sequential contexts of activity. In contrast, my analysis, begins with those recurrent organizations of language use that constitute the sequential contexts of particular linguistic forms. This way of working is in fact justified by the findings of many studies within linguistic anthropology that strongly suggest that the sense of particular linguistic elements is dependent on their location within an unfolding course of talk and action. To the extent that this is the case, we must exercise some caution in adopting, for use in the analysis of interaction, the convenient labels and categories of traditional linguistic analysis (such as ‘evidential’). Even in those languages where ‘evidentials’ constitute a well-defined morphological class the matter is not at all straightforward since overt grammatical form is not an accurate guide to underlying “logical” or “depth” grammar (see Austin 1961 for a clear statement along these lines). What is required is a thorough examination of each of these elements in relation to their particular contexts of use. In this respect consider, for instance, a case in which a group of children are attempting to get a view of a courtroom. One of them boosts the other up so that he can see through a high window. The child doing the boosting asks “What’s going on?” to which the other replies, “I see your father and another man. . .”.11 In such a case “I see. . .” does not mark evidentiality at all.

Footing and reported speech Closely related to the themes of evidentiality and epistemic stance are the concepts of footing and reported speech in linguistic anthropology. This is seen vividly in the fact that, a common way of marking evidentiality is through the use of a hearsay particle.12 In general it is clear that reporting frames routinely convey the speaker’s stance vis-à-vis the content of the utterance and, in many cases at least, the source of knowledge. Report frames such as “they say that. . .,” “He told me that. . .,” “I hear that. . .,” “they suggest that. . .” are in that sense

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

part of the evidential resources of a language. Intimately related to such report frames are constructions which introduce not speech but thought e.g. “It is believed that. . .,” “He thought that. . .,” “She knew that. . .”. One of the issues raised by a study of reported speech is the lamination of different speakers (or participants) in a single utterance. In an influential article entitled “Footing,” Erving Goffman (1981) argued that the global folk categories of Speaker and Hearer should be “decomposed” into “smaller analytically coherent elements.” At the same time, Goffman wanted to call into question the simplistic imagined event into which these categories fit – that of a dyadic exchange abstracted from the actual social encounter within which talk is in fact embedded.13 Goffman decomposed the Hearer of the “exchange model” into a number of distinct “footings” including bystander, eavesdropper, addressed and unaddressed hearer, ratified and unratified participant. The Speaker, Goffman argued, needed to be rethought in terms of a “production format” – a configuration of different participation statuses implicated in the production of a given utterance. Thus Goffman distinguished between an Animator (or sounding box) who physically produces the talk and the Author who actually composes the content of the message. In some cases it may be relevant to introduce a further distinction between the author and the Principal – the one who is responsible for what is said. Consider, for instance, the case of a politician who reads a prepared speech. The public may treat the politician as animator and principal but not the author. At the same time, within the politician’s organization the speech-writer may be treated as the principal and held responsible for anything included in the speech that is later found to be inaccurate. Goffman also noted that a full account of the production format may require taking into account the Figure whose speech is reported (and thus depicted) in the talk of the Animator. Although analytically distinct these roles are not discrete in a given utterance. Rather the stance of the author or animator towards the speech of the figure may infiltrate the report (as Bahktin 1981 and Volosinov 1973 described in detail, see below).14 Goffman’s analysis has been extremely influential and is clearly a powerful framework for analysis. From the perspective adopted in this book however, it remains deeply problematic in several respects. Goodwin and Goodwin summarize these objections in a recent overview (2004: 225):15 There are (. . .) serious limitations to the analytic approach to participation offered in Footing. Many of these arise from the way in which Speakers are analyzed in one part of the article with one model (the Production Format, and

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its possibilities for embedding) while all other participants are described in another section with a quite different kind of model (Participation Status and Framework). This has a number of consequences. First, speakers and hearers inhabit separate worlds. Despite noting phenomena such as Mutual Monitoring, no resources are provided for looking at exactly how speakers and hearers might take each other into account as part of the process of building an utterance (. . .). Second, the methods offered for investigating participation take the form of a typology, a set of static categories. No resources are offered for investigating how participation might be organized through dynamic, interactively organized practices. Third, there is a marked asymmetry in the analytic frameworks used to describe different kinds of actors. The speaker is endowed with rich cognitive and linguistic capacities, and the ability to take a reflexive stance toward the talk in progress. However, all other participants are left cognitively and linguistically simple. Essentially they are defined as points on an analytic grid (e.g., ratified versus unratified participants, addressed recipients versus bystanders and overhearers, etc.), but without any of the rich structure and intricate practices that make speakers so interesting.

In a work that addressed many of the same themes from a very different perspective, Volosinov suggested that, although reported speech differs from dialogue in significant ways, both presuppose an active relation of one message to another – both are, in that sense, dialogic. Furthermore, in reported speech, as opposed to dialogue, the speech of another is transposed into a unified authorial-reporting context made manifest in the grammatical and stylistic reporting constructions characteristic of a given socio-historical juncture. The active relation which so interested Volosinov and later Bakhtin is, then, expressed not so much in the content of the message(s) but, rather, in the lexico-grammatical patterns of reportage. Volosinov (1973: 118) claims that these constructional patterns reflect crystallized tendencies and are ultimately determined by the socio-political order and the social dynamics of the speech act. For present purposes, the particular relevance of reported speech lies in its connection with evidence and authority. Volosinov (1973) suggested that in reported speech “two intonations, two points of view, two speech acts converge and clash.” Moreover, the various grammatical constructions available for reporting speech establish different relations between the voices. At one extreme are cases in which the voice of the reporting speaker all but dominates that of the reported speaker. Thus, the essence of indirect discourse, according to Volosinov, is analysis. Whereas it is possible to take reported speech in direct discourse as an unanalyzed chunk (and reproduce the particular intonation

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and emotive colouring of the original speaker), the very nature of indirect discourse implies analysis of the constituent parts of the reported message. This is manifested in the “fact that emotive-affective features of the reported speech are translated from form into content.” Thus some lexical items such as interjections cannot be transposed from direct to indirect discourse in a mechanical way.16 In contrast, at the other extreme, the voice of the reported speaker all but completely dominates, to the point of effacing, the voice of the reporting speaker. Perhaps the most extreme case of this is seen in trance and possession (see Urban 1989). In a recent discussion, Lambek (2003: 37) writes along these lines that spirit possession entails a “disavowal of agency” on the part of the one possessed. Possession and trance apparently take certain, quite general features of ritual speech to their extreme – specifically the transfer of agency and control to something or someone other than the immediate speaker. So, Chafe (1993) describes a Seneca ritual chanting style in which the character of the speech itself indexes its depersonalization, its source in something other than the speaker. Du Bois (1986) suggests along similar lines that, unlike speech in many other contexts, ritual speech is grounded in what he calls self-evidence. Du Bois (1986: 322) explains: The problem of evidence is clarified if we first draw a distinction between providing evidence for a statement and providing authority for it. I propose as an initial principle that no utterance is accepted without authority. In a large subset of cases, the authority provided will be that of visual evidence, inferential evidence, and so on. But providing evidence is simply a special case of providing authority. This formulation forces us to take seriously two questions. First, what is the domain of applicability of evidentiality? Second, what alternative sources of authority are there besides evidence?

By self-evidence, Du Bois points to the fact that some utterances carry the force of tradition. He writes “Members in the grip of a particular culture will accept, perhaps unconsciously, that certain utterances carry their authority within themselves” (1986: 323). In his analysis, Du Bois distinguishes between a “proximate speaker,” the individual who “actually utters the sentence,” and the prime speaker, “who is originally responsible for framing the proposition” as well as between indexic and arbitrary signs of speaker reliability. If a speaker marks an utterance with a morpheme indicating certain truth, this is an arbitrary sign of reliability; but if at the same time his voice reveals certain characteristic rhythmic irregularities, he is likely to be perceived as lying, on

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the basis of what is taken as an index of unreliability. There is a crucial difference between arbitrary and indexic signs of reliability in the extent to which they are subject to speaker control. [. . .] the most powerful determinants of ethos are indexic, precisely because they are difficult to manipulate at will.

Du Bois’s argument, then, is that in ritual speech the voice of the proximate speaker is subordinated to the voice of the prime speaker and that this is made manifest in indexic signs of speaker reliability. The common features of ritual speech including marked voice quality, constrained intonational patterns, fluidity, semantic opacity and such are then crucially connected to the authority of ritual speech. Such characteristics of the speech index a “transfer of control and responsibility” from the proximate to some “prime” speaker. “Once control of and responsibility for an utterance are shifted to another speaker, the character of this new speaker becomes an issue that bears on authority” (1986: 329). One way in which this transfer is achieved is through anonymization and it is not surprising to find that one effect of ritual speech registers is depersonalization. In speech outside of a ritual context such as examined in this book, Du Bois’s insights might be applied to proverbs. Here, it seems, is a case in which the weight of tradition is invoked so as to authorize an utterance. As Sacks (1995 Vol. I: 21–35) noted, it is characteristic of proverbs that they are rarely challenged and that they are generally accepted without any requirement of evidence. The literature on reported speech, footing and dialogism points to the fact that issues of evidence and speaker certainty extend beyond the limits of the immediate speech encounter. Linguistic anthropologists have succeeded in demonstrating the complex inter-relations between contexts and the consequences of this for our understanding of the epistemic issues implicated in talk-in-interaction.

Conclusion The various studies surveyed in this section represent a wide range of approaches. Mushin, Agha and Du Bois compare a number of different languages and explore the relations between linguistic form and interactional context. Goffman is less interested in grammatical form and instead focuses primarily on interactional circumstances. Fox and Haviland focus on the uses to which the linguistic resources of a particular language are put. What many of these studies share, besides a focus on the problem of evidence, is an interest in speech outside of the ordinary, mundane contexts of conversational interac-

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

tion within which the vast majority of a society’s business gets done (Haviland and Fox are exceptions). This reflects in part a long-standing tradition in anthropology of studying the most distinctive and, to the ethnographer’s ears and eyes, “strange,” aspects of social life. This focus is often, of course, based upon and justified by members’ own sense of what is important. In and of itself there is nothing problematic with such a focus – it only becomes problematic when, first, those special (for example, ritual) encounters are reified such that analysts fail to see the extent to which they are anchored in the ordinary, mundane contexts of everyday life and talk, and second, they serve as synecdoche for the society, or ‘culture’, as a whole thereby obscuring the actual practical activities which make up the ebb and flow of everyday life.17

The “anthropology of knowledge” Despite the existence of several programmatic articles bearing the title “the anthropology of knowledge” (Crick 1982; Barth 2001) and a long standing interest among ethnographers in the substantive issues implied by such a label, the ethnographic approach to the social distribution of knowledge is really quite underdeveloped in anthropology. In this section I briefly sketch out three approaches to the problem and discuss their relative merits and shortcomings in relation to the current study. An attempt is made here to provide an outline of each approach through a consideration of particular representatives.

Knowledge of culture ‘Knowledge’ most commonly enters anthropological discussion in relation to a, broadly speaking, cognitive view of culture. In what is probably the best known summary statement of this view, Goodenough (1964 [1957]: 36) suggested: . . .a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves. Culture, being what people have to learn as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the end product of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. By this definition, we should note that culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organisation of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (emphasis added)

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This perspective was elaborated and developed in the writings of a number of anthropologists, each taking a slightly different direction (see Tyler 1969; D’Andrade 1995). For our purposes, the most relevant work in this area is by Roger Keesing. For instance, in an article which appeared in American Anthropologist, Keesing was concerned to examine the boundary between linguistic and cultural knowledge which he conceived of as “distinct subsystems more or less shared by members of a society” (1979: 16). He went on to suggest that “linguistic knowledge is [. . .] part of, and on the same epistemological claim as cultural knowledge” (1979: 16). Keesing strikes an anti-Geertzian pose when he writes “since culture consists of knowledge (implicit and explicit, unconscious and conscious) its loci are the minds/brains of individuals” (1979: 16). Keesing’s ‘knowledge of culture’ or ‘culture as knowledge’ approach consists of an analysis of cognitive systems. In this respect, Keesing’s approach, like that of the cognitive anthropologists, is unabashedly representationalist. Indeed, this kind of study began with what appeared as the most obvious and available form of representation: words.18 Frake (1969[1962]: 30) wrote: In a few fields, notably kinship studies, anthropologists have already successfully pushed an interest in terminological systems beyond a matching of translation labels. . . The recognition that the denotative range of kinship categories must be determined empirically in each case, that the categories form a system, and that the semantic contrasts underlying the system are amenable to formal analysis, has imparted to kinship studies a methodological rigour and theoretical productivity rare among ethnographic endeavours. Yet all peoples are vitally concerned with kinds of phenomena other than genealogical relations; consequently there is no reason why the study of a people’s concepts of these phenomena should not offer a theoretical interest comparable to that of kinship studies. The analysis of a culture’s terminological system will not, of course, exhaustively reveal the cognitive world of its members, but it will certainly tap a central portion of it. Culturally significant cognitive features must be communicable between persons in one of the standard symbolic systems of the culture. A major share of these features will undoubtedly be codable in a society’s most flexible and productive communicative device, its language. . . To the extent that cognitive coding tends to be linguistic and tends to be efficient, the study of the referential use of standard, readily elicitiable linguistic responses – or terms – should provide a fruitful beginning point for mapping a cognitive system.

While cognitive anthropologists began by studying phenomena such as kinship term sets which were reasonably characterized as representational systems,

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they soon turned to “behaviour” and attempted to build cognitive models that would account for it. For instance, patterns of residence (Goodenough 1956), the diagnosis of disease (Frake 1961), ways of entering a house or ordering a drink (Frake 1964, 1975) were all analysed in terms of “what a native had to know” in order to act as a native. In this way, the cognitive anthropologists became committed to the kind of “representationalism” that was later criticized by Bourdieu and Giddens as well as by Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists (see Duranti 1997: 27–20 for a useful overview of cognitive anthropology, see Schatzki 1997; Bourdieu 1977; Garfinkel 1967: 68–75; Zimmerman 1970 and Chapter 1 for critiques of representationalism). The focus on integrated formal systems obscures the social distribution of knowledge, its objectified character as well as its embeddedness in the situated activities of everyday life.19 While Keesing claims that his view attends to explicit and conscious knowledge as well that which is implicit and unconscious he is really more interested in the formal organization of knowledge systems than in what people treat as knowledge within particular communicative situations and his examples often involve culture-specific word meanings analyzed as semantic values. In failing to attend to the objective character of knowledge by treating the relevant phenomena as isolated in the minds/brains of individuals, cognitive anthropologists obscure the fact that knowledge is not simply the internal representation of a social organization external to it, but is, itself, socially organized as a distribution of rights and obligations to know.20 As will be seen in the following chapters of this book, in their ordinary dealings with one another, members of a society are oriented to a social organization of objectified knowledge – members treat items of knowledge – ‘knowables’ – as something with respect to which particular persons and particular categories of persons have rights and obligations. Moreover, members of a society are concerned not just with who knows what but also with how (and the extent to which) they know it. It is therefore members’ own behaviour and their displayed orientations that encourages us to treat knowledge in terms of rights and obligations to know. By treating culture as knowledge distinct and isolated from members’ own understandings, the cognitive anthropologist obscures those ways in which knowledge and knowing are treated by members of a society as accountable matters (see also Lambek 1993; Douglas 1981).

Knowledge and power Drawing explicitly on Foucault’s (1972) “The Order of Discourse,” Lamont Lindstrom (1990) reconceptualizes ‘knowledge as/of culture’ in his ethnogra-

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phy of Tannese social organization entitled Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Lindstrom describes his approach as one that makes explicit “the hidden task which any anthropologist faces.” This, according to Lindstrom, is “to figure out the rules and conditions that govern talking and access to knowledge in a society” (1990: xi). Like Keesing, Lindstrom equates knowledge with ‘culture’ and makes no distinction between knowledge objectified and treated as such by members on the one hand and knowledge which the anthropologist assumes to underlie various behaviours and activities on the other. However, in contrast to Keesing, Lindstrom argues that much of culture, and by extension knowledge, is not shared but is instead unevenly distributed among members of a society and that “a set of conditions and procedures work hard to keep it so” (1990: xi). Although Lindstrom wants to develop a “conversational model of society” he admits that he does “not much care about the details of what Tannese say nor about the structures in which they encode what they say.” He describes his task, rather, as one of “reading between the lines” in order to “uncover the local procedures that manage the practice of saying itself: the conditions that govern the making, circulation, and hearing (consumption) of island talk” (1990: 11). Foreshadowing his main finding, Lindstrom writes that “people attempt to control those procedures that order the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge statements. They economize information” (1990: 11). There are many aspects of Lindstrom’s approach which are congruent with the one developed in this book. In the first place, Lindstrom emphasizes the connection between knowledge and language. Secondly, Lindstrom does not assume that knowledge is shared. Rather, his analysis, like the one presented in this book, is centrally concerned with the differential distribution of knowledge. Thirdly, the approach taken by Lindstrom attends, to some extent at least, to the objective and objectified character of knowledge for members – so we find that knowledge is “exchanged,” “consumed” etc. However, the economic and Foucauldian metaphors which Lindstrom adopts commit him, in the end, to a disembodied view of the phenomenon under study. Lindstrom writes of a “mode of information”: “those cultural rules that govern who talks, how one talks and what is sayable” (Lindstrom 1990: 15).21 In attempting to abstract away from “what people say” to the “rules” or “orders” of discourse in virtue of which they say it, Lindstrom simultaneously obscures the embedding of knowledge within the activities of everyday life and the practices through which knowledge is activated and becomes interactionally relevant and, for the participants, ‘visible.’ Furthermore, by characterizing the phenomenon in terms of information, Lindstrom fails to recognize that, in talking together,

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

people are unavoidably acting, and interacting. Close attention to talk in it’s sequential environment (which Lindstrom dismisses as a topic when he says he is not interested in the “details of what people actually say”) reveals that even the most seemingly descriptive utterances are doing something – complaining, bragging, contesting, challenging – and are treated as such by their recipients (see Schegloff 1988). In this respect his approach has exactly the same disconnected feel as the cognitivist work which he criticizes for assuming that knowledge is shared. The concept of “information” encourages the analysis to shift away from the real, objective character of knowledge as it is encountered by members of a society in the course of their ordinary activities. It is perhaps worth noting that these are problems Foucault himself encountered (at a different scale of analysis and within a different tradition of inquiry) and which in part led him away from the discourse model of society he had developed in his early work. As Foucault so compellingly argued in his later studies (e.g. 1979), knowledge is intimately tied to the body and the disciplines and activities which engage it. An analytic category such as “information” is simply unable to capture this. In an earlier article, Lindstrom attempts to make cross-cultural comparisons suggesting that, “(o)ne dimension of inequality of varying significance throughout Melanesia for power reckoning and in the constitution of social groups, is the communication and control of socially valued knowledge” (1984: 292). He attempts to explain this varying significance, asking, “in what circumstances does control of knowledge become the dominant dimension of inequality in a society”? While his approach has much to recommend it, Lindstrom does not address the central problem of this book – there is no room for a discussion of practical epistemology and the place of knowledge in the ordinary activities constitutive of the life-world.

Knowledge in practice Whereas Lindstrom, Keesing and others attempt to abstract away from particular activities to a cultural system, rules of discourse or a mode of information, other ethnographers argue that knowledge, along with its epistemological underpinning, is always organized relative to the discipline, tradition or domain of which it is part. For example, Lambek (1993) examines three traditions/disciplines in his study of Mayotte: ‘ilim fakihi – Islam, ‘ilim dunia – cosmology or sorcery, and ‘ilim ny lulu – spirit possession – all of which coexist on the island. In comparing the knowledge and practices which make up each of these disciplines, Lambek identifies several dimensions of contrast.

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In the first place, experts or fundis of ‘ilim fakihi aspire to share knowledge. Their authority is expressed not only through leading others in prayer and readings but also through their teaching and as such a fundamental principle of dispersal underlies this tradition. In striking contrast, within ‘ilim dunia (cosmology), knowledge is closely guarded, shrouded in secrecy and available only to the initiated (see also Evans-Pritchard 1976 on witchdoctors). Lambek (1993: 174) writes: The value placed on the maximal dispersion of knowledge stems from the model of ‘ilim fakihi with its emphasis on instruction and conversion. This is quite contrary to ilim dunia in which knowledge is closely guarded. The fundi of ilim fakihi gains his reputation by his generosity and by his ability and willingness to articulate what is supposed to be public knowledge.

In contrast, “ilim dunia comprises the most esoteric knowledge found in Mayotte” (1993: 195) and the position of the expert within this discipline, the mwalim dunia, is ‘sharply defined” (1993: 195). Although both disciplines draw on the authority of particular sacred texts they differ again in the way knowledge derived from these texts is displayed in practice. Knowledge of ‘ilim fakihi is expressed through recitation of texts which frequently lack referential meaning for the participants (the texts are in Arabic – a language over which most villagers have little command). Since virtually no one in the village understands the referential meaning of the text and since it generally remains untranslated, the sermon comes to have a heightened performative force and empty or weakened referential content. (Lambek 1993: 166)

Knowledge within ‘ilim dunia, on the other hand, is expressed in practices of calculation. “The critical feature of ‘ilim dunia is that it concerns the nyara, the constellations and uses their configurations to provide practical advice” (1993: 196).22 Lambek goes on to say, the mwalim uses his book in order to look things up. He must be able to rapidly find his place, to locate specific pieces of information and to translate them. He also has to learn extratextual rules that tell him when and where to look and how to interpret what he finds to his clients. (1993: 196)

Whereas the cosmologer’s texts are applied to “discover things about the present and future,” Islamic texts are recited in acts of prayer. Lambek suggests that we might understand the disciplines in terms of the illocutionary character of their constitutive practices of speaking. In Islam texts are used to beseech through prayer whereas the cosmologer uses his book as the basis of divining

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

calculations. According to Lambek the speech of Islamic prayer is performative whereas that of the cosmologer is constative.23 Perhaps the most striking dimension of contrast is between knowledge objectified in texts and that embodied in the rituals of spirit possession. Both Islam and Cosmology rely on discrete texts although they differ in the ways these texts are used. Spirit possession on the other hand centrally involves “visceral often painful and always disruptive experience” (Lambek 1998: 136). Lambek writes, “the knowledge of being possessed or how to act when possessed cannot be put into words it can only be experienced in practice” (ibid.). He speaks of a dialectic here rather than a strict opposition. “It quickly becomes apparent that the textual disciplines of Islam and cosmology have significant embodied dimensions much as spirit possession requires a certain objectification of its categories and rules of procedure in a way reminiscent of texts” (ibid.). Lambek’s analysis reveals the various ways that knowledge is distributed, displayed and activated, that authority is invested, that relationships between participants are framed within each discipline. In short Lambek gives a thorough account of the social organization of knowledge in this setting. It is not difficult, in this respect, to see the parallels between Lambek’s study and EvansPritchard’s classic Witchcraft Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. The two studies are alike not only in their attempt to study the social organization of knowledge “on the ground” as it were, but also in their common commitment to analyzing the “content” of such knowledges in relation to the situated activities of the people concerned. Evans-Pritchard refused to treat ideas about witchcraft, for example, as disembodied beliefs abstracted from the context in which they derive sense and reference. Thus Evans-Pritchard remarked (1937: 540–541): I hope that I have persuaded the reader of one thing, namely the intellectual consistency of Zande notions. They only appear inconsistent when ranged like lifeless museum objects. When we see how an individual uses them we may say that they are mystical but we cannot say that his use of them is illogical or even that it is uncritical.

Elsewhere Evans-Pritchard writes, “we are trying to analyse behaviour rather than belief ” (1976: 146) and further on “. . . each situation demands the particular pattern of thought appropriate to it. Hence an individual in one situation will employ a notion he excludes in a different situation. The many beliefs I have recorded are so many different tools of thought. . .” (ibid.: 162–163). Lambek writes of Evans Pritchard’s important insight that “ideas can only be fully

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understood in the context of their use”(Lambek 1998: 131) and aligns himself with such a position arguing that (1993: 14): Local knowledge is by no means the sort of monolithic (or dualistic) entity that could be depicted in terms of such bold oppositions as ‘ordinary’ versus ‘ritual’ knowledge or a ‘natural attitude’ versus a ‘mystical’ or a ‘religious’ one. An examination of knowledge in Mayotte shows diversity along many dimensions and gradations, . . . knowledge can only be understood in the context of practice (and vice versa).

Evans-Pritchard confronted Levy-Bruhl’s conception of the primitive, prelogical mind by examining Zande notions of causality within the context of their oracular activity. He concluded (1976: 150): Azande observe the action of the poison oracle as we observe it, but their observations are always subordinated to their beliefs and are incorporated into their beliefs and made to explain and justify them. Let the reader consider any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated into Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief. For their mystical notions are eminently coherent, being interrelated by a network of logical ties, and are so ordered that they never too crudely contradict sensory experience but, instead, experience seems to justify them. The Zande is immersed in a sea of mystical notions, and if he speaks about his poison oracle he must speak in a mystical idiom.

Whereas Keesing and others treat social facts such as kinship and language as knowledge and examine these traditional topics through that prism so as to produce formal models, for Lambek and Evans-Pritchard it is knowledge itself that is the social fact and, thus, the object of sustained ethnographic analysis. From this latter perspective, knowledge is seen as something that is pursued, exchanged even avoided. Both knowing and not knowing turn out to have real consequences. Knowledge brings people into relations of obligation and responsibility – knowledge in this sense is the very fabric of social life not because we must “know” social relations in order to have them (a cognitivist truism a la Goodenough and Keesing) but because social relations are constituted in large part in and through the local organization of knowledge – people are after all in multiple ways teachers, experts, advocates, students, novices, non-initiates, nonbelivers in relation to one another.

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Knowledge in interaction What I call here “the interactional approach to the sociology of knowledge” is in fact a set of remarks scattered throughout the writings of certain conversation analysts, most prominently Sacks himself, along with a few recent attempts to develop a more systematic account (e.g. Whalen & Zimmerman 1990; Roth 2002; Heritage & Raymond 2005). As Roth (2002: 357) has recently noted: A conception of knowledge and its social distribution as accountable matters was already evident in one of Harvey Sacks’ earliest lectures (1992[1964– 1965]), in which he contrasted “knowledge” and “opinion” in terms of entitlement. Discussing how professionals (in particular, psychiatrists) talk with lay persons, Sacks argued that “opinion” is what “lay persons are entitled to have when they’re not entitled to have knowledge” (1992: 33). For Sacks, “the notion of ‘opinion”’ gives persons “permission to talk . . . under the control that one doesn’t really know” (1992: 33).

While, as Roth here points out, these issues are not new to conversation analysts, knowledge and practical epistemology are emerging as key topics in contemporary work and an attempt is made here not only to summarize previous research but also to indicate the direction in which this research is headed. It will be seen that early and recent work in conversation analysis treats knowledge as an accountable matter. What conversation analysis brings out most clearly, then, is participants’ practical understanding of knowledge as a distribution of rights and obligations to know and the consequences of such an understanding for the way people talk to one another.

Story telling, witnessing, recipient design In some of his best known and widely cited lectures, Sacks discussed the various ways that tellers display how they know what they tell. Through a close examination of a series of stories, he was able to show that a teller’s relation to the tellable informs many details of the talk’s design. For instance, a “story preface” while proposing that the telling it projects is news, provides the recipient with an opportunity either to invite or to block that telling. Routinely, recipients invite tellings through a display of being uninformed and block tellings through an assertion of independent knowledge. Thus we find examples such as 1.1 (from Heritage 1984a): 1 A: → Hey we got good news. 2 B: → what’s the good ne [ws, 3 C: → [I k n o : w.]

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4 5 A: 6 D:

(.) [Oh ya do::? [ya heard it?

In response to A’s story preface, “Hey we got good news,” B produces a typical go-ahead response displaying, by virtue of inquiring, that he is uninformed with respect to the telling that has been projected. However, in saying “I know,” C claims to already know the “good news” and thus blocks the telling. Notice that, despite the fact that B is apparently uninformed, the telling does not proceed.24 One of the most important findings of Sacks’ work on stories is that knowing is an accountable matter. In telling and listening to stories, then, participants hold one another accountable in terms of what each is warranted or obligated to know. As such, Sacks’ discussion of story-telling points to the possibility of dialogue between conversation analysis and the sociology of knowledge. Story-tellers often situate themselves within the events of the story as witnesses or as participants and in this way design their stories so as to make visible the epistemic, and moral, basis of their account. Sacks’ early work in this area suggests that this dimension of practical epistemology can be studied directly through an examination of story-telling. Well-known examples come from the set of lectures which were published as, “Doing Being Ordinary.” There Sacks (1984a) discusses two stories. In one of them Ellen tells Jean about an incident at a shop called Cromwell’s. After remarking “I just thought I’d rebetter report to you what’s happened at Cromwell’s tod:y=” Ellen goes on to say “Well I: got out of my car at fi:ve thirty I: drove arou:nd and of course I had to go by the front of the sto:re,=”. In this way, Ellen incorporates within the story, as a constituent feature of that telling, a display of the epistemic grounds upon which the report is based. In this case, Ellen’s story is epsitemically grounded in first-hand access as a witness. Moreover, by saying “I just thought I’d re-better report,” Ellen provides a warrant for her telling in the form of an obligation to tell the recipient her news – an obligation to report on events that have relevance for an uninformed recipient. So Ellen builds into this story both the warrant for its telling and the epistemic grounds which provide an entitlement to tell it. Sacks notes that Ellen is completely comfortable in acting as a witness and never once shows any concern that she might herself have been implicated in the scene. In the second fragment Sacks examines, Madge is telling Bea about an accident which she witnessed as she was driving “down to Ventura.” Madge says: “And on the way home we saw the – most gosh awful wreck.” and continues “we have ev- I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen a car smashed into sm-

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

such a small space.” Sacks focuses attention on the “entitlement to have experiences” (1984a: 424) asking under what conditions someone is considered to have rights to tell a story, to convey their feelings with respect to it, in short, to transform some set of events into their experience. In Madge’s story we see once again the way in which the teller claims credentials to tell the story and that this again involves a display of the epistemic grounds on which the telling is based (here, what she saw). An interesting wrinkle here is to be found in the way Madge self-corrects her assessment from “the most gosh awful wreck we have ever seen” to “the most gosh awful wreck I have ever seen.” With the first assessment Madge claims access to her companion’s set of experiences against which the current crash might be compared. The corrected assessment is not only downgraded in relation to the first but at the same time does not claim the companion’s experiences as a basis for comparison. Sacks picks up on the fact that Madge tells how this accident inconvenienced her saying: “We were s-parked there for quite a while.” He (1984a: 424) writes: I want to suggest that, in having witnessed this event, and having suffered it as well, in some way (for instance, having had to stop on the freeway in a traffic jam by virtue of it), she has become entitled to an experience. That she is entitled to an experience is something different from what her recipient is entitled to, or what someone who otherwise comes across this story is entitled to. In part, I am saying that it is a fact that entitlement to experiences are differentially available. If I say it as “entitlement,” you may think of it as not having rights to it, but that is only part of it. It is also not coming to feel it at all, as compared to feeling it and feeling that you do not have rights to it. The idea is that in encountering an event, and encountering it as a witness or someone who in part suffered by it, one is entitled to an experience, whereas the sheer fact of having access to things in the world, for example, getting the story from another, is quite a different thing.

Another important and not unrelated focus within the conversation analytic literature falls under the heading of recipient design: “the multitude of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974: 727). Sacks (1995) pointed out very early on that certain aspects of a turn’s design reflected assumptions about what the talk’s recipient does or does not know.25 Moreover, “(S)peakers in ordinary conversation design their utterances to display their orientations to a distinction between matters known directly or primarily to them, and matters known to them indirectly, at second hand” (Roth 2002: 355). This is clearly seen in the design of questions for instance; as well as the se-

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lection of referent identifications (e.g. on questions and answers see Heritage 1984b for an overview; Roth 2002 for a more recent statement; on person reference, see Chapter 7; Moerman 1988; Pomerantz 1987; Sacks & Schegloff 1979; and Sacks 1995 Vol. II: 444–452; on reference to place see Schegloff 1972). Sacks elaborated the notion of recipient design in his discussion of stories. In a lecture (1995 Vol. II: 437–443) entitled “Spouse Talk” he begins by noting several occurrences of “completing another’s sentence” in a transcript.26 In his analysis of this phenomenon, Sacks invokes the principle of recipient design which he formulates as, “a speaker should, on producing the talk he does, orient to his recipient” and goes on to note that one specification of that is, “If you’ve already told something to someone then you shouldn’t tell it to them again; or if you know in other ways that they know it then you shouldn’t tell it to them at all.” Put most baldly the rule can be simply stated as, “Don’t tell your recipient what they already know” (1995 Vol. II: 438). Sacks then goes on to notice that the principle of recipient design – and this specification of it in particular – presents a difficulty in certain “standardized situations” one of these being a situation in which “couples are present and talking in the presence of others possibly other couples (. . .) where for various reasons it is usual for spouses to have already heard news that is tellable.”27 According to Sacks this fact prevents spouses from following a basic rule for listening to stories which he states as, “listen to a story to find out if a similar thing or the same thing happened to you. At the end of the story, if you’ve found such a thing, tell it.” Sacks asks if there are techniques for listening to stories which are specifically adapted to a situation in which one has already heard the story being told. One such listening technique is present in our materials and is altogether kind of common; and that is a spouse listens precisely to the story they already know, for its more or less correct presentation and engages in monitoring it – as listeners should – utterance-by-utterance. But now however, for whether it’s correctly presented as they know it. If not, what they do is put in corrections at the proper places.

Roth suggests that Sacks’s and Pomerantz’s research establishes a “direct link” between Garfinkel’s notion of accountability and Schutz’s conception of a social distribution of knowledge. He writes (2002: 357) that “Sacks’s and Pomerantz’s research shows, interactants treat one another’s knowledge – including the bases for, and limits of, that knowledge – as accountable matters.”

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Knowledge in the organization of turns and sequences Two papers, which appeared quite early in the development of CA, dealt with issues of knowledge in interaction. In his “Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Conversation,” Charles Goodwin proposed that a “speaker can reconstruct the emerging meaning of his sentence as he is producing it in order to maintain its appropriateness to its recipient of the moment” and further that both “the length and the meaning of the sentence eventually constructed within a turn at talk [. . .] emerge as the products of a dynamic process of interaction between speaker and hearer” (1979: 98). Thus as a speaker produces a turn-attalk they orient to the problem of eliciting gaze from an unknowing recipient. If gaze is not returned they may build in additional turn components either to again elicit the gaze of an unknowing recipient or to reorganize the talk so as to make it recipient designed for some other, gazing, co-participant. Another early paper which dealt squarely with the issues of knowledge in interaction was John Heritage’s (1984a) “A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement.” Heritage examined various ways that informings, answers to questions and repairs were receipted in conversation, focusing analytic attention on the token oh. The analysis shows that oh is used “to propose that its producer has undergone some kind of change in his locally current state of knowledge, information, orientation or awareness” (1984a: 299). In this respect, oh contrasts with other acknowledgement tokens such as yeah and mhmm which do not indicate that their producer has undergone such a change of state (see discussion in Gardner 2001). As Heritage notes then, oh and other acknowledgement tokens are resources used in negotiating the boundaries of knowledge. “The production of an ‘oh’ receipt (. . .) may be avoided by questioners so as to propose that they have not been informed” (1984a: 310). Similarly, in the case of counterinformings participants may withhold the production of oh and instead receipt the counterinforming with a turn that, rather than indicate a “change of state”, suggests that they have consulted their own, independent and prior, knowledge and are thus in a position to confirm, or disconfirm, what has been said (e.g. “yeah, that’s right.”). Heritage (1984a: 314) writes: Through the use of the particle, informed, counterinformed, questioning parties can assert that, whereas they were previously ignorant, misinformed or uninformed, they are now informed. Correspondingly, the informing, counterinforming, or answering party is reconfirmed as having been the informative, knowledgeable, or authoritative party in the exchange. By means of

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the particle, the alignment of the speakers in their sequence-specific roles is confirmed and validated.

In the course of the paper Heritage observes that, “conversationalists exhibit a pervasive orientation to the tellability of information. A major aspect of this orientation involves avoiding telling recipients what they already know” (1984a: 303). He goes on to note (1984a: 304): Although interactants may have a variety of resources with which they can infer, a priori, whether a candidate recipient is informed or uninformed about a potential “tellable,” it is nevertheless the case that, with respect to the specifics of an informing, the informed or uninformed status of recipients is commonly the object of active negotiation and determination throughout the course of the informing itself. Negotiations over the informed/uninformed status of recipients have been shown powerfully to structure the design of storytelling, joke telling, and announcement sequences. Through these negotiations, the parties to the talk establish local identities of informed teller and uninformed recipient with respect to the matter at hand, and these identities are commonly sustained through to the termination of the informing sequence. (emphasis added)

Practical epistemology in calls to the police In a paper which bears directly on the themes of this book, Whalen and Zimmerman (1990) discuss the ways in which callers to an emergency help line design their ‘complaint’ to show how they know the specific details of what they report. Conversely, when the source of the caller’s knowledge is unclear, calltakers routinely inquire as to how the caller is related to the trouble. Whalen and Zimmerman thus show that callers and call takers draw upon a practical epistemology in designing and understanding the talk. What callers know and how they know it are treated as accountable matters. Whalen and Zimmerman illustrate this by showing the way descriptions of trouble are vulnerable to suspicion and doubt. The analysis presented focuses attention on three features of these reports which are assembled to produce what Whalen and Zimmerman (1990: 466) call epistemological displays. Displays of practical epistemology are assemblies of various features of the problematic event: what one has actually seen or heard (the empirical materials of the event), the “definition” or categorization of the event as a particular kind of problem or trouble (e.g. as a “fight,” “murder,” “break-in,” and so on), and the status of the caller vis-à-vis the event (e.g. as a witness, victim, or intercessory third party).

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

Call-takers locate vulnerabilities in the relation between these features of the epistemological display. For instance, in one of the examples Whalen and Zimmerman analyze, the call-taker expresses doubt by asking “how do you know this?” when the caller claims to know, by virtue of having heard “yelling,” (the empirical materials) that “a rape” (the categorization) is taking place in the “house next door” (the caller’s relation to the event). The call-taker’s doubt is, in this case, associated with an incongruity between the categorization of the reported event and the empirical, or, evidential basis of that categorization (overheard “shouting,” “laughing,” and talk of rape). The status of the caller vis-à-vis the reported trouble thus emerges as an important endogenous epistemological consideration. Epistemological issues are not limited to evidential concerns of this sort. Call-takers also listen to the talk for recognizable “entitlements” to know. Thus in striking contrast to the example mentioned above, Whalen and Zimmerman show that call takers demand far less elaborate epistemological displays from callers who indicate that they are speaking on behalf of an institution. Frames such as “we have” in “We’ve got a gal that’s just .hh ready tuh pass out. . .” index the institutional position from which a report is made and are strongly associated with an absence of doubt and skepticism in the calls the authors analyze.28 Such observations lead Whalen and Zimmerman to suggest that “access to an event – the experiencing of it – involves not simply being near enough to see it, or hear it, or feel it, but being socially positioned with regard to it as well” (1990: 476). Such studies as these indicate that the interactional approach provides access to an endogenous epistemological system – a domain of practices – embedded in the organized activities of members. As Sacks noted, a focus on the situated activities of ordinary life distinguishes CA from much research in the social sciences. In discussing “categories” he suggested (1995 Vol. II: 27): And I differ from the modern anthropologists, though I would recommend that work very much [. . .] The trouble with their work is that they’re using informants; that is, they’re asking questions of their subjects. That means that they’re studying the categories that Members use, to be sure, except at this point they are not investigating their categories by attempting to find them in the activities in which they’re employed. And that, of course, is what I’m attempting to do.

While the interactional and ethnographic approaches differ in many respects, here we also find some convergence. In his masterful study of witchcraft and magic among the Azande, for example, Evans-Pritchard argued that a full un-

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derstanding of Zande witchcraft beliefs could only be achieved if those beliefs were examined in their contexts of use, that is, the particular situated activities in which witchcraft was manifestly relevant.29

Epistemic issues implicated in the production of question-answer and assesment sequences Roth (2002) analyzes practical epistemology and the achieved social distribution of knowledge in broadcast news interviews. He shows that interviewers consistently design their questions so as to take into account the presumed source of an interviewee’s knowledge. In Roth’s terms, direct questions (e.g. “Reverend Jackson? Will you be marching tomorrow?”) treat interviewees as subject-actors who are requested to talk on matters of first-hand experience. Epistemically-framed questions (e.g. “Do you think he’s gonna endorse you?”) in contrast align interviewees as commentators and encourage their recipients to speak about other people’s actions, intentions etc. As is often the case in studies of interaction, in Roth’s study the deviant cases turn out to be the most revealing. Thus, Roth shows that direct questions are used to make inquiries about third parties in an orderly way. Third party questions occur without epistemic frame when the interviewee (i.e. the question’s recipient) is (a) an eyewitness, (b) a patient or experiencer, (c) an agent (e.g. a lawyer of the person asked about). Roth’s analysis then reveals the participants’s finely detailed orientations to the social distribution of knowledge in this setting as it is manifested in the design of turns-at-talk and in this respect constitutes an exemplary study of practical epistemology. Other recent work is also concerned with issues of epistemic access. For instance, Heritage and Raymond (2005) examine assessments with an eye to the epistemic issues implicated in their production and uptake. They show that a “first assessment carries an implied claim that the speaker has primary rights to evaluate the matter assessed” but that speakers avail themselves of various practices for downgrading such primacy in particular cases (through the use of evidentials such as “sounds” in “it sounds so good. . .” or tag questions inviting confirmation). In this way “persons offering first assessments may work to defeat any implication that they are claiming primary rights to evaluate the matter at hand.” At the same time, although second assessments generally assert secondary rights, their speakers have practices available for upgrading the claims of epistemic access they make (e.g. by packaging the second assessment as [confirmation + agreement token]). The authors suggest that when participants offer evaluative assessments “the relative rights to perform these evaluations

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

are indexed within the talk” and that such sequences involve “complex face considerations relating to the management of knowledge and information.” To conclude this discussion, we may say with Heritage and Raymond that the application of conversation analysis to the problem of knowledge has shown that “the distribution of rights and responsibilities regarding what participants can accountably know, how they know it, whether they have rights to describe it, and in what terms, are directly implicated in organized practices of speaking.”

Practical epistemology The analyses developed over the course of this book draw from both the interactional and ethnographic approaches to knowledge. Like Sacks, Pomerantz, Heritage and other conversation analysts, I attend to the details of talk as it is constructed within situated encounters. This focus brings with it a series of methodological, analytical and theoretical issues. Like Lambek, EvansPritchard and other ethnographers I emphasize the objective character of knowledge. I also attempt to analyze the relevant phenomena within a context of activity. For instance, local historical knowledge is analyzed in relation to the particular settings and situated activities within which it is activated, displayed and challenged. It is then, not some esoteric interest in villagers’ modes of genealogical reckoning that motivates my analyses, but rather a concern with the ways in which such genealogies and other forms of knowledge are put to use in unfolding courses of action. As will soon become apparent, a focus on the uses to which knowledge is put leads to a consideration of what constitutes knowledge in the first place: not in the abstract philosophical sense but in the more anthropological sense of what members themselves understand to be known. Epistemology is typically understood as the study of the nature and scope of knowledge and its justification. As is the case for much of philosophy, epistemological questions are not solely the concern of philosophers. The following chapters are concerned with a practical epistemology – an understanding of knowledge that is evidenced in the ordinary activities of everyday life. In the course of those activities, and their engagement with one another, people make and employ distinctions not entirely unlike those of epistemologists. Close attention to the details of ordinary talk in interaction can then provide a foothold from which it will be possible to respecify at least some aspects of philosophical epistemology. The resulting study of practical epistemology is not so much concerned with “what

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constitutes actual knowledge” but rather with what people treat as knowledge and the methods they employ to distinguish between knowledge and mere belief. The Gettier problem and many other philosophical conundrums have little relevance for us because they have little relevance for the people whose activity we are attempting to analyze.

Plan of the book Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the setting and the language. The first is a brief sketch of the village where the research was conducted. The purpose of the chapter is both to provide background information to be used in reading the case studies of later chapters and to situate the current work in relation to other ethnographic studies in Guyana. The second presents a brief sketch of the variety focusing on those features of particular relevance to later chapters. Chapter 5 provides a first point of entry into the analytic concerns which motivate the book as a whole. The chapter examines the way in which children are drawn into a web of knowledge and epistemic practice through engagement in sequences of question and answer. This chapter also draws on Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game and attempts to relate it to the findings of conversation analysis. Chapter 6 presents an analysis of advice-giving and receipt. Such activities offer a particularly important site for the analysis of knowledge insofar as they involve an articulation of the social and interactional dimensions according to which knowledge is organized and distributed. Advice-givers are constrained by the rule of recipient design: to advise only those who do not already know what to do. The advice recipient’s display of uncertainty then becomes an interactional warrant for the giving of advice. At the same time, in giving and receiving advice the participants formulate themselves and each other as expert and novice. That is to say, advising is an activity which provides for the public display and ratification of the social organization of knowledge. Chapter 7 examines another, less studied, aspect of the social organization of knowledge. Here the analysis turns to a case in which one person actively displays ignorance. The situation in which such a display is constructed and the resources available for doing it are examined in detail. Chapters 8 and 9 present an extended case study of one setting and the activities which take place within it. The rumshop is an exclusively male domain in which men reconstruct historical knowledge through collective reminiscing.

Chapter 2. Knowledge and talk-in-interaction

The analysis focuses on the character of that exclusivity and the particular practices of story-telling through which local historical knowledge is reconstituted in talk. The concluding chapter reviews the findings of the book, drawing them together in relation to recent theoretical discussion in linguistic anthropology.

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Chapter 3

The village

Introduction Guyana is located in the northeast corner of South America bordered by Venezuela to the west, Brazil to the south and southwest, and Surinam to the east. Most of the country’s approximately 83,000 square miles is uninhabited and the vast majority of the population lives on the coastal strip of reclaimed land created during the colonial period by a system of kokers, dykes and sluices (Rodney 1981). The people of Guyana are ethnically heterogeneous but the largest groups are the descendants of African slaves on the one hand and indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent on the other. Both Africans and East Indians were originally brought to Guyana to serve colonial interests as workers on sugarcane, coffee and cotton plantations. Today however Afro-Guyanese are less likely to be involved in agriculture and rice rather than sugar has become the most important crop among East Indian populations (see Despres 1967; Smith 1957). The road stretching from Georgetown east to Berbice is dotted with lowlying, densely populated villages. As one races along the road in one of the many minibuses by which the majority of Guyanese travel, villages appear and disappear in a flash. On either side of the road are a string of well-kept houses and shops. Rumshops, marked by signs painted with the logos of popular brands of rum such as El Dorado and D’Aguiars, are ubiquitous. Behind the roadside dwellings are more houses running along narrow plots of land. Callander is one such village located on this road at a point just before East Coast Demerara becomes Berbice at the Abary river. The trip from Callander to Georgetown takes about an hour by minibus and most villagers make it infrequently (a few villagers had been to Georgetown less than five times in their entire lives and many did not go to town during my 12 month period of field research between 1994 and 1996). About 650 people were living in the village in 1996 when a teacher at the local school and village resident, drew the map shown as Figure 3.1.

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Figure 3.1 Hand-drawn map of the village showing population estimates

The patrilocal group and the organization of labour The village remained relatively unpopulated until well into the 19th century. Colonization of the area was so insignificant that Schomburgk, whose A Description of British Guiana was published in 1840, devotes only a short paragraph to it (1840: 76). By the time Schomburgk wrote his description, one colonial venture, the production of cotton, had already been attempted and, by all accounts, failed due to falling international prices (Rodway 1897: 76). While, in other parts of British Guiana, planters continued to invest in sugar plantations, in this region (and possibly parts of West Coast Berbice, cf. Silverman 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980) plantations gave way to rice farms. In 1883, a group of East Indians, some from Windsor Forest, others from Haarlem and Cane Grove, all having completed the terms of their indenture, bought the land surrounding Callander for $4 an acre along with two Africans (Potter 1975). The land had been surveyed and divided into plots in 1880, and it is likely that rice was already under cultivation there by that time. Although it is impossible to fix the date at which rice-growing actually began in the region, it is apparent

Chapter 3. The village

that, within a few years of buying the land, East Indians, who soon bought out the original African partners, were cultivating rice fields, often pointed to as a great success by colonials who visited the area. By the later 19th century, East Indian families were cultivating two or three crops a year on old estates and newly established village plots like those surrounding Callander. Traditional rice-growing requires high investments of labour but relatively little in the way of cash outlay. It has been noted in this respect that there was a good fit between the kinds of labour demands of traditional rice-growing and the East Indian family or household group (see particularly Despres 1967). Despres (1967: 89) writes that, “(t)he pattern of these economic activities is functionally related to (the) kinship structures [. . . ]. Rice cultivation is primarily a family proposition.” With families combined into larger patrilocal corporate groups of the sort described by Despres (1967), rice cultivation on a large-scale could be managed efficiently and cost effectively. The patrilocal group provided a flexible labour pool such that, at harvest times, it was possible to muster as many as twenty-five adults and twice as many children to work in the fields for several days. However, the turn to mechanization in the early twentieth century had wide-ranging economic and social consequences. First of all, it tended to edge out the small producer or patrilocal family in favor of larger landholders who could use mechanized technology more efficiently. Those small producers who did embrace mechanization were unable to get an adequate return on their investments (Hanley 1975, 1979). But more often than not, small producers (those farming between 3–10 acres) were not able to put up the cash outlays involved in mechanized production. Tractors, pesticides, insecticides, specialized paddies, etc. – this was a very different business from the one East Indians had pioneered just fifty years earlier. As small producers were edged out, and small-scale production became increasingly less cost-efficient, a few corporate groups began to buy up rice land while continuing to modernize the production process and increase the scale of production. Big rice farmers turned more and more to wage labour. The overall effect was the establishment of two relatively stable, interrelated, labour systems – one based on wages and class relations, the other based on kinship and family-based corporate groups. Today, men who work in the rice fields are paid in Guyanese dollars (the equivalent of about 6 Canadian dollars per day) either by private owners or through government agricultural schemes. However, they work in crews composed of age-mates, brothers and cousins. So called “job-work” is often contracted to such kin-based crews for a fixed rate of pay.

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The situation in Callander is perhaps rather different from that in other rural areas. This was one of the very first areas to see mechanized production and the commercialization of the rice industry seems to have advanced furthest here as a result. Today very few people are small independent cultivators (unlike, say, Black Bush Polder). Instead, most are wage labourers, working for the few companies or government schemes that have large holdings in the area. Of course, there are still a few small-scale producers who rely on friends and family members to assist at shai (“sowing”) and cut (“harvesting”) times. The returns here are minimal and all the small producers that I know supplement their rice-growing income with a number of other activities. Despite changes in the organization of labour, the traditional system of generalized reciprocity centered around the patrilocal group is still very much a part of the social character of the village. Thus, while the main areas of productive labour are not organized around the corporate group of a patrilocally extended family, many other kinds of work and activity are.1 House-painting, various construction projects, car mechanic work, and tomb-building will often involve men who belong to a single patrilocal group (or two allied ones). More pronounced, perhaps, is the assembly of patrilocal groups at various kinds of religious work, including death rites, jandhi and the various pujas. Despite the well known and often cited expression aal abi a wan famalii “All of us are family,” people have a fairly firm sense of who they can, and, who they can’t, call family. Thus although the notion of family is often fictively extended, the importance of “blood” is made quite explicit in everyday talk. This exclusive and corporate nature of family is expressed in the proverb famlii stik a ben bo ii na brook,“the family-stick can bend but it can’t break.” Political positions, favors, and respect all hinge on the name and reputation of the family. Besides its importance in terms of reputation, the patrilocal group figures prominently in the organization and distribution of both property and domestic authority. In the first case, although some groups are landless, patrilocal group property is still generally inherited by the sons. Patrilocal group land holdings previously functioned as the main productive resources in a system of labour-intensive peasant agriculture. Today, few people still farm their group’s land holdings and with the move to wage labour, landholdings have become less important as an economic resource. Often they have been sold or are rented out to large rice producers. Still, the idea of patrilocal group land, embodied most obviously in the sentiments attached to the yard, is of central importance. Rights and obligations to houses, house plots, and yards are reckoned in terms of patrilocal group membership and the death of a younger, propertied male is often followed by a number of disputes in

Chapter 3. The village

which relatives make claim and counter-claim to properties. In the case of older household heads, the structure of authority between younger and older siblings has usually had time to work itself out and disputes are generally avoided. Authority and status within the patrilocal group is organized in terms of gender and age distinctions. Fathers and fathers’ brothers (Cha Cha) are thus typically understood as authoritative figures. As such, within the village and especially among adult men, age is a salient index of status and authority. At the same time, villagers hold firmly to an explicitly egalitarian understanding of themselves (see Williams 1991). They refer to fellow adult villagers as mati “close friend” and there is a commonly held belief that all people should be treated with respect and dignity. People who do not abide by this may be charged with eye-pass or with acting biggity. In fact any ostentatious display of wealth may bring similar charges. As a number of ethnographers have noted (Jayawardena 1963; Williams 1991) such an egalitarianism exists in the face of obvious socio-economic disparity and most adult men in the village consider themselves to belong to what Brenneis (1984a) has termed for Fiji “an exclusive community of equals,” regardless of differences in occupational status.

Post-marital residence and village exogamy The young men of the village often say that they would prefer to marry a woman from far away (see also Smith & Jayawardena 1959) . This preference for village-exogamy has wide-ranging structural effects which bear on our concern with knowledge and practical epistemology and therefore merit some consideration here. Smith and Jayawardena (1959: 360) reported a strong preference for local exogamy in the Guyanese East Indian communities they studied in the 1950s. In all three communities studied there is a professed preference for “marryingout” of the local community. The reasons advanced for this preference are various, but two are most frequently brought up. It is argued that a wife living far from her mother is less likely to keep running back to her on the slightest pretext, or alternatively that this exogamic pattern is “an old Indian custom”. Linked to the first of the above arguments one often hears it said that it is good not to know too much about one’s wife’s previous life. These arguments would fit in very well with a situation in which a young wife was being incorporated into a large kinship group.

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Chapter 3. The village

Table 3.1 Residence of married sons and daughters of East Indians in Clonbrook and Cromarty (from Despres 1967)

Home Village Neighbouring villages Outside of district Total

Sons N 34 10 5 6 55

Phase = 1

Phase = 2

=o

=o

Phase = 3 =o

Phase = 4

=o

=o

ego

%

Daughters N

%

61.8 18.2 9.1 10.9 100

5 4 9 40 58

8.6 6.9 15.5 69.0 100

Although they go on to note, “increasing importance being given to personal attraction and to a ‘romantic’ element in the marital relationship” which is correlated with, “changes in the ‘local exogamy’ rule” they nevertheless report a strong statistical skewing towards “marrying out” (Smith & Jayawardena 1959: 360). At the same time, as already noted, post-marital residence is primarily patrilocal. Smith and Jayawardena (1959: 336) write: (w)hen young couples marry it is customary for them to go to live at the home of the bridegroom’s parents, the bride becoming a member of that household group. They are normally dependent upon the head of the household for food and clothing and contribute anything they earn to the common purse. The wife does household chores under the direction of her mother-in-law, but gradually the couple begin to assert their independence. . . Eventually the couple break away and set up their own household in a separate building.

Drawing on Fortes (1962), Despres (1967: 78–79) described the preference for patrilocal residence as one stage in the developmental cycle of the East Indian domestic group (see Figure 3.2). Most newlyweds continue to live in the home of the husband’s parents (Phase 1). When children are born to this union, the two-generational household is transformed into a patrilocally extended unit (Phase 2). Segmentation of the patrilocally extended unit (Phase 3) varies according to a variety of circumstances. . .. Generally speaking, the patrilocally extended household tends to segment when one of ego’s brothers, who is residing at home, has married and begins to have children. This introduces Phase 4: Ego moves into a house of his own, and his family remains a nuclear unit until his own sons begin to marry and have children.

Despres illustrates the domestic cycle with the figure reproduced below. Despres reports a residence pattern which is strongly skewed towards patrilocal residence. His findings are reproduced as Table 3.1.

o= ego

ego

 o=

 o=



=o

a

a

a

a

ego

o=



ego

a



o=





Figure 3.2 The developmental cycle of the East Indian domestic group in Guyana (from Despres 1967)

A sample of twenty domestic units in Callander reveals a similar pattern. Village exogamy was practised in 70% of cases while patrilocal residence was even more strongly preferred with 80% of the families residing on land owned by the husband’s father. Thus the pattern of patrilocal residence combines with the preference for village exogamy to produce a situation in which women generally move from their natal villages when they marry. Since most women do not have other members of their own family or patrilocal group living in the same village, upon their arrival newly married women become dependendent on their inlaws. Women are relatively disempowered through this arrangement. There are few people in the village on whom they can safely count for consistent and unwavering support – such personal relationships are associated with cognatic kin or ‘age-mates’ and upon marriage a woman is separated from both groups of people. Of course, a married woman’s affines owe their primary loyalties to their own patrilocal group. However, over a number of years, a woman can build a strong network of friends. These mati are similar but not quite the same as the men’s crew.2 While they are associated with all-important relations of generalized reciprocity they are ego-based (like a kindred) and thus cannot function as an effective political unit in disputes. This is quite unlike a malecrew which is relatively stable and does operate as a political unit in certain situations. Figure 3.3 shows the patrilocal group formed by members of a single patrilineage. It will quickly be seen that a number of people who are members of the descent group by virtue of male links are not, in fact, members of the pa-

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the patrilocal group, his cousins teased him ruthlessly by asking where his father lived, when he was coming, etcetera. In short, although Charlie was for all practical purposes a member of the patrilocal group, other members often treated this as a convenient fiction and nothing more.

The road The road is the main thoroughfare not only for the villagers but also for Guyanese generally as they travel, for various reasons, between villages and between the country-side and town. Within the village, the road is not only the main artery of movement but also a meeting place and a stage upon which many of the minor and more consequential dramas of everyday life take place. Along the road are various places for people to stop and chat (gyaf ). In the morning, for instance, men gather at a place outside one of the village shops. Here they wait for the trucks which take them to the rice field or the minibuses into the market place. Adolescents in uniform also wait for the minibuses to take them to school. These congregations carry on a lively exchange. Ravan, a squarely built man in his late thirties with a loud voice, a reputation for cynicism and a tendency to ridicule those of whom he does not approve, stands here with the paper. Others are gathered around him as he announces the cricket scores. In a few minutes the talk turns to politics and then to the whereabouts of a missing member of the work crew. The truck is here – they’ll have to leave him behind – perhaps he can catch something to bring him to the work site later. Men working in and around the village on construction projects or as gardeners also meet in the road to organize their crew. They come with the tools they’ll need and disperse again either to the work site or to fetch necessary supplies. During the day the road is relatively quiet apart from the noise made by a minibus screaming through the village or a truck moving almost as fast on its way to the “rice factory.” Before mid-day a fish merchant comes down the road. He rides a bicycle to which is attached a large cart. At the sight of his cart, women bearing buckets or plastic wash bins emerge from their houses. The fish seller has several varieties: kuras, banga-mary and snapper. As the merchant and customers negotiate the price of fish the cart becomes a scene of talk and interaction. It is a magnet around which social activity is constructed – some of this relates directly to the buying and selling of fish but not all by any means. During the day the road is used by women on their way to the shop, to the

Chapter 3. The village

gardens or to a friend’s house for a visit or to ask a favor. Older boys on bicycles carrying parts from a tractor or large pieces of lumber scoot by and disappear down one of the paths between the houses. Later, when the workers return from the rice fields, the road is again humming with activity. The men settle in for a drink at one of the local rumshops. Children, now home from school, are sent out to see who has a chicken, or perhaps a duck, to sell. The road is the most public place in the village and it is here that many of the most dramatic events of village life take place. In the afternoon and early evening people gather at the little roadside stalls which sell cigarettes and a few packaged or locally made snacks. The men play cards and smoke cigarettes. They call out to those passing by using “false names”: sometimes affectionate, sometimes humorous, sometimes insulting and derogatory. Occasionally a conflict between villagers flares up and for a few minutes the air is filled with accusations and complaints, insults and threats. Such public events quickly attract a crowd and soon intercessories cut the dispute short. These scenes of life along the road are not only occasions for transmitting and exchanging knowledge but also are themselves the situations from which knowledge is generated. Events which occur along the road are routinely witnessed by others. This is not an accident: people watch the road. From their balconies and the hammock in the bottomhouse they can see, and hear, what is going on, who is involved, who is going in what direction. The road thus provides infinite material for noticings, reports and stories. The events of the road are subject to the kind of social control associated with strict surveillance (see Sidnell 1998a, 1998b). The story of the Queen Bee, one of the roadside stalls mentioned above, is illustrative in this respect. At this stand Pria and her husband Raja sold salseeoo with saurii (a local snack made with flour and water), biscuits, and cigarettes to people passing by as well as to young boys and girls, adolescents and adults who were, for one reason or another, on the road. Pria ran the Queen Bee as her own project – it had been her idea, she made the salseeo, she kept the little book of debts. Most of the regular patrons were men between 15 and 25 years old who lived in the immediate vicinity. They would come to sit on the bench, gyaf ‘chat’, smoke cigarettes and occasionally to play cards. Located near a number of locally important houses as well as the rice factory, the stand became a popular spot to meet friends and lime ‘hang out’. Often one would find ten to fifteen people lined along the road. Many of the younger men and older boys were Raja’s nephews who lived in the same or neighboring yards and who, as junior members of the patrilocal group, were obliged to call him ChaCha. Another group of young men (ranging in age from 20 to 25 years) also met regularly at

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the stand usually around six or seven o’clock. They were better-off than most in the village – one owned a car, another had a stake in a large coconut estate, another was a teacher. One of them, George, whose father was the owner of various properties including a hotel, became quite good friends with Pria. They would sit next to each other and gyaf and joke. Rumor that the two were carrying on an illicit affair did not take long to spread. Soon everybody seemed suspicious. Raja got word of this and became much more protective and involved in the stand’s operation. He would come out early, tell Pria to go inside the house and sell the goods himself. In various ways, he let George know that he was no longer welcome. Despite Raja’s efforts to contain it, the gossip became more intense and when Raja went to his sister’s house for an overnight stay he returned to find Pria involved in ‘story’.3 According to Raja’s nephews, Pria had signaled to George from her verandah as he was riding his bike along the road at dusk. Raja’s nephews testified that they had watched her as she indicated that Raja was out of the house and that George should enter through the backdam. Raja, who took his suspicions of his wife’s infidelity to be confirmed, intensified his watch. He demanded that she stay home and insisted that she ask for permission to leave the house when she had somewhere to go. When she stayed too long he would come and collect her. Eventually, Raja, fueled with several quarter bottles of rum, destroyed the Queen Bee in a fit of rage. It was never rebuilt. The incident provided material for countless stories within which members were variously positioned as witnesses, participants, or, themselves recipients of the story. The nephews teased their uncle for his public display of rage and “passion” and revived a richly polysemous falsename – Kras – the use of which Raja had somehow managed to suppress some years earlier. Allsopp (1996: 179) lists a number of meanings for “cross” in his dictionary including “Some trouble, misfortune, or burden that is not easy to get rid of ”; “A young person or a husband whose persistently embarrassing behaviour is a test of Christian patience,” “One who always seems to cause frustrating trouble,” “Cursed; blighted; bedeviled.” For many, the incident was evidence that Raja’s patrilocal group, were unruly and had lost control of their junior members and women. Further evidence for this was provided when, several weeks later, Raja returned home from work early to find that Pria was not there. He went out to look for her and the two met on the road. The public row that ensued fueled much further gossip.

Chapter 3. The village

House and yard With houses spread along both sides of the road and stretching back, both towards the backdam (the ‘line side’ of the road) and into the pasture (the sea-side of the road), Callander is a densely populated village. Houses are of wood or brick construction and consist of one or two floors. Houses belonging to a single family are arranged along a narrow plot (a parcel of land usually surveyed during the colonial period). At the road corner is the biggest of the family’s houses and often it incorporates a shop, a repair service for cars, a carpenter’s work place, or some other business. Some of the roadside houses have two floors, are recently painted and have large yards with a tractor or car strategically parked for public viewing. At the centre of the village stands the local “bossman’s” house, impressive in size and dwarfing all that surround it. This was built in the booming years of rice cultivation in the 1980’s. Not far away is the bossman’s rice mill (the rice factory) which stretches out into the backdam area to the line. Tractors, combines, jeeps and trailers are scattered across the area between two large processing plants. Other wealthy families have smaller enterprises (ten tractors, two jeeps etc.). These people make up the local village elite. They live removed from the small dramas of everyday life along the road. They are more mobile and their network extends to others in a similar position outside the village. They are seen driving out in expensive vehicles imported from the U.S., and they entertain ‘important’ people behind the thick walls and iron gates of their compound. There is a distinctly feudal character to social relations between bossman and the rest of the village. The bossman has a phone and enough economic resources to support local initiatives and small projects. At the same time, a tight circle of loyal workers are crucial to the production process and thus there has developed a relation of mutual but asymmetric dependence. Managers who run cultivation in the field, production in the mill and marketing in town, live in modest houses away from the road. Arriving early and leaving late, the manager is distinguished by his loyalty and responsibility. Gopal and Satya’s house is typical of those inhabited by working people in the village. From the road one enters the yard through a gate in the fence surrounding it. The path, which runs alongside another high fence separating this yard from the next, leads past a lime tree, a few pepper bushes and a clothes line. It also leads past a big but dilapidated front house in which Gopal’s widowed mother lives with a few of her grandsons. One of the grandsons is married and his wife and small child also live here intermittently. This is the house that once

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Chapter 3. The village

Figure 3.6 Gopal and Satya’s house (from the back)

Figure 3.7 The green kerosene stoves and various pots of an indoor kitchen

belonged to the patrilocal group’s eponymous ancestor. Gopal’s own house is just behind it. It is raised about six feet off the ground creating the space known as the bottomhouse. Up the stairs and through the door leads immediately into the multipurpose front room which houses the kitchen, a table, a couch, the small black and white TV. The walls are covered with a few posters, a calendar and, curiously, children’s dolls and other toys still in their boxes – seemingly never opened. In one corner is the altar. This consists of a shelf holding a number of framed pictures depicting the Hindu deities Krishna, Latchmi, Ganish and Hanuman. The altar also contains vases and flowers along with brass plates upon which offerings of burning incense, camphor, leaves and fresh flowers are made. The main room leads into the bedroom where there is a bed which both parents and the three children share. When dinner is served inside, Gopal and I eat sitting down at the table or downstairs in the bottomhouse. The children are sprawled out on the floor – each has a bowl of rice topped with a dollop of gravy from the curry. Satya does not sit down while Gopal is eating. After dinner we move down to the bottom house. Gopal sits in the hammock and I on the bench. Satya brings out a “quarter-bottle” of rum and some water.

Figure 3.8 The bottomhouse

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Chapter 3. The village

at a distance from the road and people make do with kerosene for lighting and car batteries to power their tape players. Fowl, dogs, and cats may cohabitate the general living area even if they are kept out of the house. The yard, enclosed by a six foot high fence, may contain several houses belonging to members of the same extended patrilocal unit. Members of this group enter freely. Others call out at the gate and wait to be invited to enter. Villagers try to keep track of who goes in and out of both their own and their neighbor’s yards, at what times and for what reasons. People often keep dogs and this adds to the feeling of impermeability given by the yard fencing. Depending on the relationship, a visitor will usually call out to the house resident before entering the yard. Once they see that somebody is at home and they are invited to come through the gate they will then go into the yard space. Sometimes, however, they will wait at the road for the resident to come out and talk at the corner.

The rumshop Figure 3.9 The yard and fencing

During the day, Satya’s friends, sisters and sisters-in-law may come by for a visit and sit in the bottomhouse. They bring their children and news. One day, Satya’s sister came here to discuss her mother’s health when she was sick and in the hospital. Others come to borrow a bicycle or to bring fish which they are not able to eat before it will spoil. As noted, the domestic unit in Indo-Guyanese villages is typically patrilocal and inheritance is primarily patrilineal. This means that, after marriage, a woman often leaves her parents’ home, and more often than not, her own village, to go live with her husband’s family – or more specifically to go live on her husband’s father’s land. At first, the new couple may live in the husband’s father’s house. If this is the case they’ll usually take over the bottomhouse which may be enclosed with sheets of cheap plywood so as to provide them with some privacy. It is more usual to construct a small dwelling at some distance from the main house, though still within the yard. This new house often – in fact, in most cases – offers very meager amenities. It is usually some way from the road and the only sources of running water. If it is not on risers the hard packed daub floor can quickly become a pit of mud during the rainy season. Most often it is a simple one-room construction with a small overhang under which is kept a green (kerosene) stove. Electricity is in most cases not available to those houses

The Guyanese rumshop is typically a one or two room structure often built onto the front of a house and facing the road.4 Here several varieties of rum are served but one is consumed on a daily basis – the so-called “white ball”. This is acquired by advancing to a counter and requesting either a quarter, half or full bottle. This is then taken back to the table with water, ice and pop. The bottle of rum is passed around and each man mixes his own drink – for most this consists of a shot of rum, about the same amount of water, ice, and a dash of coke. Everyone consumes their drink at more or less the same time but there is no strict timing adhered to. Rather, the bottle circulates the table in a coordinated fashion, and its travel provides for an inspection of each participant’s glass. It is, then, the orderly passage of the bottle which institutes an evenly distributed pattern of drinking. The participants in such activities of communal drinking are groups of men referred to as crews in the literature (see Wilson 1971, 1973). In Callander such crews are self-consciously organized as groups of agemates, in the local vernacular the men are ‘grow-match’. These are men who understand themselves as belonging to the same life stage. They were children together, now they are grown men, in the future they will be the ‘old heads’ of the village. Wilson (1973: 163) wrote of Providencia that: In an almost spontaneous, accidental way the men of a community divide up into small groups of approximately four to seven members. They are essen-

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tially groups of equals – of the same generation if not the same age, of the same life situation and with a mutual compatibility. In that the men are of similar ages such groups are akin to peer groups; but their sentimental compatibility is just as important as their similar age in making a group.

I will argue in later chapters that, far from being “spontaneous” or “accidental”, such forms of organization emerge in a most orderly way in and through practices of speaking. Crews of agemates are manifested and organized within the activity of collectively remembering or reminiscing past events and in bouts of collaborative storytelling (see Chapters 8 and 9). With respect to drinking and the purchase of liquor, the men who belong to a single crew institute and hold one another accountable to a system of generalized reciprocity. A man who always buys the rum for his crew mates is considered a fool while one who never does is a miser. Drawing on the metaphor of “white ball” (the common name for the most popular brand of rum) the men make visible each participant’s contribution by asking huu a bat “who is batting?” and huu a bool “who is bowling?” When a man is forced to repeatedly buy for the others he will complain that his arm is sore (from so much bowling). One who is seen as failing to fulfill his obligation in this respect is said to have a weak arm. There are also men who drink alone. Refusing the sociality of the rumshop they send out for a quarter or half bottle and drink it by themselves on the road or, more often, in their bottom house. Such non-communal drinking is seen alternately as weakness, on the one hand, and arrogance, on the other. One thought of as biggity “arrogant” is likely to find himself cut-off from the flow of goods and services which runs through a complex network of villagers. Jayawardena (1963: 52) wrote: Drinking is only one of several ways in which sentiments of mati are expressed through conviviality. . . Conviviality maintains the bonds of mati indirectly by siphoning off wealth in excess of that required to maintain a minimum standard of living. Social equality is bound up with living at a similar standard, but differences in skill, strength, capacity to work and a variety of other factors result in unequal incomes and opportunities. Income in excess of the common level of requirements could be used for ‘capital investments’, in raising living standards, saving and investment, acquiring prestige goods, etc., and so for asserting superior social status. But a high expenditure on conviviality prevents this potential cleavage within the relatively homogenous group. Great esteem is attached to liberality and parsimony is disapproved of. Low-status laborers in particular criticize more abstemious upwardly mobile persons on this score.

Chapter 3. The village

The emphasis on spending thus performs a double function – reaffirming the bonds of mati and inhibiting status differentiation.

One of the goals of later chapters is to show that “conviviality” is a gloss for a complex network of situated activity which can fruitfully be analysed through the techniques of conversation analysis. It will be seen for instance that a fair amount of talk in the rumshop more or less obviously topicalizes and organizes the activities of drinking but most of the conversation is concerned with other matters. Therefore, while they are not completely unconnected, there are nevertheless two relatively independent orders of activity underway at any given moment in the rumshop: on the one hand, drinking and the practices of talkin-interaction by which it is organized as a collective affair, and, on the other, gyafing. The activities of drinking and gyafing take place within a framework of social norms which specify a relationship between rumshop and gender. There is, in this respect, an often invoked rule which can be variously formulated but whose underlying sense amounts to something like, “no respectable woman goes into a rumshop,” or, put with a positive valence, “a woman in a rumshop is a prostitute.” The power of invocable rules such as this one does not depend on their definiteness and specificity in relating prescribed actions to well-defined contexts. Rather, it is the vague and unbounded character of such rules which permits searches of “indefinite scope and detail so as to see and evaluate whatever details of conduct” occur within their purview (Heritage 1984b: 207; see also Wieder 1974). Norms in this sense do not determine action, rather they provide for its intelligibility (see Sidnell 2003b). A rule such as “a respectable woman never enters a rumshop,” may be treated as a publicly available framework for the analysis and production of conduct (after Garfinkel 1967). In this respect we may note that women often call their husbands home from the rumshop. When they do this they come to the road outside the shop and yell in to the man closest the door and thus visibly avoid entering the shop. A witness to such an event can see in it the operation of the rule. Women also sometimes have reason to buy rum. On such occasions they routinely send a young male member of the extended household to purchase it for them. Women thus display an orientation to the rule “a respectable woman never enters a rumshop” in building normatively compliant conduct. An orientation to the rule is also visible in conduct which might be seen as deviant. So for instance, on many occasions, women are, in fact, present within the space of the rumshop. These women (along with children and other men

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who are co-resident or simply passing through) are engaged in the ongoing construction of simultaneous activities including those involved in the day-today maintenance of a household. The rule and the perceived respectability of the women are preserved, in such cases, through various secondary accounting practices or what Evans-Pritchard (1937) called “elaborations of belief.” In particular, members work to maintain the sense in which women in such situations, while physically present, can be seen to be excluded from the framework of ongoing, exclusively-male, activity. So, for example, if a woman works in the rumshop, serving rum over the counter or perhaps cooking fried fish a short distance away, she is routinely disattended by the men except in the course of those activities where she must be engaged – e.g. in order to request the rum, to pay for it etc. etc. This produced disattention operates to preserve the recognizability of the setting as an exclusively male domain (see Sidnell 2003b).

The social organization of knowledge in the village This book is concerned with the social distribution of knowledge and I conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of the village in terms of the way knowledge is distributed both across the population and across organized forms of activity. I have already noted the importance of the road as a setting in which knowledge is not only exchanged and communicated but also generated. The importance of the road in this respect in fact suggests an important epistemological principle to which villagers orient as more or less omnirelevant – knowledge is strongly associated with first-hand access as a witness. The public character of the road provides for the opportunity to witness events as they occur. When, in the following chapters, we turn to consider the details of what people say together it will be seen that claims to know are, more often than not, associated with claims to have been a witness – to have actually seen the events one is claiming to know take place. Conversely, challenges of claims to know very often involve someone doubting whether the claimant could possibly have seen or witnessed the relevant events. Philosophers call this dimension of epistemology, justification (see Audi 1998). Although first hand visual access is not the only form of justification which villagers invoke, it is, at least for many domains of knowledge, the most important. This is certainly the case for knowledge of recent events and the forms of talk with which such knowledge is associated (e.g. gossip, complaints etc.). It is also true of local historical knowledge. However, although these two forms of knowledge are alike

Chapter 3. The village

in terms of the importance placed on first-hand access or witnessing, they differ strikingly in other respects and in part this is a direct outcome of the characteristics they share. There is a sense in which knowledge of recent events is distributed democratically. Everybody (more or less) can participate in discussions of such matters from the very young to the most senior – and routinely they do, often together. Children, for one, make use of such knowledge to form up announcements which can be used to gain entry into adult conversations. The only condition for this domain of knowledge is that one has some news to tell, so much the better if it is based on something the teller saw, or heard, and therefore, witnessed. Although it would be possible to overstate the democratic principle at work here it does help to draw out the contrast with local historical knowledge. The epistemological primacy of first-hand access has very different consequences when applied to matters which took place in the sometimes quite distant past. Participation in discussions of local history (reminiscing) is intimately linked to age and seniority. Whereas knowledge of recent events is distributed across the population regardless of age and gender, local historical knowledge is concentrated among senior men. Here also we see the consequences of the marriage and residence system for the organization of knowledge. Remember that, due to the pattern of patrilocal residence, many adult women were born and grew up in other villages and only came to Callander when they were married. This has two obvious consequences. First, women who have come to Callander late in life, do not have the kind of first hand access to past events which is treated as a requirement of participation in the activity of reminiscing (examined in Chapters 8 & 9). Secondly, they do not have, close at hand in the village, the friends and kin with whom they grew up. The predominant practice of patrilocal residence means that female friends and sisters are scattered through many villages while male friends and brothers are still in their natal homes. Women thus do not have others with whom they can reminisce and, through such reminiscing, collectively reconstruct a local history. So women’s exclusion from this activity is, in part, an outcome of the system of marriage and post-marital residence which deprives them of access to both partners and the empirical materials which participation in the situated activity of reminiscing requires (see Chapters 8, 9 & 10). Knowledge of Hindu ritual practice, discussed in Chapter 4, is distributed in a different manner altogether. Knowledge in this case is largely procedural rather than propositional: it is a case of knowing how rather than knowing that (see Ryle 1946, 1949; see also Chapter 1; Duranti 1997: 33ff.). Knowledge in this domain is organized in such a way as to create relations of dependence between

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experts and novices (see Lambek 1993; Schutz 1964). Experts, in this case, are pandits trained in the use of an esoteric language (Sanskrit), ritual objects and particular speech acts (prayer etc.). Expertise is not limited to such persons completely. There are a few men in the village who actively cultivate expertise in ritual procedures although they are not themselves pandits. Apprenticeship is clearly important here as is public ratification of expertise through requests for assistance and advice. Knowledge in this domain is not based on an epistemological principle of first-hand access. Rather knowledge is secured through apprenticeship, through publicly ratified skill and through repeated performances. Practice in ritual gives ever increasing access to its mysteries and greater authority to speak about them. We have spoken here in a somewhat awkward way of “domains of knowledge” and in doing so have come very close to flouting some of the analytic principles advanced in the last chapter. As the discussion proceeds this abstraction will become more and more of a hindrance to the analysis. Instead of speaking of domains of knowledge we should be considering these matters in terms of the activities within which particular forms of knowledge are used, invoked, activated and ratified – we should, that is, be speaking of advising, reminiscing, gossiping, complaining, reporting etcetera. If we allow ourselves to talk about knowledge as if it existed outside and independently of these activities we will not be able to recover the endogenous, epistemic organization that is the focus of this work. We will be led to the position of the philosopher who, concerned to get to the bottom of, for instance, aesthetics, ponders the meaning of “beauty.” We have before us, as Austin (1961: 183) would say, “a good site for field work in philosophy,” which abstraction from the situated particulars threatens to obliterate. The philosopher who asks “what is beauty?” might have better luck were he to visit a tailor and listen carefully to the customer being fitted: “no, that is too short, much too narrow, just right etc.” (see Wittgenstein 1967a: 1–11). These are aesthetic judgments in their real home – the unfolding course of situated activities. Like aesthetics, in studying epistemology and the sociology of knowledge we are tempted to entertain abstractions, to invent “domains” and “fields” of knowledge. In order to avoid such abstraction we should keep our eye on the actual forms of activity in which members are engaged and allow the analysis of practical epistemology to emerge as part of the description of those activities (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 5).

Chapter 4

The vernacular

All villagers speak a variety of Caribbean Creole English which they call Creolese.1 This language is similar to other English-based creoles of the Eastern Caribbean and also shows some connection to the creole languages of neighbouring Surinam (see Bickerton 1996; Rickford 1987; Sidnell 2001, 2002; Winford 1993). In relation to other varieties of creole and English spoken in Guyana, the variety spoken in the village is what linguists call ‘basilectal’ although I prefer, for a variety of reasons which need not be discussed here, ‘conservative.’2 By these terms, creolists mean that the English input language has been significantly restructured through contact with other languages. The following is a brief sketch intended more to give the reader a sense of the variety than to provide anything like an exhaustive account. Consider, then, the following fragment from a conversation between Satya, her husband and myself. We had been talking about Satya and Gopal’s next door neighbour – Deo. At the time this conversation took place, Deo was 20 years old and had recently become involved with a girl of approximately his own age. Deo had asked the girl to marry him, and she, after consulting with her family, had agreed. The night before this recording was made, the girl and a few members of her family had come to Deo’s house to seek permission for the marriage from Deo’s older sister who was also the head of his household. Unfortunately it had not gone well and his sister had refused to agree to the match.3 In the following excerpt, Satya tells Gopal and myself that she had talked to Deo that morning. At lines 4–8 this telling is interrupted by Gopal asking Kamal to fetch him a small knife. 1

Satya:

i see i a gu tel i brada tuudee 3 S G say 3 S G I M P E R F I R R tell 3 S G brother today “He said he’s going to tell his brother today.”

2

Jack:

i gu tel i brada 3 S G I R R tell 3 S G brother “He is going to tell his brother.”

3

Satya:

yes see i waan mariid yes say 3 S G want marry “Yes, to say that he wants to get married.”

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Chapter 4. The vernacular

4

Gopal:

gu bring a lil naif fo mii opsteerz go bring D E F little knife B E N me upstairs “Go and fetch that little knife for me, upstairs.”

5

Kamal:

we i de Q-L O C 3S G L O C “Where is it?”

6

Gopal:

aks yu mada Ask 2 S G mother “Ask your mother.”

7

Kamal:

ma we i de Mom Q - L O C 3 S G L O C “Mom, where is it?”

8

Satya:

chek in a bool Check in D E F bowl “Check in the bowl.”

9

Gopal:

huu tel-huu i tel se Q - P E R tel- Q - P E R 3 S G tell C O M P “Who tel-who did he tell that

10

i gu tel i brada 3 S G I R R tell 3 S G brother he’s going to tell his brother.”

11

Satya:

i tel mi 3 S G tell 1 S G “He told me.”

12

Gopal:

aa “ah”

13

Satya:

i tel mi dis manin 3 S G tell 1 S G this morning “He told me this morning.”

14

se hou i gu tel Beebii bikoz Mis see na say C O M P 3 S G I R R tell Baby because Miss say no “Saying that he wil tell Baby because Miss said no.”

15

wen di piipol dem gu awee Mis Q- T I M E the people P L go away Miss “When the people went away Miss said

16

da

see say

shi na laik di gyal 3 S G F N E G like the girl that she doesn’t like the girl.” COMP

All the words in this fragment are apparently derived from English. For instance, see is clearly derived from English “say,” and tel from English “tell”. i in line 1, i see i a gu tel i brada tuudee, is likewise derived from English “he.” The source for aks is again dialectal English. However, while the form of many words is transparently English, their semantic and grammatical features are often not. Before turning to consider these semantic and grammatical results of language restructuring it is useful to say something about phonology. In GC (Guyanese Creole) consonant clusters are generally avoided particularly in word final position. So for instance, English ‘want’ is realized as waan

and ‘little’ as lil. The word initial h of English words such as ‘he’ is variably deleted. The diphthongs in English words such as ‘say’ are monopthongs in GC. The diphthong in English ‘boy’ is realized as ai. GC also makes a phonemic contrast between short and long a. Vowel length distinguishes, for instance, between waan ‘want’ and wan ‘one’ (the definite article) and between, kyaan ‘can’t’ and kyan ‘can’t’.4 As noted the words in the extract, and in GC generally, are derived from English forms but have taken on grammatical functions and semantics particular to this variety (and, in some cases, related varieties). Consider then line 3 of the extract. In GC the verb waan ‘want’ (which here heads the clausal complement of see ‘say’) takes a wider range of complements than does its English equivalent. For instance, yu waan ded, a commonly heard threat, means, roughly, ‘You want me to kill you?’. In this case, waan takes a predicate adjective as its complement. An apparently related phenomenon is seen in cases where English intransitive verbs such as “sick,” “gaff,” and “talk,” are able to take a direct object (see Sidnell 1997). It was said earlier that GC see is transparently derived from English “say” but this is not exactly right. Thus, although it is easy to see a connection between see and English “say” in line 3, this is not so clear in lines 9–10 where we find huu i tel se i gu tel i brada? Here se is not the lexical verb (in this example – tel is the verb of saying) but a complementizer. This apparently developed out of an earlier serial verb construction in which verba dicendi such as tel, taak and hala were followed by se. It was then generalized to include verbs of thinking and communication by non-verbal means – so in contemporary GC we find noo se ‘know that. . . ’, biliiv se ‘believe that. . .’, plee se ‘plays as though. . .’. Consider also line 5 we i de? De in this example is apparently derived from English ‘there’ but in this example it does not serve as the distal locative adverb opposed to proximate hia ‘here’ but rather as a locative verb. With respect to this example, let us note also the absence of inversion – thus preserving the word order – the literal translation of this question is, ‘Where it is?’. These examples illustrate the restructured character of GC. It is now necessary to turn to some aspects of the grammar that have particular relevance to the analytical chapters that follow. We will consider in turn the basics of tense, modality and aspect, of pronominals and of the structure of the noun phrase.

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The verb phrase As is the case for the other Caribbean creoles, in GC, aspect is more important to the grammar of the finite clause than is tense. The basic distinction here is between marked imperfective forms of the verb and the unspecifed stem form. Compare for instance line 10, i tel mii, with the examples below. (1) Di man dem a de moor in sosaiitii. ‘The men tend to be more in the public sphere.’ (2) Shi a pik plom, wen mi aks shi yestodee. ‘She was picking plums when I asked her yesterday.’ (3) Hiir, Linda a kal yu. ‘Hear, Linda is calling you.’

The default interpretation of the stem form with dynamic verbs such as tel is perfective. Dahl (1985: 78) describes perfective as follows: “A perfective verb will typically denote a single event, seen as an unanalyzed whole, with a well defined result or end-state, located in the past.” In contrast, a dynamic verb preceded by the imperfective marker a indicates an ongoing action or event – either progressive or habitual. In his early work on GC, Bickerton suggested that, with non-statives, the stem form of the verb signifies “unmarked past.” In later work (1981: 28) he writes of a marked non-punctual category (i.e. imperfective) semantically opposed to a punctual category expressing single, non-durative actions or events thus translating his earlier account based on tense into one based on aspect. For Bickerton (1980) punctual and non-punctual (perfective and imperfective) are “semantic primes,” one aspect of a “natural semantax.” The stem form of the verb is understood as “marked with zero” – in Jakobson’s (1938) terms it is a “zero sign.”5 In her critique of Bickerton’s arguments, Sankoff (1990) proposes that the stem form is “not marked with zero” but rather constitutes the “historical residue of an earlier stage of the language” in which the tense and aspect morphology of the superstrate language had not been transmitted and the creole markers had not yet evolved. In a similar vein, Bybee (1994) notes that the grammaticalization of zero depends on the concurrent grammaticalization of some overt morpheme as obligatory. When a gram becomes obligatory for the expression of some meaning, its absence takes on a specific meaning – it conveys the absence of that semantic feature which the now obligatory morpheme has come to specify. Bybee contrasts such “zero meanings” (instantiated by the

Chapter 4. The vernacular

absence of an obligatory morpheme, e.g. singular in English nominal morphology) with what she calls “open meanings” which are associated with the absence of an optional grammatical morpheme.6 With respect to GC, the account given by Bybee and Sankoff seems to better fit the facts. The weight of evidence suggests that the stem form is not, in fact, “marked with ∅” and does not instantiate a specific semantic category. Common perfective-like meanings arise in particular contexts as implicatures derived from an interaction of several levels of semantic and discourse structure (see Sidnell 2000). Derived and discourse dependent meanings tend to be defeasible whereas fully grammaticalized meanings are not. It is therefore important to note that, in other discourse contexts, the stem form of the dynamic verb conveys nonperfective meanings. For instance, The stem form is also used in clearly habitual contexts. Once a habitual interpretation is established for a series of events, subsequent predicates may occur without preverbal marking. Example 4 (from Jaganauth 1994) illustrates this. (4) Wel mi heer, lang taim, dat de das kot rais wid haan. . . wid graas naif. Den. . . den. . . am. . . wen dem kot dis rais wid graas naif. dem ∅ biit am out. dem ∅ biit out a rais wid aam. . . ageens. . . pan wan am. . . pan wan poos. . . Den wen dem biit am out pan wan poos, dem ∅ ful kopl kyerasiin kyan den dem ∅ spred am pan aam dem ∅ spred am pan bag ‘Well. I hear, long ago that they usually cut rice by hand with grass knifes. Then when they cut this rice with the grass knife they beat it out They beat out the rice with against. . . on a post Then when they beat it out on a post they fill a couple kerosene cans, then they spread it on they spread it on bags.’

The passage illustrates the use of the stem form of the verb to convey habitual meaning. The importance of sequencing should not be underestimated. Thus note the way the temporal adverbial laang taim ‘long ago’ is used in the first clause to establish past time reference, while doz (realized as das) establishes the sense of habituality. Subsequent clauses introduced with den ‘then’ are understood as carrying the same values for tense and aspect. Clearly no one level of semantic or discourse structure is alone responsible for the aspectual value of a given predicate in discourse. To summarize, the unmarked verb is best understood as unanalyzed for parameters of tense and aspect. It is this absence of specific semantic content which allows the stem form to occur in a broad range of contexts, to carry a variety of semantic interpretations and to serve a number of discourse functions.

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Chapter 4. The vernacular

The stem form of the verb allows maximal coloring from relevant, co-occurring temporal and aspectual elements in the immediate context. GC conveys distinctions of aspect, modality and, to a lesser extent, tense through a series of markers which occur singly or in combination before the main verb of a finite clause (see line 1). The preverbal markers a and gu are illustrated in line 1 of the fragment with which we began. The imperfective marker in this example combines with the irrealis to convey a meaning close to the English “going to” construction. Imperfective a alternates with a dedicated habitual marker (doz) in the speech of villagers. GC conveys modality primarily through a series of preverbal markers. Generally these may be used to convey either deontic or epistemic modality. Included here are kyan and the negative form kyaan which can convey either permission (a species of deontic modality) or logical possibility. Mos is primarily used to convey deontic meanings but even here there are cases in which an epistemic sense is possible. Hafu, gatu, ga, bongfu are primarily used to convey deontic modality.

fore the possessed noun with no intervening morphosyntactic material (see for instance line 1, i brada). Where the pronoun substitutes for the noun, the form mi-waan or mi-oon “mine” is normally used (or yu-waan and so on).

The noun phrase In Guyanese Creole, the equivalents of English ‘this/that’ and ‘here/there’ are dis/da and ya/de respectively. In addition to the possibilities known from standard English varieties, GC deictics occur in post-posed positions. Examples (5)–(8) illustrate this. (5) yu noo [dem piknii dis] a draiv laik dem na get fu iit ‘You know these children (this) go on as if they don’t get to eat.’ (6) a [mii prapatii dis] an mi hozban prapatii7 ‘It’s my property (this) and my husband’s property.’ (7) wa. [dem dis]. dis iz a mad piiopl man ‘What! These (this). These are mad people, man.’

Participant deictics

(8) see. [dis ya] bai ‘Say-what! This (here) guy!’

The pronominal system is another area of the grammar which is particularly relevant to the analyses of later chapters. GC has a pronominal system that distinguishes between subject and object in the third person, between singular and plural in all persons and, variably, between masculine and feminine in the third person. The system is represented in Table 4.1. GC allows a null-subject a number of positions which require an overt pronoun in English. See for instance line 14 of the fragment we have been considering. GC does not have separate genitive pronouns. Where the construction involves a noun possessor or pronoun and a possessed noun, the genitive relation is usually expressed by the positioning of the pronoun or possessor noun beTable 4.1 GC pronouns

First person Second person Third person

Singular Subject

Singular Object

Plural Subject

Plural Object

mi yu ii/shi

mi yu am

abii aiyu dem

abii aiyu dem

In GC and in many other varieties of English, deictics can occur postnominally. Post-posed deictics also co-occur with deictics in base position thus resulting in what Hanks (1990) calls for Mayan, continuous shapes (such as dis-ya in example (8)). In GC demonstratives always precede locatives. Both may occur in post-posed positions (although not simultaneously). The system of articles which marks a noun phrase as definite, generic or specific has received some attention in the literature on GC largely because it has been used as evidence in various theories of creole formation. The examples below are from Bickerton (1977b: 58): (9) mi bai di buk ‘I bought the [presupposed known to speaker] book.’ (10) mi bai wan buk ‘I bought a [presupposed not known to speaker] book.’ (11) mi go bai buk ‘I shall buy a book or books [even speaker does not know which].’

In fact, the system is much less monolithic than Bickerton suggests. This is due in part, to a constant interference with English which accounts for the frequent

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occurrence of the underspecified article a in discourse (see line 4). The form is often used rather than wan as an indefinite specific article. However in many cases a occurs as a reduced form of demonstrative da. In addition a is used in many cases where both definite and indefinite senses are possible as in, yu gu lait op a faia, ‘you will light a/the fire.’ In this brief sketch I hope to have conveyed, however incompletely, the efficient elegance of GC grammar. GC has none of the baroque ornateness of highly inflectional languages nor the elaborate patterning of grammatical categories found in some of the indigenous languages of North America. Rather its beauty lies in its elegant minimalism. Learning GC is fundamentally about learning what inferences can be drawn from the contextualized use of grammatical forms. This chapter has not, unfortunately, been able to describe the rich lexis of GC which is drawn from the languages of Africa, the Indian sub-continent as well as from the Germanic (Dutch and English) and Romance (French and Portuguese) languages of Europe. Some of that richness is to be found in the transcripts of the following chapters. For a detailed account of these and other aspects of GC the reader is referred to Rickford (1987).

Chapter 5

Answering questions A genealogy

The basic form of the game must be one in which we act. (Wittgenstein, Cause & Effect) Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §25) Language is a labyrinth of paths. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §203)

The concept of a language game The concept of a language game is at the centre of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. The analogy of language to game replaced in Wittgenstein’s writings an earlier conception of language as a calculus. In the Blue and Brown Books, which were recited to students in the late 1930’s, language games are characterized as simple routines which play a role in the learning of language. So for instance in the Blue Book, Wittgenstein remarks (1960: 17): I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.

In the Blue Book, then, Wittgenstein develops a kind of genealogical method which involves tracing uses of language back to the simpler, “primitive” forms in which they are introduced to the child. These primitive language games are subsequently elaborated into the more fully formed and complicated uses of language with which we are familiar.

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If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and questions, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud out ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms. (1960: 17)

While some language games are elaborated others are added. In the Brown Book Wittgenstein (1960: 81) remarks: When the boy or grown-up learns what one might call special technical languages, e.g. the use of charts and diagrams, descriptive geometry, chemical symbolism, etc., he learns more language games. (Remark: the picture we have of the language of the grown-up is that of a nebulous mass of language, his mother tongue, surrounded by discrete and more or less clear-cut language games, the technical languages.)

In this period, then, the phrase “language game” is used to denote an activity involved in the learning of language by children and novices. This conception reappears also in the Philosophical Investigations. For instance, in §7, Wittgenstein remarks: “We can also think of the whole process of using words in (the slab-beam game described in §2 – J.S.) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language.” As Canfield (1997: 275) notes, the phrase “by means of which children learn their native language” is somewhat misleading since “Wittgenstein does not mean merely that the ‘games’ in question have the heuristic function of getting the child to learn some further piece of language. Rather, what the child learns in those cases is language – primitive, simple, but bona fide language.” From the perspective of the Philosophical Investigations, these earlier notions of language game collapse the concept and the method. For in Wittgenstein’s later work, language game is used to describe the entirety of language – language just is a mass of incommensurate, interlocking, and overlapping language games.1 At the same time, Wittgenstein holds on to the method of genealogy and suggests that sophisticated uses of language, such as those associated with doing philosophy or mathematics are best understood “by comparing them to developmentally related simple ones” (Canfield 1997: 254). The difference between the concept of language game developed in the Blue and

Chapter 5. Answering questions

Brown Books and that developed in the Philosophical Investigations is thus one of refinement rather than replacement. Wittgenstein retains the focus on primitive uses of language but sees their relevance to the notion of a language game in a different light. The building-up of language out of simple activities creates a patchwork of games related via family resemblance.2 Thus, in §18 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein likens language to an ancient city: an analogy which resonates with the parenthetical remarks already cited from the Brown Book: Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (§183 )

One of the central arguments of the Investigations is that, ostensive definition is incapable of establishing criteria for the use of words and thereby fix their meaning. Wittgenstein makes this argument first for apparently simple words such as “red” and “five.” He imagines, for instance, sending someone shopping with a note which reads “five red apples.” The shopkeeper, Wittgenstein writes, “opens the drawer marked ‘apples’; then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers – . . . – up to the word ‘five’ and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer.” But Wittgenstein asks “how does he know where and how he is to look up the word “red” and what he is to do with the word “five’?” The answer of course is that even these apparently simple uses presuppose a kind of mastery. And, of course, naming and ostensive definition also presuppose this same mastery of language and therefore cannot serve as its basis. Now you can ostensively define a proper name, the name of a colour, the name of a material, a numeral, the name of a point on the compass and so on. The definition of the number two, “That is called ‘two”’ – pointing to two nuts – is perfectly exact. – But how can two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to call “two”; he will suppose that “two” is the name given to this group of nuts! – He may suppose this; but perhaps he does not. He might make the opposite mistake; when I want to assign a name to this group of nuts, he might understand it as a numeral. (. . .) That is to say: an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case. (§28)

Wittgenstein goes on to consider a modification of the thesis that meaning is secured by ostensive definition – “Perhaps you say: two can only be ostensively

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defined in this way: “This number is called ‘two”’. For the word number shews what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word.” But this only presupposes a further mastery of language – now a prior understanding of the word ‘number’ - and if one supposes that the meaning of this word is fixed via ostensive definition the regress is infinite. The point then is that naming and ostensive definition require that certain practices of using words are already established – ostensive definition cannot serve as the basis of language since its performance presupposes it! As is well known, Wittgenstein goes on to apply the argument to the vocabulary of a putatively private language. The discussion of ostension is thus the key both to Wittgenstein’s critique of the Augustinian view with which the Investigations begins and to the notion of a private language.4 In place of these ‘philosophical pictures,’ Wittgenstein employs the notion of a language game, “consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” (§7). This is to suggest that “speaking occurs in a context of human action and interaction,” and that “words derive their meanings form their roles in such patterns of interaction” (Canfield 1993: 166). Moreover, the genealogical method which examines word-use from children’s earliest speech makes it evident that “our language is,” (. . .) “a cultural extension of preexisting interaction patterns” (Canfield 1993: 166) Language is not then an abstract system divorced from and independent of our lives as social beings – on the contrary it is fully embedded in the socially organizaed patterns of activity which characterize the human form of life. The upshot of this is captured in Wittgenstein’s remarks that to “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (§19) and later “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique” (§199). As Malcolm (1986: 174) explains: One understands the sentence ‘The sum of these numbers is 982’ only if one understands the language of addition. One understands this language only if one has become competent in the technique of adding. One understands the sentence ‘This cloth is purple’ only if one has become competent in naming colours.

Thus, it is not simply that language is embedded in the ordinary activities of its users, which it surely is, but moreover that it’s intelligibility derives from its situated and multifaceted relation to these activities.

Chapter 5. Answering questions

“Learning to talk is learning to act”: The genealogical account of language games5 In the remainder of this chapter, I trace the development of the particular language game of asking questions and giving answers. I will show that the child’s participation in this game emerges organically out of a proto-form that has two important characteristics. First, it is not dependent on the specific features of any particular language. Second, it is tied to basic behavioral patterns which characterize the human form of life. The existence of such a basic, protoform of the language game at least partially accounts for the well-documented universal distribution of the question and answer sequence game (see for instance Chisholm et al. 1982). Later developments evidence a more elaborate interactional structure and an expanding web of accountability. In these later developments the language game is adapted to the particular community in which it is embedded and the social organization of which it is a part. With respect to the latter, this chapter examines the specific frameworks of knowledge presupposed by the questions asked of children. Children are treated as accountable knowers across a fairly restricted set of domains. It is in the particular configuration of domains that we see the local social organization of knowledge specific to this community. The genealogical approach to language games which I adopt in this chapter draws on work by Canfield as well as by linguistic anthropologists who study language socialization.6 Canfield’s Wittgenstenian approach to early language development involves tracing language games back to their proto-forms in basic pre-linguistic behaviours of the infant. As the infant develops, gestures and expressive vocalizations are replaced by more obviously arbitrary and conventional symbolic forms especially words. For instance, an intention to go up a set of stairs may initially be communicated by a glance first in the direction the child intends to go and then towards a parent watching. Later the same “intention statement” may be communicated through the two-word utterance “jane stairs”. A request may be conveyed within a proto-language game in which the child reaches for, and perhaps gestures at, a desired object (see discussion of Vygotsky’s 1962 similar account in Wertsch 1985). If the child has learnt the word for the item this may come to substitute or elaborate the gesture. Canfield (1993: 176) links the language game of making and granting requests to a variety of proto language-games including “grooming, begging from another, and seeking food from the mother.”

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The interactional organization of questions and answers Canfield (1993: 182) writes: “Several of the language games I shall examine have paired forms: there is making and responding to requests, making and responding to intention-utterances, uttering and responding to prohibitions, and so on.” This comment points to an interactional organization of language games which has rarely been considered within the Wittgensteinian tradition but is the specific focus of conversation analytic work. With respect to question and answer sequences, Heritage (1984b: 250) writes, a questioner, in addition to proposing that an answer should be provided ‘next’ by a selected next speaker, also proposes through the production of a question to be ‘uninformed’ about the substance of the question. Moreover the questioner also proposes by the act of questioning that the recipient is likely to be ‘informed’ about this same matter. Thus a standard way of accounting for the non-production of an answer is for the intended answerer to assert a lack of information and hence, an inability to answer the question as put.

These remarks help to delimit the phenomena with which we will be concerned in this chapter. Not all question and answer sequences are concerned with informing, news and knowledge. In fragment 5.1 for instance, Papso has just arrived in the bottom house of his neighbours and close friends the Kitar family: Shama, Zizaan and Bat. As is appropriate for the time of day and the type of relationship, Shama issues an offer of food. The sequence of offers is initiated in line 7 with the pre-offer yu gu iit? ‘Are you going to eat’ which, by avoiding any mention of what Papso needs or wants, treats him with extreme familiarity, i.e. treats him as a member of the group of people who routinely eat here at the Kitar house. Papso registers this invocation of familiarity and, jokingly, suggests to Zizaan that Shama has failed to recognize his status as a guest – as someone who should not be offered just anything to eat (lines 13–17). Fragment 5.1 (Tape 59aII): Sha = Shama, Ja = Jack, Pa = Papso, Zi = Zizan, Fa = Fasia 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Sha:→ Ja: Pa: → Sha:→ Pa: → Zi: → Pa:

Sha: Pa:

yu gu iit? grii:n tii. wa=yu=kuk daa:l an rootii. mi na wan da. wa yu waa:n? di [korii [( ) yu noo wa ii gi [mi dis ma:nin Zizaan, wa? bail=an=frai=chana .hh-

Are you going to eat? Green tea. What did you cook Daal and roti. I don’t want that. What do you want? The curryYou know what she gave me this morning Zizan, What? Boil-and-fry Chana.

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Bat: Sha: Sha: Pa: Sha: Pa: Fa: Sha: Pa: Sha:

(0.2) [hehhhhh [( ) hourii redii? [( ) [(da puudaledii)? yu waan fish ko [rii?

hehhhhh Is the houri ready? ( ) Do you want fish curry?

[(ii takin bo She’s talking about ii raas [en ( ) but she isn’t ( ) [yu laik ho:rii You like houri korii [an rootii? curry and roti? [en rootii en and roti and wel=mi=gu=chrai=da lil Well, I’ll try that liitle wid da. [Antii Ziizan of that Aunty Zizan. [al:rait. Alright.

When Papso is asked yu gu iit he treats this as prefatory to an offer. That is to say, the question is not treated as seeking information or confirmation but rather as the initiation of an offer sequence. Thus, after the insertion sequence in lines 9–10, Papso responds to the pre-offer by indicating that he does not want what he takes to have been offered. Notice, by way of contrast, the question answer pair at lines 9–10 in which Papso genuinely seeks information about something he does not know. Consider also the talk shown in 5.2 which occurs later in the same sequence. Fragment 5.2 (Tape 59aII): Sha = Shama, Pa = Papso 1 2 3

Sha: Pa:

wa part yu laik wan piis hed? setl fo da

What part do you like? A head? I’ll settle for that.

Here Shama asks what part of the fish Papso would like to eat and follows this up with a candidate answer (a head). Notice that Papso treats what is ostensibly a question about what he likes to eat as an offer of food. He responds with an acceptance of the offer projected rather than an answer to the question about which part of the fish he likes. Questions, then, occur in a broad array of environments implementing an equally broad array of actions. Consider the following example (5.3). Zenia has been complaining to Satya about Satya’s sister, Sun who, according to Zenia, had been contracted to do some housework. During a long turn-at-talk (not shown), Zenia describes the small amount of work she had asked Sun to do for her. Zenia comes to the recognizable conclusion of her complaint with the summary statement in line 47: that Sun was not obliged to ‘scrape and scrub’. When Satya begins a turn that displays a clearly affiliative stance, Zenia interrupts with a wa moo dan da shi waan ‘What more than that does she want?’.

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Fragment 5.3 (Tape 58): Ze = Zenia, Sa = Satya, Go = Gopal 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Ze:

mi na duu skreep and skrob. (0.8) Sa: mi iivin [tel Ze:→ [( ) a wa moo → dan da shii waa:n? (1.2) wa hapm? Sa: mi- (0.4) mi te:l shi se [gu ba:k an te:l di leedii Go: [chrip chri:p shi chrip. Ze: ehe (1.0) → nou mii kal Frafii:

I’m not going to scrape and scrub. I even told What more than that does she want? What happened? I- (0.4) I told her go back and tell the lady trip trip, she trips ehe

talking to a four year old child (Shakir). When an answer to the question is not delivered in next position, it is pursued by posing a second question (see Pomerantz 1984a). Fragment 5.4 (Tape 24b): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6

Go:

eh, wee=da=bai Safii: (0.8) we Safii? (2.0) haa? (0.8) o ( ) noo Sha: i gaan a work tuu

Where’s that boy Safi? Where’s Safi? Huh?

He’s gone to work as well.

After that I called Frafi

Notice that Satya does not attempt to answer the question posed in lines 50–53. Rather, she recycles portions of her interrupted turn and redoes her expression of affiliative stance. By talking about her past attempts to prod Sun into negotiations with Zenia, Satya explicitly disattends the question format of the turns in lines 50–51 and 53. Gopal, on the other hand, expresses agreement by suggesting that Sun chrip, i.e. that she is mentally unstable. In order to analyze this turn we need to consider its placement in an unfolding course of talk. Notice then that Zenia is complaining about Satya’s sister and has talked in such as a way as to invite agreement from her co-participants. While Satya’s talk in line 49 projects alignment with Zenia (in that she is suggesting that she has already thought about just the issue Zenia is here invoking) it specifically avoids doing agreement with the substance of the complaint. In this environment, then, Zenia’s wa moor dan da shi waan ‘what more than that does she want’ and wa hapm ‘what happened’ are best seen as in pursuit of a specific response (agreement) rather than as seeking information. We may note further in this respect that Gopal’s shi chrip ‘she trips’ while responsive to the question format of Zenia’s turn is not designed to be informative but rather to convey just the agreement that Zenia is pursuing. Such questions as this then are not ‘information seeking’ and do not make ‘answers’ to them conditionally relevant. In the example here, both Satya and Gopal talk in a way that is responsive without attempting to ‘answer’ Zenia’s first ‘question’ in line 50–51. Indeed, an answer to that question might well be heard as provocative and as prefacing disagreement. The example just discussed can be usefully compared with cases in which an answer to an information seeking question is missing. When such a question does not receive an answer participants treat that answer as noticeably absent (see Schegloff 1968; Pomerantz 1984a). For instance, in example 5.4 Gopal is

In example 5.5 when an answer is not forthcoming, the participants first repeat the question (as in example 5.4), then go on to issue directives to answer (at lines 4, 6) and, finally provide candidate answers in lines 8 and 10. Both the directives and the candidate answers reveal, for us and for Shakir, the participants own sense that “something is missing.” Finally, at line 11, The child provides a recognizable answer to the question by repeating one of the candidate answers which has been suggested. Fragment 5.5 (Tape 24b): Sa = Satya, Ma = Mama, Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Sa:

wa aiyu kuk. What did wa aiyu kuk.hh What did (1.5) Ma: tel am waiyu kuk= Tell him Go: =wa yu kuk. [hhh What did Ma: [taak nou bai. Talk now (0.5) Ma: o ookroo?o Okra? Go: wa yu kuk? What did Ma: daa::l. Daal. Sha: ookroo an daa:l. Okra and

you (pl.) cook? you (pl.) cook? what you (pl.) cooked. you cook? boy.

you cook? daal.

Such examples reveal the normative organization of ordered and typed actions in adjacency pairs. This normative organization has both a prospective and retrospective dimension. On the one hand, a first pair part (FPP) such as a question creates a slot in which an answer can relevantly occur. In this case, a question creates, for the participants, the expectation of an answer. A provision is thus made for an answer to be noticeablely absent. On the other hand, the retrospective dimension of the relationship between first and second part is seen in the fact that a second pair part (SPP) contains and displays an analysis of a previous turn. An answer shows that the speaker heard the previous turn as question.

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In each of the examples above, participants hear that an SPP is missing and treat that as something problematic to be redressed. As Sacks notes, it is the organization of adjacency pairs (and other aspects of sequential organization) which allows participants and analysts alike to see that some talk is missing (see Sacks 1995 Vol. II: 521–560; Lynch 2001; Schegloff 1968). The normative organization of the adjacency pair is thus a central feature of conversation and is intimately bound up with the way in which participants hold one another accountable for producing coherent courses of action in talk (see Heritage 1984b). Following Schegloff and Sacks (1973) we may say that adjacency pairs consist of two utterances which are: i. ii. iii. iv.

Adjacent.7 Produced by different speakers. Ordered as a first pair part (FPP) and second pair part (SPP). Typed, so that a particular first pair part provides for the relevance of a particular second pair part (or some delimited range of seconds, e.g. a complaint can receive a remedy, an expression of agreement, or a denial as its second).

A recognizable question thus creates an interactional context within which an answer is relevant and expected. This is, of course, not to say that questions are always followed by recognizable answers. To say that turns are often organized as adjacency pairs is to make a statement about a rule (or norm) which participants themselves use in the production and recognition of talk-in-interaction, rules which they orient to in various ways so as to find and construct orderly sequences of turns-at-talk (see Goodwin & Heritage 1990; Heritage 1984b, 1987; Button 1990 for further discussion). We can see participants’ orientation to the normative organization of question and answer sequences in many places because participants treat deviations from that organization as the basis for further inference. So, for instance, in the following example Papso has just returned from a trip to check on a fence on Shama’s property. Shama asks if the fence has been damaged. Her selection of rek “wreck” suggests that she believes the damage is the result of someone’s negligence (in fact, this is the accusation she had made earlier when she asked Papso to examine it). Fragment 5.6 (Tape 59): Sha = Shama, Pa = Papso, Zi = Zizan 1 Sha: so wahpm a bak de? So what’s happened back there? 2 (0.2) 3 → ii don rek a bak de? Is it wrecked back there?

Chapter 5. Answering questions

4 5 6 7 8 9

Pa: Sha: Pa: Zi:

ma::n taak haf lef haf da raas a dem boga fens oo bai taak na

Man. talk elliptically That ass! They have busted your fence Oh man! Tell us more!

Shama’s first question at line 1 is relatively neutral – that is, it does not suggest any definite understanding or evaluation of what has happened. When this question does not receive an immediate response, Shama poses a follow-up “yes-no” or confirmation-seeking question which conveys the answer that the questioner expects. In contrast to the first question, the second displays, by the selection of the word rek ‘wreck’, a clear stance vis-à-vis what has happened at the back. Shama’s reformulation of the question suggests that she hears the lack of immediate response from Papso as hesitancy to deliver bad (and accusatory) news. The following turns provide further evidence for such an analysis of the talk. Thus, when Papso again delays the answer with “ma::n,” in line 4 Shama instructs him – taak haf an lef haaf, ‘talk elliptically.’ This is an idiomatic way of saying that one understands the talk to be delivered is somehow problematic and potentially delicate. What we see in an example such as this is that the normative organization of question-answer pairs provides the basis for further inference. Because a question establishes a position or slot for an immediately next-positioned answer, delay is heard as foreshadowing trouble of one kind or another. Moreover, particular questions provide for particular types of answer. For example, yes-no (confirmation-seeking) questions invite “type-conforming” answers of “yes” or “no” (see Raymond 2003). Raymond (2003) has shown in this respect that non-type conforming responses to yes-no questions are routinely produced “for cause” and may be inspected by participants in their attempt to determine what that cause might be. It must be noted that the particular inferences which participants draw, regarding the specific cause or nature of the projected interactional trouble indicated by a non-type conforming response, are clearly shaped by a whole host of contingent contextual factors. In the passage cited earlier, Heritage suggested that a question not only proposes that, “an answer should be provided next by a selected next speaker,” but also that the questioner is uninformed about the substance of the question and further that “the recipient is likely to be ‘informed’ about this same matter.” We can see participants orientation to this aspect of such sequences in the design of particular questions and their responsive seconds. Consider for instance fragment 5.7. In this example Brammie is in one house calling to Kamal

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who is seated with his mother in the bottomhouse of another house within the same yard (see Chapter 2). Brammie has found a small bottle and is concerned to find out whether Kamal and the other children have played with it as he suspects it may contain poison. The talk represented in the transcript begins with a summons and elicitation. As is typical of such elicitations this one involves overlapping relations of adjacency. Thus Satya’s response in line 6 to Brammie’s elicitation in lines 3–4 is both a second pair part with respect to that elicitation and, simultaneously, a first pair part of the question-answer sequence it initiates (see Sidnell 1997 for further discussion of elicitation sequences). Fragment 5.7 (Tape 24b): Bra = Brami, Sa = Satya 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Bra:

Kamal (0.8) aks dem if eniwan a dem bina plee wi=dis ting. (0.5) Sa: aiyu bina plee wid da ting? Kum: noo (1.0) Sa: → naa:. da wa: Bra:→ mi=no=noo. mi jos fain am pon a teebl hi jos nou.

Kamal Ask them if anyone of them was playing with this thing. Were you playing with that thing No. No. What is that? I don’t know what it is. I found it on the table here a minute ago.

In line 9, Satya responds with naa to the question projected but never articulated by Brammie’s elicitation to Kamal in lines 3–4. Satya then asks da wa ‘What is that?’. In responding to this question, Brammie accounts for not answering by indicating that he does not know. As Heritage (1984b: 250) notes “a standard way of accounting for the non-production of an answer is for the intended answerer to assert a lack of information and hence, an inability to answer the question as put.” Moreover, he accounts for not-knowing by saying that he has just found it on the table (i.e. by saying that it is not his – one being generally expected to know what one’s own possessions are). For these participants then, the question proposes that the recipient is knowledgeable. Brammie counters that expectation explicitly in his response at line 10. Furthermore, in his subsequent talk he develops a more elaborate explanation of how he has come into possession of an object which he cannot identify. These participants then treat epistemic access as criterial to answering a question of this type. The following fragment offers a further illustration. Here, Gopal is asking Shakir a series of questions (as in example 5.4). When Gopal follows up on the answer to the first question with we i gaan ‘Where has he gone?’, Shakir’s

mother anticipates an inability to answer and accounts for this by suggesting that Shakir only knows that his father is out, not where he has gone: Fragment 5.8 (Tape 25a): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir, Ma = Mama 1 2 2 3 4

Go:

ee-Shamiir. Shamiir. we dadii? Sha: gaan. Go: → we i gaan? Ma: → oonlii nooz da i gaan

Hey-Shakir. Shakir. Where’s your Daddy? Out. Where has he gone? He only knows that he is out.

Questions and answers form adjacency pairs and thus exhibit a normative organization which has both a prospective and retrospective dimension. Besides being normatively organized in this way, question and answer sequences have certain features that are specific to them and not shared with other kinds of adjacency pairs. Thus a question can often be understood as proposing that the questioner is uninformed with respect to the thing being asked about. At the same time, a question proposes that its recipient should or might be informed with respect to these same matters. Finally, as we have seen, both the general and specific features of the these sequences are revealed in the participants’s own publicly displayed orientations.

Earliest sequences: The proto-language game Can we trace such sequences of question and answer back to a proto-form of the language game? Consider the following example involving a mother, Shanka, and her infant (about 3 months) Ashla. At the beginning of this segment, Ashla was lying on an empty rice sack spread out on the floor as a carpet and Shanka and I were sitting close by in chairs. Ashla began to cry. Fragment 5.9 (Tape 6b): Shan = Shanka ((Ashla crying)) 1 Shan: wa nou=wa nou What now? 2 (1.0) 3 wa? 4 (1.0) 5 hon:grii? 6 (2.0) 7 Leks? 8 Lex: mm? 9 Shan: kom 10 (0.6) 11 bring piis a di keek 12 fo Ashla.

What now? What? Hungry? Lex? ah-ha Come. Bring a piece of the cake for Ashla.

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Here, Shanka is responding to Ashla’s crying by asking a question which ostensibly calls for clarification of this behavioural display. Notice in this respect that wa nou ‘what now?’ treats the crying as a summons designed to get Shanka’s attention. In line 7, hongrii ‘hungry?’ questions Ashla about her own bodily state. What we see here is that questions are a way of holding the child accountable or answerable for their own behavioural displays. In this case, Shanka’s questions ask that an account be given for the crying. In this proto-form of the language game the child’s involvement does not depend upon an already established ability to produce any specific linguistic behaviour. Nevertheless, through it, the child becomes enmeshed in a sequence of questions and “answers.” Thus, when Ashla shows interest in the food and accepts the cake from her brother Lex, Shanka treats this as an “answer” to her question in line 5. The following example is similar. Here Satya questions Shabir (just under two years) after he produces an unintelligible vocalization.

5 6 7 8 9

Man: Ba:

(1.0) yu waan mi kyeer yu bak a Linda dem? ya wel guwan yu wee

You want me to take you back to Linda and them? Yes. Well go on your way.

Here, at line 3, Baby explicitly questions Mando’s reason for coming to the bottomhouse. This question treats Mando’s movements – her comings and goings – as accountable matters, that is, as actions for which Mando should have a justification ready-to-hand. In each of these cases, a recipient’s just prior action or behavioral display (crying, unintelligible vocalization, physical movement) is questioned and thus treated as accountable. These examples are representative of a larger corpus of questions posed of very young children in the village.

Elaborations of the language-game

Fragment 5.10 (61b Shabir – Satya): Shab = Shabir, Sa = Satya, Ma = Mama 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Shab: (doi-doi) (1.0) Sa: eh::? (0.8) wa::? Shab: aaa muuma Sa: wa::? laik oonlii da wan ting i noo fu taak. zing zing. Ma: hehehe

(doi-doi) eh?

← A

what ← B aaa muuma what? ← C like only that one thing he knows how to say. zing zing. hehehe

Here the question and answer sequence is apparently employed in the service of repair. Satya’s talk in lines 3, 5 & 7 attempts to initiate repair of the target vocalizations in 1 and 6. Note then that, when Shabir fails to produce a correction or repair of his vocalization this is explained by reference to his limited competence – i.e. that he only knows how to say one thing. This account is explicitly marked as an inference from his behavioural displays with laik ‘like.’ It is useful to consider a final example before moving to consider the significance of these proto-forms. Here a group of siblings are playing together. When Mando joins them in the bottomhouse area having come from a house in the same yard, Baby scolds her. Fragment 5.11 (Tape 24b Baby – Mando): Ba = Baby, Man = Mando 1 2 3 4

Ba:

ee gyal. muv from deer. djit wa yu kom ia fa

Hey girl. Move from there. djit What did you come here for?

We have so far seen that from a very young age children are treated as accountable for their own bodily states, behavioral displays, vocalizations and other actions. Such observable phenomena are thus the objects of inquiry in some of the earliest questions posed of children. I have called this form of interaction a proto-language game because, like those proto-forms discussed by Canfield, the child’s participation in it does not require any sophisticated linguistic ability. At the same time, this proto-form sets-up or establishes a basic sequential organization in relation to which the more complicated, fully formed languagegames stand as elaborations. Wittgenstein dedicates a number of remarks to such proto-customs. In Zettel after noting that “it is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain; and not merely when oneself is” he asks, “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1967b: §540–541). The claim then is that quite elaborate language games are built on the back of basic patterns of human behavior. I want now to talk about two ways in which the proto-language game is elaborated. First, the objects of inquiry are extended to include future, potential, and unrealized events or actions. Whereas the earliest forms treat the child as accountable for past, competed or on-going bodily states (e.g. hunger), behavioural displays (crying) or actions (e.g. vocalizations, movement), in the elaborated game the web of accountability is extended to include events or

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 5. Answering questions

actions which have not yet occurred. In the elaborated game then, the child is treated as possibly knowing what might, should, will or must happen. By virtue of this elaboration, notions of intention, cause and effect, logical consequence come to play a role in the language game of answering questions. Moreover, when inquiry is directed to as yet unrealized events or actions, more linguistically sophisticated responses are required from the child. Whereas in the proto-form the child’s response may amount to little more than the cessation of crying, in the elaborated game some intelligible vocalization is often called for (if only a “yes” or “no”). Finally, these elaborated games in which inquiry is directed to as yet unrealized or future action, shade into a wide range of actions such as requests and invitations. Consider, then, the following example in which Gopal is asking Shakir what school he plans to attend. Fragment 5.12 (Tape 25a): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Go: yes:, Kav: kwom ben dong hiiGo: bai am: (1.0) Shakir. (1.2) yu a gu skuul dis mont Shakir? (0.6) M: tel se yu gu a skuul (0.2) Sha: yea Go: yu=a=gu- wi=skuul y’a gu? Sha: da Go: aa? wich skuul? (1.0) wich wan a dem skuul yu wan gu?

yes Come, bend down hereBoy uhm Shakir. Are you going to go to school this month Shakir? say that you are going to school. Yes. You are going- Which school are you attending? (that) ah? Which school? Which one of those schools do you want to go to?

Gopal’s talk in lines 3–8 presents a yes-no question which is, after prompting from Shakir’s mother, answered affirmatively in line 12. In line 13, Gopal begins a request for confirmation but subsequently self-repairs and produces a wh-question which calls for a more linguistically sophisticated response. Notice that this question presupposes a whole framework of knowledge – of different, alternative and possibly named schools. Shakir’s attempt to respond in line 15 with the demonstrative da is treated as inadequate and Gopal reissues the question in lines 16–20 first elliptically and then with a redoing of the entire question.8 So a basic way in which this sequence differs from those discussed

up to this point is in terms of temporal reference. Whereas in the proto-form questions were directed to just prior actions and behavioural displays, here the object of inquiry is something as yet unrealized. Moore (1993 [1954]: 50ff.) reports that in his lectures at Cambridge in the early thirties, Wittgenstein was much concerned with the difference between such sentences as “I have a toothache” and “He has a toothache.” Wittgenstein noted a series of important differences between the first and third person versions. Crucially, although one can say, “I just found out that he has toothache,” it makes little sense to say, “I just found out that I have a toothache.” One’s own toothache is not something one finds out about. Similarly, the logical grammar of pain does not admit the possibility of one’s being mistaken about it in the first person and so we do not say such things as “I think I have a pain in my arm.” Either one has the pain or one does not: thinking simply does not enter into the question of whether one has a pain since having the pain and being aware of it are parts of the same concept. Malcolm writes (1986: 189): I pay attention to what another says and does when I need to learn his thoughts and intentions: but I do not do this in my own case – at least not normally. I do not infer my beliefs and feelings from my words and facial expressions – whereas I often do this with other people.

The next logical step would seem to be that whereas I don’t know what someone else is thinking, feeling or intending, I do know what I am thinking, feeling, intending. Indeed, I must know in my own case, there is no foothold for doubt here.9 In a powerful passage from the Investigations (IIxi: 222), Wittgenstein remarks that this view gets things “exactly backwards.” I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say “I know what you are thinking”, and wrong to say “I know what I am thinking.” (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)

Malcolm (1986: 190) explains, Suppose I express a thought of mine by saying, “I think that so-and-so.” It would be nonsense if another person asked, “How do you know that you think that?” He would seem to be asking for my grounds or evidence that I think soand-so. This would be like asking me for my evidence that I feel dizzy or have pain. In my own case I do not have evidence. Whereas, if I have said of another person, “He thinks that so-and-so,” the question “How do you know?” is in order. I could answer by citing something he said or did. I would be giving evidence. But there is no such thing as my “giving my evidence” that I think so-and-so.

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And again, I can have evidence that you think so-and-so, but the evidence may not be convincing, and so I can be in doubt. But when it comes to what I think, there is for me neither evidence not corresponding doubt. It is the latter point that inclines one to say “I know what I think.” But this is a misunderstanding of the grammar of “know” – where doubt is logically excluded, so is knowledge.

To say such things as “I know I exist” is absurd since the doubter’s existence is logically beyond doubt – it is objectively certain. Here we are dealing with the logical grammar of the concept “to know.” Now this tells something important about the question and answer sequences so far considered. These questions ask about first person experiences, behavioural displays, actions and the like. Such first person experiences have those characteristics that Wittgenstein noted in his discussion of, “I have a toothache.” One is either hungry or not and this is not something one might not know. But, this is a problematic way of putting things. It is better to say simply that this is not something one knows or does not know.10 We are perhaps tempted then to say that the child is first treated as knowledgeable concerning his or her own behavioral displays, sensations, and intentions but the point here is that the concept of knowledge is not properly applied in this case. The earliest child-directed questions treat the child as capable of Ausserung 11 – of first person expressions. That is, an important feature of these questions is that they are directed to matters about which there can be no doubt on the part of the question’s recipient and further, for this person, there can be no question concerning how one knows. I am suggesting, then, that an important elaboration of the language game involves its extension from recipient-directed, first person to third person inquiries. For it is through this extension that the child comes to be treated as accountably knowledgeable – accountable both for knowing certain facts and for being able to state how s/he knows. These questions constitute the child’s initiation into a domain of epistemic practice. But they are built upon a foundation established by the proto-language game – a form of question and answer sequence in which knowledge (and doubt) plays no role. Consider the following example. Satya has been asking Shakir if he is going to the motorcade (see also example 5.14). In this fragment she goes on to ask about her friends and Shakir’s neighbors “Nashoo dem”. Fragment 5.13 (simplified): Sa = Satya, Sha = Shakir 1 Sa: Na:shoo dem12 a gu tu? Nashoo and them are going aswell? 2 Sha: yes Yes

Chapter 5. Answering questions 

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Sha: Sa: Sa: Sha: Sa:

dem tel mi se huh? wa dem see?= =dem tel mii ( ) dem tel yu see dem gu gu tuu?

They huh? What They ( ) They They

told me that did they say? told me told you that are going to go aswell?13

It is important to see that when a child is asked “are you hungry?”, “do you want cake?”, “which school do you want to go to?”, or, “are you going?”, they are not accountable for how they know (in most circumstances at least). “How do you know that you intend to go?” makes little sense as a question. Intention utterances or Ausserung are not subject to verification by inspection or observation of the inner workings of one’s own mind. In sharp contrast, Shakir’s knowledge about Nashoo can be inspected with respect to its epistemic basis. Here how he knows becomes a crucially relevant issue. This then is knowledge for which one can be held accountable. This is brought out vividly in the sequence. So, without any prompting from Satya, Shakir provides, at line 3, the basis for his knowing that Nashoo dem are going – his knowledge is based on testimony.14 Satya subsequently elicits an elaboration of the testimony (at line 5). It is thus with the shift from first to third person questions that the child comes to be treated as accountably knowledgeable. This is an elaboration of a proto-form of the language game in which the child is questioned about his or her own body, movements, actions etc.. The elaborated game treats the child as one who can both tell what she knows and tell how she knows it. Before moving on to consider further elaborations in this respect I want to note another important development associated with the extension of the language game to encompass future, planned and as-yet unrealized actions and events. What we find is that question and answer sequences of this type shade into a range of other actions such as requests. Consider for instance the following example which occurred just prior to the sequence examined above. Fragment 5.14: Sa = Satya, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Sa:

aiyu=a=gu -ammootookeed tuunait?= Sha: =yes Sa: wich chrok a gu? Sha: abii wan Sa: aiyu kyerii abii? Sha: ye

Are you(pl.) going to the Motorcade tonight? Yes. Which truck is going? Ours. Are you(pl.) taking us? yeah.

There are three question and answer pairs here. The last, at lines 6 & 7, differs from the other two in that it serves as the vehicle for a request. That is, Satya is

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Chapter 5. Answering questions 

not simply asking if Shakir (and his family) will take Satya and her family – she is making a request to that effect.15

Whereabouts: News, location and accountability in a small community We have seen that through question and answer sequences, children are drawn into a web of knowledge and that this is built upon the back of a primitive or proto-language game. A crucial elaboration of the game involves a shift from first to third person questions. As seen in the previous sections this shift provides for the possibility of the child being asked, being called to answer for, “how s/he knows.” In other words, it is through this elaboration of the game that the child encounters the whole problem of knowledge, evidence, grounds, criteria etc.. Now a surprisingly large proportion of these early third person questions turn out to be about the location of various people. These questions can tell us something about the particular community of Callander and about what it means to live in a small village. In 5.15, Shakir and his mother have just arrived at Satya’s house (Shakir’s mother’s sister). Satya asks Shakir where his younger brother (Bodoo) is. In these circumstances, Satya’s question registers Bodoo’s absence from the visiting party. Fragment 5.15: Sa = Satya, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5

Sa:

we=yu Bodoo de Sha:kiir? (0.2) Sha: abi lef am hoom. Sa: mm? Sha: abi lef am hoom.

Where is your brother Shakir? We left him at home. mhm? We left him at home.

Notice that Shakir does not simply tell Satya where Bodoo is but rather, orienting to the noticing contained in Satya’s question, accounts for Boboo’s absence from the party of visitors (not then “at home” but “we left him at home”). Consider now examples 5.16 & 5.17. Fragment 5.16 (Tape 25a): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir, Ma = Mama 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Go:

Shakiir. (1.0) Shakiir. we=dadii:? (0.4) Sha: gaa:n. Go: we=i=gaan? Ma: oonlii nooz da i gaan

Shakir. Shakir. Where’s your Daddy? Out. Where has he gone? He only knows that he is out.

Fragment 5.17 (Tape 25a): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6

Go:

eh, wee=da=bai Safii: (0.8) Go: we Safii? (2.0) haa? (0.8) o ( ) noo Sha: i gaan a work tuu

Where’s that boy Safi? Where’s Safi? Huh?

He’s gone to work as well.

In these examples the child is again being asked about the whereabouts of close kin and in example 5.16 a kin term is used so as to explicitly invoke the relevance of that relationship. In example 5.17, however, not only is the kin term not used (Safii is Shakir’s grandfather) but furthermore, the name is modified by a familiarizing frame (da bai). This is clearly not an expression appropriately used by a small child to refer to his paternal grandfather. Nor is it appropriately used, except in jest, by the speaker who is considerably younger than the person being referenced. As such the way in which this person is formulated suggests that something special is being done here. In selecting a referring expression for the person whose whereabouts are being queried, the questioner may characterize their own or the recipients relationship to that person. What we see in these questions so far examined is that children are treated as accountably knowledgeable concerning the whereabouts of their closest kin. What makes Callander a small place is not so much its size or its relatively small population but the local structures of accountability through which the actions and whereabouts of each individual are tracked and made storyable. Children here become instruments of that accountability by reporting on the whereabouts of their close kin. At the same time they are mastering a practice of answering questions. If we now turn to consider examples 5.18 and 5.19 we see the game extended to include the child’s neighbours. These are people whose movements and activities may be easily monitored from the question recipient’s home. In these examples the question extends beyond asking about whereabouts to asking about recent and current activity (see 5.19, line 4 wa i a duu?). Fragment 5.18 (Tape 25a): Sa = Satya, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Sa:

Kaama:l han=mi=da=ting. (2.0) Kaamal- am tch Shakiir? (0.2) we Pamila de? shi de hoom? (1.0) Pamila de hoom? Sha: yeah

Kamal. Hand me that thing. Kamal uhm tch Shakir? Where is Pamela. Is she at home? Is Pamela at home? yeah

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Sa: an we Gyorlii:? Sha: ( ) (1.0) Sa: an wee a::m (2.5) M: Amiir Sa: Amiir de? Sha: hoom Sa: ii de hoom tu?

Chapter 5. Answering questions 

And where is Girlie? ( ) And where is uhm Amear Amear at? home. He is at home too.

Fragment 5.19 (Tape 25a): Sa = Satya, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Sa: Sha: Sa: Sha: Sa: Sha: Sa:

Sha: Sa:

Shakiir? we Pairiia (0.2) de hoo:m. wa=i=a=duu? (0.6) shidong. shi si dong? a[ha [an we Na:shoo: (1.0) we Na:shoo: ( ) wa shi a duu?

Shakir? Where is Piria at home. What is she doing? sitting down. she is sitting down? aha and where is Nasho where is Nasho What is she doing?

In these whereabouts inquiries then, the child is being drawn into the complex web of gossip which, as has often been noted, is a major source of social control. These whereabouts inquiries like the gossip for which they serve as early training, are instruments of social accountability. Learning to answer questions like these is a part of becoming a member of a small community. Knowing where particular people are, indeed, being accountable for knowing where they are, is an aspect of one’s social identity. It is through questions such as these then that the child is drawn into a web of knowledge, a web of things that they can be expected to know and that they can be held to account for.

Elaboration: Doubt and skepticism In the elaborated language game the shift from first to third person directedinquiries provides for the relevance of giving evidence and stating the grounds for how one knows. At the same time the relevance of providing grounds (justification) makes possible the adoption of a skeptical stance by the questioner. Wittgenstein’s remark at the conclusion of §246 is relevant here, “it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.”

We find then that the introduction of evidence and of practices for providing epistemic grounds are sometimes accompanied by displays of skepticism from questioning adults. Consider the following example (5.20). Here the sequence begins with the whereabouts-inquiry we have been discussing. However, after Shakir proposes that his grandfather Safi has gone to work too, Gopal first initiates repair and subsequently rejects the answer given. When Shakir refuses to be corrected, Gopal presses him by asking where Safi works. When Shakir does not answer the question, Gopal provides an alternate account. The turns following this consist of a rejection of Gopal’s alternative account and a reassertion in response by Shakir. Fragment 5.20 (Tape 25a): Go = Gopal, Sha = Shakir 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Go: an=we=da=bai=S:afii? Sha: (taak)? Go: we=Safii (2.5) hah? (0.2) ( ) nou Sha: gaan a wok tuu Go: gaan a wok tuu? Sha: ya Go: Safii na: wok. Sha: ya:: Go: wee i a wok (1.0) Safii a djraiv kyar wid homan hoo:l dee. Sha: mnm Go: ye:s Sha: mnm Go: mnm? ma tel yu yes.

And where is that boy Safi? (talk)? Where is Safi? Huh? ( ) now He’s gone to work too. He’s gone to work too? Yeah Safi doesn’t work. Yeah. Where does he work? Safi drives around in a car with women all day. mnm yes. mnm mnm? I’m telling you yes.

This epistemic teasing in which the adult doubts the child’s answer introduces a new dimension to the game for now the child is called on not only to provide grounds for how he knows but moreover to defend what he knows against opposing views. Of course, this can only enter the game once the shift from first to third persons has taken place.16

Conclusion: Proto-games and universal customs Canfield writes (1993): If language is a set of customs in which words play a role, and if language develops out of an earlier set of proto-customs, then it seems plausible to suppose

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

that certain customs are to be found in every human society. The hypothesis is, in particular, that every extant or historically known human culture has language-games of: greeting, requesting, responding to requests, refusing, responding to prohibitions, make-believe, intention-utterance, responding to intention-utterance, and possession-claiming. Across the vast differences between the various human cultures one finds those customs, and others, as a common factor. Of course whether this claim is true is an empirical question.

The question of which practices are universal and which specific to some grouping (a society, a language, a community, a culture etc.) has been shrouded in mystery. Moreover, it has frequently been misunderstood as a question about biological determinism on the one hand or “social construction” on the other (for a critique of the excesses of “social constructionism”- talk see Hacking 1999). What a genealogical account shows is that a practice can have its roots in some aspect of our natural history, thus accounting for its universal distribution, without that in any way determining the particular role it might play in some specific setting. For that reason it is perhaps easy to over-estimate the importance of saying that some practice is universal. We did not need to discover a proto-custom of answering questions to know that the elaborated game was universal since the evidence for that is in any and every anthropological account which involves the ethnographer asking after the name of something, conducting an interview, finding his or her way. No less persuasive is the conceptual argument – while we might well be able to imagine a society without prayer (or oratory, or toasting, or epic poetry) is it possible to imagine a human society without questions and answers? That would seem to go against the very character of a society. The existence of a practice is far less important than the way it fits into a framework – a framework which assigns it a role and a function – a form of life. It is then to that framework that we now turn.

Chapter 6

Uncertainty and expertise in advice

Introduction One afternoon in this rural, and predominantly Hindu, Guyanese village a woman in her early thirties named Sun arrived back at her tiny one-room house to find that her husband, Mohun, had hanged himself. Several days of grief and mourning followed. People argued about the possible reasons for the suicide and discussed the situation of the widow. Talk soon turned to the matter of death rituals. In most cases, and normatively, these rituals are undertaken by the deceased’s own patrilocal group (see Chapter 3). Mohun, however, had had a strained relationship with members of his patrilocal group. In fact, when Mohun and Sun married, they went against the norm for patrilocal residence by building a small house on land belonging to Sun’s family. On the basis of such considerations, it was decided that, in this case, Sun’s own impoverished patrilocal group would host and conduct the appropriate death rituals and that Sun would take the lead role in executing them. Three days after Mohun’s suicide, Sun came to visit her sister and brotherin-law. The relations between these participants in terms of kinship and marriage are shown in Figure 6.1. The occasion was recorded by the ethnographer and forms the basis for the analysis presented in this chapter. Close examination of the talk will show that the participants used this occasion to invite, give, receive, block and resist advice regarding the proper execution of the ritual dead work. Such activities of advising provided an opportunity for Sun’s brother-inlaw, Indar, to display his expertise with respect to matters of ritual procedure and to have that expertise implicitly acknowledged by others. However, in order to deliver the advice it was necessary to locate and display a warrant for giving it. The analysis which follows reveals an interactional structure to advice-giving and receipt in which opportunities are created for a potential advice-recipient to display uncertainty. If the recipient displays uncertainty, advice follows as a warranted and reasonable next activity. However, if the advice-recipient displays certainty in the opportunity space created, potential advice givers may

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Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice 

PLG #1

PLG #2

PLG #3

= Gigi

Indar

= Pria

Sun

Mohun

Advice-Giving

Figure 6.1 Relations of kinship and marriage between participants (PLG = patrilocal group)

seek an alternate warrant. In the case to be examined here, when the advicegiving was blocked by a display of certainty the advice giver talked in such a way as to suggest the advisee’s incompetence with respect to matters of ritual procedure. Furthermore, the advice-giver designed his talk to make visible differential access to esoteric knowledge. In this way he secured public acknowledgement of his own expertise. Knowledge about the procedural aspects of ritual, that is, how and when to do them, is not distributed evenly within the community. Pandits, professional religious practitioners, are generally recognized as authoritative with respect to matters of Hindu ritual. However, for most people in the village, contact with pandits is extremely limited. Pandits assiduously avoid socializing in public places such as rumshops and the road and generally lead a life apart. In most cases, then, pandits are not available to give advice. There are however a number of villagers who, although not pandits, are widely considered to have some expertise in conducting particular rituals. Such experts come by their publicly acknowledged position in a number of different ways. Some are involved in the administration of the local Mandir and by virtue of this fact are understood to have more extensive knowledge of religious doctrine as well as stronger contacts with local pandits. Others make it their business to assist in any ritual to which they are invited. In this way they develop a competence that exceeds that of their peers. Books are also available and play an important role in the reproduction and legitimation of religious knowledge in Guyana. As Jayawardena (1966) notes the availability of books, such as the Ramayana, was an important feature that allowed for the ascendancy of the Sanatan Dharma sect in Guyana.

Knowledge pertaining to particular Hindu rituals is thus monopolized by a select number of men in the village. Women, though they may be considered pious, do not engage with esoteric ritual knowledge in the same way. With the exception of certain wedding rituals, namely dig dutty or mati kore, women do not conduct rituals without the assistance of a brother, husband or son under normal circumstances. Furthermore, although many families do an annual Jandi as well as other forms of ritual work during the course of the year, relatively few men take an active interest in the more technical aspects of ritual practice. Those that do are thus distinguished by their greater competence. Members of this group of local experts know and occasionally consult one another. The group is, in this sense, self-sustaining although, ultimately, they depend upon non-experts to ratify their expertise. One aspect of this dependence can be examined through close attention to activities such as the giving of advice. Specifically, it is possible to see the way manifestations of expertise are tied to advice-recipients’ displays of uncertainty or exposed incompetencies. In the village, there is a strong expectation that a person will look to an expert within their own patrilocal group for instruction, guidance and advice about such matters as ritual conduct. Patrilocal groups strive to project selfsufficiency in all things and particularly with respect to the sacred. As a result, instruction or advice given from someone outside the group provides the basis for potentially unwelcome and untoward inferences. Through the giving and receiving of advice, participants are formulated as expert and novice respectively. Such an alignment is not problematic when the roles are appropriately distributed within a single patrilocal group. However, in cases like the one to be examined here, where participants are distributed across two groups the possibility arises of projecting such participant formulations as ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ onto the groups which the individuals represent. At the same time, advice giving between groups offers an important opportunity for the ratification and legitimation of expertise. An advice-giver’s expertise is ratified by the very fact that another seeks him out despite the problems inherent in staging such communicative events across patrilocal group boundaries. The analysis that follows will show that the participants handled the situation by talking in such a way as to make visible the reasonable grounds for giving the advice. For instance, in various places within the unfolding course of the talk, the participants located and displayed uncertainty about future courses of action. Such expressions of uncertainty were treated by the co-participants as soliciting advice. In other places, however, the would-be recipient of advice guarded against such a finding of uncertainty. In these cases

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

the advice-giver then talked in such a way as to uncover or ferret out certain incompetencies with respect to particular aspects of ritual procedure. Once revealed, these incompetencies served as a warrant for giving advice. The activity of advising is of particular anthropological interest because, in its course, issues having to do with the interactional organization of knowledge and those having to do with its social distribution are interdigitated. As discussed in Chapter 2, a number of studies have demonstrated that speakers are continually making assumptions about what an interlocutor does or does not know and that such assumptions inform the design of their talk. As noted, Sacks (1995 Vol. II: 438), suggested that a very general rule in conversation is: “A speaker should orient to the talk’s recipient” and goes on to suggest that one consequence of this is that “if you’ve already told something to someone then you shouldn’t tell it to them again, or if you know in other ways that they know it then you shouldn’t tell it to them at all” (Sacks 1995 Vol. II: 438). Goodwin (1979) elaborated some of the consequences of this rule showing, for instance, that speakers use it in selecting a recipient for their talk. Goodwin (1987) has also shown that a speaker can invite co-participation in the emergent course of talk through displays of not-knowing – for example through a display of forgetting. Pomerantz (1980) discussed cases in which speakers’ tellings of limited access such as “I’ve been calling for hours but yer phone has been busy” were used to elicit explanations. Finally, Labov (1970) discussed similar aspects of discourse organization in terms of A events, B events and AB events where A events are those known by A, B events those known by B and AB events those known by both. On the basis of such a categorization of the participants Labov develops the rule, “If A makes a statement about a B-event, it is heard as a request for confirmation,” and he goes on to write: “This is merely one of many rules of interpretation which relate ‘what is said’ – questions, statements, imperatives – to ‘what is done’ – requests, refusals, assertions, denials, insults, challenges, retreats, and so on.” So together these studies and others clearly indicate that assumptions about what another knows play a basic and pervasive role in shaping talk and participants’s understanding of it. To put it another way, participants orient to the assumed knowledge of their interlocutor(s) and display that orientation in both the design and the interpretation of talk. These studies are primarily concerned with the interactional consequences of the uneven distribution of knowledge. In recent work a number of linguistic anthropologists have turned their attention to the manner in which this interactional organization articulates with the social distribution of knowledge. For instance, McElhinny (1999) discusses the way in which police officers on-call use questions and answers not only to display knowledge of the street but also

Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice

to suggest that their interlocutors are not revealing all that they know about a situation. Recent studies by both Cicourel (1995, 1999) and Goodwin (1994) have examined related issues having to do with the interactional organization of expertise, showing the various ways in which the social distribution and interactional organization of knowledge co-articulate. The analysis that follows focuses not only on interactional organization of expertise but also on displays of uncertainty and findings of incompetence. It is suggested that the exposure of uncertainty and incompetence serves the participants as a warrant or reason for the giving of advice.

Locating and displaying uncertainty in advice-initiation When Sun arrived at her sister’s house, greetings were exchanged and the participants began to talk about Sun’s situation. Gigi, Indar’s sister expressed sympathy for Sun saying: Gyal, Sun, na tek ting tu had, wel wa yu gu duu, hi don gaan. Yu ga beg gad fo giyuu helt an strengt jos fu main yu chrii piknii. ‘Girl, Sun, don’t take things too hard, well what can you do? He’s dead. You have to beg God to give you health and strength just to look after your three children.’ A few minutes later, at the point where the transcript given as fragment 6.1 begins, Sun indicated that she was preparing to leave saying abi-gaan ‘we’re outta here’ (she had her seven-year-old daughter with her). However, before she could depart, Indar asked her wa yu gu du? ‘What will you do?’ following this up with aiyu du ded wok an soo? ‘Are you (pl.) doing dead work?’1 Sun’s answer to this question, mi na noo wa ma gu duu ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do’, explicitly manifested uncertainty as to what to do and, in this way, Sun situated herself as a possible recipient of advice. Fragment 6.1: Gi = Gigi, In = Indar 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Sun:

>abi gaan. ma ga gu fo sii piknii nou. Gi: oo:: Sun: an in dis cheenj, -in shi bin gu bai ting an di cheenj na bin rait. Gi: soo we yu gu, Ormii? o yeso Sun: In: → soo wa yu a duu.= =wa ya duu.= =aiyu duu ded wok an soo? Sun:→ mi no noo wa ma gu duu.

102 103 In:

[mi ( )] [(ii de:::)]

We’re outta here. I have to go collect the children now. Oh. And then there is the change She went to buy something and the change wasn’t correct So where are you going, Ermi? yes So what are you doing? What are you doing? Are you (pl.) doing dead work? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I

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104 (1.0) 105 Gi: → wel=ia wa yu kyan do= 106 wa lil aiyu kyan afoord, 107 ee ten and toortiin 108 ((truck passes)) 109 In: ( ) or wa. 110 111 Gi: 112 In: 113 114

[a i y ua i y u] [>wa lil o aiyu kyan afooo ] na diisaid if ya guyu mait giv op for am. rait de

Well here’s what you can do. What little you (pl.) can afford Eight, ten, and thirteen Or whatever You (pl.), You (pl.) What little you (pl.) can afford Did you decide whether you you might give up for him right there

Sun’s response to Indar’s question in line 101, mi na noo wa ma gu duu ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do’, is problem-indicative (Heritage & Sefi 1992) and conveys a clear sense of uncertainty. At line 105, Gigi recycles portions of this problem-indicative response in her own turn. By reusing select pieces of Sun’s talk, Gigi is able to display the way in which the advice given is tied to the uncertainty which Sun’s response manifested (see Figure 6.2). Gigi uses the uncertainty revealed in Sun’s response to Indar’s question to build a preface to advice. These materials illustrate, then, the way in which participants treat such an expression of uncertainty as an invitation to give advice. This is shown not only in the sequencing of turns – that is, in the way advice follows a display of uncertainty – but also in the lexical and grammatical features of their design. The grammatical parallelism is shown in Figure 6.2. So, in this example, we see a clear pattern of talk in which a display of uncertainty sets up and occasions the giving of advice. Indar asks what Sun intends to do, she responds with an expression of uncertainty and Gigi uses this as an interactional opening to offer advice. However, Indar redirects the talk at lines 110 and 112 asking aiyu na diisaid if yu mait giv op for am rait de ‘Did you not decide whether you – you might give up for him right there.’ We may note of this turn that, first of all, it, like Gigi’s turn just analyzed, is

Sun: Mi na noo Main Clause Gigi: Wel hia

gu

duu “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

wa

ma

C

PRO AUX V

wa

yu

kyan duu “Well here is what you can do.”

clausal complement

Figure 6.2 Tying advice to uncertainty

tied to Sun’s problem-indicative-response. Whereas Gigi displayed a relation between her talk and Sun’s by reusing certain key words, here Indar draws on the sense or meaning of Sun’s turn. Sun says: mi na noo wa ma gu duu – that she does not know what to do – but there are a number of respects in which this could be the case. For instance, she might not know what food to serve, what to say, when to do it etc. Indar’s turn here attempts to clarify the nature of the uncertainty which Sun’s earlier response conveyed. Specifically, Indar proposes that the uncertainty might be related to the decision of where this ritual is to be held – ‘give up for him’ refers to the ritual itself while rait de ‘right there’ refers in this case to Sun’s house. We may notice the way Indar formats his talk as a question about the making or reaching of decisions, and in this way clearly attributes uncertainty to the question’s recipient. There is a marked shift here in the pronouns used to refer to Sun. The pronominal system of GC (see Chapter 4) includes a second person plural form aiyu. As the talk shifts from general concerns about what Sun should do to more specific matters having to do with the execution of the ritual, Gigi and then Indar begin referring to Sun not in the singular with yu but in the plural with aiyu. There is a sharp distinction here. Thus Indar asks more generally wa ya du ‘What are you doing?’ in line 99 but then aiyu duu ded wok an soo ‘Are you (pl.) doing dead work?’ in line 100. Such pronominal usages are evidence that the participants are oriented to that fact that the ritual dead work is not Sun’s responsibility alone but rather the responsibility of a patrilocal group.

Certainty and advice closure We have seen that in the course of initiating advice, the participants talk in ways which locate, display and organize uncertainty as a specific, interactionallyrelevant, phenomenon. Notice then that when the advice-recipient does not sustain the sense of uncertainty the warrant for the advice is withdrawn. Such interactional moves routinely serve to close the advice-giving sequence underway. This can be seen, for instance, in fragment 6.2. Fragment 6.2: In = Indar, Pr = Pria 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215

In:

=an (.) waeva ting Moohun gu nii:d, kyan put wansaid. a shiir Ram said o a gu wan said.o Sun:→ ya. o i=tel=mi=put=am=de.o o ( )o In: Pr: goo sii mi lef wan

and Whatever Mohun will need can be put on one side. All and only “Ram’s” things go on one side. Ya, he told me to put them there. Go and see that I left a

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Here Indar describes the way in which objects should be placed in the course of the ritual. In line 213, Sun responds to Indar’s advice first with an agreement token, ya, and, following this, with an assertion of knowledge and a clear expression of certainty about the way to proceed. The agreement token marks Indar’s preceding turn as uninformative by suggesting that Sun has an independent basis of knowledge from which she can agree. We can see the work that ya does here by considering alternatives such as ‘oh’ which would mark the preceding turn as news. Sun’s o i tel mi put am de.o ‘he told me to put them there’ describes the basis of the independent knowledge which the ya has claimed. Indar says something barely audible and the talk then turns to other matters. The organization of this response and its interactional consequences again show the participants’ orientation to the issues of knowledge, competence and certainty which underpin the activity of giving and receiving advice. In asserting knowledge of the facts on which she is being advised, Sun effectively closes the sequence. So, just as advice-sequences may be initiated by turns which display or reveal uncertainty or a lack of relevant knowledge, so they may be closed by assertions of certainty or competence. Sun’s turn in line 213 indicates that the uncertainty revealed earlier does not obtain with respect to the matters under discussion in the immediately preceding talk. The warrant for advice-giving is thus withdrawn and the sequence closed. These examples show that potential advice recipients play an important role in establishing and sustaining the uncertainty which serves as warrant for advice. Advice recipients may also talk in ways that reshape or redefine the uncertainty and by this transform the advice-giving activity underway. Consider in this respect fragment 6.3. Fragment 6.3: Gi = Gigi, In = Indar, Pr = Pria 233 234 235 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247

Gi: In:

na kal noobadii:: mek (0.2) kopl lil hantouwil an yu stoorii don. Gi: ya >laik mi se na kal nonbadii gya:l In: mi gu asist yuu:, Gi: na strech yu han: we yu han (.) kyaan riich. In: ( ) lisn tu mi Gi: giv fu tek out Sun: → eniikain=fud ma ku:k? In: ye:::s Sun: eniting? Pr: noo::: (0.4) daa:l an rais [an

248 In:

[boo:jan fuud.

Don’t invite anybody. Make a couple of hand towels and your business will be done. Ya, like I said don’t invite anybody, girl. I will assist you. Don’t stretch your hand where your hand can’t reach. Listen to me Put in to take out. Can I cook anykind of food? Yes. Anything? No. Daal and rice and Bojan food.

249 Gi: 250 Pr: 251 Gi: 252 252 253

noo:, wa=shi=miin, na: mii:t an soo:: noo:. >shi noo yu kyaan iit reng= bo=shi miin if a aal-enikainaal kaina ting yu [iit.<

No, Not No. She but all

254 In: 255 256 257 258 259 Gi: 260 261 262

[yu ga tuu: kain. yu ga chrii: kain. na ga speshil kain. (0.5) rait?= =kuk balanjii an eda::, balanjii an aluu:, aluu korii:, or bajii: an daa:l an [rais,

You have two kinds, you have three kinds there are no special kinds.

263 In: 264 265 Gi:

lil bit yu kyan oford mangoo chotnii

[waeva

what she means is meat and such knows you can’t eat meat she means if-all-anykind kinds of thing you can eat.

Right? Cook eggplant and edo eggplant and potato potato curry or spinach and daal and rice. Whatever little bit you can afford. Mango chutney.

The fragment begins with Indar and Gigi continuing the delivery of advice. Notice the way that Indar and Gigi do this together not just in the sense that they do it at the same time but in that they do it collaboratively, as a joint action. So, for instance, in line 235, Gigi prefaces what is explicitly marked as a redoing with ya saying ya >laik mi se na kal nonbadii gya:l ‘Ya, like I said don’t invite anybody, girl.’ in this way indicating that she is monitoring Indar’s talk which is characterized as an elaboration of something Gigi has already said. Sun is facing a virtual barrage of advice here and her lack of uptake perhaps signals some quiet resistance to the role in which she has been cast (see Heritage & Sefi 1992). In line 240 Indar’s “listen to me” projects another extended and perhaps grave course of advice. Sun, however, intercepts this line of action asking whether there are restrictions on what she can cook for the event. Here, by shifting and re-specifying the domain of uncertainty, the advice-recipient transforms the activity in a number of ways. First, by turning the talk and the advice to the matter of food, Sun undercuts the expertise that Indar claims for himself. Although men often do the most publicly visible aspects of food preparation at ritual events women are not excluded from this activity. Furthermore, the question of “what to serve” is a decidedly non-esoteric feature of the ritual. As Indar himself remarks about the food in line 256 “there are no special kinds.” In re-specifying the domain of uncertainty, then, Sun creates a context in which advice from Gigi and Pria, who do not claim any expertise in the more esoteric and technical aspects of ritual, is just as authoritative as that given by Indar. Although it is Indar who initially responds to the query, he is subsequently corrected by Pria in line 245. Indar then attempts to clarify his

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initial yes and to show that he meant the same thing as Pria when she said daal an rais. But it is Gigi who ends up delivering the most explicit and complete advice on this issue (in lines 259–262). We may note in passing that Sun effects this refocusing transformation at just the point where Indar indicates that he intends to establish himself as the sole advice-giver (with his “listen to me”).

Blocking advice: Finding an alternate warrant In fragment 6.1, Sun’s response to Indar’s question displayed uncertainty and the participants treated this as an invitation to advise her. In the final extract to be examined next, Sun’s response is constructed in a wholly different manner to display competence and certainty rather than uncertainty. When Sun, in this way, does not go along with Indar in constructing a warrant of uncertainty, Indar talks so as to suggest inadequacies in the description of her intended course of action. The sequence begins with another question from Indar. Here he asks about ritual objects saying wa yu kyer ‘What will you take with you?’ When Sun responds by initiating repair with mhm? Indar rephrases the question asking what she intends to do at the canal. Such inquiries invoke a domain of esoteric knowledge associated with the ritual. Indar is thus directing the talk to matters over which he claims expertise and in this way he usurps the role of advice-giver from Gigi and the other participants. Fragment 6.4: In = Indar, Ba = Baby, Gi = Gigi 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

In: → Sun: In: → Sun:→

148 149 150 151

Sun: Gi: In: Sun:

wa yu kyer mhm? wa yu gu duu a kanal? ii tel mi kyer piis laplii::z, an di langfinga, an gu beed. (0.2) Sun:→ yuu noo wa a miin beed an chroo an see somting. (2.0) Ba: [mmmmhmmmm]

152 Ba: 153 In: 154 155 156

What will you take with you? mhm? What will you do at the canal? (She) told me to take a piece Lapis, and the longfinger, and then bathe. You know what I mean? Bathe and throw and say something. mmmmhmmmm

[( )] wa yu son neem? huu da? Chachii, [Harii dadii

What is your son’s name? Who (told you to do that)? Chachii, Harry’s Daddy

[wiidipaniii wach mii. (.) wel yu-yu-yo-yo, rait. yu kyan du yu work. wel ai noo:: yu kyaan

( ) Look here. Well yo-yo-yo-yo, right. You can do your work. Well, I know you can

157 wel, (0.2) rait we yu gu de, 158 we yu waak todee 159 yu gu tomara marnin, 160 (1.5) 161 → yu gatu get som tin. 162 Sun: wa? 163 In: gu a Malsing an bai som tin. 164 → i gu noo: a wa. 165 → >jos see yu waan tin. 166 tek kopl griin liif 167 di maarnin 168 kom pon a seem branch 169 sii wa170 (wa moos siim laik i de.) 171 rait? an yu beed, 172 an yu chroo di wata ova yu. ... Advice continues...

Well, Right where you were, Where you were today You go there tommorow morning You have to get some tin. What? Go to Malsing and buy some tin. He will know what it is. Just say you want some tin. Take a couple of green leaves in the morning which come from the same branch see what ( ) Right?, and then you bathe and you throw the water over you.

Of course, like any ritual, the one under discussion in this fragment is understood to have certain constitutive rules and can therefore be done correctly or incorrectly. By invoking this framework of correct and incorrect conduct, Indar designs his turn, at line 139, as an exam question. Searle suggests that: “In real questions the speaker wants to know (find out) the answer; in exam questions, the speaker wants to know if the hearer knows” (see Searle 1969: 66; Heritage 1984b: 284). Indar is clearly not asking this question so that he can be informed. Rather, the questions at line 137 and 139 project an evaluation of Sun’s competence in this area. Sun’s description of what she intends to do and carry is clearly to be evaluated in relation to an understanding of the ways in which this ritual is properly and correctly conducted and by asking these questions Indar situates himself as one who could determine the adequacy of the answer. Sun first attempts to answer Indar’s question by detailing the items she intends to take with her to the canal. However, when this is not met with a positive evaluation (i.e. some indication that she will be able, with these items, to satisfy the requirements of the ritual), she goes on to mention bathing and “saying something” (145). Sun reaches the possible completion of her turn, first at the end of line 142 and again, when Sun twice recompletes the turn, in lines 144 and 145. At each of these points, Sun has produced a turn that is grammatically, prosodically and pragmatically complete. At any of these points, another speaker could have begun a turn without being heard as interruptive. Indar is thus provided several places where he could evaluate and comment upon Sun’s intended course of action as she has described it. An exam question such as the one Indar has posed creates a position not only for an answer but also for an

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advice, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘authority’, ‘incompetence’ and ‘expertise’, though derived as pragmatic inferences from sequences of talk and action, are available to the participants as real and interactionally consequential phenomena.

The interactional locus of exteriority and constraint For members, ritual procedure – the constitutive conventions and rules of that ritual – appears as though imposed from the outside. A ritual is a proto-typical example of a Durkhemian social fact – both external and constraining. It almost seems as though, in the case of ritual, there can be no confusion about the rules – they seem to compel conformity with themselves. In the history of anthropology these aspects of the way ritual appears to members have had two important consequences. First, ritual has been treated as the canonical example of abstract, sociocultural ‘structure’ – the proper object of all varieties of structuralist analysis. This entails treatment on the level of type as opposed to token and thus the apparent repeatability of a particular ritual is transformed into the sine qua non of ritual writ large. Anthropologists frequently talk of ‘a ritual’ without troubling to consider any specific performance of it. A qualification is necessary here: much work in linguistic anthropology in the last twenty years has in various way challenged this view (one particularly important intervention, Keenan’s (1973) account of marriage requests, will be discussed presently). More recent work on the historical development and deployment of particular rituals has similarly had a deflationary effect. Nevertheless the traditional view of ritual as an abstract, type level, ‘language’ continues to exercise enormous influence on the anthropological imagination. Secondly, not only has the stability, repeatability, and conventional structure of particular rituals been treated as non-problematic, ritual has been invoked as an explanatory principle. So, in Goffman (1967) for instance, the regularity of a practice is accounted for by saying that it is “ritualized.” A whole host of social phenomena (greetings, leave-takings etc.) are glossed in such accounts as “interaction ritual” (see Schegloff 1988a). When exteriority and constraint are assumed to be basic features of ritual, theory turns to consider how this is achieved (e.g. socialization) and what its consequences might be (e.g. solidarity). If, however, we ask how the appearance of exteriority and constraint is itself produced as a social fact we are led to examine the application of ritual procedure and, specifically, the talk through which it is invoked. This is a change of focus which we can adopt while

Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice

remaining agnostic with respect to the questions and puzzles of traditional social theory. Within this view, then, exteriority and constraint, are, in the first place, accomplishments, achieved through the methodic deployment of practices which invoke and render recognizable to others determinate aspects of local social organization (see Schegloff 1991; Wilson 1991; Zimmerman & Weider 1978). I want to consider the talk here between Indar, Gigi and Sun in these terms. I want to consider the ways in which members orient to the perceived exteriority and constraint in the organization and design of their talk. That is, I want to ask, how the felt exteriority and constraint of social facts of ritual procedure – the social facts of convention – are brought to bear on the way in which these people talk to one another. That the exteriority and constraint of ritual procedure have an interactional locus may not appear immediately obvious. On the contrary it may seem as though procedures associated with ritual are such that they cannot produce confusion. In fact of course, ritual procedure is frequently a topic for members’ consideration, discussion, debate and not simply or solely in those cases where disagreement develops between rival sects, authorities or experts. Two points need to be made before continuing. First, the possibility for alternate understandings, divergent interpretations is obviously greater for some practices than others. That said, it is a logical possibility for any piece of customary conduct, ritual or otherwise. Secondly, questions, discussion, debate, post-mortem have to come to an end at some point. When Garfinkel’s students pushed their interlocutors beyond what is otherwise treated as adequate for all practical purposes by asking them to explain “What do you mean by ‘flat tire’?” (1967) they were revealing the tacit agreement that underpins the mundane activities of everyday life. On the one hand, in their ordinary dealings with one another, members do not overly concern themselves with the necessary, pervasive and non-fatal indeterminacy of talk and action (see also Hanks 1996). On the other hand, a speaker can generally rely on an interlocutor to treat their provisional understandings as sufficient for all practical purposes, which is to say, we often behave with certainty even in cases where doubt is certainly possible (Wittgenstein 1972). In accepting for all practical purposes the intelligibility of talk and action participants are going along with their interlocutors and, in effect, entering into a kind of tacit interactional contract to which they may be held to answer. Thus, we can well imagine someone saying – “if you didn’t understand what I meant just now you should have said something.”

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In a brilliant paper from the early 1970s, Elinor Keenan described marriage request rituals as they are performed in the plateau region of central Madagascar. Early in her discussion she notes “conceptions of the ground rules of proper kabary (ceremonial speech) are diverse, there are discussions of them before, within, alongside, and after the event” (1973: 225) and further that “(r)ules of kabary performance are a frequent point of departure for long discussions by local elders particularly during ceremonial season” (ibid.: 226). It is not uncommon to see groups of elders evaluating the skills and approaches of speechmakers following a kabary performance. A speech maker who pleases his audience is rewarded with praise such as: “He is a very sharp speechmaker,” “He is prepared,” “He is a true speechmaker, a child of his father.” His words are said to be “well-arranged” and “balanced.” His performance is described as “satisfying.” But it is rare for all elders to agree completely in their evaluations. Typically, some elders consider a speechmaker as able, while others consider him as merely a student of the kabary, as yet unaccomplished. . . Differences in evaluation reflected different ideas as to what the rules in fact are.

Not only then is the performance emergent in the context of a given set of rules – the rules are themselves emergent in the context of the performance. Ritual procedure is, in that sense, not a structure to be enacted or an abstract organization reflecting the social whole (e.g. the inequality between groups, the differences between the sexes) although some particular performance could perhaps be made to take on and convey such a meaning in some specific context. Nor, of course, can it be embodied in generative schemes of bodily orientations. It would be easy, and not unusual, for an anthropologist to abstract from the “endless post performance talk” (1973: 227), some ideal, objectified organization which is the inherently correct and shared standard of ritual procedure but this would be to completely miss the point that the postperformance talk is as much a part of the phenomenon – is as relevant to an understanding of the marriage request – as is the performance itself (assuming an heuristic distinction between the two, one which in fact won’t hold up in the face of sustained examination). Abstracting away from the discussion so as to find the real performance would be like “trying to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves” (Wittgenstein 1953: §164, see also 1960: 125). For as Keenan shows these evaluations are not restricted to the conclusion of the performance – they are rather produced throughout its course as an integral, inseparable part of that ritual. Indeed, the special character of the marriage request is made manifest in the ‘traps’ which the recipient-group’s representatives are expected to set. Keenan (ibid.: 228) writes:

Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice

It is the boy’s speechmaker who initiates each step of the kabary and the girl’s speechmaker who responds with an evaluation. He may agree with the words of the first speechmaker. He may approve his handling of that step and urge him to proceed with the next step to be completed. Or, on the other hand, he may indicate that the other’s words are not ara-dalana, according to tradition. There is an error in his kabary. When a speechmaker responds as such, he is said to manao fandrika, ‘make traps’. Before the kabary can continue, the speechmaker from the boy’s side must do one of two things. Either he must be able to justify his handling of the kabary, show that no error has been made, or he must admit his error. A speechmaker who successfully defends his approach is said to manala fandrika, ‘open the trap,’ that is, free himself from the trap. A speechmaker who admits error is said to be voa fandrika, ‘caught in the trap’. He must correct his error by first repeating the relevant step in the correct manner and secondly paying a small fine to the girl’s family.

Keenan (ibid.: 232) reports that, before the kabary begins, attempts are made to establish some ground rules but remarks, “In fact, the ground rules are typically never conclusively formulated and agreed upon and so arguments appear in the request performance.” Keenan’s study richly illustrates several crucial aspects of any practice. First, even where an explicit set of rules are available they do not determine the conduct they purport to describe. Rather, for members engaged in practical reasoning, they stand in a reflexive, mutually elaborative relationship with that conduct. Second, ‘ritual procedure’ can no more be reduced to a shared set of beliefs or cultural knowledge than any other practice. What ‘stands behind’ the Malagasy marriage request is not an explanatory scheme (or model, or shared set of beliefs) but resaka – it is undergirded by a practical organization of conversation and debate.2

Ritual procedure, advise and the finite clause What we have been considering is just a piece of the practical underpinning of a practice – a discussion or conversation in which the external and constraining features of the ritual are located, described, debated so that the relevant practices may be held up and evaluated against them. I want to consider briefly the way that is done in and through the talk between Indar, Sun, Gigi and Seeta focusing in particular on the structure of the finite clause – the verb and its modification by various preverbal elements as well its relation to associated core arguments.

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Stem form [N ø V]

159 yu gu tomara marnin 171-172 an yu beed, rait?, an yu chroo di wata ova yu.

Imperative [ø V]

163 gu a Malsing an bai som tin. 165 jos see yu waan tin. 166-168 tek kopl griin liif di maarnin kom pon a seem branch

Modal [N gatu V]

161

yu gatu get som tin.

Irrealis [N gu V]

not used

yu gu gu tomara marnin

Imperfective not [N a/doz V] used

yu a gu, yu doz gu

Figure 6.5 Advice formats: Alternative grammatical packaging

Returning to fragment 6.4, we can notice that in the very first line of the transcript Indar employs the stem form of the verb with no pre-verbal marking. In Chapter 4 it was noted that the default interpretation of the stem form with dynamic verbs (such as kyer ‘carry’) is perfective, that is, as completed action viewed as a whole, and, by implication, past. Now here that interpretation is at odds with the participants apparently shared understanding of recent events. Although Sun has begun some of the early preparations for the ritual she has not, at this point, yet performed it. It is not surprising then that what follows this turn is a repair initiator and a redoing of the problematic turn with modifications which clarify precisely the temporal and aspectual reference of the question. After Indar acknowledges Sun’s ability to do the work in the ways discussed earlier (as pro-forma appreciation initiating advice) he starts to advise Sun and at line 159 explicitly instructs her (yu gu tomara marnin, ‘You go there tommorow morning,’). The two canonical formats for advice are present in this fragment and will be considered momentarily but here Indar employs neither. Rather, he once again employs the stem form of the verb. In order to understand what Indar is doing here we need to see that, in using the stem form, he is selecting this option from among a range of alternative formats. The last two alternatives – although pragmatically possible – are not used in this sequence. The imperative construction, formed by use of the stem form without an explicit nominative argument, delivers an instruction on Indar’s authority – it does not attempt to justify the instruction nor does it attempt to locate an authority for it in something beyond Indar’s own expertise.

Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice

In comparison, the modal form explicitly invokes external constraint – in this case it is not just Indar’s say-so, it is the way things must be done that is at issue. By use of the modal construction, Indar does not so much instruct as report an external constraint which must be acknowledged and taken into account. The construction which Indar selects at line 159 (and at 171–172) neither instructs (like an imperative) nor reports the constraint (like the modal) but rather describes the action, albeit an action that has not yet been performed. It does not describe what has happened but rather what, normatively, must or should happen. We may note that this use of the stem form is similar to its use in proverbs. For instance: Dag wa ∅ bark plenti, ∅ ron wen taim kom fu fait, ‘A dog that barks a lot, runs when its time to fight’ or Wan wan dotii ∅ bil dam, ‘Successive pieces of dirt build a dam – i.e. Every little bit adds up.’ The thing about proverbs is that they are not just true for now – they are true generally. The truths which they convey, though sometimes obscure, are understood as more or less timeless. The time reference in these examples is neither imperfective nor perfective – it is nomic. That rather special meaning is conveyed by the co-occurrence of the stem form of the verb and the bare noun (ø dag, ø dam). In proverbs then the temporality is nomic – it is not contingent. Indar’s use of the stem form in line 159 conveys something similar. If we consider the distribution of the different formats in this fragment we find that Indar uses the imperative construction to instruct Sun in actions which are preparatory and not in the work itself (lines 163, 165, 166). So for instance, he uses the imperative to tell Sun to go to Malsing and buy some tin. In contrast, he uses the modal construction to report pre-requisite ritual requirements – things that must be done not as practical requirements (like going to Malsing) but as preliminary steps in the ritual. The acquisition of tin is a ritual requirement. Finally, the nomic, stem forms are used to describe the ritual procedure itself. The effect of Indar’s formatting here is it to characterize the ritual as something that exists essentially out of time – as a social fact whose exteriority and constraint impose themselves on Sun in a completely anonymous fashion.

Conclusions In this chapter I have developed a twofold argument against seeing uncertainty as a private, inner mental state. First, I’ve suggested that uncertainty is a public phenomenon which participants locate in the activities of advice-giving and

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Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice 

unsolicited

initial inquiry problem-indicative -reponse (line 101)

other response (lines 140–145)

suggested inadequacies

Advice (not included)

Advice Extracts #5

Advice Extracts #8

Figure 6.6 Pathways to advice

receipt. Secondly, I’ve suggested that uncertainty need not be understood by participants as the property of single individual. Rather it is possible for uncertainty to be predicated of members of a socially defined unit – such as a kin group. Although in some cases uncertainty emerged as a problem-indicative response to inquiry, or as displayed in a question such as enikain fud ma kuk? “Can I cook any kind of food?” elsewhere, uncertainty was denied altogether through asserting a prior understanding of the matters under advisement. Likewise, incompetencies were suggested over the course of an extended segment of talk which simultaneously served to position Indar as an expert. These phenomena emerged not as attributes of individuals per se but of the positions these people occupied within particular courses of socially organized action. One of the things that anthropologists arguably do better than anybody else is to reveal the social, cultural and interactional foundations of phenomena which are often taken to be attributes of isolated and singular individuals. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, when combined with the techniques of conversation analysis, can be used to extend this kind of analysis into areas that hitherto have remained the exclusive territory of psychology and philosophy of mind. We tend to think of uncertainty, doubt and related concepts as prototypically inner phenomena – as mental states. In his later work, Wittgenstein struggled against such a view. He advocated an alternative approach which is in many ways convergent with the aims of anthropology (see also Das 1998;

Canfield 1997). This involves a kind of fieldwork investigating the workings of ordinary language – an analysis which shows the logic or grammar of concepts such as doubt and uncertainty, belief and understanding. It seems quite natural to ask, “what is doubt?” or, “what is uncertainty?” But Wittgenstein believed such questions were deeply problematic. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein (1960: 2) writes: The questions “What is length?”, “What is meaning?”, “What is the number one?”, etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can’t point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)

For Wittgenstein such questions create philosophical problems: a situation in which philosophers are led to study the smoke from their own fires. In abstracting a word from the work it does within particular sentences, or better, language games, we are led to look for imaginary referents and so construct “grammatical” fictions. As Wittgenstein famously put it: “Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (1953: §38). Still we might well be tempted to ask, “What is uncertainty?” or “What is the nature of uncertainty?” To pose such questions at this point in time is to invite answers which make reference to states of the mind which are revealed through the use of brain-imaging technology. In contemporary philosophy of mind for instance there is a movement described as eliminitivist (see Button 1995 et al.). Eliminitivists argue, against Fodor and others, that our vocabulary of mind reflects and embodies a folk psychology which was never accurate and is, in addition, now hopelessly archaic. At its most basic, their argument is that what we think of as mental states are, in fact, material and physical processes of the human brain. This argument is interesting because it reveals something quite general about our thinking which Wittgenstein anticipates in his discussion of “substantives” – we seem to have an inclination to explain by locating causes. In the specific case, such phenomena as beliefs, desires, intentions are assumed to be explained if their cause is isolated in the physical processes of the brain. Let us assume for a moment that it were possible to determine that uncertainty was always accompanied by physical processes revealed by brain imaging. What would we have discovered by this? To paraphrase Wittgenstein once again, does the isolation of such a cause tell us what uncertainty consists in? Will our anthropological questions be satisfied by such answers? Of course, Wittgenstein suggests that this line of thinking will only lead us into confusion. Rather than ask what uncertainty is, we should give a descrip-

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

tion of the circumstances in which we feel justified in speaking of uncertainty. What are the criteria we use to decide whether someone is uncertain? Now it may be objected that such a tack involves an evasion of the original question. We started out by asking about the world and now have retreated to talk only about the workings of ordinary language. In response, however, it might well be suggested that a question such as “what is uncertainty?” is a paraphrase of, “what does the word ‘uncertainty’ stand for?” As such, it too is a question about the meaning of words, although this is not immediately apparent from the form of the initial question. The problem is that such inquiry is predicated on an understanding of language as a representational medium and this radically misconstrues the role it plays in our everyday lives. The result is philosophical confusion and bewilderment. Augustine encounters such confusion in the Confessions when he writes: “What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know; if you ask me, I don’t know” (Confessions XI, p. 14). So if we want to avoid confusion we should ask instead, “how do we use the word uncertainty?” or, “When do we feel justified in saying that someone is uncertain or feels doubt?” or, “What are the criteria we use to determine such matters?” Unlike the eliminitivist answer, a description of such circumstances might answer, in a more satisfying way, the questions that anthropologists want to ask. One of the contexts in which people routinely deal with uncertainty is in giving and receiving advice. We can examine such sequences of advice-giving and receipt to find the ordinary ways in which people manage uncertainty. In the course of these activities participants work to locate, display and coconstruct uncertainty as a precondition and warrant for giving advice. The uncertainty that is, in this way, located is not a property of an individual mind, it is not a mental state, rather, it is a co-constructed and public phenomenon which participants orient to as an intersubjectively sustained aspect of the activity they are engaged in. The materials examined in this chapter also need to be understood within a rubric of power and gender. The differential distribution of ritual knowledge is a key element in the social organization of the village. At various critical points in their lives, for example births, deaths, and weddings, women like Sun find themselves searching for the right way to do things. On such occasions they may turn to people like Indar who are acknowledged experts. The advice they receive, on such occasions, tends to cast them in a particular role – as one who does not, and need not, understand what is involved in the performance of ritual. Some of the most important events of their lives are in this way bound to displays of uncertainty and findings of incompetence. Although as the analysis

Chapter 6. Uncertainty and expertise in advice 

has tried to show, women are not resigned to this situation, the economy of knowledge in which they struggle to assert certainty is a gendered one where expertise with respect to ritual conduct is associated almost exclusively with a select group of senior men. And so, in contrast to Sun, Indar routinely plays a prominently public role in ritual work. When opportunity arises, Indar assists an elderly pandit, often fetching him on his bicycle and chauffeuring him to the event. The activity of advising provides Indar with an opportunity not only to display his expertise but also, at the same time, to have that expertise acknowledged and confirmed by others. In this sense these ordinary speech events play an important role in the legitimation of knowledge and expertise. By focusing on the practices of advice-giving we are able to uncover some of the ways in which that interactional organization articulates with a world in which knowledge is unevenly distributed.

Chapter 7

Cultivated ignorance

That he does not know takes some shewing. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Section 14)

Introduction In their well-known account of conversational closings, Schegloff and Sacks (1973) note that closure is routinely initiated by a turn which invokes a warrant for closing. They go on to make a distinction between cases in which that warrant is announced (“I have to go,” “This is costing you a lot of money”) and those cases in which it is embodied by the very actions and practices of the participants. The latter is exemplified in an exchange of what they term “possible pre-closings” often expressed, in the English conversations they analyze, by such items as “we::ll” and “oka::y.” Such possible pre-closings work to move the conversation into a closing section by passing an opportunity to launch a next topic. That is to say, such items as “we:ll,” appropriately placed at the recognizable completion of some spate of talk on a topic, are understood in terms of what they are not doing: profferring or soliciting of talk on some next topic (e.g. “so what happened with Arthur?”).1 This distinction between an action being embodied, on the one hand, and announced, on the other, has, a basic importance to any account of human conduct and particular relevance to the talk examined in this chapter.2 It is, after all, not difficult to think of cases in which saying and showing something are likely to result in different trajectories of action. One special case involves excuses, justifications and denials. Part of the special status of an announced denial derives it seems from the fact that its production makes explicit its speaker’s orientation to a possible accusation.3 In the case of a denial (or excuse) that is embodied, rather than announced, that orientation, while stile recoverable from the surface of the talk, is defeasible. Where being informed may suggest responsibility for wrong-doing

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Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance

we may find that the denial of knowledge is embodied rather than announced. We may find, that is, a speaker cultivating ignorance.

A visit to Shanka’s house I had been promising to visit Shanka for some weeks prior to the day on which the recording was made. After a late tea, around 9am, I made my way over to the small but comfortable house she shared with her husband, three sons and new baby girl. After being greeted and served a cup of tea, I turned on the tape recorder and found a place for it and the microphone in the rafters of the house. As we sat there talking about the best way to cook chicken livers one of the boys noticed his grandmother (his Nanii, i.e. Shanka’s mother) coming down the path through the yard. She was escorted up the back steps and into the house. People shifted around and, after minimal greetings, Kay made the announcement given as line 1 in the fragment below. For analytic reasons we should now turn to the talk itself before any further ethnographic background is given since it is precisely this issue of access to background knowledge that turns out be crucial to the argument of this chapter. Fragment 7.1: Shan = Shanka 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kay: Shan: Kay: Shan: Kay:

Shan: Kay: Shan: Kay: Shan:

Kay: Shan: Kay: Shan: Kay: Shan:

mi lef a-a lee:di pikni ahuu lee:dii? Satya pikni a Aisha we shi-Satya. Satya gaan a-a Mama (0.2) dem na lak op Riishi? dem kech am wee:? a workplees (2.0) soo wa-a a wa rilii hapm?= =wa dem see? ii see dem kom-(kom) mit ke-kech am in yu ruum huu dem? kech am in mii room?= [=huu dem? [=beebii sing tuu -oo- beebii sing kom he? beebii sing see shi bin haid onda di bed beebii sing bin hia fo sii da?= =mii na noo gya::l wel (a da) wa di poliis na tel

I left that lady’s children at What ‘lady’? Satya’s children at Isha’s Where is Satya? Satya’s gone to Mama’s Didn’t they lock up Rishi? Where did they catch him? his workplace. so what really happened? What did they say? He said that they came and caught him in your room. Who is ‘them’? They caught him in my room? Who is ‘them’? Baby Singh too. Oh - Baby Singh came here? Baby Singh said that she was hiding under the bed. Baby Singh was here to see that? I don’t know dear. Well that’s it Why didn’t the police tell

28 29 30 31

mii notin. le shi kom bak hia wid poliis (0.5)

me anything? Let her come here with police

Several days before this took place Shanka’s nephew (her favorite) and Kay’s grandson, Rishi, had been accused of having sexual relations with a young girl from the village. According to the girl’s mother, Rishi had taken advantage of her daughter’s friendly manner and naivety. The dispute soon took on the character of a feud between rival patrilocal groups as family members rallied around the girl’s mother on the one hand and Rishi on the other.4 One question that arose in the course of the dispute was where the alleged sexual relations had taken place. Rishi, though recently separated from his wife of two years, did not have his own house at the time and the girl lived at home with her mother. Relatedly, although the accusation was leveled at Rishi it was accompanied by discussion about those who might have encouraged or even facilitated the coupling. Shanka had come up repeatedly in such discussions and it seemed that she would be implicated in any wrong-doing. Several people reported arriving at Shanka’s house to find Rishi and the girl relaxing in the hammock and Shanka out running errands. Others said they had seen the two arriving or leaving Shanka’s house. When questioned about this, Shanka steadfastly denied that she had anything to do with it, although she did say that the two of them had been at the house together on occasion. Shanka, then, was faced with the task of controlling the knowledge generated; a wide variety of evidence all of which seemed to suggest that her house had served as the couple’s meeting place. This chapter will argue that Shanka’s talk represented in the transcript embodies a display of ignorance. That is, she does not at any point say in so many words that she does not know what is going on but, rather, designs her talk to embody such a display of ignorance and thus convey it implicitly. Her uninformed status is the product of several interrelated practices of speaking but the analysis will focus on the production and receipt of referent identifications, particularly references to persons, as well as the situated activities of telling within which these practices are embedded.

Formulating persons An influential approach to what have frequently been termed “shifters” (following Jakobson 1957) in linguistic anthropology was developed in an early

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

paper by Michael Silverstein (1976). At the centre of Silverstein’s argument is a distinction between indexical presupposition and entailment. According to the argument, any speech signal presupposes some identifiable source (specific aspects of the context, it is suggested, must exist cognitively if speech signals are to be interpretable). On the other hand and at the same time, language use indexically entails certain aspects of context, for instance, an addressee or audience, a frame of literalness or irony, etc. In cases of indexical presupposition, a shifter token is uninterpretable without knowledge of some aspect of the situation. Silverstein suggests that the clearest cases of such presupposing referential indexes are spatial deictics this and that. In the NP this table, the referent of “table” must be identifiable or “exist cognitively” for the deictic to function as a referential sign. More indexically creative are cases where the referential index serves to “make explicit and overt the parameters of structure of the ongoing event” (1976: 34). Indexical pronouns have a creative function in setting the parameters of the speech event and in establishing the roles of speaker and addressee. Silverstein counts among the more creative indexes those that signal social distance, hierarchy or conversely solidarity (e.g. T/V distinctions in Indo-European languages discussed in a classic article be Brown & Gilman 1960) which, he claims “by their very use, make the social parameters of speaker and hearer explicit” (1976: 34). Silverstein goes on to suggest that pragmatic meanings are not describable in the usual metasemantic terms used for grammatical analysis. Rather, what is required is a grammar of speech acts consisting of “rules of use.” These relate dependent linguistic variables to presupposed contextual parameters and entailed consequences. The first step towards constructing such a grammar is the differentiation of possible pragmatic categories in formal terms. Silverstein (1976: 25) states, “the specifically indexical aspect of a shifter token can be said to represent some indexical type that is, some underlying general sign that stands in the same relation to its tokens.” This type-level generalization is captured in a rule of use defined as, “a general function that describes the relationship between some speech context, given as a set of variables, some of which must have specific values, and some portion of the utterance, some message fraction.” According to Silverstein (1976: 35), then, indexes “range on a sliding scale of creativity or performative value from the extreme of presupposition displayed by deictics to the extreme of creativity displayed by subtle social indexes.” Silverstein (1976: 35) does qualify his position here saying, “placement of a given indexical token depends to a great extent on the factors of the individual context of its use,” but nevertheless claims that “different kinds of indexical

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance

types have inherent ranges on the functional scale of presupposition” since “underlying all specific usages are the rules of use.” In a book review, Silverstein (1994: 709) neatly summarizes this view saying: Abstract grammatical structure projects into “sense”-schematic interpretations that figure in semantic representation (or “conceptualization,” for those so inclined). Indexicality is the highly contingent relationship that actual forms-in-use contract with their discursive-interactional surround. The “senses” of some form-types seem essentially to be a function of the indexical contextualization effects as form-tokens are used on specific occasions of communication: I describes a referent as the individual inhabiting-at the moment of communication- the indexed (pointed-to) role of sender in some communicative situation (however else, on reflection, one might also validly describe that very individual); its sense is, as we now say, “metapragmatic.”

In many cases referential and non-referential indexical functions are combined within a single form. An example of such functional aggregation is Thai pronouns in which social deference functions are combined with pronominal referential indexes. As Luong (1987) shows for Vietnamese, such forms take on non-referential meanings by virtue of their opposition to other personreferring forms such as kinship terms in relation to which they imply a lack of deference to the addressee. Such examples show that a single form can have both discourse referential and nonreferential values that structure the factors of the speech situation. Silverstein (1976: 37) claims that in such cases, “two distinct rules of use are involved, based on two distinct functions of the forms involved. At a functional level, then, there are two indexes which happen to be represented by the same surface indexical category, one shifter, one not.” Linguistic anthropologists have developed the pragmatic approach into an account of participation, showing that the interactional frame of participation is continually negotiated and, at each point, achieved. Such participation frames are established, in part, through the use of deixis including person-referring forms typically labeled pronouns. Because all languages make a distinction between participants (1st and 2nd person pronouns) and nonparticipants (3rd person pronouns), speakers are able to manipulate, in their talk, the structure of participation – who is being talked to and who is being talked about. Subtle shifts of footing are accomplished through the use of such pronouns in addition to the other resources of a language – e.g. personal names, kin terms, identifying descriptions.5 For the most part, linguistic anthropologists have focused their attention on, first, the range of resources available to speakers of any particular language and, secondly, the specific formal properties of the particular forms which to-

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

gether constitute that system. So for instance, for Vietnamese, Luong describes the use of zero forms, kin terms, pronouns and name. It is argued that the selection of name, pronoun or zero form is alternative to the use of a kin term – the latter often invoking a system of familial distinctions of age, gender and status. Extremely subtle forms of contextual entailment are accomplished through the use of kin terms that take the perspective of some participant other than the speaker (see Luong 1984).

The conversation analytic approach to person reference: Identification and recognition In quite sharp contrast, conversation analytic work in this area focuses on the interactional circumstances within which references to persons are made and the practices used to achieve it. In the fifth lecture from the Fall term of 1971, Sacks noted that a speaker wishing to make initial reference to a person (and in fact the observation can be generalized to account for reference to any nameable thing) had two basic options and that each of these set different tasks for a recipient. So, on the one hand, a speaker may design the identification such that it proposes the recipient should be able to use it to find someone they know. Such recognitional reference forms “convey to the recipient that the one being referred to is someone that they know (about). The use of a recognitional reference form provides for the recipient to figure out who that they know the speaker is referring to by use of this reference form” (Schegloff 1996a: 459). Two common recognitional forms in English conversation are (personal) name and recognitional descriptors such as, “the guy that always comes in here.” Alternatively, the speaker may design the identification in a way that does not suggest the recipient should or could recognize the person being talked about with it. Such non-recognitional forms comprise a varied and heterogeneous set and include expressions such as “a guy,” “someone,” “this woman,” as well as non-recognitional descriptors such as, “a guy at work,” and category terms such as, “my professor,” “this student,” “the postman,” etc. There is no one single or basic way of doing a non-recognitional reference rather, different interactional circumstances make alternate non-recognitional forms relevant.6 In his lecture Sacks calls these type I and type II identifications (Vol. II: 444–445): One way of differentiating identifications made of persons in conversation is by reference to whether the speaker intends the recipient(s), or differentially

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance 

among the recipients, that they use the presented identification to find from that identification that they know the person being referred to. And we intend, by Type 1, to be naming such a type of identification. That is to say, a Type 1 identification is one that the speaker produces with the intention of having the recipient use it to find some person that the recipient already knows. And a Type 2 identification is one that a speaker uses to indicate to the recipient that he should not employ it to attempt to find who, that he knows, is being referred to.

Sacks suggests that the procedure used for selecting identifications in ordinary conversation involves selecting between these two alternatives: Type 1 and Type 2. He further suggests a rule of use which states “use Type 1 if you can” (Sacks Vol. II: 444).7 With respect to non-present, third persons, Schegloff (1996a) introduces a distinction between locally initial and subsequent forms, on the one hand, and occasions or positions on the other. For any instance of reference to a third (i.e. non-present) person, then, it is possible to distinguish “the slot in which it was done from the form which was used to do it.”8 So, the first time in a spate of talk that some person is referred to is routinely understood, by the participants, as a locally initial occasion. Locally initial reference forms include full noun phrases and names (although both may be used in positions other than initial). Pronouns, by contrast, are canonically subsequent reference forms. Mismatches between form and occasion (e.g. locally initial forms in locally subsequent position, locally subsequent forms in locally initial position) invite, “attention, both from participants (. . .) and from professional analysts, and may be understood to achieve distinctive outcomes” (1996a: 451). Mismatches then invite examination for what they are doing other than simple reference (though they are surely doing that too). Schegloff (1996a: 438–439) thus asks, “how do speakers do reference to persons so as to accomplish, on the one hand, that nothing but referring is being done, and/or on the other hand that something else in addition to referring is being done by the talk practice which has been employed.”

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance  Name Recognitionals (Sacks’ type 1)

Locally initial forms

1. 2. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Anaphora/Pro-terms etc.

Reference occasions are produced by people talking to some purpose. Like all conversational events, they are thoroughly contexted moments in which roles, values, institutions, passions and strategies are embodied, experienced, and lived. [. . .] We cannot understand the substantive, pragmatic, human and meaningful nature of any such occasion without attending to its situated particularity.

And later he writes (1988: 42): Referrings serve the current speaking purpose of the referrer: locating, invoking, creating the properties of the referent for which he was mentioned. [. . .] Many socially organized tasks, like gossiping (Haviland 1977) or testifying in court require that the person referred to be uniquely identified. A speaker who proffers or insists upon a term that makes recognition relevant is sometimes therewith proposing one of those tasks.

What Moerman is arguing for here is greater attention to the situated particulars of talk-in-interaction. The point is that the system of identifications is always situated in use. A form which makes recognition relevant is selected not solely on the basis of assumptions about what a recipient knows (nor on the basis of a preference for “recognitionals”) but also by reference to the particular interactional goals of the speaker and the activity being pursued. Consider then the way in which alternate identification forms pose different kinds of work for their recipients. Fragment 7.1 – extract – (Tape 06a) – Recognitional, name: Shan = Shanka Kay: → dem na lakop Riishi? (0.2)

Where did they catch him? at his workplace.

Indefinite descriptions

In their work on this domain of conversational organization, Sacks and Schegloff were concerned primarily to develop an account of a formal organization, a system. Moerman points out in his analysis of the same phenomenon in Thai materials (1988: 41) that:

1 2

dem ke:ch am wee? a-a workplees

Fragment 7.2 (Mango Tree) – Locally subsequent form & position: Ro = Rohan, Pa = Pank

Category terms Locally subsequent forms

Shan: Kay:

Recognitional descriptors

Non-recognitionals (Sacks’ type II)

Reference forms

3 4

Didn’t they lock up Rishi?

Ro: Pa: Ro: Pa: Ro:

Pa: Ro: Ro:

wel you noo di krash wid Tamii woz wen? a wen Joo jomp a winda. noo. yes. wen i kech Kats an i geti mango chrii de. yu noo Moti mangoo-ii bin get wan mango→ yu gatu noo a mangoo chrii. → mii noo a mango chrii. → gud. wel a de i kech Katspur

Well, do you know when the crash with Tommy was? When Joe jumped out of the window No Yes When he caught Kats and he hadHis mango tree there You know Moti’s mango tree? There was a mangoYou have to know that mango tree. I know that mango tree. Good. Well the day that he caught Katspur

Fragment 7.3 (Confession) – Non-recognitional 1 Ram: yes- Talii -am- juusto tiif 2 ii monii an gu pikcha an soo 3 wid mii fren dem an soo da4 evriidee an abi doz oda 5 shrimp an soo ... gu pikcha 6 an soo. 7 kaz dem doz tel mi see at hou 8 -am- le mii -am- sii fo monii 9 tuu- fu abii spen it 10 inbiitwiin abii self 11 an mii gon12 J: Ah-ah 13 Ram: stof i monii evriidee an 14 keem an gi dem an al abii 15 gu spen it na mii oloon. 16 a di frend dem tuu... 17 (loud bang) 18 ...wii doz gu pikcha 19 an soo an den Talii 20 get fu noo 21 an i doz biit mii an so on 22 i teek mii out from skuul 23 an wen i teek mii out from 24 skuul mi yuusto gu 25 a i teelor shap an -am26 tiif am. 27 → i had wan28 → wan big feer skin bai 29 → an a hii enkoraj mii fu 30 -am- tiif ii-i monii 31 an som a i jewol dem 32 al di jewol dem. 33 an tiif am an den 34 abii gu bin ova Wes Koos.

Yes, Tali -uhm- I used to steal his money and go to the movies with my friends an’ that. That was everyday. And we used to order shrimp an’ that. went to the movies an that. ‘Cause they use to tell me to-uhm- Let me -uhm- look for money so that we could spend it. among ourselves and I wentah-ah took his money everyday and gave it to them and all of us would spend it - not I alone it was the friends too We used to go to the movies and that. And the Tali found out and he would beat me and that He took me out from school and when he took me out from school I used to go to his tailor shop an -uhm steal from him There was a a big fair-skinned boy and it was he who encouraged me to -uhm- steal his-his money and some of the jewels all of the jewels. And (we) stole them and then we went over to West Coast.

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Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance

Fragment 7.4 (Tape 59aII) – Try-marking: Zi = Ziizan, Fa = Fasia 21 Zi:

da di [rait work ii duuin

[yu noo:: a:m 22 Fa:→ 23 Pooloo-bai? 24 Zi: [eh 25 Fa:→ [Polo [bai? 26 BM: 27 Fa:

That is the right work he is doing. You know -uhm Polo? eh Polo?

[mmhmm mmhmm hii fada: yuustu duu di wok His father used to do that work.

Fragment 7.5 (Tape 58b) – Recogntional, name: Sa = Satya, Ze = Zenia, Go = Gopal 75 Sa: 76 Ze: 77 Go: 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Frafi de? ye::s. laang tai:m.= =kom [sidong?

Sa: [soo wee: shi bin?= Ze:→ shi an (.) blak Sam setop a laintap a-anda niit a-a-a do:ngks chrii de. Go: [nou? Sa:→ [o huu Blak Sam?o Ze: rait nou dem de de.= [=mi sen kal shi Sa:→ [Balii son? Ze: fu kom he:lp mii, shi=sidong=de, shi se shi man na de, shi setop wid a neks ma:n de. Sa:→ [Ba:lii son? Go: [ooo raaso Ze:→ mhm=soo huu mi=mos ge Satya

Is Frafi there? Yes, for a long time. Come and sitdown? So where has she been? She an (.) Black Sam set up by the line. Underneath a donks tree there. Now? Who is “Black Sam?” They are there right now. I sent for her. Bali’s son? to come and help me. She’s sitting there She says her man is not there. And she set up with another man. Bali’s son? oh shit. mhm so who should I get Satya?

Fragment 7.6 (Tape 58): Ze = Zenia, Sa = Satya 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Ze:

mi gaa::n ma gu gu baiee ma::n Sa: we yu bi:n= =we y a gu? Ze: ma gu Ormii: Sa: oo:: Ze: ee:: → a wa-wa-wa Sun taa:k? giyam=a=minit mi na laik da stoorii

I’m outta here. I’m going to buyHey man. Where were you? Where are you going? I’m going to Ermie’s Oh. Eh. What did Sun say? Talk to me for a minute I don’t like that kind of thing.

In the first example, Kay refers to ‘Rishi.’ In selecting a first name, the prototypical recognitional form, Kay proposes that Shanka should be able to use the identification to find someone that she knows and Shanka’s response suggests that she has done just that. In example 7.2, Rohan and Pank are talking about events that occurred when they were children. In seeking to make his case, Rohan finds it necessary

to refer to a particular mango tree (at line 7). He at first formulates the events as taking place when something happened to Kats (another local man). However, before this can be fully articulated, Rohan self-repairs and begins speaking of a particular mango tree. What is of interest for us is the fact that Rohan begins describing this referent by noting its owner (Moti) and then by asserting its existence (there was a mango). Once the referent is so-established, Rohan reinvokes it in the next line using the clearly anaphoric article a (see Chapter 4). This is then a locally subsequent form in locally subsequent position. In the next example we see a different practice. Ram is here recounting his role in a theft. At lines 27–28, Ram introduces a character to his story saying i had wan big feer skin bai, ‘There was a big fair-skinned boy,’ this identification being specifically designed to instruct the recipient not to look for someone that they know. Example 7.5 provides evidence that participants organize reference to persons in just the way Sacks described and that, furthermore, they orient to problems in the operation of such an organization. Here Zenia is telling Satya and Gopal about someone named Frafii. At line 79 she mentions another person using the recognitional reference form, Blak Sam. Such an identification proposes that the recipient should be able to locate someone they know who has that name. However, this proves problematic and, at line 84, Satya initiates repair of the person-referring form. When Zenia does not respond to the repair initiator huu blak Sam, ‘Who is Black Sam?’ Satya offers a candidate identification based on a genealogical relation to a person she can identify (line 87). We may note then that Zenia has selected the preferred recognitional form. Furthermore, Satya has treated the identification as proposing that she should recognize the person being referenced. In fact, Satya is insistent that the identification should result in recognition and checks her understanding of that identification by proposing a referential equivalent. The example given as 7.4 illustrates the use of try-marking (Sacks & Schegloff 1979). Here, at line 22, Fasia asks, yu noo am Pooloo-bai? ‘Do you know uhm Polo-boy?’ and, when this is met with a minimal repair initiator from one of the co-participants, she repeats the name with try-marking intonation. This receives an affirmative mmhm from the recipient and Fasia continues her telling. In example 7.3 we see that Ram mentions, wan big feer skin bai ‘big fair skinned boy’ who, by virtue of such an non-recognitional, indefinite identification, remains merely a “character in a story” (Moerman 1988: 45). In identifying a person in this way, Ram proposes something about the kind of action he is currently engaged in and the role that the so-identified person is to



 Talk and Practical Epistemology

play in it. In other cases, unique identification is crucial. In the example given as 7.5, Zenia is doing something recognizable as gossip. Although the gossip seems to focus on Frafii, this other person, Blak Sam, is also implicated. However, in order to be a target of gossip, a person must be identified and in this case that turns out to be problematic and require some extra work. (Compare in this respect the reference to, a neks man ‘another man’ in lines 91–92 of 7.5 and finally also the identification in 7.6 a wa-wa-wa Sun taa:k? ‘What did Sun say?’ In this example unique identification is essential to the complaint being implemented in the talk.) Turning to the opening lines of the fragment presented we find a series of problematic identifications – identifications problematic in the first place to the participants who produced this talk. Kay, Shanka’s mother, had just arrived. A few minutes before the talk represented in the transcript began, she was spotted heading towards the house by one of the children. She came around the backdoor and entered the house. Greetings were then exchanged and there was some shuffling about as seating was rearranged so as to accommodate the newcomer. After a brief pause, Kay made the announcement represented as line 1. Fragment 7.1 – extract #1: Shan = Shanka 1 Kay: mi lef a-a lee:di pikni a- I left the lady’s children at 2 Shan: huu lee:dii? What ‘lady’? 3 Kay: Satya pikni a Aisha Satya’s children at Isha’s

In her report in line 1, Kay uses the identification a-a leedi piknii which I have glossed as ‘the lady’s children.’ The form used here is exactly parallel to that used in 7.2. However, in the instance before us the position is quite different. Recall that when Rohan said, yu gatu noo a mangoo chrii, ‘You have to know that mango tree,’ he had, in the just prior talk, introduced the particular mango tree to which he meant to refer. So, in that instance, Rohan used a locally subsequent form in a locally subsequent position. Here, on the other hand, the same form is used in what is, on the face of it at least, a locally initial position. Schegloff (1996a: 451) discusses two examples of locally subsequent reference forms in initial position. He notes that on the day Kennedy was assassinated, it was possible to observe people approaching unacquainted others and asking, “Is he still alive?” In that case, a locally subsequent form in locally initial position served, “as a striking embodiment of community for each speaker presumed. . . what was ‘on the mind’ of the other.” As a second example, Schegloff notes that on one’s return home from a meeting which has been jointly anticipated by a husband and wife, a spouse may ask, “so what did he

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance 

say?” With that use of a locally subsequent reference form in a locally initial reference position the inquirer can bring off that this has “been on my mind throughout the interim,” that this is, in effect, a continuation of the earlier conversation (1996a: 451). Schegloff notes, then, such positions are not “objective” but are, rather, reflexively constituted by the talk which occurs within them. “The so-called ‘continuity’ or ‘coherence’ of the talk is an enacted, interpreted and co-constructed affair, not an entirely inherited or predetermined one. By use of a locally subsequent reference form a speaker can – within limits – seek to bring off continuity across an intervening hiatus” (Schegloff 1996a: 451–452). And of course that can fail where the recipient is unable to solve the reference. Now if ‘continuity,’ ‘community,’ ‘my mind is with you,’ are the regular outcomes of successful mismatches, what can participants infer from a recipient’s failure to solve, and hence understand, such a usage? By interrupting Kay’s in-progress report with, huu leedi ‘what lady?’, Shanka indicates trouble in locating a unique referent for this identification on the basis of what is available to her. Kay’s reference to, a leedi ‘that lady’s’ suggests the existence of some shared background knowledge concerning Kay’s recent activity which might provide for the intelligibility of the identification. Shanka’s repair initiator, huu leedi ‘what lady?’ denies the existence of such shared knowledge and the question which follows in line 4, we shi-Satya ‘where is she-Satya?’ further elaborates that denial. Note also that Shanka does not wait for Kay to reach the possible completion of her turn. Rather she treats repair of the identification as a priority item – as something that needs to get done before the telling can proceed. In this way she exposes the problematic attribution of shared background knowledge implicit in Kay’s locally subsequent form in initial position. In two short turns at talk Shanka has thus displayed her ignorance of the situation which Kay seeks to report. In this respect she situates herself as one who is uninformed regarding the substance of the tellable. With her talk at line 7, Kay orients to this display of ignorance. We may note then that by formatting the question as a negative interrogative (dem na lak op Rishii? ‘Did they not lock up Rishi?’) Kay proposes that this is something Shanka already knows and should be able to confirm. It would perhaps not be going to far to say that the formatting of the question suggests that Shanka is being obtuse (see Heritage 2002 on negative questions).

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Questions and answers At line 4, Shanka has an opportunity to respond to Kay’s announcement. As noted in Chapter 5, such a question proposes that the questioner is uninformed about the substantive matters to which the inquiry is addressed. What then does Shanka propose to be uninformed about through the use of this question? Notice that she does not ask why Kay left the children at Isha’s. Rather she infers from Kay’s talk that Satya (whose children Kay says she has left) has gone out and, for this reason, left the children with Kay. It is important to see that this is an inference from what Kay has said and that this inference licenses the question which is the vehicle for Shanka’s display of ignorance. In asking specifically about Satya’s whereabouts, Shanka claims to be unaware of the breaking scandal. Shanka’s talk here then seems specifically designed to display her ignorance about the particular matters which Kay is invoking. As noted earlier, Kay hears Shanka’s talk in just this way. In line 7 she confronts Shanka asking – dem na lak op Rishi? ‘Did they not lock up Rishi?’ With this turn, Kay addresses the issue of what Shanka does or does not know. The design of this turn – a negative interrogative – suggests that both Kay and Shanka already know that Rishi has been locked up. Kay is here asserting something that she knows to be the case and packaging it to invite confirmation. Kay then seems to be suggesting that Shanka is being obtuse – that she understands more than she is letting on. Shanka’s turns in line 8 and 12 contrast with her carefully constructed displays of ignorance in preceding turns. Consider then Shanka’s dem kech am we? ‘Where did they catch him?’ in this respect. Not only does this not express surprise at the report to which it responds, it further displays an understanding of the circumstances which exceeds what Kay has told her. Specifically, in speaking of Rishi being “caught” Shanka indicates that she knows he was evading the police. Furthermore, at line 12, Shanka’s wa rilii hapm ‘what really happened’ suggests that a less than definitive account of what happened is already in circulation. Shanka’s use of “really” and “say” marks a contrast between what she already knows and what she is attempting to discover from Kay. While these questions convey Shanka’s limited access to the events in question they nevertheless also imply that Kay may be able to provide a definitive or at least more accurate account.

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance 

In short Shanka uses question-design first to propose ignorance and subsequently to position herself as one who though not completely ignorant is nevertheless relatively uninformed in comparison to Kay. In combination with the repair of person-referring forms, Shanka uses question-design to cultivate ignorance as a public, interactionally grounded and consequential phenomenon.

Evidence and practical epistemology So far we have considered only the participants’ orientation to the social distribution of knowledge in this fragment. As the talk continues, Shanka and Kay address another aspect of epistemology – the sources and bases of knowledge, the circumstances under which it is considered valid. Such issues are not solely the concern of lawyers, scientists and philosophers – in the course of their everyday lives, ordinary members of any society must engage these issues in both mundane and specialized reasoning. Examination of talk shows that claims to know are situated within particular language games – organized uses of language – and that the criteria for assessing the truthfulness and validity of a statement differ according to the situational particulars of the activity. Shanka’s wa rilii hapm – wa dem se? ‘what really happened – what did they say?’ provides a convenient starting point for our discussion of this issue. We have noted that, through the use of “really” and “say”, Shanka here suggests a contrast between two accounts of what happened. Fragment 7.1 – extract #6: Shan = Shanka 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Shan: soo wa-a a wa rilii hapm?= =wa dem see? Kay: ii see dem kom-(kom) mit ke-kech am in yu ruum Shan: huu dem? kech am in mii room?= [=huu dem? Kay: [=beebii sing tuu Shan: -oo- beebii sing kom he? Kay: beebii sing see shi bin haid onda di bed Shan: beebii sing bin hia fo sii da?= Kay: =mii na noo gya::l

so what really happened? What did they say? He said that they came and caught him in your room. Who is ‘them’? They caught him in my room? Who is ‘them’? Baby Singh too. Oh - Baby Singh came here? Baby Singh said that she was hiding under the bed. Baby Singh was here to see that? I don’t know dear.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Telling 1:

Baby Singh

Chapter 7. Cultivated ignorance 

Lines 21–22 beebi sing see shi bin haid onda di bed

“Baby Singh said she was hiding under the bed”

trast between reliable/valid knowledge based on first hand observation on the one hand and rumor or gossip on the other.

Policeman Telling 2:

Policeman Kay

Telling 3:

Kay Shanka

Lines 13, 14–15 “What did they say?” wa dem see? ii see dem kom-kom mit “He said that they came and caught him in your room.” ke-kech in yu ruum Lines 23–25 beebi sing see hia fo sii da mii na noo gyal

“Baby Singh was here to see that?” “I don’t know dear.”

Conclusions Sociological and anthropological approaches to knowledge have been almost exclusively concerned with expertise. A classic statement in this regard is Schutz’s “The well-informed citizen.” Although Schutz (1964: 120) begins by suggesting that: an outstanding feature of a man’s life in the modern world is his conviction that his life-world as a whole is neither fully understood by himself nor fully understandable to any of his fellow men

Figure 7.1 Three laminated tellings

and further (1964: 120) that At line 14–15, Kay answers the question by selecting and repeating one of the two evidential frames that Shanka used in constructing her inquiry (see, ‘say’). As was noted earlier, Kay’s answering turn contains a person-referring form which Shanka will subsequently treat as non-transparent. Notice also the way in which her self-repair of miit ‘meet’ by kech ‘catch’ also foreshadows trouble. There are a number of ways in which Kay’s talk might be treated as epistemically problematic. Note then that there are three distinct yet laminated tellings implicated in the talk. The earliest of these involves Baby Singh telling the Police. The next in the series consists of the police telling Kay. The third is the immediate context in which Kay is talking to Shanka. In an effort to undercut the accusation being made, Shanka might have attacked the epistemological foundations of any one of these tellings. That is, she might have questioned whether Kay rightly understood what the police were telling her or, at least, whether she was accurately reporting it to Shanka. But instead Shanka questions the source of the knowledge – its basis in first-hand observation. In asking Beebi Sing bin he fo sii da? ‘Baby Singh was here to see that?’ and Beebi Sing kom he ‘Baby Singh came here’, Shanka impugns the evidential basis of telling 1. The design of her question suggests that truthful statements in this case are based on first hand observational knowledge. These are the standards of justified belief that she proposes. By eliciting the identity of the witness, Shanka is able to shake the epistemological foundations of the charge. In this way, Shanka sets up a con-

the fact that we do not understand the why and the how of their working and that we do not know anything of their origin does not hinder us from dealing undisturbed with situations, things and persons.

he then quickly turns his attention to questions of relative expertise. He writes (1964: 121): it is clear that all the members of an in-group do not accept the same section of the world as granted beyond question and that each of them selects different elements of it as the object of further inquiry. Knowledge is socially distributed and the mechanism of this distribution can be made the subject matter of a sociological discipline.

Schutz insists that we see knowledge in terms of social relations, for instance, between those who know and those who don’t, between those entitled to speak and those who seek them out. As such, Schutz draws our attention to the social organization built up in and through the distribution of knowledge. Although Schutz usefully points out the consequences of not-knowing and not-understanding for practical action he does not analyze the absence of knowledge as a phenomenon in its own right. This and the previous chapter have attempted to do just this. Knowing is not opposed to some simple state of not-knowing. On the contrary, in the cases we have examined here the absence of knowledge is a socially organized and deeply consequential public phenomenon. In the last chapter, Sun’s not knowing was made manifest in uncertainty about how to proceed. In the present case, Shanka displayed her own ignorance about events which were claimed to take place prior to the

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

interactional encounter. Although both might be seen as “not-knowing” they are far from equivalent and, in fact, emerged as publicly available phenomena in very different interactional contexts. Not-knowing, like knowing, is then a highly structured social object which participants locate and make visible in and through organized practices of talk-in-interaction.

Chapter 8

Reminiscing local history

“I know” often means: I have the proper grounds for my statement. So if the other person is acquainted with the language-game, he would admit that I know. The other, if he is acquainted with the language-game, must be able to imagine how one may know something of the kind. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Section 18)

Introduction This and the next chapter examine a particular domain of knowledge; one setting in which it is activated and the particular practices of speaking through which it is both exhibited and organized. For the purposes of this discussion the domain of knowledge will be referred to as “local history.” Substantively, this includes knowledge of village historical geography, genealogies as well as events of local importance. Like knowledge of ritual procedures discussed in Chapter 6, local historical knowledge is controlled by a select group of villagers. However, unlike ritual knowledge, it is not esoteric and access to local historical knowledge is not controlled by elaborate initiation and socialization mechanisms. This chapter and the next examine how, in the absence of such institutionalized mechanisms, access to local historical knowledge as well as rights to tell it are strictly regulated. We will see that, as is the case for other forms of knowledge, first-hand direct access as a witness to the events in question is routinely understood by the participants as the proper epistemic basis of local historical knowledge – this is the locally accountable standard of justification. When the events in question took place sometime in the past this has an obvious consequence, an association of access with age. Challenges to local historical knowledge routinely take the form of questions about the claimant’s age. In line with Evans-Pritchard’s suggestion that we should be studying behaviour and not belief, the discussion focuses not so much on the domain of knowledge as on the situated activities within which it is articulated. This focus

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Talk and Practical Epistemology

brings into view the underlying epistemic principles. This and the next chapter then examine varieties of story-telling. While these stories involve accounts of past events, they are told in the company of others who already know and, in many cases, also have rights to tell those events. The telling thus becomes a collaborative and collective project. In many cases then people are not so much engaged in telling local history as they are in reminiscing it. In Chapter 2, I discussed Sacks’ lecture entitled “Spouse Talk” (Sacks 1995 Vol. II: 437–443). There Sacks notes a recurrent problem for spouses was that they frequently find themselves listening to a story that they have already heard or a story about events in which they themselves took part. As such, one typical listening technique is not available to them. Sacks formulates this technique as an instruction: “listen to a story to find out if a similar thing or the same thing happened to you. At the end of the story, if you’ve found such a thing, tell it.” As discussed in Chapter 2, Sacks suggested that spouses have developed a solution to the problem: a spouse listens precisely to the story they already know, for its more or less correct presentation and engages in monitoring it – as listeners should – utterance-by-utterance. But now however, for whether it’s correctly presented as they know it. If not, what they do is put in corrections at the proper places.

Sacks concludes the lecture by noting that the problem is not limited to spouses and is in fact typical of certain recurrent standardized situations. This situation also occurs when groups of people who are currently friends and also had a past together, are reminiscing together. Then, too, one finds some party telling a story they all know – indeed, that’s the nature of the reminiscence – and the others engaged in modifications and elaborations of the story being told. Occasions of reminiscing are, then, specifically occasions in which the general rule, ‘don’t tell what the others know’ is lifted, and where it’s lifted its consequence is precisely the consequence that occurs for spouses generally.

One way in which the activity of reminiscing is distinguished from other kinds of story-telling is that the former typically involves recipients who are knowledgeable with respect to the events being told. There is another important contrast. A person may tell a story that they’ve heard from others or that is otherwise in circulation among a community of tellers. While one who has actually witnessed the events may have greater epistemic rights to tell the story, such rights are not exclusive to such witnesses. Reminiscing, on the other hand, is properly done by two or more people who, together, witnessed or experienced the tellable events. In such a situation the co-participants can monitor

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history

the collective telling to see that it is being remembered and reported accurately. One who has only heard about the events but did not themselves participate in them cannot engage in this practice of reminiscing since they do not have an independent epistemic basis upon which such assessments might be grounded. Participants alternately reminisce local history with informed recipients and tell local history to uninformed recipients in the materials to be examined in this chapter. A central argument of this book is that social organization is built in and through the resulting texture of unevenly distributed knowledge and the materials examined in this chapter provide a particularly clear illustration. Through collective engagement in the situated activities of reminiscing the co-participants selectively acknowledge and ratify membership in the category of age mates. Age mates are men who consider themselves to be one age and of equivalent status, in the local vernacular they are grow-match. Participation in the activity makes visible this salient feature of local social organization. As will be seen in the next chapter, members orient to this and routinely police participation in the activity of reminiscing on the basis that such involvement presupposes that participants belong to the same age-graded set. These activities are dominated by men (see Sidnell 2003b). This is not an accidental feature of the activity – rather, women are systematically excluded from the activities of telling and reminiscing local history. As discussed in Chapter 3, one outcome of the predominant pattern of village exogamy and patrilocal residence is that an adult woman rarely lives in the village where she was born and grew to maturity. Nor do these women find themselves living in close proximity to those with whom they share childhood experiences since the in-marrying wives of a village do not come from a single area. As such, there are few opportunities for women to reminisce local histories. They are, therefore, systematically excluded from participation in the most locally significant form of historical imagining and, at the same time, from the forms of social organization that participation in these activities makes possible.1 Although women do talk about their mati, they do not form age-graded sets or peer-crews as the men do. Age-mates form, for the men, a vital network of relations. Members of one’s crew can be called on to assist in ritual and other kinds of work, can be expected to lend support in disputes and, in general, crew members maintain relations of generalized reciprocity exchanging provisions, services and even cash in some cases. Women are not only excluded from these activities in the ways just discussed, but are, moreover, excluded from the settings in which they take place. Men tell and reminisce local history in the rumshop. As noted in Chapter 3, this a space which they dominate. Before considering the organization of talk



 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history

in which men tell and reminisce local history, we will first examine, in some detail, the managed production of the rumshop as an exclusively male-domain (see Sidnell 2003b).

Constructing and managing male-exclusivity in the rumshop On many occasions, women are, in fact, present within the space of the rumshop. Despite their presence, both the rule, “a respectable woman does not enter the rumshop,” and the perceived respectability of the women involved are preserved, in such cases, through various secondary accounting practices. In particular, participants work to maintain the sense in which women in such situations, while physically present, can be seen to be excluded from the framework of ongoing, exclusively-male, activity. So, for example, if a woman works in the rumshop, serving rum over the counter or perhaps cooking fried fish a short distance away, she is routinely disattended by the men except in the course of those activities where she must be engaged – e.g. in order to request the rum or to pay for it. This produced disattention operates to preserve the recognizability of the setting as an exclusively male domain. When men do address their talk to co-present women in the rumshop, both the design of the talk and the manner in which it is fitted to the sequential organization of ongoing action work to preserve the for all-practical-purposes male-exclusivity of the setting. Consider in this respect the following example, one of the few cases I have of talk directed to a woman in the rumshop. Two relatively independent courses of action are being pursued in the talk represented by the transcript given as fragment 8.1. On the one hand, Rohan and John are challenging Jaio to substantiate a claim he has made (lines 9–11, 18, 21, 29– 31), which, as they understand it, contains the questionable assertion that Jaio knew a now deceased resident of the village. When Jaio does not answer their questions in a way that they find satisfactory (at line 16) they proceed to mock him (through imitation, lines 17, 26–27, see also Sidnell 2000 and Chapter 9). We are interested at present in the quite distinct line of action implemented in Jaj’s talk which emerges more or less simultaneously with the one just described. Jaj has found that there is no ice at the table and attempts to procure some through Sam’s wife, Baby, who happened to be within earshot at the time. Fragment 8.1 (Tape 66:(B):21.06-): Ja = Jaio, Ro = Rohan, Jo = John, Ra = Ramish 1 2 3

Ja: Ro:

yu na sopoos to bii moor dan foor yiir fo mii.= =di man na laik fu hiir

You’re not supposed to be more than four years older than me. The man doesn’t like to hear

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

s-laang taim stoorii. Jaj:→ ee. Sam waif. kom. Ro: nobadii na arguu hia fu fait. Jaj:→ kom. Ro: yuu noo, mis mana? aks-a aks am if i noo mis mana Jo: ( ) boloo shit op batii ??: hhhh Jo: di-aa jos di oda dee.

old time story. Hey. Sam’s wife. Come. Nobody’s arguing here to start a fight Come. Do you know who Miss Manners is? Ask-a, Ask him. If he knows Miss Manners. Bolo shit his pants hhhh the-aa just the other day

15 16 17 18 19 20

Jaj:→ Ja: Jo: Ro: Jaj:→ Jo:

( ) rait? Mis mana darsii moma or =ya darsii muma. eh he we shi bin liv den? EE. miz: bee:bii: [a darsii muma

Miss Manners is Darcy’s mother or Yeah, Darcy’s mother Ah-ha Where did she live then? HEY Miss Baby is Darcy’s mother

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ro: Ja:

[we shi bin liv? Where did she live? oo mi-am-tchhOh my-uhm-tchh [nat am beebii muma not -uhm- Baby’s mother [pot a ais de Put the ice there huu ga chroo wid mii. Who will drink with me? miz beebi muma Miss Baby’s mother da-a-a mis mana that is Miss Manners [pot som ( ) Put some [eh-he. ah-ha we shi bin liv? Where did she live? [o da mi wan fu noo.o ] That’s what I want to know [we shi bin liv.] Where did she live? [o som moor aiso ] Some more ice [ii noo piiopl] He knows people [weer shi woz] living? Where was she living? kaal fo wan bool ais. Call for a bowl of ice hee(hhh)? Huh?

Ra: Jaj: Jo: Ra: Ro:

Jo: Jaj: Ro: Jo: Jaj: Ro:

There are several ways in which the design of Jaj’s talk here displays an orientation to the gender-exclusive character of the setting and its constituent activities. We may begin by noting that the turn in question is a directive and stands at the boundary between the activities taking place at the table and those in the immediate surround. Jaj’s participation in the exclusively-male group at the table is a witnessable feature of the emergent setting. At the same time his talk in line 5 is specifically designed to establish contact with someone who is visibly not engaged in the activities taking place at the table. The rumshop activities are organized by reference to a normative mutual-exclusivity of men’s and women’s activities. We may ask then how Jaj’s talk is oriented to the problem of preserving that feature of the setting. The turn at line 5, is composed of three components each engaged in a particular kind of interactional work.



 Talk and Practical Epistemology Summons

ee.

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history Address

Sam waif.

Directive

kom.

“Hey. Sam’s wife. Come.”

Figure 8.1 Components of Jaj’s turn (line 5)

The first component is a summons – an action which requests a display of availability from a recipient (Schegloff 1968). A summons is an action that can be done either as the first pair part of its own summons-answer (pre-) sequence or as a component of a turn which is engaged in other interactional work (the summons usually occurs in turn-initial position). As Schegloff (in press: 53) notes: some utterance forms which serve as common pre-expansion first pair parts can also be deployed instead as initial parts of the first pair part turn of a base adjacency pair. [. . .] An important issue is involved here, . . ., and that is the possible trade-offs between turn-organization and sequence organization in getting various interactional jobs done. . .. [s]ome jobs can either have a sequence dedicated to them or can be done as part of a turn’s construction.

Here Jaj has opted to do the summons as a turn-component rather than as the first pair part of its own, separate summons-answer sequence. What does he accomplish by doing it this way? In his discussion of summons-answer sequences, Schegloff (1968) notes that a summons is fundamentally prefatory in so far as it projects further talk. Participants’ orientation to this feature of the summons is observable in deferrals such as, “wait a minute,” “not now,” and the like which convey a recipient’s unavailability for the talk which they take to be projected by the summons. In the summons-answer sequences Schegloff studied, the summons serves as a request for a display of availability and willingness to talk. In the canonical sequence (e.g. T1 = Name, T2 = “What?”), the recipient is provided with a place to display that availability, a place to show a willingness to go along with what is being proposed. Consider the examples given as fragments 8.2 and 8.3. In the first example presented below, Linda is caring for her neighbor’s child – Baby. She calls over the fence to Baby’s sister Kavita who answers Linda’s summons with a typical go-ahead response. Fragment 8.2 (61a): Li = Linda, Ka = Kavita 1 2

Li: Kavta: (1.0)

Kavta

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Kavta: Ka: eh:? Li: chroo di gyal touwi:l Ka: shi see shi na fai:n am.= =wach i wa:sh de:. Li: guforgu for am na:: Ka: ii: wet.

Kavta Yeah Throw over the girl’s towel. She said she couldn’t find it. Look, its there being washed. GetGo get it now. It’s wet.

In the example given as fragment 8.3, Kay’s summons interrupts Raja’s talk in progress. He displays an orientation to its prefatory character in the go-ahead response (at line 3). The response indicates, first, that Raja has suspended the activity he was engaged in and, secondly, that he is willing to act as recipient to the talk projected by the summons. Fragment 8.3 (34a): Ra = Raja, Se = Seeta 1

AK: ee [G]oo:bin?

Hey Raja?

2 3 3 4 5 6 7

Ra:

and ah Do you have my cutlass to clean this fish? Me? They have the cutlas up front there.

[a]naH:: AK: yu gat mii kotlas fu kliin dis fish Ra: mii? Se: dem ge di kotla:s a fron de.

In fragment 8.1, by contrast, Jaj does not build the summons as the first pair part of a pre-sequence and as such does not provide a place for an answer to it, rather he immediately launches into the next two components of his turn. This is significant in several ways. First, it suggests that the interaction that the summons projects is likely to be cursory and not open-ended. Secondly, by launching directly into the rest of the turn, Jaj subordinates the request for a public display of recipiency, conveyed by the summons, to the directive which follows. This is an intervention into an order of relevances such that it reformulates what Baby can take to be proposed as a proper next action on her part.2 Thirdly, and perhaps most important, the summons without the provision of an answer proposes that Baby should be available, that is, it does not question her availability, but demands it. The second component of this turn, “Sam Waif ” is likewise revealing. Rather than address this woman by her name, which he knows well, Jaj uses an address term that makes visible her relationship to one of the owners of the shop who is also a participant in the conversation underway at the table.3 The address term does not treat the woman as an individual in her own right but rather as an individual associated with one of the men with whom Jaj is drinking. So, in formulating Baby in this way, Jaj displays a link between the recipient

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

for his talk and a legitimate participant in the rumshop activities (Sam). Finally, the directive component of the turn (kom) displays, to some extent at least, the warrant for talking to a woman in this context. It is not to engage in conversation but rather to have some task accomplished – a task which requires her to move into close proximity. Relatedly, the preferred response to a directive such as kom “come” is non-vocal. As such, it is possible for Baby to properly respond to Jaj’s talk without becoming publicly engaged in the ongoing course of the activities taking place at the table. So Jaj has designed his talk here to preserve the observable male-exclusivity of the activity. While summonses in other contexts (e.g. 8.2, 8.3) call for a vocal response and project further talk, Jaj builds in additional turn components so as to provide for a non-vocal response from the recipient. Jaj’s later talk is further suggestive in that, when his directive (reissued in line 8) is left unanswered, he soon abandons this course of action. After a second and again unsuccessful attempt to summon Baby (line 19), Jaj re-engages the course of action underway at the table (line 25). In line 33 Jaj publicly notices a need for ice and then somewhat ambiguously directs Ramish to “call for a bowl of ice” (line 34).4 In this way he avoids further interaction with the woman and furthermore avoids topicalizing her in his own talk. Jaj’s talk directed to Baby should be contrasted with his talk in, for instance, line 25. While his talk to the co-present woman is specifically designed to provide for only minimal further interaction, that directed to the co-present men invites collaborative activity (e.g. toasting, drinking). While analysis in the preceding has focused on the design of Jaj’s talk, one could argue that Baby is actively engaged in preserving the exclusively male character of the setting also. Baby and others are engaged in a set of activities of which these recordings provide only brief glimpses. The recordings thus do not provide an adequate basis for an analysis of what is going on in this respect. However, it is possible to see that, for whatever reason, Baby fails to hear, or perhaps more to the point, she withholds any audible acknowledgement of the talk directed to her. In this and other ways, then, women work to preserve the exclusivity of the setting, just as men do. It is the managed and produced non-engagement of co-present women in the two intertwined activities of drinking and talking which provides for and sustains the perceived male-exclusivity of the setting. That is to say, even when women can be said to be co-present given some definition of the here-now, that co-presence is not disruptive of the seen-at-a-glance, exclusively male, character of the setting as long as the women remain non-participants in the two focal activities of drinking and conversing. This peripheralization and exclu-

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history 

sion does not simply happen but is rather a situated accomplishment. It is the product of concerted interactional work.

Reminiscing as a situated activity At the heart of the exchange to be examined in the rest of this chapter is a story told by John primarily to Raja who, along with several other members of their crew, were taking a drink in the rumshop. Briefly, the story involves two central characters, the teller, John, and somebody these people refer to as Buddy’s Daddy (the formulation “Buddy’s Daddy” is discussed in Chapter 7).5 The larger segment of talk from which this fragment is extracted involves a series of stories in which Buddy’s Daddy is portrayed as a menacing antagonist (on stories in a series see Jefferson 1978; Ryave 1978). The fragment here begins with Ramish suggesting that, on occasion, someone got the better of BD (and his brothers).6 The story John then tells illustrates just this. According to John BD got his comeuppance because of his own predictable behavior. The young John – these events took place many years earlier – knew that if he was walking with a stick, BD would want it and insist that John give it to him. John prepared for this eventuality by putting one end of the stick in a latrine before he encountered BD. As predicted, BD grabbed the stick, took it away from John, and in the process the contents of the latrine were transferred to his hand. Despite the grotesque content, we can see that the story is in fact built quite artfully and with some subtlety despite a number of attempts to derail it. In particular, the byplay – surrounding the botanical knowledge implied by the use of a name chichilelee – presents a significant potential obstacle to the telling of the story. This section is more or less confined to lines 25–73 (although Jaj persists till the end of the telling). After John’s story reaches recognizable completion there follows a series of “second stories” which constitute a focal point for analysis here (lines 140 and following). Fragment 8.4 (RS:66b): Ra = Ramish, Raj = Raja, Jo = John, Ro = Rohan, Ja = Jaio, Chi = Chire 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ra: Jaj: Raj: Ra: Jaj: Jo: Raj: Jo:

Yaro prapa biit dem man, (tuu)∼ aal de fokin (leta) bodii. Wodiialii? tchh-bodi dadii. oo-ya [wan taim deer nou, [ya-a-a-a-a-aya-ii a bad bai.(.)

Yaro really beat them (too) All of those brothers Wodiialii? tchh- Buddy’s father Oh yeah Now one time Yaaaaa Yes, he was a bad man

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Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history

10 11 12 13 14

i a wikid kaal.(.) an yu ge wan lil pis stik an soo,(.) kom bai.(.) Sam: gi mi di fo:king [stik hi.

He’d call you with wicked intention and you have a little sitck or something “come boy” “give me the fucking stick here”

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Jaj:

“fucking stick here” You can tell him what he do with -uhmTonic in front with Sam

22 23 24

Jaj: [gud. Ro: wan slap an ii bos op [ii ( )

Good a slap and he bust ( )

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Jo:

[yu noo chichilelee? Ro: den mi sta tek af. ?: no. Raj: if yu tel mi bak wan neks - odinrii nemor it. Jo: beebii shuu. dee doz kaal am man. Ra: chichileelee a wan griin staak ting man (wid a bal) Jo: yu noo chichilelee? Sam: yea. mi na mos min nof= Ja: =a da eria de. Raj: oo. wan=wan wiid ya taak bou? ??: ai. Jo: n [o::.

Do you know what chichilelee is? Then I started to run No If you tell me another ordinary name for it “Baby’s shoes” they call it, man. Chichilelee is a Green stalk thing man (with a ball) Do you know what chichilelee is? Yeah, How could I not? There was a lot in that area there Oh. Is it a weed you are talking about? Yes No

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Raj: ??: Jo: Ro: Sam: Jo:

[oo-oo-aaa (na dakta feea fin ) wat rilii hapm, wan griin ting bai.= yea fel in dakta (swii) flowa plant rait bot ii-ii ting Raj: mmmm Jo: wel i doz bos wan la:ng (.) ting. Ro: bot ou i liifbot i iif nou= Jo: wen yu tek af da [skin,

Oh-oh-ahhh

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Sam: Ro: Jaj: Ro: Ja: ??: Ja:

Ro:

[foking stik hi. yu kyan tel am wa i du wid -amTanik in fron wid Sam? (0.2) wen [klap-wan bai

griin liif. griin liif [noo bot am, [griin opon red. wait. di ting red

when he gave a boy

What really happened It’s a thing with green leaves Yes, fell in the doctor’s a flower plant right but it’s mhhh Well it produces a long thing. But the leaves. But it’s leaves When you take off that skin

[griin liif. Green leaf Green leaf Green leaf No but - uhm Green on red White. The thing is red

64

laik a b [ord pepa. Jaj:

like a bird pepper

65 66 67 68 69. 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

[mi no noo wa nem chichilelee. Ra: i som an skont Ja: alrait di wan wa gii laik a bord pepa. Jaj: mi no noo [wa nem chicheeleelee. Ja: [ya Ra: (samwan ) Jo: =nou wen mi -mi kot wan Ro: i kyaan see Jaj: ah? Jo: wan aftanuun, (.) mi see [am gona laarn yu]

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ro: Jo: Jaj: Raj: Jo: Jaj: Jo: Ja:

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Jo: Sam: Jaj: Sam: Jo:

[af ( )] na sii de? huu se?= [= chichileelee de. [= yu na sii abi lachrin? abi lachrin don ool. ??: wa rang wid yuu? Jaj: le mi [shoo yu

Don’t you see there? Who says? That’s chichilelee there you never saw our latrine? The latrine was already old. What’s wrong with you? Let me show you

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

Jo: [mi pul out wan bood Jaj: if yu wan noo [wa neem chechileelee Jo: [mi jos mek so rait dong Raj: (an ) yu pul bak Jo: put am a kana Raj: di di tuu bood a duu di ting Jo: yu wok wid a ( ) an yu push am in a [a lachrin pit soo Jaj: [le mi sho yu Jo: fol a shit. Ro: (eva sins [( )

I pulled out a board If you want to know what chichilelee is I just went like this right down And you pulled it back? Put it in the corner The two boards did it. You work with and you push it in the latrine like this. Let me show you. It was full of shit. Ever since ( ) see bread..

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Jaj:

A black man A black man planted it. Well I went out on the road theabout seven o’clock. six-thirty, seven your (pl.) fence We were outWe use to live right here I used to trim them

[( )] a sens. flowa plant da yu tel yuself? yes. (di wee an ) mi mek soo. gu tek (w)an haf sii dem [jringk de nou.]

[wan blak man, wan blak man plant am. Jo: wel mi gu out a rood diobou sevn aklak siks torty - sevn= Jaj: aiyu fens Jo: abi de outabi liv rait hi.= Jaj: =mi oz chrim am.

I don’t know what chichilelee is. It’s some stupid thing. Alright the one that gives off like a bird pepper. I don’t know what chichilelee is. Yes. Someone... Now, when I-I cut one He can’t say it. What? One afternoon I said I’m goin to teach you a lesson. Flower plant. You told yourself that? Yes. The way I went like this Go take a half-bottle watch how they are drinking over there.

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history 

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

Raj: Jo: Ja: Jo: Ja: Chi: Jo:

ya mi noo de aiyu bin liv ee yu bai. outsaid a Kasim de. bring da stik le mi sii bai. ( ) ( ) mi se (.) ma:n na tek wee mi stik man. mi se hee. yu sii bai taim mi see hee ii mek [soo an ii hool am.]

129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

Chi: [( Jo: an ii jos mek soo shit de in ii han. Jaj: (chichileelee) Jo: oo skont man. shit de in ii han. na tek wee hool nada foking bodii stik. (.) wa woz ii op [tu todee

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

Chi: [(hooz) Sam: hee. wan taim Diizil biit am ba:d doo bai Ra: ii a plee foking bad man.= Sam: =Diizil biit bodii dadi skont rait a fr-in front a Mazjibit. le mi tel yutek out ii shuu::z. an ii bii:t ii skont.= Ro: =ii=teek=out=ii=shuuz an biit Mongkii tu∼ (0.2) jos in front de. Raj: dem teelii na don gu an biit wid foking shuuz.

Yes I know that you lived there. “Hey you boy” Outside of Kasim there. “Bring that stick let me see, boy.”

I said, “Man, don’t take away my stick man.” I said, “hey.” You see by the time I said “hey.” he went like this, and he held it.

)] and he just went like this. There was the shit in his hand. chichilelee Oh skont man. The shit was in his hand. Don’t take away any-fucking-body else’s stick. What was he up to today. Hey. One time Deezil beat him bad though boy. He used to pretend he was bad Deezil beat-up Buddy’s father right in front -in front of Mazjibit Let me tell you, he took off his shoes and he beat him.- ahh He took off his shoes and beat Monkey too just in front there. Those Tally’s are forever beating people with shoes.

Establishing activity-relevant alignments Our consideration of this fragment will begin with an examination of the way in which activity-relevant alignments of knowing-teller and unknowingrecipient are achieved over the course of the first 24 lines of talk. I want to suggest that one thing that is happening here is that the participants are aligning themselves as informed or uninformed with respect to the events John invokes and, in doing so, are proposing the kind of activity within which they might appropriately be told.

These men had been discussing a person that they refer to as Buddy’s Daddy. In the talk leading up to that represented by the transcript, BD has been the object of several negative assessments. In fact the group has reached a publicly ratified consensus regarding this man. At line 1, Ramish takes the theme of BD in a new direction by proposing that BD was beaten up by a man named Yaro. Ramish’s reference here is plural (dem) and Jaj elaborates on this in the next turn (aal de fokin (leta) bodii ‘All of those brothers’). Notice that Jaj designs his talk not only to accomplish these tasks but also to affiliate with what Ramish is saying. Specifically, by adding other people to the one that Ramish has mentioned and proposing a category to which they all belong (“the Leta brothers”), Jaj provides additional support for what Ramish is saying. Of concern to us here is the fact that by recompleting Ramish’s turn, Jaj shows that he is informed about the events that Ramish has invoked and, at the same time, indicates that he would not be an appropriate recipient for their telling. Moreover, by doing this as an alignment (rather than say a correction) Jaj ratifies Ramish’s own claim to know about such matters. Let us now consider the talk at line 4 and following to see the way in which the initial alignments of participants in terms of their informed or uninformed status is further elaborated. At line 4, Raja’s single word turn marked with upward intonation apparently targets Ramish’s person-referring form, dem (Yaro prapa biit dem man, ‘Yaro really beat them’), in line 1, as a trouble source and thus repairable (see Appendix). In this context such a repair initiator expresses the speaker’s uncertainty with respect to who it is that is being talked about. Ramish provides the repair in line 5 and, in line 8, Raja’s ya-a-a-a suggests that he has used this to locate a person that he knows. At the same time as Raja produces this third turn in the repair sequence John attempts to start a story with wan taim deer nou, ‘Now, one time’. Such a preface projects the telling of a specific encounter. However, John abandons this projected course of action and, in line 11, instead characterizes Buddy’s Daddy. This story’s beginning, soon abandoned, is quite different from considered that in Chapter 1. Compare then John’s wan taim deer nou ‘Now, one time’ with the example discussed in Chapter 1 and repeated here as 8.5. Fragment 8.5 (Tape 59aII): Sha = Shana 1 Sha: 2 → 3 Bat: 4 Sha: 5

yes: Bat, yu noo wa Chobii see::? wa hou Zarii: ron am til a lai:n wid kotla:s

Yes Bat You know what Chubby said? What? that Zari chased him to the line with a cutlass.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

In 8.5, the teller does not launch into the telling immediately. Rather the speaker produces a turn which is recognizably prefatory to that story and in so doing checks on the story’s newsworthiness for the projected recipient. In 8.4, by launching directly into the story without the provision of a preface, John conveys his own sense that the projected recipient, here Raja, is uninformed with respect to the events about which he intends to speak. Simply put there appears to be no question as to whether Raja knows or does not know the story. This turn is produced simultaneously with Raja’s response to Ramish’s repair – a very hearty success marker. So just as John is launching into a story whose telling presupposes that Raja is uninformed, Raja is producing an elaborate claim to recognize who it is that is being talked about. Although such alignments are not necessarily incompatible (i.e. Raja may know who is being talked about without knowing this story) there is nevertheless a potential alignment conflict implicated. By launching the story without a preface, John claims exclusive rights to know and tell this story if not with respect to all the co-participants at least with respect to the recipient (Raja). Raja’s own display of recognition then might be heard as adumbrating trouble in this respect. There is some evidence for this in so far as John abandons the turn containing this beginning and ends up initiating the story in an altogether different manner in the subsequent talk. Thus, rather than immediately begin a story about Buddy’s Daddy, John first assesses him and prefaces this with the agreement token ya ‘yeah’ – ya-ii a bad bai. i a wikid kaal. ‘Yes, he was a bad man He’d call you with wicked intention.’ In this way, John specifically acknowledges the earlier talk by Ramish and Jaj and ties his own contribution to theirs. As Heritage and Raymond (2005) have recently noted (see also Goodwin & Goodwin 1987) assessments imply epistemic access to the person or thing being assessed. In producing this assessment John is once again claiming epistemic access to Buddy’s Daddy and the events with which he is associated. However, unlike the story which he alone knows, the assessment format provides opportunities for others to coparticipate in the activity in intricate ways. In this respect, we may note that while John’s assessment (in lines 9 and 10) leads him into something which strongly resembles a story-telling, it is designed so as to allow, indeed invite, the supporting contributions and participation of the other co-participants. Whereas John’s talk in line 7 had projected the telling of a specific encounter, here his talk is designed to convey something generic, not limited to a specific occasion; quite the contrary this is a situation that John takes it others might recognize. This is conveyed in part through John’s use of you which invites the recipient to position themselves in this scene which John has char-

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history 

acterized in such a way as to make available for others to know. This is an invitation that both Sam and Jaj recognize and accept as displayed in their anticipatory completions (14, 15). As Sacks noted, anticipatory completion allows a recipient to display not only that they are listening (and understanding) the talk in progress but also that they can project its course. Here, the completion is in part invited by John’s selection of you. Sacks (1978: 257) mentions, in one of his lectures, a discussion of Gogol by Nabokov where Nabokov makes the point that, “[b]efore Gogol, if when the curtain rises, there’s a gun on the mantelpiece, you can be sure the gun will go off before the end of the play.” That is, features of the constructed setting routinely turn out to matter, and participants can and do inspect settings fully expecting that this will be the case. Something like this appears to be happening in the fragment under examination. John’s mention of the stick is surely not coincidental. Rather, Sam uses that reference to anticipate what John is getting at (line 14) before John says it. We have considered the way in which these participants talk in and around the beginning of the story so as to align themselves as informed or uninformed with respect to the events to be told. Before concluding this section, there is one further section of talk that merits consideration in this respect. At line 17, Rohan asks John, yu kyan tel am wa i du wid -am-Tanik in fron wid Sam? ‘You can tell him what he do with -uhm- Tonic in front with Sam?’ and goes on to further specify the occasion of which he speaks. Rohan’s turn here interestingly questions John’s ability to tell (inform) Raja about these events. Rohan is questioning the extent and breadth of John’s knowledge. We may note that Rohan provides a place at line 20 for John to take up the challenge and, when John remains silent, he further elaborates the story he is eliciting. I have argued that a basic issue running through the talk here has to do with entitlements and obligations to know and that these participants are aligning themselves as informed and uninformed with respect to the relevant people and events that figure in these, broadly speaking, historical accounts. Here we see Rohan’s orientation to just these issues. Rohan has formatted his turn as a challenge which suggests possible limits to what John knows. Moreover, by formulating the activity underway using the verb construction tel am ‘tell him’ Rohan quite clearly implies that Raja – the recipient of John’s talk – is in a position to be informed. Finally, Rohan displays his own, independent knowledge of these events by citing witnessable details of the scene which he challenges John to tell. What is more, by formatting this as a challenge he suggests that he occupies a position of greater epistemic authority from which he can evaluate the adequacy and accuracy of any account which John might offer.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

To summarize, the talk in these first few lines establishes participants’s alignments as informed or as uniformed vis-à-vis the events to be reported. Furthermore, in the details of their talk the men are differentiated further in terms of the degree of epistemic authority they claim.

Maintaining and displaying alignments across the telling These alignments are not simply established at the story’s beginning and, by virtue of that, stable across the telling. Rather, participants maintain a turnby-turn orientation to this issue of who knows what and design their talk in such a way that it displays that orientation. Furthermore, participants do not treat the story-events as a single, unanalyzable and homogeneous chunk but rather as composing a heterogenous set of persons, places, events, objects and actions, knowledge of which is differentially distributed. Thus the alignments established at the beginning of a story may shift through the course of its telling as different persons, places etc. come into focus. Moreover, even if alignments are relatively stable, participants work to publicly maintain them across the course of the telling. Primary recipients may talk in such a way as to show not only that they are following and understanding the talk-in-progress but also that they continue to be informed by it. Consider then the talk at lines 25–73. Disattending Rohan’s challenge begun at line 17, John asks Raja at line 25–26 yu noo chichilelee? ‘Do you know what chichilelee is?’ Given its place in the sequence, the participants can presumably see in this otherwise seemingly out of place question, a task that needs to be accomplished before the telling can proceed in earnest. Yu noo X ‘Do you know X’ is a typical way in which prospective tellers can check on the recognizability of a referent identification (see Chapter 7). Tellers routinely treat recipient’s recognition of some person or object as necessary to the understanding of their story. So in this way John has made the progress of the story hinge upon Raja’s ability to recognize a plant named chichilelee. Raja’s, if yu tel mi bak wan neks – odinrii nemor it. ‘If you tell me another ordinary name for it’ defers a negative or positive response to John’s question and leads to a significant elaboration of this prefatory sequence. We won’t deal with all the talk surrounding the identification and recognition of chichilelee. On the face of it the knowledge involved here seems rather different from that we discussed earlier. It has so far been suggested that knowledge of past events is very often grounded in first-hand access – in occasions of witnessing those events. Displays of such knowledge become indices of comembership in the group of age-mates. Botanical knowledge of the sort being

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history 

invoked here would appear rather different in this respect. However, if we turn to consider the way in which these participants actually talk about this plant, we may find that this is not the case. Let us consider, then, Raja’s response to this in more detail. Note that Raja suggests that he might recognize an ordinary name for this plant even if he does not recognize the one given. Now we can ask what kind of opposition Raja is invoking here. In order to answer this question, we should turn to consider the “ordinary” name actually given in line 31–32 – beebii shuu ‘Baby’s Shoe.’ This name is transparently derived from English whereas chichilelee is not.7 As such, it would seem that the participants are here drawing a contrast between an ordinary, English-derived and commonly used name on the one hand and one that is archaic, esoteric and not derived from English on the other. By requesting an “ordinary” name, Raja then positions himself as one who does not have access to the kinds of esoteric knowledge with which such names are associated – knowledge which the “older heads” of the village might be expected to possess. Consider also the sequence beginning at line 36. Here, having secured a less-than adequate display of recognition from Raja, John turns to Sam to ask if he knows this plant chichilelee. Sam answers with absolute certainty saying, yea. mi na mos ‘Yeah, How could I not?’ With this, Sam suggests that it would be quite impossible for him not to know the plant. Such an emphatic response is remarkable and at its completion Sam begins to produce an account for his use of this expression. We may note that Sam’s min nof ‘There was a lot’ situates the epistemic grounds of his certainty in some past set of affairs. In doing so, he transforms the activity of the moment from one concerned with identifying and recognizing chichilelee to one concerned with remembering something about the local geographic history and ecology of the village. Thus, with this min nof, Sam proposes that the task John has set first for Raja and now for him might be accomplished ostensively, through first hand experience with public, empirical features of the world, rather than by recourse to an abstract, cognitive system of classification. Furthermore, in prefacing this with mi na mos ‘how could I not?’ Sam suggests that John’s question is inapposite and that he should know that Sam will be able to identify the plant. If Sam’s turn suggests that the problem of identification might be solved through recourse to memories which he and others share, Jaio’s anticipatory completion a da eeria de ‘in that area there’ further elaborates this. Jaio’s formulation of the location is highly indexical and in that sense suggests that the co-participants should fill in the values of deictic da an de by drawing on a stock of shared knowledge in order to find the particular place he is talking about.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

So by the design of their talk, Sam, Jaio and Raja actively manage the alignments of knowing and unknowing recipients with respect to John’s telling. Raja continues to situate himself as the primary, unknowing recipient for John’s story throughout the course of its telling. His talk at lines 41–44, 51, 82, 100– 102 accomplishes the two tasks set for a story’s recipient. First, by the timing of his contributions, Raja shows that he is monitoring the story’s progress on a turn-by-turn basis. Secondly, by asking questions such as da yu tel yuself? ‘You told yourself that?’ at line 82 Raja not only demonstrates that he is understanding the story, but also shows that he is being informed by it.

Concluding, evaluating and following up the story In several places in his lectures Sacks notes that, upon completion of a story in conversation, a response from the recipient is due. In responding in the appropriate place with an appropriate turn the recipient not only displays their monitoring of the story’s progress (i.e. that it has reached completion) but also their understanding of its sense, the reason it was told in the first place. Compare in this respect the way in which laughter, expressions of sympathy, displays of surprise or disbelief each convey a distinct sense on the part of the recipient as to why the story was told – what its upshot is. One of the things that recipients routinely do upon completion of a story is tell another story, not just any story but one that conveys their understanding of the first. These second stories, according to Sacks, offer recipients a way to show their detailed understanding of a first story and also their particular sense of the import of its telling, at this juncture, in this conversation. A first question we may ask is how John, in fact, concludes his story – how he makes his story’s conclusion something that his recipients can recognize. This is an issue of some importance if only for the basic reason that the story’s conclusion should coincide with the initiation of another extended turn-at-talk or a resumption of the turn-taking machinery whose operation has been suspended to allow for the telling of John’s story. If neither of these things happen their absence and the resulting silence could be heard as reflecting the participants’ failure to understand or appreciate the now-concluded story. As noted earlier, John does not begin the story with a preface. Such prefaces often provide resources to be used by recipients to locate the story’s ending – that is they indicate what it will take for the projected telling to reach completion. In this case, John does not provide such a preface. What resources for locating the story’s completion does he provide? Let us note that the recipients can find in the talk at line 121 something they have heard before. Moreover at 124–131 the

Chapter 8. Reminiscing local history 

details which John has provided, that is the stick, the latrine, Buddy’s Daddy’s capriciousness are brought together in a single tightly organized event. Here, with bai taim mi see hee ‘by the time I said ‘hey.”, John artfully builds a time signature into the telling against which the temporally unfolding character of the narrated events may be calibrated. The climax of action is followed by an evaluation and statement of the story’s point or moral. In fact John has provided some clues which his co-participants might use to find both the point and the conclusion of the story. So, at line 77–78, John says wan aftanuun, (.) mi see am gona laarn yu a sens ‘One afternoon I said I’m goin to teach you a lesson.’ With this John indicates the kind of story this is. And notice that John formats the “lesson” so as to make it easily recognizable as such na tek wee hool nada foking bodii stik ‘Don’t take away any-fucking-body else’s stick.’ This is precisely the lesson he has taught Buddy’s Daddy. Upon completion of John’s story, Sam launches his own, responsive second story with the words, ‘Hey, one time Diesel beat him bad, though.’ In this turn, Sam, establishes a contrast between his projected story and the one that has just been told by John through the use of “though.” At the same time Sam ties his story to the one that precedes it through the use of anaphora (am ‘him’). Sam proceeds to tell a story in which Buddy Daddy receives a public beating. In some significant respects, John’s story is built around his own involvement in the events he narrates. Here then, his own personal biography is worked into the organization of the story. Now it may appear that Sam’s story does not involve personal biography in the same way; after all, the characters are now Buddy’s Daddy and Diesel. However, although Sam does not explicitly make himself a character in his story, he implicates himself as a witness. Sam’s citing of a place where the events took place and the manner in which they were done (beat him bad, take out his shoes) index his position as a witness to them. In this sense Sam’s story involves the swapping-off of biographical knowledge with John. Sam has heard in John’s talk both particular details (i.e. the characters and what happened to them) as well as the more general theme (someone “getting the better” of this particular character) and uses those features to build a responsive story – one that displays his own understanding of John’s story and his access to similar and more or less contemporaneous events. We noted that, throughout the telling of John’s story, Sam situated himself as one informed with respect to the people, places, and events involved in the story. Sam’s second story is consistent with such an alignment. By citing a similar incident, involving an overlapping set of characters, Sam displays similar or at least comparable access to the local history which John is telling. Compare then Raja’s talk at the story’s completion. As John’s primary recipient, a

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

response to the story is particularly due from Raja. However, as we have seen these co-participants do not accord Raja epistemic rights to talk about the relevant storyable events. In that sense, Raja is not in a position to tell a second story like the one told by Sam. However, Raja does manage to make a contribution to the talk. Rather than ground what he says in personal, first-hand access to some set of relevant tellable events, Raja casts his contribution as common knowledge. Dem teelii na don gu an biit wid foking shuuz ‘Those Tally’s are forever beating people with shoes’ affiliates with what Sam and Rohan have said (their second stories to John’s first) without having to cite any specific happening which Raja has witnessed. In this way Raja maintains his alignment as uniformed vis-à-vis the local historical specifics to the very conclusion of the story and into the next stretch of talk.

Conclusions In this chapter we have seen that issues of epistemic access are centrally implicated in the telling of stories. These men tell, or reminisce, local history as narratives based on first-hand access to the relevant events. Because these events took place in the past, those who are able to legitimately participate in these tellings display in doing so their membership in a group of age-mates. The activities of telling and reminiscing then provide for the visibility and on-going relevance of a particular form of social organization. The analysis has concentrated attention on one particular telling and the practices of speaking through which participants claim epistemic access and so situate themselves as informed or uninformed with respect to the events being recounted. The next chapter will extend the analysis by looking at cases in which claims to epistemic access are challenged. In examining such challenges we will extend the analysis of the present chapter further in two ways. First, we will be able to see with greater clarity the character of the epistemic claims being made and the practices of speaking which are used to make them. Secondly, the inferences regarding membership in the group of age-mates, that is the crucial connection between epistemic access and age, will come more fully into focus.

Chapter 9

Policing knowledge

Introduction In the previous chapter we have seen that conversationalists in the rumshop talk in ways which display knowledge of past events. In talking together these men not only show themselves to be more or less knowledgeable, they locate themselves in past events and a local history of the village. Participation in the activities of telling and reminiscing local history thus becomes an index of membership in the group of age-mates. These activities provide for the visibility of an important aspect of local social organization. The present chapter extends the analysis of the previous one by examining cases in which claims to knowledge and associated claims to group membership are challenged. I first discuss the central importance of story-telling. As noted in Chapter 8, stories frequently involve the teller as a witness, and because of this they offer their tellers opportunities to locate themselves in past events. Accordingly, I consider the way story-tellers situate themselves in the events which they narrate. I then move to consider the various forms of coparticipation in story-telling. Stories are often not told by a single individual.1 Rather, they frequently depend on the contributions of others and both the role of story teller and the role of recipient may be distributed across several of the co-participants. This then allows a number of conversationalists to display knowledge through co-participation in a single story-telling. Knowledgedisplays are also collaborative projects and can either be ratified or challenged. In many cases a participant is characterized as knowledgeable by the design of a turn which is addressed to them. In the conversations at the rumshop the way in which a turn is designed for its recipient becomes a vehicle for making various aspects local social organization visible.

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Chapter 9. Policing knowledge 

Locating the story-teller in past events In the previous chapter we considered questions of epistemic access as they are implicated in the telling of stories. However, we did not consider in any detail, the character of the epistemic claims being made in the course of a story’s telling. That is to say, although we saw that participants oriented to a situation in which knowledge of the tellable events was unevenly distributed, we did not ask about the epistemological bases of such knowledge. However, we did see that John situated himself as a character in the story that he told. In this way recipients could see that John knew this story by virtue of having been a participant in the relevant events. As Sacks notes, participation in some set of events confers strong rights to tell the story of those events. Knowledge in this case is treated as epistemically grounded in first-hand access. With this in mind we may now turn to consider the second story Sam tells upon completion of John’s first. As we have seen, Sam, the principal teller here, fits his story to the one which came before it by marking it as contrastive with doo “though”. Fragment 9.1: Ra = Ramish, Ro = Rohan, Raj = Raja 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155

Sam: hee. wan taim Diizil biit am ba:d doo bai Ra: ii a plee foking bad man.= Sam: =Diizil biit bodii dadi skont rait a fr-in front a Mazjibit. le mi tel yutek out ii shuu::z. an ii bii:t ii skont.= Ro: =ii=teek=out=ii=shuuz an biit Mongkii tu∼ (0.2) jos in front de. Raj: dem teelii na don gu an biit wid foking shuuz.

Hey. One time Deezil beat him bad though boy. He used to pretend he was bad Deezil beat-up Buddy’s father right in front -in front of Mazjibit Let me tell you, he took off his shoes and he beat him.- ahh He took off his shoes and beat Monkey too just in front there. Those Tally’s are forever beating people with shoes.

At lines 144–146, Sam characterizes the events as occurring at a particular place within the village and in this way situates himself as a possible witness to those events. Although he never explicitly refers to himself witnessing the events or participating in them, his invocation of the specific place where the action took place implicates him as a witness. In jointly told stories, the tellers may speak in ways which display their differential access to the story-events. Consider in this respect the following example in which John introduces Buddy’s Daddy for the first time:

Bodii Dadii

Generation I

Bodii

Generation II

John & Rohan

Figure 9.1 A web of relations invoked through the use of a person-referring identification

Fragment 9.2: Jo = John, Ro = Rohan 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Jo:

>Soo bodi dadii, ee da f:uka noo fu ponish waif. Jaj: da rait. Ro: iif? Jaj: da ii kaal neem. Jo: >tek a leediitak se i bin don alredi chriit wan leedii so< (.) bongk.= Ro: =(seem in shap bai.) abi doz pas bai de Jo: adwaiz-adwaiz shiJaj: Malsing. Jo: shi feea rait? Ro: big fu abi rait? abi kyaan see notin∼ Jo: yea. shoo mi shi fut aal-tchhbodii dada shuut a leedi= Ro: =de see Aluu Baal doz gu ova de an mai:n dem.

Just like Buddy’s father. That fucker loved to beat his wife That’s right If? ((You’re telling me?!)) That was his nickname He’d grab that woman saying he’d already treated a woman in the same way Bang (same thing in the shop) We used to pass by there Otherwise-otherwise she Malsing She was fair right? They were older than us right? We can’t say anything Yeah. She showed me her foot and everything (tchh) Buddy’s father shot that woman They said Alu Baal used to go over there and look after them

One can recognize in this story a set of persons who are organized in terms of relative age and gender in relation to whom the tellers, John and Rohan, situate themselves. Note then that the co-participants consistently use the term bodii dadii ‘Buddy’s father’ to refer to the main character. Through the use of this formulation they invoke a web of relations which encompasses both the current co-participants and the story characters.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

In the initial turns reproduced here (lines 1–2), John introduces the new topic of Buddy’s Daddy (henceforth BD) by fitting it to the talk that preceded it, suggesting in effect that BD was similar in some respects to a previously discussed person. John designs this talk for his most immediate recipient, Rohan, and the manner in which he introduces the referent bodi dadii suggests that he believes Rohan should be able to recognize the person so designated and hence see the topical coherence John is attempting to establish (see Schegloff & Sacks 1973; Sacks & Schegloff 1979 and Chapter 7). Besides introducing BD, John provides first an assessment (da f:uka ‘that fucker’) and then a characterization (noo fu ponish waif ‘loved to beat his wife’) of him. The course of action initiated here, allows the men to display an emergent consensus in following turns. An assessment makes relevant a series of next actions (see Goodwin & Goodwin 1987; Pomerantz 1984b). Thus, before John completes his characterization, Jaj provides a marker of agreement in overlap. Rohan also indicates agreement, by the apparently simple lexical turn, iif ‘You’re telling me?’25 Jaj then indicates further agreement, by suggesting that the characteristics John has ascribed to BD were so integral to his character that, in fact, it became an appellation for the man. Moreover, by suggesting that this was his “call-name”, Jaj characterizes what John has just said as “common-knowledge” since names are one of the things that most people know of another person who lives in the village even if they know nothing else. Rohan and Jaj then indicate agreement by treating John’s remarks as something everybody knows. They are thus doing agreement in a way that suggests it is an artifact of a wider consensus. Rohan’s iif ‘You are telling me?’ points to the apparent obviousness of the report while Jaj’s da ii kaal neem ‘That was his nickname’ relates the specifics of the report to a domain of local, common knowledge. In these first turns then the participants use the emergent story-telling to display access to shared local knowledge. Having secured co-participation and agreement from both Rohan and Jaj, John now provides further evidence of the truth of his characterization in the form of a story. As Sacks (1995) noted, any set of events, can be told from a number of perspectives. A story about a car wreck will differ systematically depending on whether it is told from the perspective of a witness, who drove by, or a victim receiving medical aid. The particular configuration of witness and other characters is quite consequential given that, alternative configurations of the relationship are not treated as equivalent. One can, for instance, claim to have heard from somebody else that some event took place. Alternatively, one can claim to have been a witness to those events. Finally, one can claim to have been an active participant in the events and by virtue of this to have witnessed them.

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge

These alternatives are not treated as epistemically equivalent and they do not confer the same rights to tell a story of the events. Each type of justification is, rather, successively stronger. Now when John reports something that BD said there is a kind of ambiguity because he does not include any explicit mention of an addressee. While the report of speech (at line 8–9) presupposes that John was a witness to it, the terms in which it is formulated do not make this explicit. There is a rather interesting linguistic detail here that merits consideration. Linguists have long noted a connection between tense and the various ways in which speakers mark their own sense of certainty (see, for instance, Nichols 1987). By virtue of having already happened, events characterized as past or perfective carry a stronger sense of speaker certainty than do events marked as future or, more to the point, habitual. In marking an event as past or perfective a speaker is at the same time citing a particular instance of what he or she is talking about – the same is not true of events characterized as taking place habitually. Now, here John speaks of these events using the unmarked form of the verb. Generally, such unmarked forms of dynamic verbs such as tek ‘take’ (as opposed to statives such as noo ‘know’) are understood as perfective and past. However, John uses these forms without an overt subject the presence of which contributes to the finiteness of the stem form. To my ear, John avoids situating these events, specific as they are, in any particular point in the past. By using this bare form of the verb without an overt subject, John characterizes the events as happening in the past without at the same time indicating a specific occasion on which they did actually happen. In this way, he makes his description unfalsifiable and relatively impervious to challenge on grounds of accuracy. At the same time, he endows the narration with a kind of rhythmic timing. It is worth comparing this with the telling examined in Chapter 8. While John began that story in a similar way he soon launched into a telling of events in which he participated. Because knowledge of such events is almost by definition limited to those who participated in them, their telling does not provide opportunities for others to co-participate in that telling. Here though, John has avoided situating himself in some particular set of events and in this way does not claim exclusive epistemic access to them. In saying abi doz pas bai de ‘We used to pass by there’, Rohan appears to be claiming the kind of epistemic access as a witness which might serve to ground a contribution to the telling. In fact Rohan and John work here to achieve a delicate balance of epistemic access and rights to characterize the relevant events and people involved. Notice then that at lines 16 and 17 first John and then Rohan add a tagging rait? ‘right?’ to their turn. Such tags downgrade claims to epistemic priority in so



 Talk and Practical Epistemology

far as they suggest that the recipient is in a position to confirm what they are saying. In the first place, John holds out the assessment shi feea ‘She was fair’ for Rohan’s confirmation. In the next turn (line 17), the tag in big fu abi rait? ‘They were older than us right?’ is perhaps more transparently motivated by the fact that Rohan is talking about a situation common to both of them. In any case, through the use of tag questions, these two men jointly ratify each other’s access to the story’s events in the course of recounting it. Note the way in which Rohan locates the events in the domain of the local: the village, the road, the local landmarks. Moreover, we should also see in Rohan’s remark here a characterization of the social relationship between himself (along with the other(s) referenced by the plural pronoun) and BD. Rohan “passes by” the house or yard, he doesn’t go in. A few lines later this issue of the nature of the relationship between John, Rohan, BD and his wife comes to the fore. Thus, Rohan suggests in lines 15–16, that, consistent with his earlier characterization of himself and others “passing by” and therefore acting as non-participant witnesses, these people were big fu abi ‘older than us’ and that therefore Rohan and his co-referents couldn’t say anything to them (i.e. even if they didn’t like what they saw). At line 19 John explicitly locates himself in the story events for the first time. As noted, John prefaces the turn with an explicit marker of agreement (yea) to Rohan’s previous turn. The agreement may however be pro-forma. Rohan has suggested that these people were big fu abii and that as a consequence John and Rohan couldn’t say anything to them. Although John appears to agree with such a characterization what he says next is not consistent with such agreement. So we see that, BD’s wife ‘shows John her foot.’ John is introducing some gradations of experiential knowledge which Rohan’s characterization with abi ‘we’ glossed over. Whereas Rohan ‘passed by,’ John claims much more intimate contact with these people. Rohan orients to this claim in following turns. Thus, although in saying, de see Aluu Baal doz gu ova de an main dem, ‘They said that Alu Bal used to go over there and look after them’ Rohan now situates himself as a recipient to talk (compare abi kyaan see notin), in so doing he also ratifies John’s (here referred to by his proper or ‘book’ name Aluu Baal) characterization of his own more intimate relation with the people (main dem). Notice also that here Rohan returns to this issue of inside and outside. Whereas before they claimed to have ‘passed by,’ now Alu Bal/John ‘goes over there.’ In this sequence, John and Rohan locate themselves in past events. In doing so, they have also located themselves within a domain of differentially distributed local-historical knowledge. The way they characterize themselves as witnesses with more or less contact with the story participants turns out to be

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge 

significant. For in characterizing themselves as witnesses to events which took place in the past they have simultaneously situated themselves within the local history of the village. An obvious inference to be derived from their claimed co-presence at the scenes being described is their membership in the group of age-mates. These claims to epistemic access and membership are monitored by the co-participants. Claims may be treated as problematic and subject to challenge in subsequent turns. Before moving to examine such challenges we will briefly consider a further way in which these men display knowledge in the course of telling stories.

Knowledge and the turn-at-talk: The case of anticipatory completion A single turn-at-talk is not always produced by a single speaker. Collaboratively built utterances are produced in a variety of ways but we will consider only one. In cases of ‘anticipatory completion’ a first speaker may produce their turn to be recognizably incomplete and, in the course of its production, invite others to finish it. Even where a first speaker has not invited such assistance, another participant may be able to insert their own talk, so that it recognizably completes the turn another speaker initiated (see Lerner 2004).2 An example from the Guyanese data follows. Here a group of men are discussing relations of kinship between several people who share the surname “Suna”. Fragment 9.3 (Rumshop@2:36): Ja = Jaio, Raj = Raja, Jo = John 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Ja:

yes yes >da rait [darait darait darait<] Raj: [uh joo -joo suna huu ] dadii? Jo: wadifok yu noo Sam:→ jarj suna= Ja: → =a narain dem dadii. Jo: huu? Ja: [jaj.] Sam: [jaj.] jaj a [Hari Suna dadii] Jo: [fok dem dis. ] Sam: dem iz a mad piipol man?

Yes, yes that’s right that’sright, that’sright, that’ sright uh Joe-Joe Suna is whose Father? What the fuck do you know George Suna is Narian et. al.’s father. Who? George. George. George is Harry Suna’s father Fuck these people. Are these people crazy?

At lines 3–4 in the transcript Raja has initiated repair of a prior turn using a next turn repair initiator (see the entry for “Repair” in the appendix) form which targets a specific trouble source (Wh-question word + repeat, huu dadii). In response, at line 6, Sam begins a turn which is subsequently completed by Jaio in line 7. What is involved, for Jaio, in producing such a completion? We

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge 

may begin by noting that Jaio produces his talk so that others can see that he is doing a completion. He fits the talk precisely to the phrasing, grammar and intonational contour of Sam’s turn. Notice also that Jaio’s talk does not by itself, constitute a grammatically complete turn, that is, a self sufficient utterance. In this way Jaio and Sam can be seen to be saying something together – not simply saying the same thing. In producing the completing component of the turn, one of the things that Jaio does is to show that he knows what Sam is going to say (or perhaps should say) before Sam says it. Here Jaio uses anticipatory completion to display such knowledge and by this take up a stance of agreement and alignment with Sam. Moreover, by producing the talk before Sam articulates it, Jaio claims equal epistemic access to the facts under discussion. Such equivalent access is further elaborated in the talk that follows. Thus, when John initiates repair with, huu? ‘Who?’, both Sam and Jaio simultaneously respond with Jarj. Finally we may note that John orients to the alignment between Jaio and Sam when, in lines 12–13, he curses them both saying dem iz a mad piipol man? ‘Are these people crazy?’. Consider example 9.4 from the same conversation. Here the participants are discussing the recognizability of the identifying term chichileelee. By this point several of the participants have recognized this as the name for a plant and are now describing it. Fragment 9.4 (Rumshop): Ra = Ramish, Jo = John, Ja = Jaio, Raj = Raja 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

chichileelee a wan Chichilelee is a griin staak ting man Green stalk thing man (wid a bal) (with a ball) Jo: yu noo chichilelee? Do you know what chichilelee is? Sam: yea. mi na mos. Yeah, How could I not? min nof= There was a lot Ja: =a da eria de. in that area there Raj: oo. Oh. wan=wan wiid ya taak bou? Is it a weed you are talking about? ??: ai. Yes Jo: n [o::. No Ra:

44 Raj:

[oo-oo-aaa

Oh-oh-ahhh

In constructing the talk which is represented by the transcript the participants explicitly orient to the differential distribution on knowledge. Thus, in line 36, we find John asking Sam yu noo chichilelee? and, in line 37, Sam begins a responsive turn-at-talk. This turn has three components. The agreement token yea responds to John’s question. The second component, mi na mos, conveys the obviousness and unquestionable character of the response. The third component, although never completed by Sam, is projectably designed to provide

a basis for that obviousness. Jaio however intercepts Sams’ turn in progress constructing his own talk as its completion. Sam and Jaio’s collaboratively produced utterance invokes the certainty associated with first-hand perceptual access by citing a location in which the plant was found at some time in the past. In completing Sam’s turn in this way, Jaio displays his own monitoring of the talk-so-far and at the same time suggests that what goes for Sam goes for him also – i.e. that he knows what chichilelee is because it was endemic to an area close at hand. In cases of anticipatory completion, the placement of a turn-at-talk, such that it begins before another has reached possible completion, serves as the basis for inferences about what the completing speaker knows independently of the talk-in-progress. Placement is also the basis for further inference in cases where a responsive action occurs before the current turn reaches possible completion. Placement of talk prior to the completion of another’s turn can thus be seen to embody claims to independent knowledge or epistemic access. Participants display an orientation to such an embodied claim in the extracts to be discussed presently.

Challenging claims to knowledge Claims to know the events which make up local history are treated by participants as accountable actions. Challenges are practices which make accounts of a particular claim to know interactionally and sequentially relevant, i.e. they institute the accountability of such claims. In this context, they are a means by which co-participation in talk generally, and displays of knowledge specifically, are policed and regulated. By attending to the way in which challenge sequences are formulated and the way in which they are responded to, we can see that participants themselves orient to the issues that we have proposed are implicated in the telling and reminiscing of local history. Challenges are often embedded in the initial few turns of a story-telling. The first fragment I present below does not contain a single course of action. Rather, in it, one finds multiple frameworks of participation and various shifts between them. At the point where the transcript begins there has been a slight lull in a very dense conversation. Rohan takes this opportunity to initiate a story-telling, locating the events to be narrated temporally and spatially in relation to a person now dead and the geography of the village.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge

Fragment 9.5: Ro = Rohan, Ja = Jaio, Jo = John 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Ro: wen am (0.2) da man bin liv a bak a dakta de, Ja: Larbaj. Ro: wa ii neem ogen? =wa abi bin taak taak a Jo: Seloorz? Ro: Gordat. yu bin kyan noo Gordat? Ja: huu na noo Gordat bai. Ro: yu noo Feeka Samii? Ja: Gordat a lilet bodii.

When uhm that man used to live behind the doctor there, Larbaj What was his name again? Who we were talk-talking about Sellers? Gordat? You could have known Gordat? Who doesn’t know Gordat boy. Do you know Faker Sammy? Gordat is Lilet’s brother.

Rohan begins with, wen am (0.2) da man bin liv a bak a dakta de, ‘When uhm that man used to live behind.’ When he finds, at line 6, that he can’t remember the dead man’s name he initiates a word search inviting the co-participants to collaborate in his attempt to locate a name. By his prosody and through the use of a second prompt (wa abi bin taak taak a ‘who we were talk-talking about’) Rohan indicates that he is looking for assistance. As the Goodwins (see Goodwin & Goodwin 1986) have shown, it is also possible to produce a word search in a way that does not invite collaboration from the co-participants. Clearly the choice between such alternatives is shaped by assumptions about what the co-participants know. As Goodwin (1987) demonstrated a display of forgetfulness which solicits assistance in remembering some relevant piece of information can activate context-tied (or “discourse”) identities of knowing and unknowing recipients. Rohan’s invitation to co-participate in the word search thus embodies a proposal that the recipient of the invitation is knowledgeable. At line 7, John provides a candidate answer marked with rising intonation. Rohan then finds the name he was looking for (at line 8) and rejects John’s suggestion. Once the name is found, Rohan uses it to challenge Jaio. In this turn, Rohan combines preverbal markers of tense and modality (bin kyan) to scrutinize the extent and nature of Jaio’s knowledge. Rohan might have asked Jaio yu bin noo Gordat ‘Did you know Gordat?’ or, alternatively, yu kyan noo Gordat ‘Could you know Gordat?’. Rather he formats his turn as a challenge which questions the source of Jaio’s knowledge. By asking Jaio if he could have known Gordat using the combination of past-marking bin and the modal kyan, Rohan focuses on the conditions which would make such knowledge possible. At the same time, the design of the earlier word search turn suggests that Rohan believes that at least one of the co-participants should know who it is he is talking about. His question alone ‘what was his name again’ implies this while the mention of a previous

occasion during which the person was discussed elaborates it (‘who we were talking about’). Also, in line 6, Rohan uses the plural deictic abi ‘we’ referring to himself and others and so, when he later asks Jaio, ‘you could know Gordat?’ his use of the singular pronoun yu ‘you’ stands in contrast with his previous use of abi ‘we’. Rohan thus selects Jaio out of the group of co-participants despite the fact that Jaio has not, to this point, participated in the word search. Rohan has embedded the challenge within the initial turns of a story-telling which locate the story-events in relation to the time at which a man lived in a particular place. Thus Rohan invokes the temporal and spatial context of the village as a way of situating his narrative and, by initiating a word search in which the name of a local person is requested, Rohan makes co-participation in the telling contingent upon access to background knowledge about local people and places. In this context, Rohan’s challenge suggests that Jaio does not have access to this necessary background information. Rohan’s talk here suggests that use and recognition of the name involves the operation of a membership analysis. Discussing such membership analyses implicated in formulations of place, Schegloff writes: The ‘right’ selection and adequate recognition of place formulations can be seen to be one basis for demonstrations of, claims to, failings in, decisions about, etc., the competent membership of either speaker or hearer. [. . .] Each occasion of the use of a place formulation selected because of its presumed recognizability to a member of such a class is part of a never ending potential test in which persons can be shown to be inadequate members of the class, and thereby inadequate candidates for the activity. (Schegloff 1972: 114–115, emphasis added)

Rohan’s challenge then proposes, first, that Jaio cannot recognize the name, secondly, that he is therefore an inadequate member of the category “agemates”, and finally, that he is therefore an inadequate candidate participant in the activity of reminiscing. Jaio first responds to the challenge with a counter-move (huu na noo Gordat bai ‘Who doesn’t know Gordat boy?’) by which he displays his own hearing of Rohan’s utterance as an aggressive challenge (rather than, for instance, an information question) only after this does he then provide an answer to it. His use of the address term bai ‘boy’ suggests that he has heard in Rohan’s talk the implication that he is not a peer and is now actively contesting this.3 Participants, both respond to and anticipate further talk. In this respect note that Rohan attempts to intercept Jaio’s offering of proof in line 12. By countering Rohan’s challenge Jaio indicates that he in fact does know Gordat and is

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

ready to demonstrate it. Rohan, however, attempts to launch a second challenge before Jaio has offered his proof.

Being there: Age and entitlement to know By the use of a challenge such as Rohan’s in the previous example a speaker not only questions the extent of another’s knowledge but also its epistemic basis. A challenge appears to be oriented to the existence of different forms of knowledge. Here we may borrow and adapt Russell’s (1990[1912]: 46–59, 1961[1948]: 103–108) distinction between ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description.’ Russell suggests that knowledge of things, as opposed to knowledge of truths, is of two kinds. Knowledge by acquaintance is knowledge by means of direct awareness of objects. Although it appears that we can be thus acquainted with the objects in our immediate environment, Russell argues that our contact with ordinary things (such as a table) is in fact indirect and always mediated by our mental representations. According to Russell our knowledge of such ordinary objects is in fact by description since it is entirely dependent on the application of mental, and linguistic, categories. What we know by acquaintance in this case are the so-called sense data of “hardness” and “flatness” etcetera which together make up the physical appearance of the table. Besides this Russell proposes we might know by acquaintance the content of our own minds, abstract universals, and perhaps our own selves. Clearly this is not the distinction that men in the rumshop draw. However, the terms which Russell uses and, in some sense, the basic distinction he was trying to get at, fit well. In challenging Jaio by asking whether he could possibly have known Gordat, Rohan is asking whether he knows by acquaintance and specifically excludes knowledge by description. Rohan is oriented to the possibility that Jaio may have heard the name Gordat (possibly in the previous discussion Rohan mentions) and may know some stories about him in this way. But Rohan wants to know whether he could have known Gordat by acquaintance. Of course this is exactly the form of epistemic justification that, as we have seen, is treated as the basis of accurate and reliable local historical knowledge: first hand access as a witness or participant. Clearly only knowledge by acquaintance in this sense can serve as a reliable index of membership in a community defined by age. At issue then throughout many of these challenge sequences are several senses of the verb noo ‘know’. Consider in this respect the following:

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge 

Fragment 9.6: Raj = Raja 1 2

Raj:

mi noo huu yu a taak obou, bo mi na noo di man

I know who you are talking about but I don’t know the man

Here the speaker introduces an explicit distinction between knowledge by description, that provides for an understanding of the talk to which he responds, and knowledge by acquaintance that is based upon independent access to the person being referred to. In another exchange, Jaio displays in his own talk, that he is attending to the inferences regarding the source of knowledge. Thus he says: Fragment 9.7: Ja = Jaio 1 2 3

Ja:

Mi kyaan riimemba ii neem bo mi noo am mi a sikstii-wan baarn

I can’t remember his name but I know him I was born in 1961

Evidence for suggesting that Jaio himself orients to the inferences regularly attached to this use of the verb ‘know’ comes in the form of an account (mi a sikstii wan barn ‘I was born in 1961’). Thus, rather than specifying his age at the time of speaking, Jaio here notes his year of birth and by this specifies explicitly an intersection in time where access to the person would have been possible (i.e. acquiantance). In this way, he displays his own understanding that what is crucially at issue is knowledge derived from direct experience with the person being discussed, that is, knowledge by acquaintance. In the following fragment Rohan is again initiating a story. In the last fragment we saw Rohan attempting to secure public displays of co-participation in his talk through the use of a word-search. In the next example, Rohan makes a similar effort by eliciting the story from another participant. Specifically, Rohan begins by asking Sam if he knows ‘Miss Manners.’ Fragment 9.8: Ro = Rohan, Ja = Jaio, Jo = John, Raj = Raja 1 2 3

Ro:

yu noo mis mana? (.) Wa yu doz duu fu m [is mana.

You know Miss Manners? What did you used to do for Miss Manners

4 5 6 7 8

Ja:→ Ro: Jo: Sam: Jo:

[ah-hah-hah ee Sam le mii hiir nou. yu noo mis mana?= =na worii yu-ii kii noo mis ma [na?

ah-hah-hah Eh Sam, let me hear now You know Miss Manners? [to Jaio] Forget it You-he can know Miss Manners?

9 10 11 12 13 14

Sam: Jaj: Sam: Ja: Raj: Ja:

[ii: ii= =rait. iit an jringk mis mana( ) foking skont hool dem fok op dis taa:k skont wa yu o tel mii bai?

He-he Right. eat and drink Miss Manners’ Fucking asshole They’ve fucked-up this conversation What are you telling me boy?

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

15 Sam: 16 Ja:

mis mana bota an bred ai bai wa yu o tel mii?

Chapter 9. Policing knowledge

Miss Manner’s butter and bread Hey boy, what are you telling me?

In line 2, Rohan pursues the story asking Sam, Wa yu doz duu for Miss Mana? ‘What did you used to do for Miss Manners?’ In this second elicitation Rohan frames the transaction between Sam and Miss Manners using the habitual marker doz which is tense neutral (see Winford 1993; Sidnell 2001a). The construction implies repeated actions sustained intermittently over time (see Comrie 1976; Sidnell 2001a). The pursuit here significantly elaborates the initial elicitation in a number of ways. Thus, whereas Rohan initially asked simply if Sam knew Miss Manners, here such knowledge is presupposed by the fact that the two people are characterized as standing in a specific relation to one another. The pursuit with wa yu doz duu fo Mis Mana projects the telling of a particular story and, before the turn reaches a point of recognizable completion, Jaio begins a loud segment of laughter. In producing this laughter, Jaio implies that he already knows the projected story will be a pejorative one (see Sacks 1978). Jaio’s laughter is also evaluative and displays his own appreciation of the course of action that Rohan has undertaken. So laughter in this sequential context is not simply a “flooding out” as Goffman (1974) once put it, but a form of social action which both responds to what comes before it and projects what might be a relevant next thing to do (Jefferson 1979). The laughter, produced as it is at this point before the story is told, embodies a claim to know the specific story of Sam and Miss Manners the telling of which is projected by the turn the laughter overlaps. In line 6, John displays just such an analysis of Jaio’s laughter. He questions here whether Jaio actually knows what it is he is taking up a stance towards (i.e. the story of Sam and Miss Manners). He first asks whether Jaio knows Miss Manners and, in line 8, he reformulates his question now employing the epistemic modal kyan ‘can’ to ask whether it is possible that Jaio knows Miss Manners (kyan is reduced to kii). Notice also that (in line 8) John adjusts his talk in its course (yu-ii ‘you-he’) so that he now addresses his question not to Jaio, but to the co-participants, thus effectively excluding Jaio from the group of recipients for his talk. The error correction format John uses here makes this adjustment and the exclusion it implements a visible feature of the talk (see Jefferson 1974). For his part, Sam has already attempted to block the telling of the story in which he figures prominently with na worii ‘forget it’. In line 9, 11, 15 he joins with John in shifting attention away from himself and toward Jaio. In line 9, Sam has begun a turn in which, from its inception, it is clear that Jaio is the

main figure. Echoing John’s use of ii ‘he’ to refer to Jaio, Sam clearly formulates Jaio as topic rather than a recipient for his talk. Jaio hears John’s question to the co-participants (ii kii noo mis mana ‘Could he have known Miss Manners?’) as a challenge to his legitimate participation in this activity and attempts to initiate repair of it twice in lines 14 and 16. While these turns encourage the challenge-maker to reformulate his previous turns, they are also unsuccessful attempts by Jaio to re-establish himself as a ratified recipient for John’s talk. Again the design of the turn is interesting in this respect. Although Jaio asks wa yu o tel mi bai? ‘What are you telling me boy?’ John has in fact not told Jaio anything, rather he has explicitly addressed a question to the other co-participants. But Jaio’s choice of the verb ‘tell’ implies both that John has said something in the indicative and that John still acknowledges Jaio as a recipient. Jaio also uses the address term bai ‘boy’ this time in referring to John. The peer relationship thus invoked is however exactly what John has called into question. By asking the others whether Jaio could possibly know Miss Manners, John calls attention to the difference in age between Jaio on the one hand and himself, Sam and Rohan on the other. John’s challenge in line 8 carries with it the implication that a difference in age is in fact significant and that Jaio does not belong to the peer group of the other co-participants. Jaio thus cannot share in their collective reconstruction of boyhood memories. Later in this exchange, the issue of Jaio’s age relative to the others was made a topic of explicit discussion. Jaio, having been once again told that he could not legitimately participate in the activity of reminiscing local history, confronted his older brother Rohan saying ai bai wa yu o tel mii? ‘Hey boy, what are you telling me?’ Jaio here rejects the claim, made by Rohan and John, that the difference in age is significant. By suggesting that Jaio does not share the same boyhood memories as the other co-participants, Rohan and John propose that Jaio does not belong to the category “age-mates.” In saying that Rohan is na sapoos to bii bot foor yiir moor dan mii bai ‘only supposed to be four years older than me boy.’ Jaio suggests that Rohan is making more out of the difference in age than is warranted. Fragment 9.9: Ja = Jaio, Ro = Rohan, Ra = Ramish 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ja: ai=bai=wa=yu=o=tel=mii ee (.) noo noo yu na Ro: di man see ii wan hiir Ja: sapoos to bii bot foor Ro: fos yu laik fos foking ting Ja: yiir moor dan mii bai. Ra: na aa:guu bai

Hey boy, what are you telling me? Hey. No no. You are only The man said he wanted to hear suppose to be four first. You’re like the first fucking thing years older than me boy. Don’t argue. boy.

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

10 Ro: noo badii na arguu hiir 11 Ja: yu na sopoos to bii moor 12 dan foor yiir fo mii 13 Ro: di man na laik fu hiir 14 laang taim stoorii. 15 nobadii na arguu hia 16 fu fait.

Nobody’s arguing here You’re not supposed to be more than four years older than me. The man doesn’t like to hear old time story. Nobody’s arguing here to start a fight

What we see here then is that challenges to participation in these activities are built as questions about age, knowledge and experience. Consistent with what we have observed elsewhere, in the first instance men evaluate claims to knowledge on the basis of a single epistemic principle. The requirement of participation in these activities of telling and reminiscing is first-hand access to the relevant objects, persons and events – what, drawing on Russell, I have here termed “knowledge by acquaintance.” Participation in these activities therefore involves a membership analysis (see Schegloff 1972). Jaio’s exclusion from the collective rememberings – reminiscing – marked him as a non-member of the category of age-mates. Category membership here is important in part because it entitles one to membership in the social group of peers. In this way categories (age-mates) and social groups (peer-group, or, a “crew”) are articulated in these situated activities of the rumshop through which the differential distribution of knowledge is made visible.

Conclusion In this chapter we have examined a set of clear cases in which the differential distribution of knowledge is invoked so as to make visible particular aspects of local social organization. The chapter has focused on a practice of speaking through which this is accomplished. Challenges make the rights and obligations which are constitutive of the local social organization of knowledge an accountable matter (in Garfinkel’s sense). It should not be supposed that this social organization exists independently of the practices of speaking which make it visible. After all, this visibility is only secondarily our concern. In the first instance, the contours of knowledge and the various forms of social organization derived as inferences from it, are the concerns of these participants. For this reason I have tried to show their orientations as evidenced in the particular ways they spoke to one another. These practices of speaking then are constitutive of the social order which they make visible. The objective character of these social facts is a product of members’ ways of talking them in to existence.

Chapter 10

Conclusion Knowledge, belief and action

Truth is a thing of this world. . .

(Foucault, Power/Knowledge)

The things that characterize ordinary activities for those engaged in them seem to disappear whenever sociological themes and methods are brought into play. (Sharrock & Anderson 1986: 15)

Post-marital residence and the epistemics of telling local history A strong preference for both patrilocal residence and village exogamy is a consistent finding of ethnographic work among East Indians in Guyana. In the 1950s Smith and Jayawardena (1959) described the resulting patterns of residence and discussed the various ways in which their informants explained and justified this pattern. Despres (1967) examined its larger social and structural implications in terms national integration. In Chapter 2 I described the same pattern of preferential marriage and residence in Callander. The implications of this pattern for the organization of talk and the social distribution of knowledge may now be sketched. In Chapter 8 and 9 I showed that local histories are articulated through the activity of reminiscing. The analysis showed that, within such activities, claims to know are evaluated according to a basic epistemic principle: villagers treat first-hand perceptual access to the relevant events (as an actor or as a witness) as a requirement of participation in the activity of reminiscing. Contributions to such collaborative tellings of local history are thus treated as accountable matters on this basis and subject to challenge regarding their epistemic grounding. Rights and obligations to know local history are bound up with participation in the activity of reminiscing but this is contingent upon having grown up with the other co-participants. As such, to challenge another’s legitimate participation in the activity of reminiscing local history is to challenge and question his membership in the

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

group of recognized peers, that is, his membership in what Wilson described as the basic local social grouping of public life in the English speaking Caribbean – the crew. Most of the men of Providencia are, or have been, members of crews (. . .). These crews have no formal status in the institutional structure of the island’s society, but since the institutions are of alien origin, this is not surprising. This does not, however, diminish the importance of these crews to the social and political life of the island, or to its public as contrasted with its domestic life. It is this public life that centers on men, and it is through crews that much of the public life is activated. These are also the only “social groupings” that arise out of the very nature of social relations among men rather than being imposed from the outside. (1973: 180)

The activity of reminiscing constitutes the practical basis of this type of social organization and shapes the form it takes in at least the following ways. First, and most obviously, reminiscing is an activity which imposes limits on the number of participants. While I cannot at this point provide a full analysis to support the contention, it would seem from the data examined in previous chapters that the optimal number of participants in reminiscing hovers between three and six. The addition of participants beyond six routinely results in schism.1 Reminiscing is a collective activity and relies crucially on a relatively even distribution of opportunities to speak but in large groups such opportunities become a scarce resource. Here we find a more or less exact parallel to the social organization of crews which Wilson and others have documented. Wilson (1973: 168) writes, “In an almost spontaneous, accidental way the men of a community divide up into small groups of approximately four to seven members.” A second way in which the activity of reminiscing shapes the social group has already been discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. Reminiscing requires that participants share a common stock of storyable memories. Moreover, in the context examined, a further requirement is that these memories be based on first-hand witnessing of the relevant events.2 Now there is of course considerable flexibility here – a flexibility which is without a doubt also integral to the organization of the activity – since just what was witnessed is, as a matter of logical necessity, always going to be different for different participants. So in the limiting case, you may have witnessed an event from one side of the road and I from the other – in that sense it could be reasonably said that we in fact witnessed slightly different things.3 While such differences may be routinely treated by participants as trivial and inconsequential, I have argued that

Chapter 10. Knowledge, belief and action 

other differences are not. So for instance in, Chapter 9 we saw that John and Rohan oriented to their differential access to the events under discussion and that they treated this as a constraint on their participation in the activity of reminiscing. Differential access to the storyable events is thus a basic and inevitable feature of these activities and one which is treated as relevant by the participants in many, though not all, cases. The crucial difference, however, is between those who did witness and those who did not witness – indeed, could not have witnessed – the relevant events however those are understood. The activity of reminiscing is policed so as to draw this line in a totally unambiguous way. These issues can be summarized by saying that reminiscing is properly done by peers. And again, this is a basic feature of the social groups which Wilson and others have described as crews. The organization of the activity of reminiscing in this and other ways is reflected in the social groups which it brings into existence. Wilson noted the importance of story-telling and some of the epistemic issues linked to it. So he writes (1973: 158–159): there are a number of anecdotes about individuals that crop up again and again. Many of these concern the “history” of the island, but others are contemporary, have a moral twist and are humorous, being told for purposes of entertainment. (. . .) These make up what might be considered a local folklore (. . .) Being able to tell these stories, or being made the hero of such a story, makes a great contribution to a man’s reputation.

And later that, . . .When men gather together in rum shops or beneath the palm trees on the beach much of their conversation is taken up with stories of their exploits (. . .) The teller is always the central figure, and to one from a European background the tales and the teller seem quite immodest. It helps the teller to have someone in the capacity of witness to confirm the story. These witnesses are usually a man’s best friend, and witnessing may be thought of as part of the role of being a best friend. Best friends are those who stick by each other through think or thin, who help each other confirm their identity.

A final feature of these activities is their male-exclusivity. Men dominate the rumshop, monopolize the activity of reminiscing and to a large extent the production of local history. This is the outcome, I suggest, of a complex interaction of factors. The predominant pattern of village exogamy and patrilocal residence means that an adult woman rarely lives in the village where she was born and grew to maturity. Nor do women usually find themselves living in close proximity to those with whom they share childhood experiences since the inmarrying wives of a village do not come from a single area. As such, there are

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

few opportunities for women to reminisce local histories. They are, therefore, systematically excluded from participating in the most locally significant form of historical imagining and, at the same time, from the forms of social organization that participation in these activities makes possible. Thus women, unlike men, do not form peer groups or crews – collections of people who grew up together and can jointly engage in the activity of reminiscing local history.

Bhatgaon: A point of ethnographic comparison Brenneis’s study of the Fiji Indian community of Bhatgaon offers a useful point of ethnographic comparison. His study is particularly relevant given his own focus on issues of talk and knowledge. Bhatgaon is a rural village of 690 Hindispeaking descendants of North Indians who came to Fiji as indentured laborers between 1879 and 1919. The villagers are predominantly farmers planting rice on plots leased from the government or working as seasonal agricultural laborers in a plantation-type system. Brenneis (1984a, 1984b) describes an equivocal egalitarianism which prevails among village men. He (1984a: 489) writes: As one villager said, Gaon me sab barabba hei (“In the village all are equal”). . . The roots of this egalitarian outlook lie in the conditions of immigration and indenture, central among them the difficulty of maintaining subcaste identity and purity and the disappearance of the hierarchical division of labor which helped sustain the caste system in north India. Egalitarian values are reinforced by the relative similarity in wealth throughout Bhatgaon. Such egalitarianism, however, is problematic in several important respects. First not every villager is a potential equal. Sex is a crucial dimension, men do not consider women their equals. Age is also consequential. Adolescent boys (naujawan) are accorded less respect than older, married men (admi). As there are no formal criteria or ceremonies to mark the transition from naujawan to admi – to social adulthood – disagreements about how one should be treated are common and often lead to serious conflict between males of different ages.

Besides these comments concerning conflicts over membership in age-related categories, Brenneis also reports that this egalitarianism and general leveling has been accompanied by a democratization of knowledge. In those north Indian communities from which Bhatgaon villagers’ ancestors emigrated, various types of knowledge were differentially distributed along lines determined by the caste system, just as were more tangible resources. Brahmins, for example, had a virtual monopoly on many types of sacred and ritual knowledge, while blacksmiths controlled a range of technical in-

Chapter 10. Knowledge, belief and action

formation forbidden to Brahmins. A great deal of knowledge, both sacred and secular, was status specific. Who one was determined what one knew; what one knew demonstrated who one was. (. . .) The radical leveling of Indian immigrant society in Fiji had obvious implications for the allocation of knowledge. While in north India the differential distribution of knowledge had both reflected and helped maintain a system of ranked but interdependent groups, in Fiji the groups were at best ill-defined, and the division of labor in part responsible for the division of knowledge no longer existed. Secular knowledge became, in effect, open to all. (. . .) In Bhatgaon, at least, there was a corresponding democratization of sacred knowledge as well. (Brenneis 1984b: 74–74)

While Brenneis description of the “north Indian communities from which Bhatgaon villagers’ ancestors emigrated,” is not entirely compatible with the arguments developed in this book, his characterization of the current situation in the village resonates strongly with my own portrait of Callander. Brenneis emphasizes the constitutive role of talk, arguing that “while one’s general status as an equal derives from sex, age, and residence in the community, specific standing vis-à-vis others is not based on (. . .) fixed criteria but comes in part, from individual accomplishment and, in larger part, from talk.” He goes on to suggest that, “where egalitarian ideals are stressed, continuing symbolic expressions of one’s membership in a community of peers are necessary. One must not only feel membership but be able to maintain it publicly.” Drawing these two themes together, Brenneis (1984a: 75) writes: A crucial way of demonstrating one’s membership is through sharing in what is “common knowledge” in the community – what “everyone” knows. Although sacred and technical knowledge can be included in this, they are relatively unchanging. The real action lies in the dynamics of everyday life; familiarity with local individuals and recent events is necessary. No one, however, knows everything, and some villagers are considerably better acquainted with particular incidents than are others. This differential participation in common knowledge is, . . ., an important political fact. . ..

The many parallels between Bhatagoan and Callander are striking to say the least. The approach taken here complements that developed by Brenneis – whereas Brenneis describes the different genres within which displays of knowledge take place I have emphasized the importance of conversation.

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 Talk and Practical Epistemology

The priority of practice A basic and long-standing problem in social theory concerns the relationship of the individual to society (or vice versa). Much wrangling over “agency” and “structure” in contemporary theoretical writings in fact recapitulates debates over the relative importance of individual and society. So, if on the one hand, we emphasize the constraining power of the society, individuals look like automata. If, on the other hand, we emphasize the possibilities for individual action (or, for that matter, collective action) we fail to account for the real constraints (social, economic, epistemological, discursive etc.) within which action is inevitably embedded. Either we fall into methodological individualism or structural determinism. To invoke a dialectic here is to admit failure – to allow equivocality to substitute for an argument. An account which focuses on the middle ground of practices, rather than in either the ether of theoretical constructs or the inescapable plurality of unique actions, offers a way out of this conundrum – or rather a way of avoiding the problems which beset traditional theorizing from the outset. Practices are neither in the heads of individuals nor in the culture, institutions, social structure or economy. But what then is a practice? Sacks gives many examples of practices in his lectures. For instance, in one case, he describes an incident in which a young man offers some candy, first to one of three other participants in a group therapy session and then to another (Sacks 1995 Vol. 1: 292). Sacks observes that the one offering the candy, Jim, “is observably ‘not offering candy to Roger’.” Sacks goes on to suggest that such a finding – that something observably or noticeably did not happen – is far from trivial since in any given case an infinite number of other things also did not happen. Of course what makes the non-occurrence of an offer to the fourth participant noticeable (accountable) is the background of a stable practice. Sacks suggests that the notion of a ‘round’ might account for the observability of the absent offer. Lynch (2001: 133) explains the significance of Sacks discussion: It is important to see that Sacks proposes that this vernacular notion of a ‘round’ is both a general analytic concept and a contingently produced phenomenon which, in the case at hand, provides a basis for seeing that a relevant action does not take place. The notion is not (or not only) a conceptual principle invoked by a professional analyst in order to establish the relevance of the action that did not take place; it is evidently and performatively relevant to the accountable absence. One kind of evidence for the relevance of the local ordering principle is that parties can comment on it: Roger might, for example, complain that Jim failed to offer him any candy. Similarly, evidence for the

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relevance of an analogous kind of ‘round’ in an occasion of joke-telling can be found when, after a series of others in the group have told ‘their’ jokes, a remaining member confesses that he can never remember jokes. Such explicit comments are not, however, required for establishing that the parties to the scene recognize, count on, and contingently enact a projectable order of collective activities. If, as Sacks proposes, rounds of introductions, jokes, stories, offers, etc., exhibit characteristic features – for example, that a first offer in the series will be marked in specific ways (although not necessarily announced in so many words as an offer or even as a first in a series of offers), and another offer will be performed in unmarked fashion as a ‘next’ of the same kind until the round runs to completion – an absence can be noticeable by virtue of its placement in a local context of the contingently relevant events (in the case in point, the events making up a ‘round’ of offers).

A practice such as an offer is located within a more general organization – here a round. This organization is generic in that it can be seen to organize not only offers but also jokes, stories, introductions, compliments etc. A ‘round’ involves a method which although transposable is always applied to some particular situation, context or set of circumstances. That application introduces innumerable contingencies and associated accounting practices. Those contingencies, as Garfinkel and Wittgenstein showed with such force, are interminable – irremediable – but members do not let that trouble them in ordinary circumstances; rather they proceed on the understanding that what they are saying and doing, is adequate for all practical purposes. Still the inevitable contingencies of human practice – the gap between a method and an instance of a practice – and the irremediable indexicality of linguistic expressions can be exploited. It is that ever present possibility that makes action what it is, that encourages us to ask after, and reexamine, the explanatory potential of a rule (or structure, or “shared belief ” etc.) and to assert the ultimate priority of practice. Practices are incommensurable, multiple, heterogeneous, related at most via family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s refusal to engage in theory and generalization is an acknowledgement of the irreducibility of practices to some single over-arching structure. Thus we find Wittgenstein (1980: 629) writing of the whole hurly-burly of human life and comparing language to the twisted routes and alleys of an ancient city. This emphasis on heterogeneity and incommensurability makes the approach taken here quite distinct from those various micro-sociologies which adopt as their unit of analysis the individual and various theoretical constructs essentially tied to her (face, status, role etc.) Charac-

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terizing conversation analysis as a molecular sociology, Lynch (1995: 258–259) explains: A key difference between a microsociology, in which individual actors are the most elementary constituents, and a molecular sociology, in which embodied techniques are foundational, is that the latter units are essentially plural and heterogeneous. There is no idealized concept of the fundamental sociotechnique parallel to that of the social actor. Instead, CA’s molecular sociology begins with a conception of social order in which different combinations of heterogeneous techniques produce an endless variety of complex structures. This conception is distinctive for the way it is social structural all the way down. The basic unit of analysis is not an ideal-typical “actor” or “self ” but a plurality of socially structured techniques through which orderly social activities are assembled.

In fact concepts of “self ” and “other” are used in CA only where they are demonstrably implicated in the logic of an interactional organization (e.g. that of repair see Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks 1977). From this perspective, then, individuals are subordinate to the organization of situated practices.

Of “practices” and “theories” In the preceding chapters I have attempted to show that close attention to the details of talk-in-interaction can provide a basis for analyzing the social organization of knowledge in an Indo-Guyanese village. One of the steering motivations of this work has been to find a satisfactory articulation between interactional detail and the larger social frameworks of the life-world in which such details are embedded. This issue, generally conceptualized in terms of micro-macro linkages or one of a series of related metaphors, has a kind of basic significance for many linguistic anthropologists who feel that one must attend both to the larger social context and the “microscopic detail” in a single sweeping analytic move. I think adopting the terms and associated concepts of “micro” and “macro” commits us to a deeply problematic and inescapably confused view of things. Such terms make, what is for the people we are examining, a practical distinction between details and generalities, between this situation and the perceived regularities of social life an unruly theoretical superstructure, which quickly takes on a quasi-causal and occult life of its own. One striking exemplification of this is seen in the rise of so-called “practice-theory” about which there is a great deal of talk in anthropology these days. In fact, the term “practice” was

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introduced as a solution to that web of theoretical problems talked about using such terms as micro-macro, structure and agency, subjective and objective, individual and society. In one influential approach, practice is seen as the mediating term within such oppositions – promising to bring them into a dialectal relationship and thus produce a synthesis. If this is the way we think of practice, it is appropriate to construct a theory around it. Practice in this way becomes a way of rethinking old problems in social theory. Stern (2003: 185) writes: Perhaps the most significant point of agreement among those who have taken the practical turn is that it offers a way out of Procrustean yet seemingly inescapable categories, such as subject and object, representation and represented, conceptual scheme and content, belief and desire, structure and action, rules and their application, micro and macro, individual and totality. Instead, practice theorists propose that we start with practices and rethink our theories from the ground up.

Although Stern (2003: 185) goes on to note that in this work one finds “an emphasis on the importance of close attention to particular practices and the context within which they are located,” to someone who spends their time looking at the details of social interaction as it is constructed on a momentby-moment basis, “practice-theory” may seem heavy on theory and light on practice. When practices are discussed, for instance in Bourdieu’s (1977) wellknown discussion of the challenge and the riposte, the reader is rarely presented with a description of any particular occasions and thus has no access to the relevant details of its organization. As such one must accept the analysis largely on faith. Moreover, one must reconstruct and imagine that practice in order to follow the theoretical argument being made. This has important consequences as Sacks (1984b: 25) pointed out in an early lecture: I want to argue that, however rich our imaginations are, if we use hypothetical, or hypothetical-typical versions of the world we are constrained by reference to what an audience, an audience of professionals, can accept as reasonable. That might not appear to be a terrible constraint until we come to look at the kinds of things that actually occur. Were I to say about many of the objects we work with “Let us suppose that this happened; now I am going to consider it,” then an audience might feel hesitant about what I would make of it by reference to whether such things happen. That is to say, under such a constraint many things that actually occur are debarred from use as a basis for theorizing about conversation. I take it that this debarring affects the character of social sciences strongly.

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But practice need not be another term in a theoretical framework made more elaborate by its inclusion. Instead practice might be treated as the object of study. Wittgenstein suggested that the roots of conceptual confusion often lie in excessive theorizing – in a craving for generalization. The alternative for Wittgenstein is to look carefully at the workings of our language as it is used in the course of our ordinary activities. In this respect Wittgenstein represents a radical departure from the prevailing, highly intellectualized, view of language predominant in his own time and to this day. Wittgenstein (1953) was adamant on this point saying in the Philosophical Investigations (§109): “We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.” Elsewhere (1993b), Wittgenstein complains that Frazer’s account of magical and religious practices is unsatisfactory because it “makes these views look like errors.” Wittgenstein asks, “Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?” Error, Wittgenstein suggests, is not properly applied here. Wittgenstein concludes that Augustine was not in error, “except when he set forth a theory.” This may all seem a bit obscure. What, after all, is anthropology, or any social science for that matter, if it is not “theoretical” and “generalizing” in some straightforward way? The talk of description in Wittgenstein’s writings and also those of Evans-Pritchard, may seem hopelessly dated in relation to current theoretical debates. After all, haven’t recent developments in social analysis, not least of all those in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, shown us that descriptions are never neutral representations of an external world? Isn’t, then, an insistence on description over theory a bit obtuse? Drawing as I have done on Wittgenstein, Lynch and Bogen (1996: 270) address this issue: Wittgenstein’s renunciation of the craving for generality in favor of description may seem quaint in light of prevailing tendencies to consider “pure description” an epistemological impossibility, and it may recall the sorts of avowals of neutral, value-free description so often criticized these days for disguising an author’s normative slant and deleting the contingencies involved in the construction of such descriptions. Again, it may seem that from Wittgenstein we have adopted an unsophisticated conception of discourse that has been surpassed by more recent developments in literary and cultural studies. Note, however, that Wittgenstein is not endowing description with a special epistemological status; indeed, he is arguing against the craving for generality, which he describes as a “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case.” Such a contemptuous attitude denigrates mere description for its failure to subordinate the concrete details of a case to theoretically specified foundation,

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ideology, or generalized discourse. For Wittgenstein, descriptions of singular activities are valuable precisely because they cast into relief diverse, unexpected, yet intelligible organizations of language use.

There is a sense in which such ideas concerning these “intelligible organizations of language use” have been circulating in anthropological writings for some time. Malinowski (1935: 52) for instance suggested that, “words in their primary sense do, act, produce and achieve” and further that, “language is primarily an instrument of action.” Unfortunately Malinowski never followed through on this intuition but instead attempted to incorporate language into his functionalist theory. In fact, it is in his study of language that one feels the methodological and technical limitations of Malinowski’s work most forcefully. Malinowski’s analysis of language, as Henson (1974) among others have pointed out, is in many ways very unsophisticated. Seemingly, unaware of structural and descriptive linguistics, Malinowski developed a kind of naive grammatical analysis which drew heavily upon the various forms of prescriptive and classical grammar to which he had been exposed. But the real impediment to Malinowski’s analysis, like that of Austin’s, was a failure to recognize the temporal character of action: Malinowski had no sense of sequence.

Glossing and therapeutic analysis Malinowski had been confronted by language as an instrument of action in the course of fieldwork among people whose way of life he did not fully comprehend. In that sense Malinowski came upon language more or less by accident. Malinowski soon realized that in order to fully understand the Trobriand way of life and capture in his ethnography the “native point of view,” he would need to learn their language – words for Malinowski were instructions for seeing and without a grasp of the language, Trobriand life appeared is if observed through a kaleidoscope.4 Sacks, on the other hand, turned to language as a solution to a methodological problem. He writes (1984b: 26). When I started to do research in sociology I figured that sociology could not be an actual science unless it was able to handle the details of actual events, handle them formally, and in the first instance be informative about them in the direct ways in which primitive sciences tend to be informative – that is, that anyone else can go and see whether what was said is so. And that is a tremendous control on seeing whether one is learning anything.

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Chapter 10. Knowledge, belief and action 

So the question was, could there be some way that sociology could hope to deal with the details of actual events, formally and informatively? (. . .) I wanted to locate some set of materials that would permit a test; materials that would have the virtue of permitting us to see whether it was possible, and if so, whether it was interesting. The results might be positive or negative I started to work with tape-recorded conversations. Such materials had a single virtue, that I could replay them. I could transcribe them somewhat and study them extendedly – however long it might take. The tape-recorded materials constituted a “good-enough” record of what happened. Other things, to be sure, happened, but at least what was on the tape had happened. It was not from any large interest in language or from some theoretical formulation of what should be studied that I started with tape-recorded conversations, but simply because I could get my hands on it and I could study it again and again, and also consequentially, because others could look at what I had studied and make of it what they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able to disagree with me.

Having failed to recognize the role which such formulations, glosses and descriptions play in the organization of our activities, social scientists had treated them as resources. The situations that anthropologists and sociologists studied were thus glossed as instances of “gossiping,” “deliberating,” “arguing,” etc. This set up a whole series of questions in which actual observable activities were seen as “approximations” of categorical types. Sacks (1963: 8) made this criticism in his first publication. There he writes:

As he made clear later in a paper co-authored with Harold Garfinkel (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970), Sacks had also been motivated to find such a source of data, in part, by a frustration with traditional practices of glossing in the social sciences. As Garfinkel and Sacks noted, ordinary members of society are continuously engaged in glossing the practical activities of everyday life. Moreover, a gloss enters into the logical grammar and organization of the particular situated activities in which it occurs thereby reflexively shaping that organization (see also Mehan & Wood 1975: 8–14). However the orderliness of ordinary activities is not in any way dependent on such glossing practices or members’ capacities to formulate them (Peyrot 1982: 264–268).5 Where such glosses are produced they become a consequential feature of the activity of which they are a part. Sharrock and Anderson (1986: 57) write:

Such glossing obscures the organization of the activities studied and effectively blocks analysis of them. Moreover, glosses such as “gossip” are available for further (meta-) glossing. The theory of practices for instance proposes a single underlying foundational logic which underpins the organization of our various activities. “Practice,” in other words, becomes simply another gloss. What kind of therapy is appropriate to such excessive glossing, generalization and theorizing? Wittgenstein suggests that what we need is already in front of us. We must only rearrange it to see it in the proper light. The ethnographic data do not require a theory to be made either intelligible or relevant to our inquiries. Rather, what is required is analysis. As the Greek root implies, this involves a loosening up and undoing of things that have been put together. “The resolution or breaking up of anything complex into its various simple elements, . . . the exact determination of the elements or components of anything complex.”6 If one wanted to understand the working of a car or some other complex machine, one would need to know what parts it consisted of and how these were made to work together. To focus on the inner workings of activities involves a significant shift in focus. Why should we suppose that action, and talk-in-interaction, is any different in this respect? In a discussion of social studies of science, Sharrock and Anderson (1986: 87) write:

The fact that members of a social setting give descriptions of it comes as no news to sociologists. They have long sought to profit from the fact that you can find out about social life by asking people to talk about it (though that has perhaps turned out rather more fraught than they thought). The novelty in the idea of accountability is not in noticing that people tell about their activities, but in proposing that the relationship is reflexive and that the describing of social activities is part and parcel of the activities so described. Again, a shift of interest is involved, away from whether the descriptions people give of what they are doing are true ones and toward the question of how they are, organizationally speaking, related to the activities they describe.

The crucial difficulty with Durkheim’s suicide is not that he employs official statistics, but that he adopts for sociology the problems of practical theory. ‘Suicide’ is a category of the natural language. It leads to a variety of practical problems, such as, for example, explaining particular suicides or explaining the variety of suicide rates. To say that Durkheim’s error was to use official records rather than for example studying the variation in the reporting of suicide is to suppose that it is obvious that events occur which sociologists should consider ‘really suicide’.

. . .establishing that science, mathematics or art might be a proper topic for sociological inquiry does not involve showing that the products of science, mathematics or art are affected by external circumstances, by the environing

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social structure of the relevant scientific, mathematical or artistic subject matters. On the contrary looking at these things sociologically involves looking at them as sociologically organized phenomena, involves looking at the doing of scientific inquiry, mathematical reasoning or artistic creation as a socially organized practice [. . .] What actions make them happen? [. . .] From that point of view, the technical aspects of activity, far from being an irrelevance, must be central to all considerations, for it is in their technicalities that such things as art, science and mathematics consist.

If we want to understand the social organization of activities, we need to see the parts out of which they are constructed and the ways in which such parts hang together, accountably as an ongoing accomplishment. But this is not what anthropologists, perhaps linguistic anthropologists in particular, generally do. Rather the anthropologists’ attention is almost exclusively taken up with the perceived connection between actions and the “larger” social, political, economic and historical structures and processes within which these are understood to be embedded. In an effort to get at and theorize such “linkages” the particular case is treated as an illustrative instance of a recurring, general type. The practical and technical details are bleached out of existence in order to allow the particular to speak to the theoretical framework. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to move in a different direction. I have examined such phenomena as ignorance and uncertainty, knowledge and authority with an eye to the way in which they were built and organized in temporally unfolding sequences of talk-in-interaction. Much of this work is descriptive and doing it involves training ourselves to look carefully – carefully enough to catch those momentary inbreaths and pauses, those artful recompletions, the split second timing of a turn’s onset, the precise formulations, lexical selections and the delicacies of turn-formatting. This is the level of detail out of which our world, and that of these villagers, is built. As social scientists we have a responsibility not only to recognize that but also to make it an integral part of our account. It has been suggested that these analyses consist of more than simply descriptions of talk’s detail. In attending to the minutiae, along with and in relation to the situated activities in which they occur, we are provided a view of local social organization. But here we may be charged with twisting this phrase, “local social organization” to suit our own purposes, or worse, with having done the thing to which we objected – glossing the relevant details, out of existence. Without a doubt, glossing is an inevitable feature of what we do but it is being suggested here that the “local social organization” which our methods

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have made visible, is of an entirely different order from that which is traditionally discussed in anthropology. We do not mean the abstract, organizational “structures” which lie, as it were, behind the natives’s “movements” and “behaviours.” Rather, the organization that is revealed is one which the natives are themselves concerned with and which they themselves institute within and through the situated activities of everyday life. In this respect it is useful to once again turn to the issue of knowledge and specifically to a debate which took place at the border of anthropology and philosophy. It is fitting that the debate should revolve, at least in part, around Evans-Pritchard’s classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande.

Knowledge, belief and anthropological confusion Peter Winch (1964) wrote “Understanding a Primitive Society” in part as a reaction to Evans Pritchard’s monograph. Winch’s assessment of EvansPritchard’s account is equivocal. He begins by noting that an anthropologist, studying a people who “believe in witchcraft” and consult oracles, “wishes to make those beliefs and practices intelligible to himself and his readers.” Winch goes on: This means presenting an account of them that will somehow satisfy the criteria of rationality demanded by the culture to which he and his readers belong: a culture whose conception of rationality is deeply affected by the achievements and methods of sciences, and one which treats such things as a belief in magic or the practice of consulting oracles as almost a paradigm of the irrational. The strains inherent in this situation are very likely to lead the anthropologist to adopt the following posture: We know that Zande beliefs in the influence of witchcraft, the efficacy of magic medicines, the role of oracles in revealing what is going on and what is going to happen, are mistaken, illusory. Scientific methods of investigation have shown conclusively that there are no relations of cause and effect such as are implied by these beliefs and practices. All we can do then is to show how such a system of mistaken beliefs and inefficacious practices can maintain itself in the face of objections that seem so obvious. Now although Evans-Pritchard goes a very great deal further than most of his predecessors in trying to present the sense of the institutions he is discussing as it presents itself to the Azande themselves, still, the last paragraph does, I believe, pretty fairly describe the attitude he himself took at the time of writing this book. There is more than one remark to the effect that ‘obviously there are no witches’; and he writes of the difficulty he found, during his

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fieldwork with the Azande, in shaking off the ‘unreason’ on which Zande life is based and returning to a clear view of how things really are.

According to Winch, then, Evans-Pritchard, “is right in a great deal of what he says here, but wrong, and crucially wrong, in his attempt to characterize the scientific in terms of that which is ‘in accord with objective reality.”’ The disagreement between Winch and Evans-Pritchard points to a problem in our use of ordinary words when we are describing the practices of another people. While Winch focuses on the phrase “in accord with objective reality” he might just as well have centered his attention on Evans-Pritchard’s many references to Azande “belief ” in witchcraft and the results of oracular consultation. The troubling thing about applying the term belief in such cases is that it obscures and confuses the very ethnographic facts which are being described. It is essential that we recognize that for the Azande such propositions as “witchcraft caused the collapse of the granary,” “witches exists,” and so on are not expressions of belief in any ordinary sense of that word. If we accept, at least provisionally, the standard analysis of knowledge as “justified, true, belief ” from the perspective of the Azande what is expressed in the proposition “witchcraft caused the granary to collapse” is not belief, but rather, knowledge. That such propositions meet the first and last criteria is uncontroversial – clearly the Zande has his justification and his belief is not in question. The anthropologist describes this as “belief ” and not knowledge because the second criterion is not met. And so we find Evans-Pritchard writing: “Witches, as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist” (1976: 18) and “We must remember that since witchcraft has no real existence a man does not know that he has bewitched another, even if he is aware that he bears him ill will” (1976: 43).7 Evans-Pritchard equivocates occasionally, allowing Azande criteria and thus writing of their knowledge rather than their belief: “Thus a man who suffers a misfortune knows that he has been bewitched. . .” (1976: 47). The source of the confusion here should now be apparent. In deciding whether this is known or simply believed, Evans Pritchard has imposed his own criteria for deciding what is true. But the Azande are not lacking methods for deciding such matters. They have their own rich vocabulary and technology of truth. Evans-Pritchard’s confusion here is all the more alarming given that the method of discovering truth among the Azande is the very object of his inquiry – the poison oracle. The poison oracle is not simply another ethnographic fact to be examined against the standard of science or “common sense” notions of causality. Rather it, like science, is a method for discovering facts, for deciding what is true – it runs parallel to science in this sense. The oracle

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is a technology of fact production and, like other such technologies, its use requires commitment to certain fundamental assumptions: “‘The poison oracle does not err’ is every Zande’s credo” (Evans-Pritchard 1976: 61). As Mehan and Wood note: “The Azande know that an oracle exists. That is their beginning premise. All that subsequently happens they experience from that beginning assumption” (1975: 9). On the basis of that premise, apparent contradictions are easily explained by invoking the interference of witchcraft, the incompetence of the operator, a broken taboo and so on. It is important to see that Azande assumptions about the incorrigibility of the oracle do not differ in kind from assumptions about the constancy of objects, which provide the basis of our own scientific reasoning and much common sense. Evans-Pritchard’s mistake according to Winch then lies in failing to appreciate the role that the oracle actually plays among the Azande and consequently refusing to acknowledge the problems inherent in his use of such words as exist, reality, belief and knowledge. Sharrock (1989: 672–673) suggests an alternative and a way out of Evans-Pritchard’s conundrum. There is another tack entirely, which is to avoid trying to say what kinds of things ‘facts’ are in the way Durkheim tries to do, and to go for something which is a banality bordering on a tautology, which is that facts are the things that fact finding procedures find. Since there is not much room for subtlety here, I make a rough and ready formulation, disavowing, as I do, any supposition that I am thereby relativistically endorsing any and all supposed ‘fact finding’ procedures. It might be as well to adopt the convention which obtained in ethnomethodology’s earlier days, of bracketing expressions in quotation marks, thus letting me say that ‘facts’ are those which ‘fact finding’ procedures find. Thereby one indicates not an all round endorsement of everyone’s proposals, but an attitude of neutrality requisite to the description of the diverse ways in which people in society go about finding what is the case, the objective being – of course – to find out about the practical organisation of ‘fact finding’ activities (without regard for their epistemological bona fides.). . . Putting things polemically, (and methodologically, not metaphysically), let me say that from this point of view the social facts are neither ‘in the head’ or ‘out in the world’ but entirely ‘within the (socially organised) practices by which they are assembled’.

My contention then is that by imposing our own standards we risk obscuring important ethnographic details. For the Azande also do have beliefs – but these are an entirely different order of phenomena from what they know. Just as our beliefs are in various respects unlike the things we know, so are theirs. The question then is simply: what does the collapse of knowledge into beliefs

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obscure? If there is really to be something like an anthropology of knowledge it will have to reconsider previous ethnographic accounts – and probably many more to come – with this question in mind. This is not some obscure issue. The problem here is one that goes to the core of anthropology and it is implicated in anthropological uses of such terms as “belief,” “ideology,” and “world-view”. In “Ideology as a Cultural System” Geertz sets out to save the ideology concept for anthropology claiming (1973: 196) that “the conception of ideology now regnant in the social sciences is a thoroughly evaluative (that is, pejorative) one.” Drawing his illustrations from Parsons and Mannheim among others, Geertz shows quite convincingly, that the social scientist’s conception of ideology involves the twin notions of selectivity and distortion. Selectivity ensures that ideologies “emphasize some aspects of social reality – that reality, for example, as revealed by current social scientific knowledge – and neglect or even suppress other aspects” (Geertz 1973: 198). At the same time ideological thought “positively distorts even those aspects of social reality it recognizes” (Geertz 1973: 198). For Geertz, then, ideology is an “egregiously loaded concept.” He is led to ask (1973: 199):

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argued in this book, to recast ideology as a set of public symbols but, as Schutz suggested, to make the social production, organization, distribution of knowledge a topic of inquiry and, at the same time, to examine and describe the various technologies of fact production. The problem does not lie simply in the fact that such analytic terms as ideology presuppose knower-independent truths (which, of course, they do) or in the fact that they are evaluative, indeed, pejorative. It is rather that their use almost inevitably involves a confusion of “their” standards and one’s own, of knowledge and belief, of subject and object. All notions of ideology crucially invoke a distinction between belief based on appearance and some actual set of facts – they insist upon a contrast between appearance and some non-ideological reality which is variably intelligible and visible to those held captive by the ideological formation. Ideology then rests on a notion of belief masquerading as knowledge.

If the critical power of the social sciences stems from their disinterestedness, is not this power compromised when the analysis of political thought is governed by such a concept, much as the analysis of religious thought would be (and on occasion has been) compromised when cast in terms of the study of ‘superstition’?

Behind the concept of ideology, the nostalgia for a quasi-transparent form of knowledge, free from all error and illusion. [. . .] The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. (Foucault 1980: 117–118)

While Geertz, I think quite rightly, claimed that ideological analysis can lead to a “flattened view of other people’s mentalities” (1973: 210) he nevertheless argued that there was, at the time of writing, “nothing. . .with which to replace it” (1973: 200) and, in the end, attempts to do for this concept what he did for culture elsewhere; that is, cut it down to size. Thus Geertz’s notion of ideology is not the all-encompassing one common to many social theorists but is rather, by definition, linked to politics and political rhetoric. Ideology is reconceptualized as a set of “symbolic models” which “render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful” (1973: 220) and “so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them” (ibid.). Ideology, we are told, consists of “maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (ibid.). While Geertz’s critique of the ideology concept is incisive and powerful I believe that his suggestion (1973: 212) that “the sociology of knowledge ought to be called the sociology of meaning” is misguided. The solution is not, I have

What is peversely missing in most ethnographic uses of the ideology concept is any account of what people know. If this literature were a reasonable guide to what anthropologists think about the people among whom they study (which, thankfully, it is not) one would have to concede that anthropologists generally understand their subjects to know absolutely nothing. Rather than knowledge, the ethnographic other as she has been so tellingly formulated, has only beliefs and, in this sense, is quite unlike the anthropologist. The criticism is not simply that ideology implies some non-ideological truth or that ideology implies that people’s beliefs are false. Eagleton, perhaps prompted by Foucault’s well-known arguments cited above, addresses both these issues even if he does not respond to them in a completely satisfactory way. My criticism is rather that ideology imposes our standards of truth and, by extension, knowledge upon others and fails to recognize that the people so characterized have their own methods for deciding such matters of truth and falsity, etc. The notion of belief is over-extended and as a consequence the

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knowledge of the ethnographic subject is ironicized. Notions of ideology, then, obscure both the local organization of knowledge and the workings of practical epistemology. The analysis presented in this book is completely at odds with the ideological-perspective which, for instance, Eagleton (1991) advocates. There, for instance, Eagleton asks us to: “Imagine (. . .) a society which uses the word ‘duty’ every time a man beats his wife” (1991: 14). This is a powerful and striking example. We may ask initially why such an example has been chosen involving things we can see are morally reprehensible. What is involved here? Part of it turns on the relation between saying and “believing” which Eagleton treats as much the same thing. But, if a man says he has beaten his wife because it is his duty, what he believes may well turn out to be inconsequential. What is crucial is that such a statement is used to justify his action. As Austin (1961: 201) remarks: “It is very evident that the problems of excuses and those of the different descriptions of actions are throughout bound up with each other.” So, rather than question this man’s belief or characterize this as ideology, we are led instead to ask whether others accept such a justification as reasonable, how it might be challenged, how, in fact, in excusing, explaining, justifying and challenging actions people are caught in a seamless web of accountability. The question of whether this man believes that it is his “duty” to beat his wife is, in that sense, quite beside the point. One of the central arguments of this book has been that the people anthropologists study have their own methods for distinguishing between knowledge and belief, between fact and fancy, between insight and illusion. These methods are not located “in the heads” of individuals but rather in the organized set of practices which are constitutive of the particular scenes which make up the life-world. These practices fit together to make up the accountably organized, coherent and orderly activities or language games of everyday life which, it has been suggested, can be fruitfully studied through the techniques of conversation analysis.

Appendix

Conversation analysis Glossary and guide to the literature

Introduction: Conversation analysis (hereafter CA) developed in the 1960s and 70s in the writings and research of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson along with their students and a number of close colleagues. This alphabetically arranged glossary is meant to guide the reader through that technical vocabulary of CA which is relevant to the analyses contained in this book. Action: CA is distinguished from other approaches to “discourse” and “pragmatics” in the social sciences by its focus on action. Any phenomenon in “talk-in-interaction” can be examined to see what job it is doing, in this place, in this unfolding conversation. When conversation analysts build collections these are, typically, collections of actions, (e.g. assessments, repair initiations, requests etc.).1 When such collections are made, it is routinely found that a single such job may be accomplished by a range of distinct linguistic, and sometimes non-linguistic, components. Furthermore, the particular practice selected for doing a job may have different sequential consequences. So, for instance, next turn repair can be initiated both by partial repeats of the turn containing the trouble source (with or without a “wh-” question word) or by components such as huh? These set up different relevancies for next turn and thus result in distinctive trajectories of action. Reading: Heritage (1984b), Schegloff and Sacks (1973), Schegloff (1995, 1996c), Goodwin (2000). Format: Formatting encompasses two distinct issues – action formatting and turn formatting. In the first place, a speaker may select a particular action out of a range of possibilities to accomplish a particular interactional goal. Sacks, for instance, discussed the way an offer of food is transformed over the course of a single encounter from an offer, to a request, to a warning and, finally, to a threat. The interactional goal of “getting someone over to your house” might be

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pursued through the use of an offer, a request or an invitation. The question to ask is why a particular action format has been selected and what consequences this has for the sequence of which it is a part. Turn formatting refers to the fact that turns are assembled out of relatively stable lexical, grammatical, prosodic and non-vocal resources. The organization of any turn is an accountable matter and participants inspect it’s timing, placement and design and the components out of which it is constructed to see “why that now?” A given turn may accomplish a number of jobs simultaneously – get attention, select next speaker, correct a previous utterance, deliver a report. In assembling a turn, speakers may thus select particular lexical, grammatical and non-vocal turn-components which specifically address different issues. As Goodwin has shown the turn’s design is not a single cognitive event but rather an emergent product of interaction between speaker and recipient. Reading: On “why that now?” see, Schegloff (1998). On ‘action formatting’ or ‘action selection’ see Sacks (1995 Vol. II: 325–331), Davidson (1984), Drew and Heritage (1992: 33). On ‘turn formatting’ or ‘turn design’ see Goodwin (1979), Goodwin (1990), Drew and Heritage (1992: 34–35). Formulate: ‘Formulate’ refers to the selection of a particular lexical item or combinations thereof where several alternatives are, in principle, available. In his discussion of “formulating place,” Schegloff showed that the selection of a particular descriptive/referential form over others could not be motivated by “correspondence.” My current location could be described in any number of equally corresponding ways. And the most “precise” or “accurate” description, however that judgment is arrived at, is clearly not always the most “appropriate” one either. Sacks noted for instance that to say someone was driving at 37 miles an hour is a very different thing from saying they “were driving with traffic” or “slow” or whatever (Sacks 1995 Vol. I: 435–440). Philosophers had been concerned with this issue for sometime before conversation analysts turned to examine it as an empirical feature of talk-ininteraction. Frege, for instance, argued that if the meaning of a name was the object to which it referred, as Mill had proposed, then names which have the same referent should be interchangeable (by virtue of their identical meaning).2 But this is not the case. For instance the expression Clark Kent is not substitutable for Superman in the sentence, “Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly” despite the fact that both names refer to the same person.3 Considerations such as these led Frege to propose that meaning is not exhausted by the sign’s reference. Rather, signs may differ in their sense or mode of presentation even where the referents are identical. In fact, as Frege (1948 [1892]) noted, an

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

expression may have sense without having an identifiable referent as his example “the celestial body most distant from earth” was meant to illustrate (1948 [1892]: 211). Frege wrote (1948 [1892]: 211), “there is, connected with a sign [. . .] what I should like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained,” and later, “to the sign there corresponds a certain sense and to that in turn a certain reference, while to a given reference (an object) there corresponds not only one sign.” A

F

D

B

E

C

The intersection of AE&BF AE&CD BF&CD

Different “senses” fit into alternate descriptive frameworks and different courses of action. Consider in this respect another example from Frege’s account. If we imagine a triangle with lines from each corner to the middle of the opposite side, a point of intersection is established. There are various ways in which that intersection can be formulated. Each of these alternates fits with various (geometrical, mathematical) facts – e.g. the formulation of the point as the intersection of AE and BF fits with statements about the dimensions of the triangle the longest side of which is BE. Schegloff argued that selection of a place formulation proceeds on the basis of a series of analyses. So, for instance, certain place terms are selected by virtue of who one is talking to (a membership analysis). A native of a city may not use the same term with a tourist as they would with another native. A location analysis is implied by speaker’s selection of a term – so, if A says: “Where will you be at three, I’ll come and meet you.” B will not say “Canada” (generally, in such situations, speakers do not formulate their location in terms of a place for which speaker and recipient are co-present). Specific activities call for certain kinds of place formulations – so, for instance, people don’t normally

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give directions to their house using longitude and latitude although this might be appropriate in directing an ocean-going vessel. Person formulations were described also by Sacks and Schegloff (1979) and are discussed in Chapter 7. Pomerantz discussed formulations in court noting the operation of something akin to Schegloff ’s topic-activity analysis. Thus she noted that “my sister” and “Linda Pomerantz,” as referentially equivalent expressions, may be selected by reference to the particular kind of account the speaker is building. Drew and Heritage (1992) and Lynch and Bogen (1996), both following Sacks (1995), have made similar observations with respect to time-formulations. Thus, calendrical dates (e.g. July 23rd) propose a chronological, “objective” listing of events whereas formulations such as “the last time I was there,” or “the day after that” are fitted to a more personal and biographical narrative. Sacks also noted that particular devices are available to speakers who wish to avoid formulations altogether. Thus Sacks argued that indexical expressions (indicator terms) were not simply substitutes for corresponding descriptions. A speaker may have good reason for selecting “here” in “what are you doing here?” where “here” is “group therapy.” Sacks concludes, “you can’t be engaged in ‘merely’ – non-consequentially, nonmethodically, non-alternatively – saying ‘This is, after all, a group therapy session.’ To do that – even though you’re merely invoking one thing that’s true about this – is to do other things as well, e.g. put somebody down for something they just said, propose special relevancies, propose that some topic ought to be discussed or ought not to be discussed, invoke a status hierarchy, etc.” Schegloff (1988: 19) argues along the same lines that, “In most ordinary talk-in-interaction it is virtually impossible for conversationalists to accomplish ‘mere description.’ Descriptions are inspected by co-participants to see what their speaker is doing by talking in that way. Describing is a vehicle for acting.” Reading: Frege (1948 [1892]), Sacks (1963), Schegloff (1972, 1988b), Sacks and Schegloff (1979), Drew and Heritage (1992: 31–33), Pomerantz (1987), Lynch and Bogen (1996), Sacks (1995 Vol. I: 515–522). Preference: Another aspect of sequential organization has to do with the “preference relations” between alternatives (see Bilmes 1986; Heritage 1984b; Levinson 1983; Pomerantz 1984b; Sacks 1987; Schegloff in press). The basic idea of preference is summarized in the following passage from Schegloff (in press):

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis

In the vast majority of sequence types, there are not only alternative responses which a first pair part makes relevant and a recipient of a first pair part may employ; there are alternate types of response, and these embody different alignments toward the project undertaken in the first pair part. A recipient of an offer or an invitation may accept it or decline it. Requests can be granted or rejected. Obviously there are different particular forms which can be used to do either of these, but accepting and declining, granting and rejecting, are fundamentally different types of responses and alignments to the offer or invitation. [. . .] (t)he alternative types of second pair part which a first pair part makes relevant are not equivalent, or equally valued. They are not “symmetrical alternatives” (Schegloff & Sacks 1973: 14). Sequences are the vehicle for getting some activity accomplished, and that response to the first pair part which embodies or favors accomplishment of the activity is favored – or, as we shall term it, the preferred second pair part.

Although a number of exceptions have been noted (Pomerantz 1984b: 83– 90), in general terms (+) responses (acceptances, grantings, agreements, i.e. those responses which promote the successful accomplishment of the course of action embodied in the FPP) are preferred while (–) responses (rejections, declinings, disagreements) are dispreferred. The organization of preference in conversation is very complex and cannot be adequately summarized here. Instead we will draw attention to just two central points that have emerged from a number of studies. First, preference is manifested in the design of particular turns. Dispreferred turns generally exhibit some collection of the following features: delay, associated accounts, prefaces, perturbations and hitches, mitigation, pro forma “agreement”. In general, dispreferred seconds tend to exhibit more internal complexity than preferred ones. A turn may, then, be specifically marked as dispreferred. The following is a well-known example from the conversation analytic literature: A: Uh if you’d care to come and visit a little while this morning I’ll give you a cup of coffee. B: hehh Well that’s awfully sweet of you. I don’t think I can make it this morning. .hh uhm I’m running an ad in the paper and-and uh I have to stay near the phone. (Atkinson & Drew 1979: 58)

B’s response to A’s invitation incorporates various features typical of a refusal – the dispreferred action in this case (see Kitzinger 2000). Thus B delays the production of the refusal by prefacing the turn with “hehh” and “well that’s awfully sweet of you” while at the same time expressing appreciation. Moreover, B does



 Talk and Practical Epistemology

not produce a simple “flat-out” refusal, but includes an account of why the invitation cannot be accepted. Note that the account is designed to describe the relevant details of B’s situation which prevent acceptance of the invitation (B has to stay by the phone). Secondly, preference is manifested in the organization of sequences in so far as participants routinely work to avoid dispreferred actions. So, for instance, the features of dispreferred turns mentioned above, particularly delay, become resources which the speaker of a first pair part can use to project an imminent dispreferred response and subsequently take measures to head it off. A pause after an FPP reaches recognizable possible completion provides an opportunity for the speaker of the FPP to withdraw, ‘upgrade’ or otherwise modify the action implemented in the FPP (see particularly Schegloff, Sacks, & Jefferson 1977). Readings: Heritage (1984b), Levinson (1983), Pomerantz (1984a, 1984b), Sacks (1987), Schegloff (in press). Repair: Repair refers to an organized set of practices through which participants are able to address and potentially resolve troubles or problems of speaking, hearing or understanding arising in prior talk. The repair mechanism in conversation has been described in terms of two interrelated components, initiation and repair. Descriptions further rely on a distinction between self (the speaker of the trouble source) and other in repair sequences. Finally, repair and repair initiation can be described as to their placement or position within a turn, within a series of turns and in relation to the repairable/trouble source. It is not possible within the space available to exemplify all the possibilities. However, some sense of the phenomena under discussion may be conveyed by a few examples: Self-initiated, Self-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977: 370 [GTS:5:33]) Roger: We’re just workin on a different → thing, the same thing Self-initiated, Self-repair in third turn (Schegloff et al. 1977: 370; see also Schegloff 1996) J: Is it going to be at your house? B: Yeah= J: → =your apartment?= B: =my place.

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

Self-initiated, Other-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977: 364) B: → He had dis uh Mistuh W- whatever k- I can’t think of his first name, Watts on, the one thet wrote [that piece, A: → [Dan Watts. Other-initiated, Self-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977: 370 [GTS:5:3]) Ken: Is Al here today? Dan: Yeah. (2.0) Roger: → He is? hh eh heh Dan: → Well he was. Other-initiated, Other-repair (Schegloff et al. 1977: 365 [TG:3]) B: A: B: A:

=[Oh:::. =[half the group thet we had la:s’ term wz there en we jus’ playing arou:nd. → Uh- fooling around. Eh- yeah. . .

These few examples illustrate a number of important aspects of the repair mechanism. First, they illustrate the various ways in which repair-initiation is done. When repair is initiated by the speaker of the repairable, initiation is indicated by the perturbations, hitches and cut-offs in the talk. In the case of self-repair, both initiation and the repair itself are routinely done in the same turn as the trouble source or in the transition space which directly follows the possible completion of that turn (the exception of third-turn repair is in fact not so exceptional as it may at first seem – see Schegloff 1997). When repair is initiated by a participant other than the speaker of the trouble source, repair is typically initiated in the turn subsequent to that which contains the trouble-source. A variety of next-turn-repair-initiators (NTRI) are available for accomplishing this. The various NTRIs, “have a natural ordering, based on their relative strength or power on such parameters as their capacity to locate a repairable” (Schegloff et al. 1977: 369). At one end of the scale, NTRIs such as what? and huh? indicate only that a recipient has detected some trouble in the previous turn, they do not locate any particular repairable component within that turn. Question words such as who, where, when are more specific in that they indicate what part of speech is repairable (e.g. who – a person referring noun phrase etc.). The power of such question words to locate trouble in a previous turn is increased when appended to a partial repeat. Repair may also be initiated by a partial repeat without any question word.

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Partial repeat + who (Schegloff et al. 1977: 368) o hhh Well I’m working through the Amfat Corporation. B: A: → The who? B: Amfah Corpora [tion. T’s a holding company. A: [Oh A: Yeah. Partial repeat (Schegloff et al. 1977: 365 [TG:15–16]) A: Well Monday, lemme think. Monday, Wednesday, an’ Fridays I’m home by one ten. B: → One ten? A: Two o’clock. My class ends one ten.

The formats of self- and other-repair-initiation are thus quite distinct and this engenders a different trajectory of repair in each case. Whereas self-initiation generally takes place in the same turn as the trouble source, other initiation does not. As Schegloff et al. note this means that in “other-initiation, the operations of locating the repairable and supplying a candidate repair are separated. The techniques for other-initiation are techniques for locating the troublesource.” In conversation, speakers address themselves to the talk contained in immediately preceding turns and most specifically in the most immediately preceding turn. In formulating their talk in this way, speakers can reveal to the co-participants understandings of the previous talk which the latter find problematic. Such misunderstandings can then prompt the initiation of “third position” repair as in the following example. T1 Annie: T2 Zebrach: T3 Annie: → → Zebrach: Zebrach: Annie: Zebrach:

Which one:s are closed, an’ which ones are open. Most of ‘em. This, this, [this, this ((pointing)) [I ‘on’t mean on the shelters, I mean on the roads. Oh! (0.8) Closed, those’re the ones you wanna know about, Mm[hm [Broadway. . .

In T2, Zebrach displays an understanding of Annie’s inquiry in responding to it. Annie then surmises that there has been a misunderstanding of her talk in T1 (what is at issue specifically, it seems, is the interpretation of “which one’s”). In T3 Annie repairs the problem and the course of action underway is

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

then re-engaged on the basis of the new understanding which Annie’s correction provides for. What is particularly obvious in such cases of third position repair is the way in which the repair mechanism operates in conversation to sustain an intersubjectivity that is the basis of any collaboratively built course of action (see Schegloff 1992b). So, given that speakers display, in their talk, their understanding of a previous turn, repair operates as a kind of “selfrighting” mechanism where those displayed understandings turn out to be misunderstandings (Schegloff et al. 1977). As Schegloff notes, “The ordinary sequential organization of conversation thus provides for displays of mutual understanding and problems therein, one running basis for the cultivation and grounding of intersubjectivity” (Schegloff 1991b: 158). One of the central findings of early work on repair concerned the preference for self-correction. Schegloff et al. noted a “strong empirical skewing” such that one found a greater number of self- over other-corrections in a collection of instances. One purpose of the 1977 paper then was to describe, “an organization, operative in local environments and on a case-by-case basis, which cumulatively produced the aggregate orderliness of repair phenomena” (Schegloff et al. 1977: 374). They show that positions for self-correction precede positions for other-correction across a repair-opportunity space and that these positions are not only ordered relative to one another but, further, that the ordering is “organizationally designed.” The organization which produces the skewing of the aggregate in the direction of self-correction, is seen in the positioning of other initiation relative to the trouble-source turn. Other initiations routinely occur in one position – next turn. Moreover, other-initiations are routinely withheld a bit past the possible completion of the turn containing the repairable. So withholding not only causes other initiations to be positioned in next turn, it can further cause ‘next turn’ to be itself delayed slightly. “In such cases, other initiations occur after a slight gap, the gap evidencing a withhold beyond the completion of the trouble-source turn – providing an ‘extra’ opportunity, in an expanded transition space, for speaker of trouble source to self-initiate repair” (Schegloff et al. 1977: 374). The preference for self-correction is seen also in the fact that next turn repair initiators provide for a next turn in which repair may be accomplished by the speaker of the trouble source. Finally, where other-corrections do occur they typically occur in modulated form – further testament to their dispreferred status. A final piece of evidence relating to the dispreferred status of other-correction is found in the fact that unmodulated other-corrections are often treated by the participants as constituting or as preliminary to disagree-

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

ment. In short, several strands of evidence converge to suggest the operation of a strong preference for self-correction in adult conversation. While it is clear that repair operates to sustain understanding between conversationalists, particular repair sequences frequently advance rather more specific courses of action. A clear example of this is seen in the many cases where repair is a vehicle for disagreement and disaffiliative responses more generally (see Goodwin 1983; Drew 1997). Egbert (1997b) shows that otherinitiated repair may serve as an entry or exit device to a conversation and that repair is often implicated in transformations of the participation framework in conversation such that a single conversation becomes two simultaneous conversations. In an early paper, Jefferson (1974) showed that error-correction could be used to display self-monitoring (as when a speaker replaces a word such as “cop” with one such as “police officer”). In a later paper Jefferson (1987: 88) suggested that, “In the course of the business of correcting we can find such attendant activities as e.g. ‘instructing’, ‘complaining’, ‘admitting’, ‘forgiving’, [. . .] ‘accusing,’ ‘apologizing’, ‘ridiculing’, etc. That is, the business of correcting can be a matter of, not merely putting things to rights, [. . .], but of specifically addressing lapses in competence and/or conduct.” The extreme flexibility of the repair device and its potential to serve as the vehicle for such a wide array of actions is, in part, a result of its omnirelevance and scope of application. Repair is always potentially relevant in conversation. It has been pointed out that, because repair is potentially always a relevant next action, continuers (mhm, uh huh) serve to pass the opportunity to initiate repair. Secondly, it appears that nothing in the talk is, in principle, excludable from the class of potential repairables. As such, repair-initiators may “make” trouble just as they may locate it. Reading: Sacks (1995 Vol. I: 1–11), Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977), Drew (1997), Jefferson (1974, 1987), Schegloff (1991, 1992b, 1996c). Sequence: Schegloff (1995b) notes that a crucial development in CA came when Sacks realized the methodological relevance of the fact that, embodied in a second turn is an analysis of an immediately previous one (see Moerman & Sacks 1988[1970]; Heritage 1984b). This analysis is embodied not only in the turn’s construction, placement and timing, but also in the action it implements. Schegloff discusses a particular lecture labeled 04.a from the Fall 1966 term. Sacks opened the lecture with a fragment from the Group Therapy Sessions (Sacks 1995 Vol. II: 281).

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

Roger: Jim: Therapist: Jim: Therapist: Jim: Therapist: Jim: Ken: Therapist: Roger: Jim: Therapist:

On Hollywood Boulevard the other night they were giving tickets for dirty windshields ((door opens)) hh Hi, Jim [c’mon in. [H’warya Jim, this is uh Al, Hi Ken, Hi Hi Roger. Hi Hi Jim Reed.

Schegloff (1995 Vol. II: xliii) summarizes Sacks’s analysis of this fragment for its methodological and analytic importance, writing:4 Sacks offers as evidence that some prior talk was attended to by others than its overt interlocutors, and as evidence that it constituted a recognizable introduction, the prima facie evidence afforded by a subsequent speaker’s talk. Specifically, he notes, that when Ken responds to the utterance with his name (. . .) not with “What” (as in an answer to a summons), indeed not with an utterance to the therapist at all, but with a greeting to the newly arrived Jim, he shows himself (to the others there assembled as well as to us, the analytic overhearers) to have attended and analyzed the earlier talk, to have understood that an introduction sequence was being launched, and to be prepared to participate by initiating a greeting exchange in the slot in which it is he who is being introduced. There is a shift here in analytic stance and procedure, from the analyst’s understanding as a particular point of departure on the one hand to the co-participant’s understanding as an initial point of departure on the other. (emphasis added)

The coherence and organization of sequences is rooted in such relations between turns-at-talk. Sequence [Adjacency Pair]: At its most basic, ‘sequence organization’ is embodied in the phenomenon of paired actions or adjacency pairs. For instance, a question creates a ‘slot’, ‘place’, or ‘context’ within which an answer is relevant and expected. This is, of course, not to say that questions are always followed by recognizable answers to them. To say that turns are often organized as adjacency pairs is to make a statement about a rule (or norm) which participants

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

themselves use in the production and recognition of talk-in-interaction, rules which they orient to in various ways so as to find and construct orderly sequences of turns-at-talk (see Goodwin & Heritage 1990; Heritage 1984b). Rules in this sense are frameworks of accountability which provide for the intelligibility of action. As Levinson puts it, “conversationalists are . . . not so much constrained by rules or sanctions, as caught in a web of inferences” (Levinson 1983: 321). Such paired actions are themselves components of larger sequences. One can often describe larger sequences as consisting of a base pair and various expansion sequences. Pre-expansions, precede the base pair. Insert expansions, occur between the first and the second pair part of a base sequence. Postexpansions are placed after the second pair part of a base pair. Sequence [Pre-Expansion]: As the name implies pre-expansions involve the expansion of a sequence prior to the occurrence of a base first pair part. Preexpansions are, in a basic sense, preparatory to some other, projected, work to be done in the sequence. Some pre-expansions are type-specific. That is, they project a specific base first pair part, e.g. they are pre-invitations “hey, are you busy tonight?”, preannouncements “Guess what happened to me?”, pre-requests “You wouldn’t happen to be going my way would you?” (see Levinson 1983; Schegloff 1988c, in press; Terasaki [2004]1976). Such type-specific pre-expansions typically check on a condition for the successful accomplishment of the base first pair part. One type of pre-expansion – the summons-answer sequence – is generic and checks on the precondition of any interactional project – the availability of a projected recipient to do recipient’s work (i.e. to attend the talk for which s/he is selected as recipient). As Schegloff (1968) noted a summons projects further talk by the same speaker. Participants orientation to this is seen in deferring (e.g. “wait a minute”), go-ahead (e.g. “what?”) and blocking (e.g. “I’m not interested in what you have to say,” “I know, take out the trash.”) responses. Go-ahead responses, in so far as they orient to imminent further talk, are expectably minimal contributions (similar in this respect to continuers) which claim as little turn space as possible. Taken to the extreme, this may result in the collapse of a sequence into a single turn with an adjustment in gaze direction being treated as equivalent to a summons’ answer. As noted, type-specific pre-expansions check on a condition of, or establish the reasonable grounds for, some projected action (which, if it is done, is embodied in the FPP of a base adjacency pair). For example, story-prefaces,

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

pre-announcements and pre-tellings in general routinely check the newsworthiness of the telling they project. Pre-expansion sequences contribute to the in-situ coherence and detectable orderliness of activities. Often such sequences display the grounds for doing some activity or establish that some pre-condition for doing the activity obtains. In this sense they provide for the visibly occasioned character of the activity embodied in the first pair part of the base pair. Sequence [Insert Expansion]: An adjacency pair consists of two adjacent utterances, with the second selected from some range of possibilities defined by the first. While this is an empirically verifiable generality (that is, it is true of most adjacency pairs), this account of adjacency pairs is meant to describe members’ own normative expectations and in-situ orientations. As such it does not trouble the conversation analyst to find that, on some occasions, the two utterances of an adjacency pair are not, in fact, adjacent. Rather, such apparently deviant cases routinely offer further support for the analysis of adjacency pairs as a normative framework which participants use in the course of building coherent activity together. A case in point is provided by insert-expansions which occur between the first and second pair parts of adjacency pairs (see Schegloff 1972). In doing an insert expansion, participants can be seen to sustain the relevance of the second pair part and use the insert expansion to, in some sense, work towards it. Although insert expansions sustain the relevance of an SPP, they nevertheless break the contiguity between FPP and SPP and as such are implicated in the organization of preference. Insert expansions can be divided into post-firsts and pre-seconds (Schegloff in press) according to the kind of interactional relevancy they address. The most common form of post-first insert-expansion consists of a next turn repair initiator (NTRI) and its response. The structure is outlined in Figure 1. A: B: A: B:

FPP 1 FPP 2 SPP 2 SPP 1

Although the utterances in lines 1 and 4 are not adjacent, the talk in lines 2 and 3 displays an orientation to the conditional relevance of the second pair part. Pre-second insert expansions are oriented not to trouble with the FPP but rather to trouble with an expected SPP. Such insert expansions routinely ad-

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

dress issues that stand as preconditions to the doing of a preferred SPP (for instance, locating an object requested in the FPP). Sequence [Post-Expansion]: Post-expansions are highly variable with respect to their complexity. “Oh” occurs in a number of different positions within both turns and sequences and generally serves to mark a change of state from notknowing to knowing (Heritage 1984a). When it occurs in a recognizably third position in a sequence it tends to be associated with sequence closing.5 Reading: Schegloff (in press). Turn: Although it is clear that conversation is made up of turns at talk and that these are arranged one after the other it is not immediately obvious how participants accomplish this organization. In their 1974 paper, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson argued that turn-taking in conversation is organized locally by and for the participants on a turn-by-turn basis. Participants are able to do this because they have available to them a machinery for turn-taking which consists of two components. A turn constructional component determines the shape and extent of possible turns at talk. By extension it defines points of possible completion. Participants use it to find that turns are recognizably now just beginning, now still in progress, now ending. That is, they use it not only to locate but also to project points of possible completion within the talk. A point of possible completion constitutes a transition relevance place, that is, a discrete place within the talk at which transition to a next speaker is relevant. A turn allocation component provides a set of practices for selecting next speaker. The turn construction component defines a range of possibly complete turns for any particular point in a conversation. Turn constructional units so defined are distinguished from one another by their syntactic shape: lexical, phrasal, clausal, sentential. Single word-turn (Lexical) Desk: What is your last name [Loraine. → Caller: [Dinnis. → Desk: What? Caller: Dinnis Single phrase-turn (Verb phrase) Anna: Was last night the first time you met Missiz Kelly? (1.0) → Bea: Met whom? Anna: Missiz Kelly.

Appendix 1. Conversation analysis 

Bea:

Yes.

Single-clause turn (Relative clause) A: Uh you been down here before [havenche. B: [Yeh. → A: Where the sidewalk is? B: Yeah,

Sacks et al. (1974) note that such materials constitute evidence for the projectability of each turn unit insofar as, in each case, one finds, “sequentially appropriate starts by next speakers after turns composed of single-word, singlephrase, or single-clause constructions, with no gap – i.e. with no waiting for possible sentence completion” (Sacks et al. 1974: 701). The second component of the model specifies that, at a point of possible completion, speaker transition may occur. Unless special provisions are made by a current speaker, such as prefacing the talk with a story-preface (see Sacks 1974, 1995 Vol. 2: 222; Schegloff 1982 and below), a projected point of possible completion constitutes a “transition relevance place” or TRP (see Sacks et al. 1974: 705–706, Note 15). Such TRPs are, for the participants, “discrete places in the developing course of a speaker’s talk (. . .) at which ending the turn or continuing it, transfer of the turn or its retention become relevant” (Schegloff 1992a: 116). Tourist: Parky: Old man: → Parky: → Parky:

Has the park cha:nged much, Oh:: ye:s, (1.0) Th’Funfair changed it’n [ahful lot [didn’it. [Th[ThatThat changed it,

In this example Parky begins an incipient next turn at the first point of possible completion in Old Man’s turn. Parky starts up here and again at the next point of possible completion not by virtue of any silence (by the time he starts there is no hearable silence) but by virtue of the projected possible completion of the turn constructional unit which constitutes a potential transition relevance place. Evidence such as this leads to the conclusion that “transfer of speakership is coordinated by reference to such transition-relevance places” (Sacks et al. 1974: 703). Reading: Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), Schegloff (1992a), Sidnell (2001b).

Notes

Chapter 1 . Malinowski (1926: 126) continues: Piecemeal items of information, of customs, beliefs, and rules of conduct floating in the air, or rather leading a flat existence on paper with the third-dimension, that of life, completely lacking. With this the theoretical arguments of Anthropology will be able to drop the lengthy litanies of threaded statement, which make us anthropologists feel silly, and the savage look ridiculous. I mean by this the long enumerations of bald statement such as, for example, “Among the Brobdignacians when a man meets his mother-in-law, the two abuse each other and each retires with a black eye”; (. . .) and (1926: 126–127) It is easy, however, to poke fun at the litany-method, but it is the field-worker who is really responsible. There is hardly any record in which the majority of statements are given as they occur in actuality and not as they should or are said to occur.(. . .) The modern anthropologist, working through an interpreter by the question and answer method can again collect only opinions, generalizations, and bald statements. He gives us no reality, for he has never seen it. The touch of ridicule which hangs about most writings of anthropology is due to the artificial flavour of a statement torn out of its life-context. The true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules – it simply does not; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life. . Ortner (1984) complains of an “essential individualism of most current forms of practice theory.” . One detects a kind of blithe reification at work here that comes close to the excesses seen in, for instance, philosophical discussions of ‘beauty,’ or ‘the good.’ However, the real danger is the tendency to reduce any and all approaches to the problematic terms of contemporary theory. In this respect see Ahearn’s characterization of Wittgenstein as “failing to theorize” or leaving the details of an interrelationship “unexplained.” Ahearn has here mistaken Wittgenstein’s principled rejection of theory and refusal to engage in explanation (which he articulates in one the most well-known and frequently cited passages from the his later work, i.e. 1953: §109) as a ‘failure’ on his part! She (2001: 114) writes: Similarly, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous philosopher of language to whom linguistic anthropologists increasingly look for inspiration, fails to theorize adequately the sociocultural nature of language and action. While Wittgenstein (1958)

Notes 

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

recognizes the degree to which language and social forms are intertwined, he leaves the details of this interrelationship unexplained. Sharrock and Watson (1988) have written explicitly about similar attempts to force ethnomethodology into the problematic categories of conventional theorising: The attempt to treat ethnomethodology as a species of ‘interactionism’ crucially lacking a theory of large-scale social structure, as an approach that places emphasis on ‘agency’ at the expense of ‘structure’ or that prefers a ‘voluntaristic’ over a ‘determinist’ approach are all efforts in that same direction and ones that we shall suggest presuppose an apparatus of theorizing that is obviated by ethnomethodology’s assumptions and strategy. (1988: 56) Ethnomethodology approaches these matters in this way, it does not stand within the same conception of theorizing, does not affiliate itself to the received tradition of theorizing, but steps outside of that and thus outside the collection of dualisms (including structure-and-agency) which comprise sociology’s institutionalized dilemmas. (1988: 58) . As Canfield (1997: 264) notes “a folk-philosophical” criticism of Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game would be to say that he supplies no criterion of identity – how then will we know if we are dealing with a language game rather than something else? The criticism, however misses the point: What he fails to supply, presumably, is some top-down account of when something counts as a given language-game. By his own lights, however, Wittgenstein does not owe us a top-down elucidation of ‘language-game.’ Defining his technical terms by means of one another is bootless; defining them in a non-circular way in ordinary speech or in someone else’s system is impossible. What one really needs to learn is how to use the term; and one can. The proper answer to “What is a language game?” is: this is one, and this, and this, and so on. Presented thus the answer may seem lame, but it is another matter if the this’s refer to detailed and closely examined examples. . . . In posing the question we perhaps invite the kind of assimilation of which Wittgenstein spoke in §13 and §14 of the Philosophical Investigations. . Such a move is, of course, common in the social sciences. However the fact that people can and do describe action in the terms of their ordinary language sets up a dilemma for sociological and anthropological theorizing one that both Winch and Schutz identified. As Coulter (1979: 9–10) notes: Human beings can describe and explain their own and others’ activities for practical purposes and in the light of a host of relevances in everyday life. . . What relationship is there between the ‘first order’ descriptive and explanatory constructions of commonsense reasoning and those of sociological inquiry? . Bourdieu (1977) too begins his critique of the social sciences with a consideration of time. . In the paper with Garfinkel, written at about the same time that the cited lecture was given, the point is made in almost identical language: “We are saying that we ought not to suppose that in order for persons in the course of their conversations and other ordinary

activities to behave in an orderly fashion, one set of things that has to be involved is that they are always able, say, to formulate their role relationships and systematically invoke their consequences” (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970: 359). The view against which Sacks and Garfinkel struggle is put with remarkable clarity by MacIntyre. He writes (1984: 211): If I listen to a conversation between two other people my ability to grasp the thread of the conversation will involve an ability to bring it under some one out of a set of descriptions in which the degree and kind of coherence in the conversation is brought out: ‘a drunken, rambling quarrel’, ‘a serious intellectual disagreement’, ‘a tragic misunderstanding of each other’, ‘a comic even farcial misconstrual of each other’s motives’, ‘a penetrating interchange of views’, ‘a struggle to dominate each other’, ‘a trivial exchange of gossip.’ Sacks and Garfinkel argue that to “bring a conversation under some description” is necessarily to do something more than simply understand it. . Which is of course not to say that members do not frequently attempt to impose order in just such a way. However, to the extent that an orderly organization of human activity results from such imposition it is always a situated, ongoing and contingent accomplishment. See for example Lynch’s work on laboratory science (Lynch 1985). . See also Ryle (1949: 41): . . .it would be quite possible for a boy to learn chess without ever learning or reading the rules at all. By watching the moves made by others and by noticing which of his own moves were conceded and which were rejected, he could pick up the art of playing correctly while still quite unable to propound the regulations in terms of which ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ are defined. We all learned the rules of huntthe-thimble and hide-and-seek and the elementary rules of grammar and logic this way. We learn how by practice, schooled indeed by criticism and example, but often quite unaided by any lessons in the theory. . Others have suggested that Bourdieu remains wedded to the very representationalism he criticizes. Schatzki (1997: 294) writes: Giddens and Bourdieu contest the adequacy of representationalism as a complete or even partial account of human activity and seek to do justice to the practical nature of action by rooting human activity in a nonrepresentational stratum, which also undergirds the resultingly limited role that representations play in determining action. [. . .] In Bourdieu, the principles and operations spelled out in practical logic are “performed directly in bodily gymnastics” (1977: 117, 1990: 89), without mediation of representations or cognitive operations. The selection of action is immediately and nonrepresentationally acted out by the bodily “practical transfer of incorporated, quasi postural schemes” (Bourdieu 1990: 92). Bourdieu, consequently, describes the dispositions that compose habitus as “bodily schemes.” On his official account, action is not governed by representations. Schatzki goes on to argue that in their attempt to theorize practice both Giddens and Bourdieu refuse to honour their own finding that the situational particularities of action always over run any attempt to map them in a generalizable, theoretical, representation. A theory of practice, such as both Bourdieu and Giddens construct, refuses to allow the practices to speak for themselves as Wittgenstein says they must (Wittgenstein 1972: Section 139).

Notes 

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Speaking of the various practice theories, Stern (2003) notes “one of the ironies of the relationship between these intertwined yet opposing approaches is that practice theorists such as Bourdieu or Bloor employ Wittgensteinian arguments for the irreducibility of practice to theory in the service of a systematic theory of practice.” Wittgensteinian arguments could never, of course, give unequivocal support to any such development since any theory involves abstraction and generalization from particulars and it is just those particulars which Wittgenstein insists we must keep in view. . See also Keenan 1973 and Chapter 6. . Of course there is another event – the one in which Shama tells Bat what Chubby said to her – but given that no one speaks of this it is not the object of an epistemically qualified account.

Chapter 2 . This book contributes to a small but growing number of ethnographic studies which draw heavily upon conversation analysis – M. Goodwin (1990), C. Goodwin (1994, 1995, 1997), Goodwin and Goodwin (1996), Heritage and Lindstrom (1998), Moerman (1988).

. While Fox’s consideration of utterances which could have been marked for evidentiality but are not, opens up important questions for consideration, the notion of “zero-marking” is in fact quite problematic in this context. Zero-marked (as opposed to unmarked) suggests the operation of some kind of privative basic opposition such that the absence of an explicit marking comes to have a specific meaning in opposition to the presence of such a mark. So for instance, in English, most zero-marked nouns (e.g. dogø) are singular by virtue of an opposition to marked forms (e.g. dogs). This is clearly not the case for utterances which lack any explicit evidential marking and they are probably best understood as “unspecified” rather than zero marked. These issues are discussed in Jakobson (1938) as well as various considerations of language change and grammaticalization – see for instance Bybee (1994), Sankoff (1990), Sidnell (2001a). . The criticism I make of Fox could be put in the terms of speech act theory by saying that she seems to suggest that evidentials modify the locution of an utterance – the basic semantic content of the turn – and that this has implications for the illocutionary force – essentially making the utterance “weaker” or “stronger”. The alternative analysis is that these evidentials alter the basic illocutionary character of the utterance. Of course there is a much more basic problem involved in assuming a distinction between locution and illocution – see Wittgenstein’s (1953: §22) discussion of Frege who inspired Austin’s distinction. . The scene is from the film, To Kill A Mockingbird.

. Moerman (1974) pointed out the problematic character of such identifications. I use the term here only as a conventional ethnographic orienting device.

. It should also be noted that one of Mushin’s categories of “epistemic stance” is termed “reportive.”

. See Jacobsen (1986) for further discussion concerning the history of the study of evidentials by linguists working with Native North Americans.

. See Hutchby (2001) for an excellent review and critique of the “computational model of communication.” See also Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson (1996).

. The contributors to Chafe and Nichols do mention some antecedents – important here is, for instance, Jakobson’s (1957) discussion of verbal categories.

. Footing shifts can be achieved very subtly in conversation. Schegloff (1996a), notes that speaker’s use of own name: “can be understood as marking the utterance as a putative quote of what others might be saying among themselves about him” (1996a: 444).

. This is not to suggest that Agha and Mushin propose identical accounts – in fact they differ significantly. However, with respect to the central issue of how evidentials are related to a given context of use their accounts are similar. . This is what Agha calls “participant centering”. An illustrative example is provided by the sentence-final particles of Japanese. Japanese sentence-final particles Speaker Addressee yo + – marks speaker confidence, responsibility for claim ne – + seeks addressee confirmation yone + + presents proposition as given, shared information ka – + marks yes-no questions . Fox includes also verbs such as “hear,” “see,” “look,” “sound,” “say,” “must,” as well as modifiers such as “seem,” “look like,” “sound like,” “seem like,” “apparently.” . Presumably “the soup looks good” would, in this framework, count as an evidentially marked utterance. But what then of “the soup tastes good.” Is that also to be counted as ‘evidentially’ marked vis-à-vis a ‘claim’ such as “the soup is good”?

. More generally problematic aspects of Goffman’s work from the perspective of conversation analysis are discussed in Schegloff (1988a). . Rumsey (1990: 347) argues that: . . . all reported speech implicates two analytically distinct speech situations- the “projecting” and the “projected” – and in. . . languages that distinguish direct discourse from indirect. . . the more “direct” varieties import features of the projected speech situation into the projecting one, to a greater extent than do the “indirect” ones. The imported features generally include at least some lexico-grammatical ones, namely the indexical specifications for person, tense, deixis, and so on, since these are the minimal features by which speech situations (whether “real” or “imagined”) are constituted. The imported features can never include all those of some presumed “original” speech situation, since the prosodic ones can never be precisely reproduced. But they generally include some code features: direct discourse, to a greater extent than indirect, invites us to focus on the way in which it is encoded. . E. O. Keenan (1973) illustrated this anchoring of ritual speech in everyday forms of talkin-interaction in her study of marriage-requests (see Chapter 6 for discussion of this study

Notes 

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

and its implications for the present analysis). For further discussion of this issue see Keating and Egbert (2004).

a normative fallacy. For a discussion of rules and their treatment in anthropology see Sidnell (2003a).

. Which is not to say that words are, in fact, best thought of as “representations” only that this is the way they are typically understood. See Wittgenstein (1953: Sections 1–50).

. The distinction is similar to one which Sacks draws between claiming and demonstrating knowledge.

. Work on the distributed character of cognition marks a vast improvement in this respect. While this research clearly recognizes the distributed character of knowledge as well as its embeddedness in social activity, it does not attend to the ways in which knowledge is objectified and oriented to by the participants within those activities. (See Hutchins 1995; Lave & Wenger 1991; see also Duranti 1997: 30–33 for a discussion of the connection between the “cognitive” anthropology of Goodenough and Keesing and the work in distributed cognition by Lave and others).

. Austin (1971[1963]) of course abandons a strict opposition of constative and performative – claiming in the end that constatives are in fact performative. On the impossibility of “pure description” see Schegloff (1988b).

. Harris (1974) develops a related argument suggesting that Goodenough’s solution to the apparent “ambiguity and diversity” of knowledge of rules involves the identification of authorities and that this obscures consideration of the distribution of power. Thus he cites the following passage from Goodenough (1970: 100–101): In any community. . . there are some people who are regarded as having greater knowledge of what the standards for the group are supposed to be. They are called upon to pronounce what the standards are in disputes about the [the standards]. Thus, for some subjects at least, there are acknowledged authorities whose judgments regarding the agreed-upon standards and whose pronouncements as to whether something is right or wrong are accepted by others in the group. . . People want such authorities. Ethnographers concerned to describe a group’s culture, in the sense in which I am using the term, make a regular practice of seeking out recognized local authorities and experts in order to use them as their principal sources of information. . . Even in ordinary matters, one does not use a five-year old as a reliable informant about adult activities. Harris (1974: 247) argues that: What Goodenough fails to realize in granting to authorities the ability to decide right or wrong is that general behavioural conformity to such decisions is in no way proof of general consensus. People obey rules endorsed by authorities, not because they are obedient to rules, but because they are obedient to authorities. The question of conformity to authoritative rules thus leads directly to the consideration of the distribution of power within a population. . .Thus the prediction of the degree of conformity or consensus with respect to rules, even in the minimal sense of acknowledging competence, requires an analysis of etic conditions. While Harris’s suggestion that we must attend to the social distribution of knowledge and not simply reify the “expert’s” understandings is well-taken, he nevertheless maintains a view of rules as causes or determinants of human behavior. He disagrees with Goodenough over the nature of this determination not over the issue of whether rules are rightly understood in these terms in relation to human conduct. . In this Lindstrom’s approach is actually very conventional. He slips easily into talk of rules as if such an account were equivalent to a description and analysis of situated practice –

. A question may be raised about the priority of considerations here: should a teller tell his good news despite the fact that one the participants already knows it? . For detailed analysis along these lines see C. Goodwin (1981, 1987). . The lecture is the fourth from Fall 1971 (Lectures on Conversation, Vol. II, pp. 437–443). The transcript, updated slightly, runs as follows: Ben: Lori: Ben: Lori: Ben: Ben: → Ethel: → Ben:

Bill: Ethel: Ben: → Ethel: → Ben: Lori: Ethel: Ben: Lori: Ethel: Ben:

When’re yer folks comin’ down. They should be he:re. (1.5) There wz the one spot there, – they must have hadda, [some kind’v a [Will they get into it too? ’r wz it- more up by yer house. Yeah. No, no they’ll get into it. They must’v had some type of a showing. A camper sho:w or uhm- [flea market [At the great big drive in theater. = =or they mighta hadda swap meet, and there were, so many carsparked there en’ so many people walkin’ on the bridge across the freeway thet people were slowin’ down tuh look. Huhh Brother I mean it slowed up [a:ll, the traffic y’ know [An’ there-there wz at least ten mi:les of traffic bumper tuh bumper. -because a’ that, (1.0) [Damn idiots, [An’ how long did it- So-so it took a while tuh get throughWhat time [didju leave. [Mm hm, Well, let’s [see, we [‘Leven thirty, But that wz- Then you wentuh Fre:d’s. We, [we left- we left[No. That’s the time we left Fre:d’s.

. “Another aspect of it is spouses will jointly have participated in some of the events that they will have occasion to tell in the company of others.”

 Talk and Practical Epistemology . See Drew and Heritage (1992) for a discussion of such frames in institutional encounters. . It should be noted that Sacks had read Evans-Pritchard’s work and may well have considered it an exception to the general finding that anthropologists were completely dependent on interviews. This remark seems more likely to have been addressed to then current “ethnosemantic” approaches.

Notes

a highly focused variety which is commonly used in conversation between villagers. It is this focused variety which I intend to sketch in this chapter. For discussion of variation in Callander see Sidnell (1999, 2001a). . For one, the term basilectal carries with it certain assumptions about the nature of language variation and change – namely that the former reflects an ongoing process of accommodation to standard varieties of English. For discussion of this issue see Winford (1996). . Deo had also asked Gopal and I to come to represent his interests to his sister.

Chapter 3

. For a detailed discussion of these and many other aspects of GC phonology see Rickford (1987).

. It should be noted that wage labour (day work or job work) is often done in “crews.” Rice producers do not hire individuals but groups of men who are used to working together. The composition of these crews usually shows the influence of patrilocal group allegiances.

. Within Bickerton’s theory of creole genesis, the punctual/non-punctual distinction is claimed to be a reflex of the “language bioprogram” triggered in children, who, faced with inadequate and disorderly pidgin input, create a creole in the process of first language acquisition (for criticism of this theory see for example Goodman 1985).

. The origin of this word is somewhat obscure. It is often suggested that it derives from English mate via vowel epenthesis (a common phonological process in the Caribbean Creoles, see Holm 1988). However, Robertson (1983: 13) writes that: “Items such as /mati/ ‘a close friend’ have been assumed to be phonetic variants of English mate. The form however, follows a regular sound change evidenced in Berbice Dutch in which the Standard Dutch suffix -tje becomes /ti/. The Guyanese item is therefore more likely to have been of Dutch origin, maatje being the etonym.” This would go someway to explaining its distribution as it is found in Guyana and Suriname, which experienced Dutch colonization, but not, as far as I know, the rest of the Caribbean, which did not. The relationship which mati refers to is an important one in both Guyana and Surinam and further investigation of both of the social and linguistic significance of the word is warranted (see Herskovits & Herskovits 1936: 32–35; Jayawardena 1963: 48–52; Price 1974: 165).

. Here she usefully contrasts English present progressive which is obligatory in the expression of “event in progress” with the gram useto which is optional in the expression of past habitual, so it is possible to convey past habituality by use of the preterit form – e.g. Everyday I ate an apple and walked to work. . It is alternatively possible to see this as an example of VP fronting with dis as an underlying subject. [IP [DP dis][ I’ ∅[ VP a mi prapatii]]]

Chapter 5

. Raja’s sister had moved to live with her husband in a village some distance from Callander. . This way of stating things accords particular rumshops a transcendental existence above and beyond members’ production and recognition of such spaces as rumshops. Such an account cannot in fact adequately deal with the phenomena under study. The same space can be seen, and oriented to, as a wake house, a shop front, a family home etc. This is to say that it is the activity of men drinking in the space that affords it the status of a rumshop for members. This is particularly the case given that, because most rumshops sell liquor without a license, there are times when proprietors and patrons collectively work to obscure the seeing of this space as a “rumshop” – i.e. by quickly hiding the glasses, rum and money.

Chapter 4 . I speak of a single variety here despite the existence of significant variation at all levels of linguistic structure. This variation has been a major focus of research and is the subject of two book length studies as well as numerous theses and articles. Talk in Callander is of course marked by significant variation in grammar, phonology and lexis. There is, however,

. This and related passages in which Wittgenstein suggests that the game in question should be conceived as a complete language have generated a fair bit of controversy and important discussion. See Rhees (1996[1959–1960]) “Wittgenstein’s Builders” and Malcolm (1995) “Language Game #2”. . See Chapter 1 on family resemblance and Wittgenstein (1953: §66). . Schulte (1992: 101) includes a similar passage from lecture notes in which Wittgenstein characterizes himself as a “bad guide”. I am trying to conduct you on tours in a certain country. I will try to show that the philosophical difficulties arise. . . because we find ourselves in a strange town and do not know our way. So we must learn the topography by going from one place in the town to another, and from there to another, and so on. And one must do this so often that one knows one’s way, either immediately or pretty soon after looking around a bit, wherever one may be set down. This is an extremely good simile. In order to be a good guide, one should show people the main streets first. But I am an extremely bad guide, and am apt to be



Notes 

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

led astray by little places of interest, and to dash down side streets before I have shown you the main streets. The difficulty of philosophy is to find one’s way about. The real difficulty in philosophy is a matter of memory – memory of a peculiar sort. – A good guide will take one down each road a hundred times. And just as a guide will show new streets every day, so I will show you new words. See also Canfield (1997) who cites Wittgenstein’s (1953: §199) “To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)” before remarking “Language is a heterogeneous collection of such customs, linked by ‘family resemblance.”’ . The argument is a criticism of both Wittgenstein’s earlier work (i.e. the Tractatus) and Russell’s account of logical atomism. It is important to note that Wittgenstein does not deny the importance of ostensive teaching in the learning of words – the target of his criticism is the idea that meaning is a function of ostensive definition. Although commentators emphasize different aspects of Wittgenstein’s argument most agree that an important point is that ostensive definition presupposes the existence of language and some quite complicated ways in which it is used (naming, etc.) and thus cannot serve as its basis or foundation. . “Learning to talk is learning to act” is from Canfield (1993). . See Canfield (1993) for a useful comparison of these two approaches. Canfield suggests that whereas Ethnographers of Communication are interested primarily in the diversity of routines and their relation to the larger social milieu, the Wittgenstienian approach involves examining the relationship between a language game and some proto-custom. A study by Ochs, Schiefflin and Platt (1983) entitled “Questions of Immediate Concern” offers some interesting parallels to the argument presented here. Specifically, they note the inherently multi-functional character of questions and suggest that they are first used as attention getting devices. Their notion of “immediate concern” resonates with my emphasis on “first person questions.” Studies by Ochs, Schieffelin and others in the field of language socialization develop many themes which this chapter cannot adequately address. . As is well known, insertion sequences create principled exceptions to the criteria of adjacency. . Let us note here that the question asks specifically about which school Shakir “wants” to attend and not which he “will” attend. That is, the question asks about Shakir’s own desires or wishes (perhaps plans) and not things over which he may have little control (i.e. which school he will in fact attend – a decision to be made by his parents). . This is Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance.” See Chapter 9.

. Satya’s use of the person referring form Nashoo dem not only presupposes Shakir’s ability to use names but at the same time his understanding of the associative plural dem. In this context, dem does not simply mean plural (and notice of course that English plural -s is not used with names in this way) but rather modifies the name to which it attaches such that the construction refers to a collective. So this referring expression presupposes Shakir’s ability to pick out not just named individuals but also the collectives to which they belong. . The sequence continues: 13 14 15 16 17

Satya: yu kyaan kos op dem an tel dem se da antii Satya a gu gu. wen yu gu hoom mos kos op dem rait?

You can’t curse them and tell them that Aunty Satya is going to go. When you go home you have to curse at them, right?

. Notice that the epistemic basis which Shakir provides presupposes his understanding of first person intention utterance – the one that Shakir here reports to Satya. . In the earliest question and answer sequences the child is asked about his/her own actions, behavioural displays, sensations etc. In later elaborations of the game, the scope of questioning is broadened and extended to include the child along with others (see e.g. 5.7). Such questions frequently employ the plural form of the second person pronoun. From an early age children are expected to care for and attend to their younger siblings. In that sense they become accountable not only for their own actions but also for the actions of those in the charge. . Consider also the following example: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Gopal:

huu gu djraiv? ((Bogle game making noise)) Satya: eh stap. na plee wid da. huu gu djraiv? (0.4) Shakir: o mio Satya: yuu? Shakir: o yao Satya: hou i tii:f de soo [ Gopal: (uh-) Mama: [o aal ratino Gopal: [wa yu gu djraiv. kou? (1.0) wa yu a djraiv. Kou?

Who will drive? Hey stop. Don’t play with that. Who will drive? Me. You? Yes. Why are his teeth like that?

They are all rotten. What will you drive? Cow? What will you drive? Cow?

. Which is of course not to say that people do not say such things as, “I do not know if I’m really hungry” or “I don’t know if I really want to go to that school.” But here the meaning is not “I have not inspected myself to find out if I am hungry” or “I have not observed whether I want to go to that school” but rather that one’s mind is not made up.

Chapter 6

. See Canfield (1997).

. Which is one very good reason for asserting the priority of conversation vis-à-vis other forms of talk-in-interaction. A kabary performance clearly depends upon recourse to resaka

. Notice that this sequence of two questions involves a replacement of an “informationseeking” question by one which is “confirmation-seeking.”

Notes 

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

(ordinary speech i.e. conversation) but the reverse is not true. This goes to a debate between conversation analysts and linguistic anthropologists (see for instance Sidnell 2001b; Gaudio 2003).

Chapter 7 . Schegloff and Sacks note that, given the availability of alternative ways of invoking a warrant, it should be possible to say something about what constrains the selection of one over the other. One issue they mention here is placement. A possible pre-closing which embodies the warrant for closing a conversation is restricted in where it may occur – the items which do this job are also used to do other actions in conversation and, thus, in any specific case an item such as “we::ll” derives its recognizability as a possible pre-closing from its placement – at the analyzable end of talk on a topic. An announced warrant does not have the same restrictions on placement and, indeed, may often interrupt talk on a topic – that being a routine feature of its use in closing down a conversation (or in making such a closing locally relevant.) Of course the kind of embodied practices which are discussed in this chapter show similar restrictions in terms of placement because they invariably “play off ” of something that the other said. . This distinction is not to be confused with that proposed by speech act theorists between “direct” and “indirect” or between “explicit” and “implicit.” Such terms imply a quite different understanding of the relation between what is said and what is done – one not obviously compatible with the conversation analytic stance (see Schegloff 1988c; Levinson 1983). Closer to the announced-embodied distinction is that made by Silverstein (1993) between metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. See also Du Bois (1986) whose distinction between indexic and arbitrary is discussed in Chapter 2. Wittgenstein’s pointed contrast between the logical possibilities of “saying” and “showing” shows a number of similarities to the announced/embodied distinction. . For discussion of the claim that something is a “possible X” see Schegloff (1996b). . This was complicated by the question of whether the two were in fact related and, as such, to whom a few villagers owed their primary loyalty. For most participants there was no question of whom they should support. In the end most villagers felt that although there was some genealogical relation it was too distant to be of any importance. . See Goodwin and Goodwin (2004). . Sacks (and later Sacks & Schegloff 1979) argued that the use of these options for reference to persons in conversation was organized via the operation of two preferences. A basic preference for recognitionals over non-recognitionals is evidenced most obviously in that, where there is uncertainty about the possibility of achieving recognition through a given form, the speaker may use it with try-marking. Thus the anticipated possibility of failure does not prevent the pursuit of recognition – rather a special device comes into play. Further evidence of the preference for recognitionals is found in the fact that recognition may be pursued through several successive tries.

Finally, the preference for recognitionals over non-recognitionals is treated as accountable by the participants. So, for instance, if a non-recognitional form is used and later it is found that recognition might have been achieved, this can then become grounds for complaint indeed for the inference that the speaker is being purposively vague or even deceptive. The second preference for minimization operates concurrently and is relaxed “step-by-step” so as to allow for the achievement of recognition. Later work by Schegloff extended and elaborated the earlier analysis by taking into account both initial and subsequent references. . In the later paper, Sacks and Schegloff argue that reference to persons involves two, sometimes competing, relations of preference – the preference for minimization and the preference for recognitionals (Sacks & Schegloff 1979). . The case of reference and address with regard to speaker and hearer is discussed separately.

Chapter 8 . Women do occasionally slip away to meet in much less visible locales than the village rumshop – more often than not the back room of a house some distance away from the public road. I was lucky to be invited to a number of these gatherings and was struck immediately by the contrast with the activities which take place in the rumshop. Whereas the men police the boundaries of their group and work to display asymmetrical access to knowledge of local village history, women gather primarily to sing songs. Women encourage particularly good singers to lead a song and a woman so chosen in turn requests the others to help by clapping, singing along, or by playing an instrument made by dropping two spoons in an empty coke bottle. Whereas the men seem almost obsessed with sometimes extremely esoteric particulars of local village history – I have recorded stories that turned on the location of a mango tree or the question of who planted a patch of flowers – women by contrast often talk and sing about travel outside the village. The following song is illustrative. Tilii-lalii-loo gyal Tilii-lalii-loo gal Oo tilii-lalii loo Oo tilii-lalii loo Ai waan tu tek a- Klap aiyu hanz! Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to- Clap your hands! Parimaribo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Tilii-lalii-loo gyal Tilii-lalii-loo gal Oo tilii-lalii loo Oo tilii-lalii loo

Notes 

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Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Blakbush is a ples gyal we ratlsneek alweez Blackbush is a place gal where rattlesnake live Blakbush is a ples we ratlsneek alweez Blackbush is a place where rattlesnake live Kambain an chrakta gu put am a dem plees Combine and tractor put them in their place Oo tilii-lalii-loo gyal Oh tilii-lalii-loo gal Oo tilii-lalii loo Oh tilii-lalii loo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Tilii-lalii-loo gyal Tilii-lalii-loo gal Oo tilii-lalii loo Oo tilii-lalii loo Ai waan tu tek a chrip to Parii-marii-boo I want to take a trip to Parimaribo Rais ful a rais-fiil an aal dem kota ded Rice fills the rice-field and all the cutters are dead Rais ful a rais-fiil an aal dem kota ded Rice fills the rice-field and all the cutters are dead If yu want a bag a rais kom duu i pan mi bed If you want a bag of rice come do it on my bed . The first pair part (FPP) of an adjaceny pair is related to a second pair part (SPP) by a relation of conditional relevance: a question establishes a next position for an answer and talk in this position is routinely inspected to see how it might be seen as doing answering (see Heritage 1984b; Schegloff 1968). Here Jaj has intervened into the relations of conditional relevance by talking in the position that might otherwise have been occupied by the response to the summons. Another feature of conversational organization then comes into play – where two actions are done in a single turn at talk, recipients routinely respond to the second action first (see Sacks 1987). . We may speak of formulating persons here just as we spoke of formulating settings or contexts earlier. What is particularly clear in a consideration of place (Schegloff 1972) or person formulation is the way a referent remains constant while, to borrow from Frege, the “mode of presentation” differs (see Frege 1948 [1892]). . Jaj’s selection of Ramish may be prompted by the fact that they have together, just prior to this talk, distributed the few remaining pieces of ice.

. The relevance of this formulation – “Buddy’s Daddy” – is discussed in Sidnell (2000). . Raja’s “Wodiialii?” (line 4) is offered as candidate hearing of an earlier mention of “Buddy’s Daddy” and serves as a next turn repair initiator to which Ramish responds with the correction “tchh-Buddy’s Daddy:”. . I have not been able to trace the origin of this word.

Chapter 9 . See for instance Lerner (1992), Mandlebaum (1987), Sacks (1995). . In another set of cases, discussed in Chapter 2, a second speaker, rather than begin their own turn, may recomplete that of a previous speaker. By recompleting another’s utterance the second speaker often claims some kind of independent access to the events being recounted. . See Goodwin (1990) for an analysis of address terms along thse lines.

Chapter 10 . For discussion of how and why this happens see Egbert (1997), Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). . “Requirement” is used here to describe a constraint imposed by the participants – that is a fully endogenous aspect of the organization. . This is an issue which Schutz discussed at length and is sometimes discussed under the rubric of the “reciprocity of perspectives” (see Schutz 1962; Hanks 1996; Heritage 1984b). . This conception of words as “instructions for seeing” is one I think I owe to Chuck Goodwin with whom I have discussed many of the issues covered in this chapter. Of course, Malinowski would not have put things this way at all but I nevertheless feel it is a reasonable account of his views. . See also Sacks discussion of this issue in the lecture for 1966, Feb. 16th. A related set of issues is addressed in the literature on rules – for an overview see Lynch (1995) and Sidnell (2003a). . The definition is from the Oxford English dictionary. . Evans-Pritchard equivocates occasionally allowing Zande criteria and thus writing of their knowledge rather than their belief: “Thus a man who suffers a misfortune knows that he has been bewitched. . .” (1976: 47).

 Talk and Practical Epistemology

Appendix . Sometimes conversation analysts collect a recurrent “place” in conversation rather than an action (“fishbowls, not fish” as a prominent conversation analyst once put it).

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. Mill (and later Frege) was of course well aware of differences in connotation or subjective meaning. Such differences were not in question. It is not differences in connotation that prevent substitutability in Frege’s account which is based on a theory of truth conditions. . Besides such belief ascription sentences, quotative and modal sentences also illustrate problems of substitutability of names with identical referents. . See also the discussion of this lecture in Lynch (2001). . Oh in third position typically proposes sequence closure but this may or may not be effected (see Schegloff in press and also Schegloff & Sacks 1973). Oh, Okay along with assessments which occur in this position may reasonably be spoken of together as sequence closing thirds to capture this fact (see Schegloff in press).

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