ANTH-A 107 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Erving Goffman, Social Business, Socratic Method
Dona Carabaugh: Ethnography of Communication
• Communication event – a social event that is constrained by rules and norms which has parts
that happen in a particular order including a beginning and end (class, church)
• Communication act – any individual act of communication
• Communication situation – specific setting and scenes for communication
• Speech community – a group of people who share rules for using and interpreting at least one
communication practice (quakers)
o Many speech communities overlap with other groups
Erving Goffman: Encounters
• The difference between gatherings, encounters, focused interactions, and social groups
• Unfocused interaction – chance encounters that are not sustained
• Focused interaction – occurs when two or more participants share a focus for an extended
period of time
o Focused and unfocused are not mutually exclusive
• Social group – participats do’t eed to aitai cotiuous egageet i a activity. It is
hard to rotate leadership and time strengthens/ weakens the group. Solidarity is the social
business.
• Recontextualization –
o She then wrote the email message to me that provided a new context for the
conversation. By telling me she was sending me a breakup conversation, she was
“recontextualizing” the conversation
• Entextualization – turned into bits of conversation that would travel
• Decontextualization – taken out of their original context
• Recontextualization – interwoven into a new context
• Deictics – words that refer to people, objects, places, or the time that require contextual
information to make sense: “he” “she” “that” “then” because you don’t know what they
refer to, there is no name behind it
• Silence
o Silence is as much a social tool as speech is, it does something
o It is important to note how silence is working when you take jottings and write
fieldnotes
• Authorial persona
o The voice of the author (authorial voice)
• Triangle of linguistic structure – 3 essential properties
o Form (syntax or grammar) – have meaning and refer to entities outside
themselves by agreement among speakers
o Meaning (semantics) – semantics link form and meaning to combine sentences
o Function (pragmatics) – pragmatics are crucial to the subject matter of
communication
Elizabeth Mertz: Linguistic Ideology and Praxis in US Law School Classrooms
• The teacher in law school using the Socratic method on a student
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