Linguistic Ethnography – Meaning in Action

Some have argued that in the so-called Western world, both participants and researchers live in an ‘interview society’ (Silverman, 1993, cited in Holstein and Gubrium, 1995; Forsey, 2010), one which has raised the importance of interviews and sound, and that language analysis is as much a relevant data source as visual observation (Hockey, 2002). Rampton (2004) argued that it was likely, when scrutinising discourse data for signs of ‘creative practice’, in which “tensions at the very edge of semantic availability, active, pressing but {are} not yet fully articulated” exist, so that “specific articulations - new semantic figures - in material practice” may be found (Rampton, 2004:7). Linguistic ethnography - practised in European countries - is closely related to its sister field of linguistic anthropology, a recognised sub-discipline within American anthropology that is an interdisciplinary

field dedicated to the study of language from an anthropological perspective.

Linguistic anthropologists have regarded language as a sophisticated sign system that contributes to the constitution of society and the reproduction of specific cultural practices. In addition to being a powerful tool for exchanging information, language has been shown to play a crucial role in the classification of experience, the identification of people, things, ideas, and emotions, the recounting of the past and the imagining of the future that is so critical for joint activities and problem solving. (Duranti, 2004:2)

Both linguistic anthropologists and ethnographers use a variety of methods, including grammatical analysis of texts and speech acts, by searching for grammatical markers, pronoun use, turn-taking, narrative structures, overlapping utterances, the already-mentioned frame analysis (Goffman, 1974), vernacular use (Coleman, 2010), and other linguistic features and grammatical forms elicited from native speakers, or from recordings of speech events. Linguistic anthropology helps us to investigate how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural context (Goffman, 1974; Silverstein, 1985; Duranti, 1997; Agha, 2006). While looking to language for concrete examples of effective (and ineffective) social action, it obtains insights from linguistics (Eckert, 2000), qualitative sociology (Goffman, 1981) and cultural anthropology (Street, 2005; Wortham, 2008).

Common to both linguistic anthropology and linguistic ethnography is a specific approach derived from question-posing. Duranti (2003), narrating the history of linguistic anthropology, points out that “in contrast to earlier generations of students who started from a fascination with linguistic forms and languages, students today typically ask questions such as ‘What can the study of language contribute to the understanding of this or that particular social/cultural phenomenon?'” (Duranti, 2003:332). Such a question does not consider language as the primary object of inquiry, but rather regards it as an instrument for gaining access to other complex social processes. Rampton (2004), in the UK context, calls this a ‘bottom-up’

question: “what more general issues can the description and analysis of my experience help to clarify?” as opposed to a ‘top-down’ one (Rampton, 2004:15). It is from such standpoints that the tools of linguistic ethnography will be used in this study.

As linguistic ethnography offers descriptive and analytic procedures for investigation, within the temporal unfolding of social processes, of persons, situated encounters, institutions, networks and communities of practice, its methods of combining ethnography with linguistics and linguistically sensitive discourse analysis seem to be ideally suited for investigation of the actors’ perceptions in this current study. Thus, as I discussed in Chapter 2 concerning my intention to move away from the actor-network theory (ANT) approach and the 'flat ontologies' of its earlier stages, the study of language and linguistic form can help to uncover the otherwise suggested diminishing role of the human agency (See Chapter 2.2.3). As Ahearn (2001), in her thorough survey on meanings of agency within a broad field of academic practice points out, while broadly speaking “agency refers to the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001:112), it is much more complex and often difficult to articulate. As linguistic anthropology treats language as a form of social action and sees it as inextricably embedded in networks of socio-cultural relations, it is well situated to uncover the meanings in action. As meanings are often co-constructed, so is the social reality. From such a standpoint, “language does not merely reflect an already existing social reality; it also helps to create that reality”

(Ahearn, 2001:111).

3.4. Organisation of The Study, Data Corpus and Analysis 3.4.1. Background and Data Corpus

The core data corpus for this study was collected in the period between Nov 2011 and May 2013, with the additional online data retrieved in the period from 2013 to 2018. It should be noted that the later data is less related to the study subject, but rather forms contextual data that has informed the analysis of the core data. The total data corpus of this study is comprised of 810GB of original video recordings and 2GB of video recordings received from New York and Amsterdam; a collection of platform screenshots taken in the period between 2011-2013; data records of the AQE, unformatted and published, during the period between May 9th, 2013 - May 10th, 2015; observations of meetup.com of several communities: IoT London, IoT/sensmakers in New York, Sensmakers in Amsterdam, IoT Madrid, IoT

Barcelona and IoT Munich, IoT Berlin and IoT Zurich; observations of the AQE campaign site on Kickstarter.com; postings on the AQE wiki site and forum; blogs and articles published by community members on their personal sites, as well as on other online platforms such as Twitter, Prezi, Flicker, Postcapes; personal notes on observations; and a collection of a significant amount of media articles on a variety of IoT discourse-related issues.

As noted, the study is divided into three parts. The focus and data sets used in each part of this study, as well as specifics regarding the methods of analysis applied, are discussed next.