In the ethnography of speaking, which began with Gumperz, Hymes and Goffman at Berkeley, Goffman’s influence was felt in linguistic anthropology as well as what came to be called interactional sociolinguistics. What Goffman had done was to introduce microanalysis to urban sociology after developing his methodology in a small, stable Shetland community (Merritt, 2001). Yet, he himself did no linguistic analysis, though he cited Voloshinov on reported speech in Frame Analysis (Goffman, 1974). Through reading Uspensky (1973), who had introduced Goffman to Voloshinov, we began thinking in terms of dialogicality and polyphony or heteroglossia. By the time we went to Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, our anthropological linguistic toolkit had already been supplemented by Goffman, ethnomethodology and phenomenology, and Foucault.
With an understanding of Athabaskan communicative practices and how they led to complementary schizmogenesis when Athabaskans interacted with Euro-Canadians, we became critical discourse analysts in the sense that we exposed power relations between government bureaucrats including ser- vice professionals in health, law and education, who tended to be Anglo- Americans, on the one hand, and Native Alaskans as clients on the other. We described communicative practices as arising out of conflicting reality sets or ideologies and sought to explicate these conflicts for practitioners and Native Alaskans alike (Scollon and Scollon, 1981).
The basic approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and anthropo- logical linguistics, then, were integrated as we became engaged and commit- ted advocates for Native Alaskans, showing how they were being given short shrift by carriers of what we came to call the Utilitarian Discourse System (UDS) (Scollon and Scollon, 1995 [2001]; S. Scollon, 1994). Our approach could almost be called critical anthropological linguistics, as we sought to cri- tique the UDS first from Athabaskan and then from Chinese perspectives. What began as a critique of Western alphabetic literacy emergent in the dis- cursive practices of our two-year-old daughter led to a broader critique of the ideology and discursive formation of a globally intrusive worldview embed- ded in powerful institutions.
While the social practices of educators for example, including ourselves and our colleagues, were based in the literate practices assumed to be necessary for success in the contemporary world, we came to see, with others in what came to be called new literacy studies (Gee et al., 1996), that literacy, far from being the cause of success, was more a package of practices controlled by the power- ful. Becoming literate in what we called essayist literacy required a restructur- ing of personal identity that threatened more harm than good. It threatened what Mead termed ‘the moral autonomy of the human spirit’ (cited in Bateson, 1942 [1972], p. 159).
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Like the discourse-historical approach of CDA, we followed a principle of triangulation. However, rather than triangulating disciplines within Western academics, we triangulated the UDS within which these disciplines are embedded with the Athabaskan reality set and the discourse of East Asians literate in the Chinese script or Sinographic writing. While CDA attempts to attack institutions of power by critically analysing institutional texts, we see this privileging of text as a manifestation of the UDS.
Our approach, which we call Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA), differs from CDA in its focus on action. Unlike CDA, which operates with a pre- supposed psychology of the individual and recruits psychologists for the discourse-historical approach, as psychologists and anthropologists we retain the concept of the person as a social actor embodied in the society of various social groups. We thus maintain the distinction between the biological person and the abstract individual made by Mauss (Mauss, 1979a; Scollon and Scollon, 1994, 1995 [2001]; S. Scollon, 1997; Weber, 2001).
Taking action as the unit of analysis forces attention to time, space, objects and the histories interwoven in these mediators of action. This principle underlies the sociocultural historical psychology of Wertsch and others (Wertsch, 1985, 1991, 1994, 1998; Cole, 1995; Wertsch et al., 1995), based in the psychology of Vygotsky.
French ethnographers have recently proposed an ‘ethnography of action’, and Weber (2001) argues for a ‘multi-integrative ethnography’ which takes interaction as primary, after Bateson (1958). A recent monograph by Chase Hensel (1996) is a model of what might be considered multi-integrative ethnography, integrating the practice and structuration approaches of Bourdieu and Giddens with anthropological linguistics with a Batesonian focus on interaction and an interactional linguistic focus on linguistically mediated interaction. Hensel defines what might be considered linguistic habitus in terms of contextualization conventions, acquired ‘as a result of a speaker’s actual interactive experience, i.e., as a result of an individual’s partic- ipation in particular networks of relationship’, citing Gumperz and Cook- Gumperz (1982, p. 18) (Hensel, 1996, p. 159). The family systems approach of Bateson, Ruesch and others helped overcome the weakness of practice theory, adding a diachronic element of learning, maintenance and change.
Having relocated culture in interaction where the structures of habitus are generated, Hensel suggests parallel structures of ‘subcultural’ and ‘family’ habitus and even ‘individual’ habitus (ibid., p. 156). Having overcome the individual–society antinomy, like Wertsch, it remains only to elaborate on sit- uated learning in particular networks as Lave and Wenger (1991) have done with the notion of ‘communities of practice’.
MDA, a nexus of practice2
The primary theoretical issue addressed by MDA is the juncture between individual action and public discourse in the complex environment of
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contemporary societies. The question we asked was, ‘How do people con- struct social identities in discourse and social interaction?’ Taking action as the unit of analysis, we regarded speech, gesture or text as mediational means appropriated by agents to do something. In looking at media texts, we analysed how news-makers and journalists were positioning themselves and each other in producing text. We looked at how news stories spread among different populations in Hong Kong during an ‘event survey’, asking people what was happening while also collecting newspapers, magazines and recording broadcasts.
On first going to Hong Kong we began with an ethnography of commu- nication approach to studying discourse in Hong Kong by trying to teach it to our students – which meant also trying to explain it to junior colleagues. This resulted in a synthesis of our earlier work among Native Americans and East Asians, which gave us a triangulation of perspectives on the UDS which was fast spawning neocapitalism (Scollon and Scollon, 1995 [2001]). We encountered a strong literate bias that was antithetical to the ethnographic method. We had earlier accounted for behaviour in contemporary Taiwanese that resembled that in the Li Ji (Book of Rites) in terms of systems of face rela- tions (Scollon and Scollon, 1994). Now we had to account for differences not only between Taiwanese and Hong Kong students but also between genders and generations of Hong Kongers.
The different emphases, one on discourses of geopolitical events and how they were interpreted by political leaders and journalists, the other on social actors and what they were doing in relation to the discourses taking place around them, came together in what Ron Scollon called Mediated Discourse Analysis (1998, 2001a,b). The linguistic analysis of texts informed my analysis of the action mediated by those texts. I was able to show that verbal and non-verbal behaviour during the height of the Taiwan missile cri- sis could only be understood by taking into consideration news accounts of political events (S. Scollon, 2001). But the texts themselves were only clues as to what the actors were appropriating in their actions on the field as they played out through habitus the ideologies embodied in their life histories. Using MDA, I showed how actors reproduced identities of mainland Chinese communists and Hong Kong Guomindang loyalists, with the texts of journalists, politicians and DJs, part of what Bakhtin (1929 [1984]) called ‘hidden dialogicality’.
I first described what we call a nexus of practice, an interlinked set of prac- tices enacted daily by members of a group of retired people who practised Tai Chi (taijiquan) together at a Hong Kong park. Many of the linked prac- tices are associated with the community of practice of Yang-style taijiquan. Others are practices of having tea and dim sum in restaurants, shared not only by Hong Kong Chinese but also by people in the neighbouring province of Guangdong. I then showed how one woman in the group, anticipating the Taiwan missile crisis, gradually began untangling the web of interwoven
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practices so that in the heat of the crisis she rather suddenly separated her- self from the group.
The concept of the nexus of practice is prefigured, I discovered to my cha- grin, in The Civilizing Process, published by Norbert Elias in 1939.
The network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together. Such interdependencies are the nexus of what is here called the figuration, a structure of mutually orientated and dependent people (1939 [1968, 2000, p. 482]). In his Postscript to the English translation, written in 1968, Elias offers as the simplest example of figuration, social dances such as the mazurka, tango, or rock’n’roll. The image of mobile figurations of people on a dance floor helps eliminate the antithesis between individual and society.
MDA and CDA
Like other approaches to CDA (Fairclough, 1992, 1995; Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; Wodak, 1999), MDA began with a social semiotic grounding in Hallidayan linguistics. Unlike CDA, which focuses on texts, whether pub- lished or recorded in interviews, MDA takes language as primary but not unique among the mediators of action. The term ‘mediated discourse’ implies that all discourse is mediated, whether it involves two people face-to-face or multimedia productions. Action, being socially oriented, is inherently com- municative and embedded in a nexus of social practice.
Like the discourse-historical approach to CDA (Wodak et al., 1999; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001; Wodak, 2001), MDA is diachronic and views all text as sit- uated discourse, though we place more emphasis on ethnography. In prac- tice, what I do is learn everything I can about the people I deal with, both by interacting with them directly and by reading whatever I can find that they themselves read or that is written about them as a population, which in the case of Hong Kong Chinese and practitioners of taijiquan meant learning to speak Cantonese and Putonghua and to read Chinese. As the colony, not to mention myself, had also been shaped by the history of the Enlightenment and Utilitarianism, this was an important area of study. What we called the UDS (Scollon and Scollon, 1995 [2001]) came into contact with Confucian- ism and local practices when Hong Kong was colonized, and Mao’s revolu- tion added a new twist.
By teaching courses in rhetoric, communication, pragmatics, sociolinguis- tics, linguistics and English language and literature to Hong Kong tertiary stu- dents and English teachers for three years, I learned about teaching and learning practices in the colony as well as patterns of language use (S. Scollon, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999). By studying Chinese in Kunming, Yunnan, after having studied it some two decades before, I learned about Mao’s revolu- tionary discourse and Deng’s reform discourse (Gu, 1996). This provided a contrast with one year of ethnographic research in Taiwan. I found that the Mandarin I had learned at university served me better in Taiwan than in
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China, where Chinese (Putonghua) had evolved during the course of Mao’s modernization and continued to adapt to Deng’s reforms.
In parallel with my participant observation among a group of retired and semi-retired people who practised taijiquan together every morning at an urban park, I was engaged with a group of colleagues in studies of public discourse as Hong Kong made the transition from British to Chinese sover- eignty ( Jones et al., 1997; Scollon and Scollon, 1997; R. Scollon, 1999, 2000). Serendipitously, not only did we develop theory and methods incorporating sociocultural psychology and CDA in approaching public discourse, but the database we collected happened to coincide with the Taiwan missile crisis, and I was able to make use of it to analyse the fission that took place in the group of morning exercise friends whose community of practice I was a legit- imate peripheral participant in.
In analysing news stories we used CDA, showing how choice of verbs of reporting indicated sociopolitical positioning. Comparing multiple accounts of the same press conference, we showed that the same statement was fil- tered through ideologies of libertarian free press ‘objectivity’, Cold War ‘China threat’ or socialist modernization (S. Scollon, forthcoming (a)).
At the same time, I listened to what people on the field were discussing and observed which newspapers they bought as they went to take tea. Here I was interested in how people were aligning themselves as colonial subjects incredulous at the posturings of Princess Diana, as Hong Kong citizens antic- ipating return to Chinese sovereignty and considering options for emigra- tion, as savvy business people, or as friends interested in health, enjoyment of food and taijiquan.
In the analysis, then, I use myself as informant, much as Gary Snyder (1972) transformed himself from anthropologist to informant in his practice of Zen. I became the subject who embodied incommensurable practices as I became socialized first to a Putonghua-speaking group in China and then to a Cantonese-speaking group in Hong Kong, with a history embodied in habitus of experiences with both languages in other places, in and out of classrooms.
Being marked as Other by elders in the group, an abnormal person with no memory, no manners, I was subject to the reversal, ‘a reading in reverse of the ethnographer’, discussed by Rose:
What is possible in this space of contact, crossing over, assimilation, appropriation, juxtaposition, and fusion, has not been adequately explored; indeed, this space has no real name. What we know is that there are numerous ragged zones of contact between peoples who hold incommensurable values and beliefs, traditions and philosophies. (Rose, 1991, pp. 289–90)
Here I engage in yet another aspect of interdisciplinarity, ethnopoetics or anthropological poetics, which Rose locates at the periphery of cultural
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theory, as Bourdieu, Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Lévi-Strauss, Williams and the others neglected cultural difference and diversity. Taking the practice of tai-
jiquan, I ‘inhabit a zone of contact (by crossing it again and again)’ (ibid.,
p. 291). Furthermore, I inhabit this zone with others who are also Other, exploring assimilation, appropriation, juxtaposition, fusion and fission.
From contact with Snyder before going to Asia I began thinking in organic metaphors, as he conceived of Zen meditation as cultivating weeds, of dis- course as organically related to the people, animals, plants and earth it inhab- its. Thus I see habitus as a compost heap of organic matter capable of fertilizing seeds, in addition to the fossilized layers of sediment visualized by other social theorists.
My analysis of the phylogenesis of practices is reminiscent of Norbert Elias’ study of the sociogenesis of civilizing practices, and my analysis of the ontogenesis of my own practice as I integrate into the different groups draws on Vygotsky’s notion of the Zone of Proximal Development and Bakhtin’s dialogicality including hidden dialogicality.