Comptes rendus 155
Michael Moerman, Talking Culture. Ethnography and Conversation Analysis. With an Appendix by M. M. & Harvey Sacks. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, xiii + 211 p., bibl., index (« University of Pennsylvania Publications in Conduct and Communication »).
Michael Moerman is a zealot. Conversation analysis, in the manner of Harvey Sacks, is his passion. It could become the « paragon of ethnographic practice ». His book, Talking Culture, attempts to synthesize conversation analysis with ethnography. It is a how-to book — an example of that distinctly American and obsessively popular genre of books that must not be confused with the manual because it promotes « growth », here the growth, the progress, of a discipline. Talking Culture is also an ethnography of sorts, for it examines Thai conversational strategies and compares them to American ones. It is, to my knowledge, the first systematic cross-cultural study of such strategies. It is finally an often trenchant critique of ethnographic practice, particularly that of Clifford Geertz, and of the social theories of Weber and Schutz.
For Moerman, « culturally contexted conversation analysis » can make up for deficiencies in ethnographic practice and theory. He writes : « By explicating elements of the social organization of speech, conversation analysis provides a component that has been critically missing from the realistic examination of such issues as how language relates to thinking, how « structure » relates to « practice » and institutions to experience, or how actors can be both agents and objects in the social world » (p. x). Moerman recognizes that conversation analysis can be arid, but it provides the necessary « skeleton » for deepening our understanding of social and cultural organization. His position is radically constructionist : « Every thing that matters socially — meanings, class, roles, emotions, guilt, aggression, and so forth and so on — is socially constructed » (p. 1). Central to this construction is social interaction, and central to social interaction is ordinary conversation with its « turn-takings », its « repairs », its « overlaps », its « possible completion points », its « discovery markers » and the like. (All of these technical terms, and others, are at least implicitly defined.) Like Sacks and his followers, Moerman pays particular attention to what can be called the bare mechanics of talk (e.g. to the mechanisms, like a slightly prolonged silence, that bring about a change of speaker or to those that « repair » the effects of a coincidence of utterances, or « overlap ») but, unlike some of the most mechanistic of conversation analysts, Moerman recognizes the effects of meaning and extra-conversational context on conversational mechanics. He tends at times, however, to o ver privilege, to reify, ordinary talk, indeed the transcript. He does provide the reader with detailed transcripts in Lue, Siamese, and Yuan with English translations of the talk he analyses.
Through the detailed analysis of bits of conversation, Moerman not only demonstrates how to analyze conversation but also uncovers interesting parallels between American and Thai conversational organization, most notably in sequencing and person reference. This is an important finding, particularly for a language as different from English as Thai, one that has a different pronominal structure and a different economy of reference (e.g. greater use of titles where in English pronouns would be used). It offers « empirical » confirmation of the universalist claims that conversation analysts have been making without any comparative evidence. Moerman also shows that the close analysis of talk, when properly contextualized, can reveal interactive processes, reflective of larger social and cultural arrangements, that are masked from the immediate consciousness of participants and observers alike. He argues that it is possible to bridge the micro- and macro-social through the analysis of conversation !
