This book was read over several months by a group of faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University who share an interest broadly characterized as “social meaning in language.” We were all excited to read the volume, since we are focused on understanding the interaction between language and social meanings, and the book promises a look at how practical knowledge (including knowledge of social relationships) is created, contested, demanded, negotiated, and mediated by everyday interactions. One of Sidnell’s goals is to use Conversation Analysis (CA) as a basic ethnographic method for discovering how knowledge is organized and circulated in everyday interactions. The data Sidnell presents, which come from Sidnell’s extensive fieldwork in a Guyanese village, are rich and vivid, and Sidnell’s analyses of the interaction are elegant and illuminating. In fact, it is worth reading the book just for these analyses. However, we came away a bit frustrated with a lack of focus and central claim to the work. These imperfections are important, but the book is ultimately still significant and worth reading. One reason for the imperfection(s) is the over-valorization of the CA framework as the savior of ethnography and practice-based approaches to social science. CA is undoubtedly a powerful set of observations and methods for doing all kinds of social science, and Sidnell’s use of it is masterful. However, it was not clear to us how CA becomes the only or best answer to “Malinowski’s complaint,” as he terms it (essentially, that ethnographers tend to reify the ideal culture as told to them by members of the culture, rather than focusing on the culture as it is actually lived). Sidnell shows that a focus on everyday interaction, combined with ethnographic observations (and local knowledge created by the ethnographer from many such interactions) is a powerful combination for understanding social life and culture. But it is not clear to what extent the method Sidnell uses is specifically CA, and what is more generally discourse analysis and pragmatics. Given his goal of showing how to use CA as an ethnographic tool, more programmatic discussion of CA and ethnography would have been welcome. For example, Sidnell provides a nice outline of the principal ideas of CA in an appendix; given his methodological goals, it would have been useful to explicitly tie the ideas presented there to the analyses in the book. Thus the programmatic application of CA to ethnography is not completely clear. We found Moerman’s (Reference Moerman1987) discussion of the same topic to be more illuminating about this interaction, with its main focus on this topic. We also found Sidnell’s sparse citing of Moerman to be rather surprising (if only to distinguish his approach from Moerman’s, or to criticize Moerman’s work).
We were also frustrated in discussions that followed Sidnell’s skillful exegeses of fragments of interaction. We would find ourselves lost in trying to find how exactly the exegesis fit into the overall arguments of the book. Although Sidnell articulates three central arguments for the book in the opening chapter, new ones seem to appear at the end of each chapter, somewhat tenuously attached to the actual analyses. For example, at the end of chapter 6 we learn that a “central argument of this book is that social organization is built in and through the resulting texture of unevenly distributed knowledge” (p. 153). While he had introduced the themes of socially distributed knowledge earlier, this is not one of the three main arguments introduced in chapter 1. It is related to one of the main arguments, namely “to access the local organization of knowledge as this is revealed in the talk of mundane activities” (17). In this statement of objectives, Sidnell seems to be assuming an already existing knowledge that is revealed by speakers in interaction, but later on he seems to suggest a more radical view that sees knowledge not as preexisting but as created in interaction. This argumentation practice may be related to Sidnell’s explicit rejection of “theorizing” (i.e., abstract, generalized model building), or perhaps a disciplinary difference between linguistics and anthropology or philosophy. He urges a rejection especially of practice “theory” and argues that social science based on practice must not become overly abstract, but should focus on detailed everyday practices. CA, he writes, “already embodies a practice account consistent in important respects with recent development in this area.” (18). Our point here is that we found the book’s arguments rather diffuse, and this structure got in the way of being able to transfer Sidnell’s robust and effective methods into our own analyses.
In chapter 1, Sidnell introduces a fragment and his main points, as listed above. He begins with a conversational fragment that immediately brings his concerns to life, and puts the reader on notice (or gives them hope) that he will focus on recorded practices. However, he fairly quickly leaves the data, and doesn’t return to it until chapter 5, which we found frustrating. After an effective critique of practice theorists (including Bourdieu) for not performing very much analysis of actual practices, Sidnell argues that “actions must be examined in relation to the socially organized practices which provide for their intelligibility” (11). We found this critique illuminating and well-argued.
In chapter 2, Sidnell delves more into the fields of epistemology, linguistics, and anthropology. The chapter argues that the work done in linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of knowledge is valuable, but falls short of the interactionally-focused CA approaches he advocates in the final third of the chapter. We found his criticisms measured and valid, as Sidnell was able to take the useful portions of each theory and apply it to what he explains as “practical epistemology” in the final section of this chapter, which, he argues, “draw from both the interactional and ethnographic approaches to knowledge” (49).
Chapters 3 and 4 are brief ethnographic and linguistic sketches, respectively, of the village. These two chapters effectively set the stage for the more in-depth analysis chapters to follow. Chapter 5 focuses on questions and answers and how children learn to use them in interaction, and how they also end up structuring knowledge in practice. After some material that introduces us to Wittgenstein’s language games and turn-taking in CA, Sidnell argues that questions and answers can be traced back to a “proto-language game” in which children are held accountable for their own behavioral displays. He then builds on this to show how questions place the recipient in a position of knowledge accountability, and he writes that what questions are asked, and the sequences that precede and follow, not only tell the analyst about the community’s knowledge, but in fact reveal how the speakers construct this knowledge themselves.
Chapter 6 details the interactional structure of advice-giving in the context of ritual procedures following a death in the village. Sidnell claims that warranted advice-giving serves to ratify expertise, and illustrates how ritual experts, who are disproportionally men, create opportunities to advise, chiefly by exposing the uncertainty or incompetence of non-experts. Sidnell also spends a portion of this chapter establishing the idea that male exclusivity is constructed and managed in rum shops. One nice thing about this is that Sidnell shows how one might marry critical approaches to discourse with CA in an analysis of how power and exclusivity are created, drawn on, and reinforced in interaction.
Chapter 7 proposes that just as knowledge is unevenly socially distributed, ignorance is also a highly structured social object. The case for this claim is built on two facets of talk: question design (negative questions, use of markers like really) and nominal reference forms (recognitional/non-recognitional forms, anaphora, pronominals). Speakers manipulate both of these in order to deny or affirm shared knowledge of background information and control presuppositions and inferences by other participants of what the speaker does or does not know.
In chapter 8, Sidnell discusses reminiscing, or the co-construction of local history through narrative, as a male activity that makes social organization visible. Participants in reminiscing demonstrate varying levels of epistemic access to events based on whether or not they witnessed or experienced them at first hand. Claims to epistemic authority in this context rely on what details participants can contribute, and often reveal the status of certain individuals as age-mates.
Chapter 9 shows what happens when knowledge is challenged, and includes an insightful analysis in which Sidnell shows how the use of a non-specific tense “inoculates” a speaker against challenges to the veracity of a narrative. Sidnell goes on to show other ways in which knowledge is challenged through anticipatory completion, invitations to co-participate in storytelling, and challenges to a speaker’s entitlement to know (through age and participation in particular practices).
In the wide-ranging conclusion, Sidnell returns to several theoretical arguments, the central one of which is that the debate about the location and nature of cultural “knowledge” should not be about whether it is in the heads of individuals or in more etic descriptions, “but rather in the organized set of practices which are constitutive of the particular scenes which make up the life-world” (206). Thus, Sidnell is arguing not just for a different understanding of knowledge, but really for a different focus for the scientific/humanistic projects of understanding humans and human nature, and showing how to do it.
