Rapport is a widely used concept in anthropology, which first referred to the development of intimate interpersonal relationships between the researcher and the researched throughout long-term fieldwork activity. However, this static view on the nature of social relations has been widely criticized. Instead of drawing on the obtainment and translation of the insider's view, contemporary anthropologists advocate for understanding rapport and knowledge as being co-produced by the research participants and all interested parties. This volume of selected papers provides a sociolinguistic repurposing of the idea of rapport in order to shed new light on the discursive co-constructedness of research, knowledge, and fieldwork relations by closely examining the experiences of scholars who conducted anthropologic or sociolinguistic studies in different areas of Indonesia.

The book consists of twelve chapters. Chapter 6 and chapter 12 are commentaries written by leading researchers in the field, namely Anna De Fina and Joseph Errington. All of the authors focus on concepts that contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between the researcher and observants, such as role alignment, common ground, participation framework, and interdiscursivity. They have examined disparate moments from the data gathering process. Mikihiro Moriyama (chapter 9), for instance, summarizes his decades-long presence in the field, whereas Dwi Noverini Djenar (chapter 11) provides a microscopical analysis of metapragmatic negotiations in the first two to five minutes of interviews.

The chapters of this volume express the idea that rapport is a constant meaning-making procedure that can (and should) be reflexively examined in all aspects of encounters by researchers conducting fieldwork. Debbie Cole (chapter 2) argues that the quality of rapport and role alignment should not only be reflected in the context of an interview situation, but other background information on the research event should also be considered, such as the particular venue where the interview was conducted, or even the gifts that researchers prepare for their interviewees. Rapport is not a stable, but an emergent relationship manifested in sets of interactions that are evaluated retroactively and anticipatorily as Rafadi Hakim argues in chapter 5. De Fina, in her commentary, adds that roles and relations co-exist and are exposed to continual negotiations. As situations not subject to external constraints or influences cannot be created, researchers should seize the observer's paradox by reflecting on it, instead of blurring their presence in knowledge production.

Ethnography as a mutual learning process between research parties entails the need for analysis of different sociolinguistic scales; downscaling to ethnographic particulars (from bird's eye view to worm's eye view, as Adam Harr puts it in chapter 7) and upscaling to ethnographic rapport in general. This volume provides great examples of how the social relations created in and out of field can and should be made visible by the analyses of scholars in order to facilitate the reliability and the credibility of knowledge production in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics.