The contributions in Zane Goebel's Reimagining rapport move sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to ‘more sophisticated ways of understanding, interpreting, and representing connotation’ (183). While discourse analysts will be familiar with Deborah Tannen's ‘rapport talk’ in You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation (1990), here Goebel defines rapport anthropologically, as co-presence of the researcher and participant through language, being something that leads to positive social relations and, in turn, good data collection and interpretation (2–3). The second chapter, by Goebel, traces the development of ‘rapport’, ‘phaticity’, ‘communication’, and ‘phatic communion’ in anthropology and sociolinguistics, noting that ‘rapport’ is an under-theorized folk anthropological concept which has historically been explored in context-independent denotational analyses rather than through examinations of how social relations are bound up in localized ethnographic practice.
Two areas of focus pull the ten chapters of this volume into dialogue with one another. An overarching organizing framework falls under the rubric of theoretical, meta-methodological, and methodological reimaginings of rapport. Theoretical reimaginings entail seeing rapport as emergent and ever-changing (all chapters), considering the mediation of rapport by various actors and materials (Joel Kuipers, Aurora Donzelli, Michael C. Ewing, and Howard Manns), viewing rapport as co-constructed from both sides of the research relationship (Sabina Perrino, Manns, and Ewing), and considering the place of professional and folk ideologies of rapport (Ben Rampton, Kuipers, Perrino, Donzelli, Ewing, and Nicholas Herriman & Monika Winarnita). Meta-methodological reimaginings might consider the relationship between disciplines (Goebel, Rampton) or scramble the received process of ‘rapport to data collection to analysis’ (Rampton), while methodological reimaginings may closely examine interactive speech generally (all chapters), such as by focusing on chronotopic breakthrough moments in conversational storytelling (Perrino). Relatedly, a second area of focus is how interactional data, stories from the field, and other forms of discourse construct ‘acts of belonging’ and ‘role alignments’ for researchers and participants (foregrounded especially in Kuipers, Donzelli, Manns, and Ewing) and contribute to the mechanics of ‘rapport management’ (Ewing).
The volume opens up a number of issues which linger with the reader and warrant further consideration in future work. Goebel's introduction encourages us to think about where and when rapport starts versus where and when it is recognized (3). Rampton observes that for scholars who work in contexts and with languages familiar to them since childhood, betraying trust may be a greater concern than building it (44). Donzelli notes that rapport is embedded in and mediated by ‘culturally and semiotically regimented attitudes’, for instance, toward hospitality (99). Herriman & Winarnita point out that rapport is ‘stubbornly abstract, unquantifiable, indeterminate, and, well, “mysterious” ’ (117), yet they also emphasize that rapport is reciprocal, being something that is only ever half understood from the researcher's perspective (132). Mann describes how the path to ‘coevalness’ passes through rapport, and that joint researcher-participant attention to some cultural artifact depends on intersubjective relationality, whether positive or negative (140). Finally, Ewing's conceptualization of rapport management, following work by Spencer-Oatey, reminds us that rapport is an ongoing (re)negotiation of harmony and disharmony between interlocutors through various interactional domains (illocutionary, discourse, participant, stylistic, and nonverbal) (159).
