This book explores the relationships among language, culture, and identity in an eclectic mix of data, including anecdotal observation, frequently of his own family; the findings of a number of scholarly studies, primarily of cross-cultural discourse in the classroom; and the results of his own studies of cross-cultural discourse in pedagogical and service encounters. Riley’s analytical method is discourse analysis, broadly defined; theoretically, he works within European traditions of sociology and social psychology.
Drawing upon Mannheim Reference Mannheim and Edward1936, Schütz Reference Schütz and Broderson1964, and Elias Reference Elias and Edmund1939, Riley conceives of culture as a “social knowledge system.” Language, in the form of discourse, serves as the principle mechanism for the system and its group praxis. In chapter 3, Riley uses Mauss’s (Reference Mauss1938) model of personhood to argue that “identity” consists of individual awareness, or the “self,” as well as social identity, or (following Mauss) the “person.” In chapter 5, he introduces the “me,” or “the individual’s personal perception of his or her social identity” (p. 214).
Riley argues that public perceptions of the me and the person give rise to the individual’s communicative identity, or, following Amossy’s (Reference Amossy1999) development of traditional Aristotelian rhetoric, the “ethos.” Drawing upon Marui et al.’s (1996) concept of “communicative virtues,” Riley reasons that speakers strategically deploy socially valued characteristics of discourse (such as politeness) to project an ethos that hearers will perceive positively enough to license the illocutionary force of speakers’ speech acts. Riley argues that this ethos – discursively negotiated between speakers and hearers, and fluid from situation to situation – corresponds to notions of “identity.”
In chapter 1, Riley provides an introduction to his theoretical and disciplinary roots in the sociology of knowledge and European ethnolinguistics. In chapter 2, he defines the “social knowledge system,” emphasizing the differential distribution of knowledge and the existence of individual knowledge repertoires. In chapter 3, Riley introduces the first part of his “identity as ethos” model, demonstrating how social identities rest on individual knowledge repertoires, but are instantiated in interaction.
In chapter 4 Riley discusses “the Stranger” as a social type; although he provides a thorough review of the relevant sociological literature (Simmel 1950 [1908]; Schütz Reference Schütz1944), he concludes that globalization and modernization have rendered this social type less salient than in the past. Here, he also discusses the phenomena of pragmatic failure and compensation strategies in cross-cultural interaction. In chapter 5, Riley fleshes out his “identity as ethos” model by detailing the dialectical relationship between the individual’s own evaluation of his or her social role (the me) and public evaluation of that role (the ethos). In this chapter, he also discusses the phenomena of standardization and scaffolding. Riley ends the book with a brief, anecdotal conclusion.
Riley’s model of “identity as ethos” is appealing because it addresses two persistent problems in identity studies. First, by conceiving of culture as knowledge, but locating identity in the acquisition or demonstration of knowledge, he finds middle ground between cognitively oriented approaches in linguistics and anthropological linguistics, on the one hand, and interactionally oriented approaches in linguistic anthropology and sociology, on the other. Second, his model squarely addresses the micro/macro problem: He provides an account of how micro-level interaction both produces and reproduces broader macro-level discourses.
Riley’s approach to the structure/agency problem is less satisfying. On several occasions (for example, 200, 241) he challenges poststructuralist social theory to highlight cases of individual speaker agency; however, he fails to acknowledge how resistance itself is constrained by dominant discourses. Riley also makes several idiosyncratic interventions. For example, he proposes a taxonomy of “categories of co-existence of language varieties” that defines “code-switching” as “individual discursive or textual performance involving the coexistence of two language varieties,” in opposition to “heteroglossia,” which would involve more than two varieties (55). Yet few students of code-switching limit the term, in principle, to two varieties, and Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” is not limited to any particular number of varieties, nor is it fully parallel to “code-switching,” since it includes contemporaneous, as well as sequential, co-existence of multiple varieties (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:324).
Riley is an exceptionally skillful writer. He engages the reader with a conversational tone, and leavens his theoretical argument with a number of personal anecdotes. These stylistic and organizational choices leave the impression that he intends his work to serve as a textbook on contemporary approaches to identity. His light touch makes the work accessible to undergraduate and nonspecialist readers, while his topical approach, which interweaves within each chapter detailed historical overviews, summaries of contemporary literature, and the author’s own observations, suggests ready applications in the classroom.
Unfortunately, the book does not provide enough coverage of contemporary approaches to identity, many of which focus on gender and sexuality, to stand as a textbook on its own. For example, Riley briefly cites Wenger’s (Reference Wenger1998) “communities of practice” (182), but does not discuss Eckert & McConnell-Ginet’s (Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet1992) application of Lave & Wenger’s (Reference Lave and Wenger1991) work to the study of language. Nor does he cite Livia & Hall’s (Reference Livia, Hall, Livia and Hall1997) essay applying Austin’s (Reference Austin1962) speech act theory to issues of language and identity, even though his arguments about illocution parallel it. He might also have sharpened his discussion of the structure/agency problem by considering Kulick’s (Reference Kulick2000) criticism of Livia & Hall’s piece.
Riley cites linguistic anthropologists Duranti Reference Duranti1997 and Ochs & Schieffelin Reference Ochs and Schieffelin1983, Reference Ochs, Schieffelin, Shweder and LeVine1984, Reference Ochs and Schieffelin1986, but ignores Irvine & Gal’s (Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) influential language ideological approach to linguistic differentiation, as well as that of Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz and Hall2004, Reference Bucholtz and Hall2005. And although Riley frequently invokes the term “indexicality,” he does not discuss Peirce’s 1955 [1940] semiotic framework, from which it derives, or Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976, Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993, Reference Silverstein2003, whose work on indexical presupposition and entailment represents a productive contemporary approach to the micro/macro problem.
More importantly, Riley fails to critically evaluate the term “identity” itself. In their influential essay, Brubaker & Cooper 2000 argue that “weak” constructivist approaches like Riley’s, which qualify identity as provisional, contested, and fluid, repudiate the commonsense understanding of “identity” as “stability over time” while rendering the term too ambiguous to do serious analytical work. More subtly, they argue, the tendency to treat the existence of identity as axiomatic disposes analysts to conceptualize it in terms of bounded groups.
Riley’s model of “identity as ethos” addresses the first line of criticism by carefully distinguishing numerical identity from social identity, and by relating numerical identity to the “self” and social identity to the “person” (87–88). Riley also sensitively explores the tension between what Brubaker & Cooper term “self-identification” or “self-understanding” as opposed to “identification” or “categorization” of the self by others. However, the second line of Brubaker & Cooper’s criticism hits the mark in Riley’s definition of social identity as “the sum of all the subgroups of which the person is a member” (88). In addition, much of Riley’s data consists of descriptions of cross-cultural interactions that actually reify homogenous European national cultures (for example, 120–21, 146–51, 219–33).
The terminological difficulties inherent in “identity” are also apparent in Riley’s interventions against “verbal hygiene” (Cameron Reference Cameron1995). In a critique of intercultural training, he reviews Sontag’s (Reference Sontag2003) essay on telephone call centers in India (pp. 232–33), quoting a passage in which Sontag expresses alarm over workers’ desire actually to become the middle-class Americans they simulate on the job. Riley, following Sontag, suggests that workers suffer harm through their adoption of an “inauthentic” persona. Yet how can this cause harm to social or communicative identities that are provisional, contested, and fluid to begin with? Presumably, Indian telephone center workers do not try to deploy the communicative identities they negotiate at work in their everyday lives.
Instead, Riley seems to argue, the harm is to the workers’ “essential” selves, which global capitalism encourages to desire an “inauthentic” lifestyle. Here, he shifts the referent of “identity” (and “ethos” along with it) from the provisional construction of his analytical model to a “stronger,” more commonsense concept of fundamental or abiding sameness. Such confusing shifts lend support to Brubaker & Cooper’s call for a set of analytical categories more finely distinguished than simple “identity.”
While Riley’s work does not stand on its own as a textbook, it may not quite satisfy specialists as a theoretical intervention, either. Riley argues for a very specific analytical model, but he introduces it gradually in chapters 3 and 5, which makes his argument a bit difficult to follow. More important, Riley’s eclectic mix of anecdotal evidence, summaries of previous scholarship, and observations from several of his own, pedagogically oriented studies provide specialists few opportunities to evaluate his “identity as ethos” model in action.
It would have been helpful if, after introducing the model, Riley had presented an analysis of a more homogeneous corpus of naturally occurring interactional data in order to demonstrate speaker strategies, the emergence of ethos, and the consequences for speakers’ interactional goals. One would particularly like to see empirical evidence of the psychological processes he proposes. Nevertheless, Riley’s contribution of “identity as ethos” deserves careful consideration as an approach that seeks to integrate existing individual and social approaches to identity.
