Research Methods in Linguistic Anthropology

406 Pages·2022·2.825 MB·English

by  Sabina M. Perrino (editor), Sonya E. Pritzker (editor)

Figures
1.1 Fractal patterns
17
8.1 Girl wearing GoPro with chest harness in
conversation with her friend
230
8.2 Full spherical video still image from footage of a
dinner table conversation filmed with a 360-degree
.
camera. Courtesy Didem Ikizoğlu
232
8.3 A zoomed-in section of the same still. Courtesy
.
Didem Ikizoğlu
233
8.4 Screenshot of folder structure on computer hard
drive. Each folder contains a video file, an extracted
audio file, an ELAN transcription file, a file for ELAN
settings, and a subtitles file
239
8.5 Screenshot of a section of an Excel spreadsheet
formatted as data table with multiple columns for
different categories of metadata. Each entry (row)
refers to one “session,” i.e., a video file with its
respective transcription and subtitle files
241
9.1 A funnel–spiral illustrates the recursive nature of
collecting, selecting, transcribing, and analyzing
data
263
xii Figures
9.2 Excerpt from the CELF study’s activity logs
265
9.3 Excerpt from the CELF study’s code definitions of
activity logs
266
9.4 A funerary inscription coded for its placement
(indoor or outdoor); material (paper or cloth);
color (black and white or colorful); medium
(printed or embroidered); script (Traditional
Chinese, Romanized Vietnamese, or Sino-
Romanized script); and audience (close family
and friends or broader public)
275
9.5 Example of how images can supplement a written
transcript
286
Tables
10.1 Types and examples of new media characterized
by participation structure
306
11.1 Selected Methods
333
11.2 Designs for mixed methods studies (adapted from
Fetters et al. 2013, 2136–7)
346
11.3 Strategies for triangulating data in mixed methods
studies (adapted from Fetters et al. 2013,
2139–41)
348
11.4 Approaches for reporting data in mixed methods
studies (adapted from Fetters et al. 2013,
2142–3)
350
Contributors
Steven P. Black is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State
University. He has conducted research on global health discourses since
2008 with a focus on ethics, speech play, and performance. He is the author
of Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health: Zulu Tradition, HIV
Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa (Rutgers, 2019), is coeditor of a
special issue of Medical Anthropology titled, “Communicating Care,” and has
also published articles in numerous edited volumes and in journals including
American Anthropologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Ethos, Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, and Medical Anthropology. His
current research project, funded by National Geographic, is a collaborative
multimedia ethnography based on fieldwork in Boruca Indigenous Territory,
Costa Rica, and on indigenous knowledge, planetary health, and cultural
sustainability.
Lydia Catedral is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and
Translation at City University of Hong Kong. She is a sociolinguist whose
research focuses on the intersections between language, identity, and morality
across time and space, and the implications for marginalized groups including
transnational migrants, domestic workers, and LGBTQ Christians. She has
published in Language and Communication, Language Policy, and Discourse
and Society. Her recent coauthored book, Chronotopes and Migration:
Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior, published by Routledge, presents
a chronotopic and scalar approach to sociolinguistic behavior in general and
to the issues of migration and marginality more specifically.
Elaine Chun is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at the
University of South Carolina. Her linguistic anthropological research
examines ideologies of language, race, and racism in the United States and
transnational social media spaces. Drawing on methods of interactional
analysis and ethnography, she has investigated language parody among
multiethnic youth, representations of Asian speakers in popular media, and
linguistic hybridity in transnational youth spaces. Her work has appeared
Contributors xv
in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Pragmatics,
Language & Communication, American Speech, and Discourse & Society.
Robin Conley Riner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Marshall
University. Her book, Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language
Influences Jurors in Capital Cases (Oxford, 2015), investigates how language
shapes jurors’ experiences during capital trials and impacts their life and
death decisions. She also has a coedited book, Language and Social Justice
in Practice (Routledge, 2018), which addresses the relationship between
communicative practices and the creation of more just societies. Her
most recent research project uses video ethnography to explore yoga and
embodied communication as therapy for moral injury among military
veterans. She teaches courses in cultural, linguistic, and legal anthropology.
Archie Crowley is a Linguistics doctoral student at the University of South
Carolina. Their research focuses on language practices, ideologies, and
activism within online and offline trans communities. Crowley is involved
in various projects and organizations that facilitate greater affirmation of
trans, nonbinary, and queer communities, including UofSC’s LBGTQ+
Grad Student Affinity Group, the Harriet Hancock Center’s Nonbinary Peer
Support Group, and the Committee for LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics
(COZIL) for the Linguistic Society of America.
Sonia Neela Das is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New
York University. Combining ethnographic, linguistic, bibliographical, and
archival methods, she investigates how linguistic forms and ideologies
interface with communicative practices to contribute to social inequality
in Canada, the United States, and South Asia. Her current research
analyzes the institutional, interactional, and ideological factors producing
escalation, violence, and unfair legal outcomes ensuing from racially
charged police-civilian interactions in the US South. She also investigates
technocratic ideologies about unsociability among commercial seafarers.
Her first monograph, Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco
Conflicts, won Honorable Mention for the Sapir Book Prize by the Society
for Linguistic Anthropology. She is the recipient of grants from the National
Science Foundation, Association for Canadian Studies in the United States,
and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is coeditor-in-chief of the flagship
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and a Junior Fellow in the Mellon Society
of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.
xvi Contributors
Ilana Gershon is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Anthropology at Indiana
University and studies how people use new media to accomplish complicated
social tasks such as breaking up with lovers and hiring new employees. She
has published books such as The Breakup 2.0, Down and Out in the New
Economy and edited A World of Work: Imagined Manuals for Real Jobs, and
Living with Animals. She has been a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced
Study, and is presently a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki. She
is currently studying how working in person during a pandemic sheds light
on the ways workplaces function as private governments.
Jan David Hauck is British Academy Newton International Fellow in the
Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and
Political Science. He has used video extensively in his research, recording
verbal art, narratives, and cultural practices in a project to document
the indigenous Aché language in Paraguay, as well as in a video-based
socialization study of Aché children, recording interactions in children’s
peer groups, with caregivers, and with a variety of nonhumans in a village
and on forest hunting treks. His theoretical interests are on the perception
of language and linguistic difference, the ontological underpinnings
of conceptions of language, language ideologies, ethics and morality,
cooperation, child development, the perception of the environment, and
human-nonhuman interactions.
Deborah A. Jones is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany, where she specializes in the
study of language, ethics, and political economy. She is currently preparing a
monograph on language and violence in Ukraine, where linguistic differences
are often cited as a factor in the war in the country’s east, but suppositions
about the sort of speech that incites, prevents, or facilitates healing from conflict
have proven much more varied. Another project, pursued as part of the Max
Planck—Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change, focuses
on ghostwriting and the relinquishment of authorship in the digital age.
Farzad Karimzad is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at
Salisbury University. His research focuses on theorizing context and semiosis
in relation to issues of normativity, mobility, and marginality, and the
implications of these theories for sociolinguistic and anthropological studies
of discourse and behavior. His recent work has been published in the Journal
Contributors xvii
of Sociolinguistics, Language and Communication, and Applied Linguistics.
His recent coauthored book, Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social
Imagination, and Behavior, published by Routledge presents a chronotopic
and scalar approach to sociolinguistic behavior in general and to the issues
of migration and marginality more specifically.
Gregory Kohler is an AAAS American Science & Technology Policy Fellow
with USAID. His PhD dissertation, “Accounting for Modernity: Calculative
Infrastructures of Sardinian Dairy Production,” is based on twenty-four
months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sardinia, Italy, and was supported
by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright IIE. His research is
rooted in a critical dialogue between linguistic anthropology, ethics, and
critical food studies and explores the growth of audit cultures in governing
global food chains.
Heather Loyd Heather Loyd consults as a business anthropologist and user
experience researcher and is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her work lies at the
intersection of linguistic anthropology and cultural studies of urban youth,
gender, morality, and the family in Italy and the U.S. As a consultant, she
helps businesses understand and connect with customers. At UCLA, she
teaches students anthropological field methods, as well as how to apply
anthropological concepts, research methods, and analytical skills to a wide
range of careers. As a business anthropologist, she conducts ethnographic
research that helps businesses understand and connect with people,
improving both customers’ experiences and clients’ businesses.
Teruko Vida Mitsuhara recently completed her dissertation, “Moving
toward Utopia: Language, Empathy, and Chastity among Mobile Mothers
and Children in Mayapur, West Bengal” at the University of California,
Los Angeles. Her research interests include utopian and world-building
movements in India and the United States. She is a linguistic anthropologist
who has used video ethnography to document women and children in a
religious utopian community in Mayapur, West Bengal, in northern India.
She also works as a freelance entertainment market researcher carrying out
remote, video-based ethnography.
Keith M. Murphy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University
of California, Irvine. His research explores design and designing from the
xviii Contributors
perspective of face-to-face interaction. He is the author of Swedish Design:
An Ethnography (Cornell) and coeditor of Toward an Anthropology of the
Will (Stanford), and Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities
(SAR Press).
Sabina M. Perrino is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics
at Binghamton University. She has conducted research in Senegal, Northern
Italy, and the United States. Her research examines racialized language in
discursive practices, offline and online narratives, intimacy in interaction,
language and migration, language revitalization, transnationalism, language
use in ethnomedical encounters and in political discourse, and research
methods in linguistic anthropology. She is author of Narrating Migration:
Intimacies of Exclusion in Northern Italy (Routledge) and Storytelling in the
Digital World (with Anna De Fina; John Benjamins). She has numerous
publications on a wide range of linguistic anthropological topics. She has
coedited eight special issues for journals including Language in Society,
Language & Communication, Narrative Inquiry, Multilingua, and Applied
Linguistics. She is the coeditor of the series Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistic
Anthropology.
Sonya E. Pritzker is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Alabama, where she teaches theory and method
in linguistic anthropology and directs the UA Open Laboratory on
Embodiment, Communication, and Health (ECHO). Her research focuses
on the intersection of language and embodied experience in relation to
culturally situated notions of health, social justice, intimacy, and well-being
in the United States and China. As a linguistic and medical anthropologist
as well as licensed practitioner of Chinese medicine and former clinical
researcher in the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, she is committed
to multidisciplinary, collaborative research. She is the author of Living
Translation: Language and the Search for Resonance in U.S. Chinese Medicine
(Berghahn Books, 2014) and the coeditor (with Janina Fenigsen and James
Wilce) of The Handbook of Language and Emotion (Routledge, 2020). She
has also published widely in journals across psychological anthropology,
linguistic anthropology, and integrative medicine.
Justin Richland is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on Native
American law and politics in the contemporary moment, particularly the
Contributors xix
interface between tribal nations in the United States and the US federal and
state governments.
Merav Shohet is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University.
She is the author of Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the
Limits of Love in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2021). Her work
integrates linguistic, psychological, medical, and sociocultural anthropology
to examine care, affect, ethics, gender, and the end of life in North America,
Vietnam, and most recently, Israel/Palestine. She has published articles on
morality and language socialization; care, social change, and the semiotics
of funerary ritual; narrative and eating disorders; love, family, and gender
politics; and hierarchy and forms of address/self-reference in American
Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Ethos, and the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, among others. Two of her current projects include
an SSRC-funded study of stigma syndemics and end-stage kidney disease in
disenfranchised urban communities fighting COVID-19 and a longitudinal
study of practices of elder care and inequality in Israel’s transforming
kibbutzim.
Acknowledgments
This book began to take shape during a vibrant conversation with Andrew
Wardell at the 2018 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)
meetings, in Chicago. We would like to thank him and Becky Holland of
Bloomsbury Academic for their support and guidance throughout the
development of our book. Likewise, we are very thankful to the reviewers
of the book proposal and of the book manuscript for their advice and
support. Special thanks go to the contributors of this volume who accepted
our invitation to be part of this collection. We would like to acknowledge
the enthusiasm and great care each of them took in writing and revising
their chapters. Without their dedication and unique expertise in linguistic
anthropology, this volume would have never materialized. We both thank our
students and colleagues in the Departments of Anthropology at Binghamton
University and the University of Alabama for their continuous intellectual
and social support throughout the course of this book’s preparation. Taking
place within conversations about research methodology over coffee, in the
hallways, and via Zoom, their contributions to this volume are immeasurable.
Finally, we would both like to offer our immense gratitude to our advisors,
mentors, and colleagues in linguistic anthropology who have supported us
in our studies and careers: the reality that there are too many of you to name
individually is a reminder to us of just how lucky we have been. We hope that
this volume contributes, in whatever small way, to furthering the enormous
legacy of innovative methodologies that you have developed, refined, and
shared with so many students over the years.
Sabina M. Perrino and Sonya E. Pritzker