face to face interaction

Theory in Social and CulturalAnthropology: An Encyclopedia

Face-to-Face Interaction

Contributors: R. Jon McGee & Richard L. WarmsEditors: R. Jon McGee & Richard L. WarmsBook Title: Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An EncyclopediaChapter Title: "Face-to-Face Interaction"Pub. Date: 2013Access Date: June 24, 2015Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.City: Thousand OaksPrint ISBN: 9781412999632Online ISBN: 9781452276311DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79Print pages: 252-256

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Page 3 of 10 Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: AnEncyclopedia: Face-to-Face Interaction

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79inandThough rarely discussed explicitly in anthropology, face-to-face interaction (FFI) is aprimordial site of social and cultural life. Consider that human infants are treated aspossible co-interactionalists from birth (indeed, in some cases, before birth!), and thereis evidence, in various forms, that they are capable of intentionally contributing to suchinteractions within the first few months (and perhaps the first hours) of life. Moreover,everywhere we look, society on the ground is, in large part, constituted through thecoordinated activities of individuals and groups in direct FFI. Inuit song duels, Wolofgreetings, and Iatmul Naven are just a few of the anthropologically more famous formsthat human social interaction takes. When seen in comparison with more familiar formssuch as those found in English courtrooms, American presidential press conferences,and French family dinners, we may be impressed by the apparently limitless diversity.However, underlying such diversity is a robust, universal, generic infrastructure thatexploits a range of species-specific cognitive abilities and prosocial motivations. It is thisinfrastructure that will be briefly sketched here.

Significant contributions to current thinking about FFI have come from a variety ofsources, including linguistic pragmatics, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce,as well as studies in anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines. This briefsketch, however, focuses on an approach to FFI that emerged in the work of HarveySacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson and has come to be known asconversation analysis. Both Sacks and Schegloff were students of Erving Goffmanatransdisciplinary scholar who, though trained as a sociologist, had a major impact on,and indeed was himself strongly inspired by, anthropology. Goffman was perhaps thefirst and certainly the most eloquent defender of the view that FFI constituted its ownphenomenonthat it had properties that were sui generis and not reducible to individualpsychology or broader social processes. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson incorporatedthis idea, and it may be understood as the first pillar of conversation analysis.

While Sacks and Schegloff were studying with Goffman at Berkeley, they wereinfluenced by the highly original studies of Harold Garfinkel and the approach hedeveloped known as ethnomethodology. The goal of Garfinkel's early studies wasto uncover the underlying practices of reasoning that members of a society use inaccomplishing everyday activities and that make society possible. A major part ofGarfinkel's investigations was taken up with the question of how one person makes



sense of another's conduct, including their talk. This concern was incorporatedinto conversation analysis, the second pillar of which is the idea that participants insocial interaction engage in practical reasoning both to produce their own talk and tounderstand the talk of others. Both Goffman and Garfinkel thus provided inspirationfor a new and distinctive approach to the study of ordinary social interaction. Sacks,Schegloff, and Jefferson were left though with the task of inventing a method by which itmight be systematically studied.

Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson began their study of social interaction by lookingat audio recordings [p. 252 ] of telephone calls as well as copresent interactionand found there to be a locus of intricate order. Early studies showed that any giveninteraction could be broken down into parts and that these parts consisted of orderlypractices of speaking that issue in orderly consequences and that together form orderlysequences of action in interaction. Moreover, this order is not the product of statisticalregularities or of categorical imperatives but rather of a persistent and pervasiveorientation by the participants to a set of structures or norms. Like any set of normsor rules in this sense, those that organize social interaction do not determine conductbut rather provide a framework through which it is intelligible. That is, participants ininteraction can be seen by others as following a rule, deviating from it, attempting butfailing to follow it, or simply violating it flat outthese various alternatives generatingfurther informative inferences about what a participant means by behaving in aparticular way. The orderliness of interaction then is a product of a member's methodsthat is brought off by participants in interaction in each and every one of its localinstantiations through the application of regular practices of reasoning.

The structures or norms of FFIthe largely universal and generic underlyinginfrastructure alluded to earlierare organized into partially independent orsemiautonomous domains or systems. Three of these domains can be briefly sketchedhere.



Domains of FFI

Turn TakingFirst, there is an organization of turn taking that provides for the orderly distributionof opportunities to participate in talk-in-interaction. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jeffersondescribed a system having two components: (1) a turn constructional component, whichdefines the units out of which a possible turn can be constructed and, by extension,allows participants in interaction to anticipate the possible/probable extent and shape ofany actual unit and thus to project its completion, and (2) a turn allocation component,which specifies an organized set of practices by which transition from the currentspeaker to the next speaker is managed. Together, these two components and therules that organize their relation provide for the detailed orderliness of turn takingin interaction. It can be seen, for instance, that overwhelmingly self-selecting nextspeakers target possible unit completion points as places at which to start their owntalk. In Figure 1, it can be observed that Parky twice attempts to begin his turn Thatchanged it, before it is eventually produced at line 06. Note the split-second timingevidenced here, with Parky attempting to come in at just those points where Old Manhas reached possible (though obviously not actual) completion of his current turn.Clearly, to come in at just these points, Parky must have anticipated where Old Manwould reach possible completion of his current turn. Examples are presented using thetranscription conventions originally developed by Jefferson. For present purposes, themost important symbols are the period (.), which indicates falling and final intonation;the question mark (?), indicating rising intonation; and brackets ([]), marking theonset and resolution of overlapping talk between two speakers. Equal signs, whichcome in pairsone at the end of a line and another at the start of the next line or oneshortly thereafterare used to indicate that the second line followed the first, with nodiscernible silence between them; in other words, it was latched to it. Numbers inparentheses (e.g. (0.5)) indicate silence, represented in 10ths of a second. Finally,colons are used to indicate prolongation or stretching of the sound preceding them. Themore the colons, the longer is the stretching.



Figure 1 Parky

An important and widely underappreciated point is that this turn-taking system operatesindependently of whatever actions are being accomplished in and through the talk itorganizesthat is, whether persons are requesting, inviting, questioning, answering, [p.253 ] agreeing, disagreeing, complaining, excusing, insulting, or whatever else, theydo it in turns at talk constructed and distributed through an orientation to the turn-takingsystem.

Arrangement of Actions into SequencesThe arrangement of actions into sequences represents a second domain of organizationin interaction. A very basic observation is that manythough not allactions in talkin interaction come in pairs, for example, request and granting (or rejection), invitationand acceptance (or refusal), complaint and excuse (or denial), and so on. These pairsare linked together by a relation of conditional relevance whereby, to paraphraseSchegloff, given a first action (such as a request, invitation, or complaint), a secondis made expectable. On the occurrence of a second, it can be seen to be a seconditem to the first (rather than an independent turn), and on its nonoccurrence, it can beseen to be absent (where an infinite number of other things did not occur but were notabsent in the same way). Conditional relevance thus establishes a relation betweena first and a second action that has both a prospective and a retrospective dimension.The prospective dimension ensures that the doing of a first action will activate a norm,making the doing of the second action relevant and noticeably absent if not produced.The retrospective dimension allows the speaker of the first action to see if and howshe was understoodfor example, the production of a turn recognizable as an excusein response will reveal to the first speaker that she was heard to be complaining oraccusing, whether that was her intention or not. Thus, the production of actions within



sequences constitutes an architecture of intersubjectivity by which understandingsare publicly displayed and ratified incarnately, en passant in the course of whateverbusiness the talk is occupied with.

RepairThe third and final domain of organization to be described here is the system of repair.Troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding are endemic to all forms of humaninteraction. The organized set of practices of repair constitute a natural, interactivesystem by which such troubles may be addressed at or near their point of production(or manifestation) and potentially resolved more or less immediately. The practices thatmake up the domain of repair are described in terms of personnel (self = speaker oftrouble source, other = any other participant), component (trouble source vs. initiationvs. repair proper, etc.), and position (same turn, transition space between turns, nextturn, third turn, third position). Consider, for instance, the case in Figure 2 excerptedfrom a talk show in which Ellen Degeneres is interviewing Rashida Jones.

Figure 2 Rashida Jones on Ellen, April 2009

[p. 254 ] Where this fragment begins, DeGeneres is raising the topic of Jones's newtelevision show with the comedian Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation. DeGeneresinitiates the topic by inviting Jones to tell the audience about the show. She then givesthe title, before concluding the turn with an' you an' Amy Poehler howHow great



is that. Note then that this final part of the turn can be heard as a real informationquestiona request for Jones to specify how great that is. At the same time, theconstruction How X is that? is a familiar, idiomatic expression that, by virtue of thepresupposition it carries, conveys that it's X or, in this case, it's great. So here thetalk at line 03 (the A arrow) takes the form of a wh question (How great is that), andRashida Jones treats it as one by answering, It's pretty great (at the B arrow). Thisresponse, by treating How great is that= as an information-requesting question,reveals a problematic understanding, which Ellen subsequently goes on to repair inlines 0910 and 13 (the C arrows). By saying, I: say it's really great, Ellen indicatesthat How great is that= was not in fact meant as a question but rather as an assertion(or, more specifically, an assessment). We call this repair in third position for thefollowing reason. A first-position utterance (How great is that) has been produced,and the response to it, in second position, It's pretty great, reveals a problematicunderstanding of it. This problematic understanding is then repaired in third position bythe speaker of the first-position utterance when she clarifies that she was asserting orassessing and not asking.

Note that we can distinguish such cases from instances of third-turn repair, asexemplified in Rashida Jones's talk at lines 0408. Here, the speaker originallyproduces the turn It's pretty great, and this is treated as a trouble source whenshe repairs it by inserting the phrase experientially for me, resulting in the repairedutterance I just mean experientially for me it's pretty great. In this case, the repairmight have been produced in the transition space between turns but has been pushedinto third turn by Ellen's =mm mh[m. at line 05. In contrast to the instance of third-position repair we just considered from this same fragment, here Ellen's =mm mh[m.does not reveal a problematic understanding of what the prior speaker has just said andthus does not prompt the repair that is eventually produced.

A very important initial step in developing a rigorous account of interaction involvesdetermining the different systems or domains out of which talk-in-interaction iscomposed. Though obviously interrelated in multiple ways, these domains have theirown distinctive properties and operate to some extent independently of one anotherso, for instance, it may have been noted that the turn-taking system underlies all thepractices of repair just described but does so indiscriminately, irrespective of whether itis a repair or something else that is being done.



Language and the Structure of InteractionRecent work from an anthropological and crosslinguistic perspective has begun to askwhether the particular language being spoken has consequences for the organization ofinteraction as described here. That study is still in its infancy, but initial results suggestthat the underlying, generic structures of interaction may be inflected or torqued bythe particular semiotic structures through which it is accomplished as well as the localcircumstances within which it operates.

JackSidnell

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79See also

Ethnomethodology

Further Readings

Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Introduction: Human sociality as a newinterdisciplinary field . In N. J. Enfield, ed. & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of humansociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 135). Oxford, UK: Berg.Levinson, S. C. (2006). On the human interaction engine. In N. J. Enfield, ed. & S. C.Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and interaction (pp. 3969). Oxford, UK: Berg.Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for theorganization of turn-taking for conversation . Language , 50(4), 696735. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/412243

Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings . AmericanAnthropologist , 70(6), 10751095. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1968.70.6.02a00030Schegloff, E. A. (2006). Interaction: The infrastructure for social institutions, the naturalecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted . In N. J.



Enfield, ed. & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, andinteraction (pp. 7096). Oxford, UK: Berg.Sidnell, J. (2009). Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives . Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511635670

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction . Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

face to face interaction

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