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Since the early 1980s, a new approach has emerged in the area of intercultural communication—ethnography of communication. Stemming from the sociological work of Dell Hymes (1972), this approach has the aim of providing thick description of a single culture, rather than making predictions of behavior based on culture (or, rather, cultures as representative of underlying variables, such as individualism/collectivism). Hymes developed a framework for studying cultures and began to focus on the “ethnography of speaking.” One of his doctoral students, Gerry Philipsen, imported this approach to communication studies and has been one of the greatest proponents and expositors of this theory. Many today who follow in this line of research were students of Philipsen, who continues to teach at the University of Washington (e.g., Donal Carbaugh, Kristine Fitch, Brad “B.J.” Hall, Tamar Katriel). An example of Philipsen’s early work in this area is his now-classic study, “Speaking Like a Man in Teamsterville” (1975). In this study, Philipsen lived and worked in an urban Chicago neighborhood which he called Teamsterville. He paid special attention to the communication resources (how communication was used and with whom) among the men who spend time in the local pub. He concluded that communication was, for these men, a resource to be used with status equals, but that various forms of aggressiveness were more the norm for communication with status inferiors (children, wives, outsiders to the community), and mediation by a third party the norm with status superiors (potential bosses, God). Philipsen, over the period of several years, developed and built upon Hyme’s (1972) framework of ethnography of speaking to various forms of communication and contexts. Others within this approach also applied it to the use of silence (e.g, Braithwaite, 1990). These writers, as they were focusing on uncovering through observation and informal interview, the realities of single cultures, tended to refer to this field as cultural (rather than intercultural or cross-cultural) communication. An example of this type of study appears on the Chapter 3 Website for our text. Studies often rely either explicitly or implicitly on Hyme’s (1972) SPEAKING framework:
As Philipsen (1989, 1992) continued to develop his approach, he elaborated several goals of the research, framed in clearly stated assumptions:
While he believes each culture is unique, Philipsen suggests that after we look at enough individual cultures, we might be able to look for explanations that fit across most cultural studies (but, again, they would be derived inductively, as Braithwaite’s study noted above [1990], in which he looked at ethnographies of many different cultures to find uses of silence that seemed to be appropriate in most or all cultures studied to date]. Most recently, Philipsen has summarized this research and presented many examples of specific studies in the Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication (2nd edition, 2002). He synthesizes the above assumptions into two summary principles: (1) “Every communal conversation bears traces of culturally distinctive means and meanings of communicative conduct” (p. 53); and (2) “Communication is a heuristic and performative resource for performing the culgtural function in the lives of individuals and communities” (p. 59). In sum, quite contrary to many of the theories in Chapter 10 that attempt to provide a system of terms or variables, this perspective seeks to provide an in-depth understanding of a single culture, often in terms of frameworks of rules and meanings surrounding a specific genre or type of behavior, or the meanings surrounding specific terms and types of speaking. References:
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