Assignment # 2: Greetings

Anthropology 33:Culture and Communication

Syllabus for Anthropology 33

Instructor: Prof. Alessandro Duranti

[Updated March 4, 2006, 11:50am]

Goal

This assignment is designed to get students to (1) collect data on human interaction, (2) provide a classification of the phenomena under consideration (in this case, greetings) and (3) and provide a hypothesis about the results of the classification. There are several links that have been created to help you through this assignment (e.g. to a definition of "adjacency pairs" and to a variety of on-line video clips with relevant examples). Make use of them.

STEP I: Data Collection. You will have to find two sites on campus where to collect examples of naturally, i.e. spontaneously, occurring human greetings. These should be public places, that is, places like a street or the entrance to a building, where a person standing by with a notebook or a recording device would not attract too much attention or would not interfere with other people's activities. If you end up choosing a closed space like a store or any other place where people are working, you need to explain what you are doing to the people you are observing (and recording) and obtain their permission (for this, it might be appropriate to talk with the manager of the store). If you see the need to ask for permission to record, you should politely explain that you are doing a class assignment for a course on culture and communication and you need to observe and record people talking to one another in a public place (avoid saying that you are studying how they greet each other because it might make people too self-conscious about their greeting behavior). Before proceeding, read the next two paragraphs about research on human subjects.

RESEARCH ON HUMAN SUBJETCS. Anthropologists, like all social scientists working in a university, need to comply with federal regulations on research on human and animal subjects. At UCLA this is done through the Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRS) . Any UCLA researcher (whether faculty or student) needs to (i) get a certificate that shows that he or she has learned the basic principles of doing research on human subjects (this is done on the web now), (ii) accurately describe the project and how human subjects will be selected and treated (or how one might interact with them) and (iii) submit the proposal for the project and the protocol to OPRS, which reviews it for approval. It is a fairly elaborate procedure and takes time. For this project you will NOT need to go through the approval of OPRS for a number of reasons including the fact that this is a class project and you will be observing a form of public behavior that should not put you or your subjects at risk and does not violate their privacy. This means, however, that you will not be able to publish or use the material you collected for this project outside of class. If you wish at a later point to use some of the material and information you collected, you will need to comply with OPRS regulations.

BEHAVIOR AS A RESEARCHER. As a researcher and fieldworker, you need to be on your best behavior, respect the culture of the community you are studying, even when you are there for a very short time. Be polite, ask permission if you are doing something that may interfere with what others are doing, and make sure to explain what you are doing if people ask you (see above).

STEP II: Recording. You will need to either audio record or video record enough interactions in both places to be able to have a collection of greetings (see below for the exact number depending on how many people are involved in the assignment). These greetings should not involve you. You are an observer and by-stander but the exercise is NOT about how people would greet you or how you would greet people. You should also NOT record other students in the class greeting each other or set up any situation in which people greet each other in order to provide you with some examples for this assignment. The idea is to find a situation in which greetings occur spontaneously for reasons that have nothing to do with this assignment.

One of the problems with recording spontaneous interaction is that it is difficult to get good sound (and sound is crucial for hearing what people are saying to one another). You can try to improve the quality of sound by one of the following techniques: (a) place a microphone (or a whole audio recorder) in or very close to the place where you think or you know that people will be greeting each other, e.g. on the steps of a building, next to a door of a building or of an office, on the counter of a store, on the table of a group of people who are outdoors inviting others to join them in some club or activity, on a person who is for some reasons in a position that invites or elicit greetings; (b) if you are using a camcorder and you cannot be close enough to get good sound and you don't have a remote mike, you can also use an audio recorder as indicated in (a) above (this will give you two sources of information, which are better than one). The most delicate part of this assignment is the quality of the data. You should think hard about the best possible place for collecting good data. In your case, good data are examples of greetings that can heard and/or seen well enough to be transcribed and studied. Notice that if you find a situation in which people DO NOT use talk AT ALL, then you would have solved the problem of having to worry about recording and transcribing sound. But you have to find a setting where you can demonstrate that spoken language is not a relevant factor (e.g. greetings from a distance or in a place where interactants have visual access to each other but can't hear each other or choose not to raise the volume of their voice).

STEP III: Selection of relevant segments. You will then need to listen (or watch and listen) to the recordings you made in order to select ONLY examples of GREETINGS, i.e. those portions that conform to what you can identify and define as greetings. Those are the sections that you will have to transcribe (see Step IV below). For this assignment, you DO NOT NEED to transcribe entire conversations or interactions. You need to transcribe ONLY examples of greetings (in some cases, you might find it useful to transcribe a couple of turns/lines before or after).

STEP IV: Transcribe. You will need to transcribe those portions with examples of greetings following the transcription conventions as shown in the examples of transcripts of greetings. Then print out ALL of your EXAMPLES, numbering them from (1) on.

STEP V: Classify the transcribed greeting segments. After you make up a collection of transcribed greetings, you need to examine them in order to see whether they conform to the types described below (in each case you will need to refer to the examples in your collection that conform to the type under discussion).

TYPE A. They come in adjacency pairs. Indicate which examples in your collection conform to this type (A).

When they are a pair, distinguish between TYPE A1, where the two pair parts identical, as in the following example?

and TYPE A2, in which the adjacency pairs have different parts, as shown in the exchange called Michael, where Margaret says "Hello" and Michael responds "Hi."

For both TYPE A1 and TYPE A2, indicate which examples in your collection conform to each type (you don't need to repeat the examples, you can just refer to the example number in your collection).

TYPE B. The greetings do not come in adjacency pairs.

There are two possibilities:

TYPE B1: Only one greeting by one speaker occurs but there is no second pair part with another greeting by the other speaker.

EXAMPLES OF TYPE B1. For example, in Segment # 9 of Introductions , the Libertarian candidate David Bersohn starts with "Hi. My name is David Bersohn." In this case, it does not seem that others respond with another greeting (unfortunately, the camera does not show members of the audience, but we do not hear any "hi" following Bersohn's "hi"). Also in the interaction between Hillary Clinton and the Capps family members , Hillary Clinton says "Hi" to Lois Capps, but no audible "hi" is heard from Lois Capps.

TYPE B2: Any other examples of greeting exchanges that do not fit in any of the previous types. Indicate which of your examples conform to this category.

STEP VI: Description of settings. Describe in ONE PARAGRAPH (100-150 words) the two settings where you recorded the interactions for this assignment. (The two settings can be within the same locale, e.g. the entrance to a building and a place inside the building or two counters in the same store).

STEP VII: Hypothesis. On the basis of your responses to the questions above, formulate ONE original hypothesis about what you just described from looking at your data. You could focus on some specific differences or similarities within or across situations. For example, if you find a difference in the types across situations, you could make a hypothesis about the possible factors that might account for the difference and thus make it predictable (that's what a theory does). You could find for example that in one situation people greet each other and in the other they do not. Or that in one situation only one party greets. Or that one party greets verbally and the other greets gesturally. Whatever you decide to concentrate on, remember to always start from whatever regularities (which does not mean 100% of the time) you find and then move to their larger context. And the "context" can be thought of all kinds of potentially relevant factors, e.g. the assumed roles that the interactants have, their respective competence or knowledge, their respective goals in the activities, what happened immediately before the interaction or immediately afterwards. For example, in the case of the libertarian candidate David Bersohn during one political debate (see above), we are dealing with an individual addressing a large group. We could hypothesize that a person giving a public speech can greet the audience without expecting members of the audience to respond (or, conversely, that when you are a member of a large party receiving a greeting, you are not obliged to respond). Does this sound right intuitively? What would you need to test it?

Number of greeting segments. This assignment can be done individually OR in a group (with students who are ALL in the same section or have the same TA).

Number of examples of greetings needed for your analysis. The number of examples of greetings that you need to record, transcribe and use for your analysis varies according to the number of people doing the assignment:

You are NOT being asked to write a paper. Restrict your writing to the tasks as described above. Do not waste words with fancy or cute introductions or other rhetorical devices that do not have anything to do with what this assignment is about. Again, this is NOT a paper. Think of it as a REPORT on what you were able to see, hear and find out about a particular cultural activity (i.e. greetings).

Hand in to your TA: (1) the original data you recorded (e.g. a tape or a disk with digitized audio or video data); (2) a typed (double spaced) version of your analysis, which should be organized into 3 sections, each with a title: (1) The DATA, that is, the list of numbered examples of greetings (for Type B, you need to show that a greeting was NOT followed by another greeting, hence one line/one turn is not sufficient as an example); (2) Your CLASSIFICATION of your examples in terms of the TYPES described in Step V; (3) the DESCRIPTION of the settings you recorded in (150 words), and (4) Your HYPOTHESIS with a brief discussion of how you came to such hypothesis and what you would need to do to test it (200 words max.).