Anthropology 33: Culture and Communication

Assignment # 1: Introductions

Anthropology 33:Culture and Communication

[Updated Jan 22, 2007]

Goal

This assignment is designed to get students to analyze video recorded interactions. It simulates the kind of problem-solving that researchers on culture and communication engage in when analyzing video recorded material. The activity you will be examining can be thought of as a cultural activity, that is, something that people in a particular community do and need to be socialized to (e.g. through participation, observation, explicit instruction, or implicit modeling). It might be something that is also found in other communities and in other languages. But we do not know until we go and look. Before we go and look for what happens elsewhere, we need a good description of what happens in the DATA that we have at our disposal.

Procedure

You will review 15 video clips taken from a large corpus of audio-visual material recorded by Alessandro Duranti during the 1995-96 political campaign for the U.S. Congress in the Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo district (what at the time was the 22nd district of the State of California - districts have been redrawn since then). You will also have access to rough transcripts of all the video segments (in some cases the transcripts might need to be slightly revised). The final goal of the assignment as a research project is for you to propose a series of generalizations about introductions. This means that once you are done with the assignment, (a) you should know more about introductions than when you started, (b) what you have learned should be of potential use to others who are interested in similar phenomena, e.g. students of American politics, or of debates, or of how social identities are formed, and (c) others should be able to understand your analysis and be able to test your description and your hypotheses.

Directions for analysis

A First Observation. In looking at the 15 segments or just by reading the transcripts, one realizes that one of the activities that participants are engaged in is to introduce other people or to introduce themselves. This does not mean that everyone introduces everyone else or that all people introduce someone else. But there is a fair amount of "introducing" that goes on (in addition to other kinds of social activities also done through language, like, for instance, "thanking" or talking about places and family members). You will be asked to focus on such "introductions."

How do we know that there is "introducing" going on? First of all, we do find a couple of people referring to the activity itself. For example, in Segment 8, the Moderator says "At this time I would introduce Mr. Porter ...", which is both a description and an instantiation of the act of introducing (just like when people say "I would like to thank so-and-so," which is a way of saying "thanks" to so-and-so). And in Segment 9, Mr. Bersohn says "I'll give you a short introduction to myself." But looking for the word introduction or some form of the verb introduce might not very productive for finding examples of "introductions." For example, in Segment 1, the speaker says "I'm Irene Harter ..." This seems a good candidate for an introduction even though the term "introduction" is not used. Similarly, when the moderator says "Our- third speaker is:- representative Andrea Seastrand," one could argue that this is understood by the audience as an introduction, although it is a bit different (it will be up to you to decide whether this difference constitutes a different TYPE).

Task 1: Find EXAMPLES in the data and list them sequentially. Think of the 15 clips plus their transcripts and the contextual information provided here and elsewhere on my web pages as the DATA. Looking through your data, you need to find examples of introductions. To do this, you need to go to introductions, and carefully look at and listen to the 15 clips taken from the project on Walter Capp's 1995-96 political campaign . The site with the introduction also provides you with (rough) transcripts of all the examples (if you find that any one transcript is, in your opinion, inaccurate or misleading, please note what needs to be fixed and write the instructor a message about it). WRITE a LIST of all the examples of introduction in your data and number them sequentially, starting with clip 1, then clip 2 etc.

TASK 2. Provide a DEFINITION of the phenomenon under investigation. On the basis of all the examples of "introductions" you identified in the DATA provide a definition of introductions, i.e. answer the question "what's an introduction like (in the available data)?" Your answer should include (a) one or more structural description(s) and (b) a list of the variants of each TYPE as identified by each structural description (you can refer to the different examples by using the numbers you have assigned in TASK 1 above). For example, if you were giving a structural description of greetings in English, you might have to include the TYPE "Good TIME-of-DAY" (a structural description which would cover "Good morning" and "Good evening") and the TYPE "Hi" or "Hello" (there might be differences between American English and British English). An issue to consider in this case would be whether you should include address terms like proper names or titles as part of the greeting (i.e. should "Good morning Dr. Smith" be considered a greeting or should one separate "Good morning" from the rest?). Include a brief discussion (150-200 words) of potential issues with your description (e.g. are alternative descriptions possible? Why?) or a brief statement about the logic you followed in your classification/definition.

TASK 3. Provide a HYPOTHESIS about the potential goal(s) of introductions or what they seem to accomplish. You need to think about what "introductions" (of the kinds found in your data) accomplish, i.e. what they are used for (e.g. you could say "We hypothesize that introductions are used by participants to ..."). This does not mean, by the way, that participants are conscious of what introductions accomplish. It could also be that what they think is different from what you hypothesize (see TASK 4). To do this, there are different research strategies. For example, you might want to consider what happens BEFORE or AFTER introductions are done: does the context change? If so, how? Could you say that "introductions" (as they suggest) are "preliminaries" or "necessary steps" to do other kinds of things? If so, what exactly? (In your discussion, remember to support your claims with examples from the corpus of data you have, including the examples that do not fit in your definition). (250 excluding examples).

Task 4: Find out if there is a NATIVE THEORY of introductions and compare your hypothesis (Task 3) with such a theory. Check your hypothesis about what introductions seem to accomplish with people who are not part of the class. Find at least two people (outside of the class). Give them examples of what you are studying (from your list in Task 1) and ask them to tell you (a) what they would call these things and (b) what they think these things do or what they are done for. This should allow you to find out whether the people you are talking to have their own theory, what we might call a native theory of the same verbal activity that you have been analyzing. Describe the results of this in a paragraph or two (max. 200 words).

Reaching CONSENSUS. Working in a group implies getting used to the possibility that the people you work with may have different ideas from yours. Try to benefit from any possible differences in opinion and be open to alternative solutions. Ideally, at the end, you should try to reach a consensus on all four tasks. Should you not be able to reach a consensus, you should make it explicit by stating, when appropriate, there more than one answer (e.g. more than one hypothesis) is possible.

Instructions for completing the analysis and turning in the assignment:

This assignment should be done in a GROUP, with all members (2, 3, or 4) from the same section (all exceptions must be negotiated and approved by your TA prior to the completion of the assignment). Working in a group will hopefully allow you to pool resources and gain from each other's insights.

You are NOT being asked to write a paper. Restrict your writing to observations, classifications, generalizations, and hypotheses. Do not waste words with fancy 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 that characterizes political debates in the U.S.

Hand in to your TA a typed (double spaced) version of your analysis. Make sure to write the first and last name of ALL members of your group on top of ALL pages. Divide up the assignment according to the 4 tasks described above.

To view the video clips for this assignment, go to introductions.