Research Projects

A considerable portion of my research and publications is based on my fieldwork in (Western) Samoa (1978-79, 1981, 1988, 2000) and in Southern California (1990-95), with immigrants from the Samoan islands and their children. In Samoa I studied verbal art, politics, everyday encounters, register variation, and literacy practices. In Southern California, I studied family interaction, literacy practices in the home and in the Sunday school, and church activities. In the work done in Samoa, my overall project has been to provide an ethnographically informed description of a wide range of speech activities Samoans engage in. In so doing, I have had two goals in mind: (a) to provide a fairly comprehensive sense of what it means to be a speaker of Samoan from a perspective I called Samoan ethnopragmatics; and (b) to use Samoan communicative practices as a way of testing theories and methods in linguistic anthropology and related fields.

My work on Samoan language and culture can be seen as devoted to two related dimensions of human practice and its symbolic representation: (i) intentionality and (ii) agency. The interest in the epistemological and ontological foundations of intentionality came out of a combination of (i) ethnographic and linguistic observations and (ii) theoretical readings in dialogically oriented theories of interpretation and social action. After a number of years spent studying Samoan verbal exchanges, I came to the conclusion that the common view of meaning as reading the intentions of the speaker is highly problematic and that the audience, especially certain types of interlocutors, has an important role to play in the definition of what someone (else) means to say. I articulated these thoughts in a number of articles which focussed on Samoan ways of speaking and interpreting or directly dealt with a number of philosophical traditions that used intentions in their accounts of meaning and interpretation.

The same perspective informed my discussion of speech acts and participation in my book Linguistic Anthropology (1997) and my project on the 1995-96 political campaign of the late Walter Capps for U.S. Congress, which provided an unprecedented quantity and quality of political discourse by one candidate across both public and private interactions and exposed me to a new set of theoretical and methodological questions. In particular, I became interested in analyzing the forces that shaped the candidate's daily public presentation of self and limited his attempts to control the political process he originated by his decision to run for office. This project was meant to contribute to a model of political discourse in contemporary U.S. and provide an understanding of the moral dilemmas caused by the decision to assume a new public identity.

The second dimension, agency, a notion that has received a considerable amount of attention within anthropology and sociology in the last decade, was at the center of my From Grammar to Politics (1994) but not fully developed beyond its representational force. More recently, I have returned to agency in a comparative perspective and from a wider theoretical stand. The first installment of this expansion can be found in my keynote address at the 2001 SALSA conference, revisions and expansions are in progress for a number of publications [More].

Over the years, I have also been interested in the construction of activities, their temporal and spatial organization, and the relationship between action that is planned and action that emerges out of the contingencies of the immediate context. My work on the universal and local properties of greetings is part of this research enterprise. More recently, I have expanded this area to the study of how jazz musicians communicate musical ideas and manage to coordinate their action while creating "on the spot." (see Acquisition of Jazz Aesthetics and The Culture of Jazz Aesthetics).