Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2702

AUTHOR: Adrian Blackledge
AUTHOR: Angela Creese
TITLE: Essays in Linguistic Ethnography
SUBTITLE: Ethics, Aesthetics, Encounters
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Eric ALVAREZ

SUMMARY

Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese’s “Essays in Linguistic Ethnography: Ethics, Aesthetics, Encounters” investigates novel pathways that add depth to comprehending the intricacies of social encounters between distinct groups of people. The authors advocate for an approach in linguistic ethnography that shifts away from the viewpoint of the researcher. Instead, the authors seek to balance accounts of the complexities of people’s lives by amplifying the voices of collaborators, participants, and researchers. The essays consider methods of presenting research from arts and philosophy that convey the ambivalence and the multiplicity of perspectives found in the field more effectively than conventional academic writing. Through a polyphonic approach to ethnographic writing, Blackledge and Creese aim to represent the “experiential, aesthetic, emotional, moral and ethical values people bring to encounters with others” (p.3). The essays show how new, less deterministic ways of writing ethnographically level the often-implicit hierarchical researcher-participant-collaborator dynamics. The implications are significant, as Blackledge and Creese take ethnography, and the curious reader, into the unknown to “disrupt the orderly logic of the ethnographic account” (p.4). At the crossroads of linguistic ethnography, art, and philosophy, this polyphonic collection of essays is suited to an interdisciplinary audience (students and researchers) seeking new ways to explore, analyze, and balance accounts of everyday social encounters between people.

The book delves in various facets of the TLANG research project through 12 essays which are divided into three sections.

Part 1, Encounters in Linguistic Ethnography, establishes the book’s orientation and includes the first two essays.

Essay 1, “Linguistic Ethnography”, introduces the reasoning, structure, and guiding principles of the book. For example, that “Analysis of human relations (…) must account for multiplicity and ambivalence” (p.3). This essay also summarizes the collection “that bring[s] to bear thought and practice developed in the arts and in philosophy” (p.3), providing theoretical insights and practical perspectives of linguistic ethnography. In Essay 1, the goals and framework of the TLANG project which “studied encounters between people in contexts of social and linguistic diversity” (p.6) are outlined, highlighting the primary research outcomes. The authors refer to four different books that were generated as creative outputs of the TLANG project, and that also serve as anchors in the ensuing essays. Next, Blackledge and Creese identify eight researchers whose “reflexive methodological accounts” (p.13) introduce the final four essays.

Essay 2, “Developing an Ethical-Aesthetic Perspective in Linguistic Ethnography”, discusses the theoretical underpinnings in Part 2 and Part 3. It engages with the ethical-aesthetic approach which provides a way “to represent multiple voices without the insistence on the imposition of meaning or explanation (stepping) back from the authoritative, authorial voice of the academic researcher, allowing space for the inclusion of the of the voices of the others” (p.18). Blackledge and Creese tackle issues of responsibility, temporality, and spatiality, articulating an approach that balances traditional hierarchies in the research process, heightens the voices of the researchers and the researched, and cultivates a perspective that refrains from explaining others’ cultures. The authors embrace the ambiguity and the complexity of everyday life, advocating for creative writing practices that depict the incompleteness of observed social interaction. Specifically, poetry and theater are rich mediums through which social and linguistic experiences can be represented in all their multiplicity and ambiguity. Indeed, “in adopting ethnographic poetry and ethnographic drama to represent the voices of participants in research, we have found the means to produce those voices as vital, vibrant and visible” (p.20-21).

Part 2, Enacting Linguistic Ethnography, details the process of writing and performing linguistic ethnographic research that creatively represents social practices. Five essays explore how research results were transformed through creative curation into poetry and theater.

Essay 3, “Polyphony”, refers to an artistic result of the TLANG project where everyday practices are presented in a Birmingham market. This essay underscores an approach to writing ethnographically that allows multiple voices to be represented independently. Following Bartlett (2012), Blackledge and Creese propose that “Polyphony refers to the multifractal coherence that is achieved through the representation of multiple voices and world views within a single text” (p.34). The authors seek to do away with interposing authorial comment to attenuate the often-privileged perspectives of researchers. As such, they address “the question of narrative authority and discursive hierarchy” (p.35). This essay proposes that ethnographically collected and curated voices can stand alone, underscore mundane daily experiences, and represent the coexistence of linguistic and cultural differences found in the various social encounters of everyday life.

Essay 4, “Poetry”, examines the potential of poetic approaches in ethnographic writing. This essay aligns with the idea that poetry infuses ethnographic narratives with the rhyme and rhythm of daily life. Indeed, “Ethnographic poems rely on a belief in the ability of poetry to speak to something universal, or to clarify some part of the human condition” (p.59). For example, in Blackledge and Creese’s book Voices of a City Market: An Ethnography, poems capture the multilayered, pluri-sensory experiences in a market. Moreover, following Burnside (2019), the authors advance that poetry provides a medium through which the cacophony of time can be re-lived as the melody of an unfolding social encounter. In ethnographic research, not only does the poem hold the capacity to introduce novel perspectives and unique modes of expression, but it also does so while maintaining “the same responsibility to technical features as does any other poem” (p.60).

Essay 5, “Ethnographic Drama”, investigates how performance may enhance understanding, and elevate how social life is portrayed. Performance “allows research participants to speak on their own behalf, without interpretative intervention” (p.77). The authors argue that ethnographic drama which “employs techniques of theatre production” (p.76) may be a strong vector for engaging the public with research results. Indeed, “Performative ways of enacting observed social practice challenge existing means of representing the world” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; cited by Blackledge and Creese, 2023). Referring to Interpretations – An Ethnographic Drama, Blackledge and Creese advance that performing research findings may inspire audiences to think critically, but curation and creation are necessary to transform observed social encounters into ethnographic drama. Finally, the authors argue that unlike the classic academic report, ethnographic drama encompasses a broader range. That is, when social practices are performed their interpretative possibilities are given “an exponential quality” (p.14).

Essay 6, “Performance”, applies ethnographic drama’s potential by observing a volleyball team during their activities since their “social practice (is) not only polyphonic and polyrhythmic, but also polysemiotic” (p.90). The authors refer to Volleyball – An Ethnographic Drama, to investigate Brechtian (1978) theatrical techniques where the estrangement of characters allows audience members to understand that they are watching excerpts of human exchanges. Some methods involved researchers consistently being on stage and engaging in diverse activities. Moreover, Blackledge and Creese argue that careful curation of social encounters using theatrical techniques like shadowing, choreography, and speech renders the audience unable to see that they are observing the real world, thus creating a need for the audience to scrutinize everyday life with a discerning perspective.

Essay 7, “Politics”, concludes Part 2. It details observations in a major state-of-the-art city library during a period of political tension. Blackledge and Creese in the play Ode to the City – An Ethnographic Drama, depict the social world to the audience through four characters, insisting that “ethnographic drama is (…) a creative curation of field notes, transcripts, audio-recordings, video-recordings, conversations and observations” (p.114). The authors evoke issues of economics, power, and politics. Following Brecht (1978) Blackledge and Creese suggest that “The task of theatre is to show the world as it changes, and also how it may be changed” (p.122). Moreover, for the linguistic ethnographer transformation entails turning their research outcomes into ethnographic drama through an artistic writing process. Curation of these rich sources of data thus engender a dramatic form of creative non-fiction.

Part 3, Relations in Linguistic Ethnography, shifts focus to researcher subjectivity in five essays, showing how researchers portray research team relations and research participant relationships through the ‘research vignette’, or “mini auto-ethnography” (p.127).

Essay 8, “Relational Ethics”, is grounded on the work of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This essay provides a point of departure to understand human interaction in everyday encounters. According to Blackledge and Creese “For Levinas, individuals no longer serve themselves but are bound to the Other relationally” (p.134). Individuals thus attain their uniqueness and ethical character through their interactions with others. This essay thus accounts for “compassion, humanity, empathy, and understanding” (p.15) in human encounters throughout the research process. The authors advance that relational ethics allows to develop an awareness beyond mundane encounters, and that their ethnographic research continually showed how individuals actively sought connection and engagement. Finally, the authors propose a theoretical approach that directs the analysis of research issues at the crossroads of relations and relationships.

Essay 9, “Responsibility and Trust”, considers the key notion of ‘moral spacing’ in business and cultural heritage locations. Indeed, “’Moral space’ requires attention to the stance people take towards one another (and is) not easily synthesisable in a linguistic or social analysis of stance” (p.148). Blackledge and Creese delve into what responsibility is from the relational ethics paradigm discussed in Essay 8 above, proposing that responsibility is an orientation to others rather than to an obligation. In the field, moral possibilities abound in researcher-researched relationships. Other than requiring an openness to distinct world views, the authors show how navigating difference or diversity, or needing to make quick decisions, required both ethical and moral evaluations.

Essay 10, “Strangeness and Proximity”, studies ethics in relation to the plurality and presence of others. Accordingly, “Plurality is not made possible through ‘fraternity – a common identity or a cosmopolitan sense of sameness – but relies on the preservation of distance and strangeness” (Biesta, 2014: 21; cited by Blackledge & Creese, 2023: 161). Based on research from a study in the TLANG project, political categories were found not be conducive to harmonious field relation development. The authors return to the idea of making the strange familiar advancing that “proximity does not erase strangeness but maintains plurality and difference” (p.16). Blackledge and Creese suggest that strangeness is primordial and that it enriches the social encounter. Strangeness is therefore not to be sugar-coated and made easy to understand; instead what is needed are approaches “which build a relational ethics which works with the concept of individual uniqueness” (p.173).

Essay 11, “Difference”, underscores philosopher Pierce and Levinas’ “theoretical insights into the way difference is conceptualized” (p.191) by discussing cross-disciplinarity, ethics, and the production of knowledge from an anti-subjective framework. Drawing on expertise from researchers in “law, business and entrepreneurship, and sport, exercise and public health” (p.16), Blackledge and Creese delve into notions of responsibility-vulnerability-susceptibility when researchers are faced with traumatic accounts in a semi-legal context. The authors look at the construction of meaning as a shared, and essential process in team research. Blackledge and Creese argue for an ethical viewpoint when introspecting on the potential ramifications of research and the human impact of those ramifications. Indeed, in encountering difference, the researcher-researched distinction is a critical alterity, and shared vulnerability.

Essay 12, “Movement and Affect”, focuses on investigating ambiguity and doubt in written depictions of beliefs, feelings, behaviors, perceptions, and other conceptions in linguistic research. Blackledge and Creese “believe that the creative arts, and ethnographic drama in particular, offer a promising direction for reporting, representing, and interpreting ethnographic research findings” (p.196), or writing which is less deterministic. Moreover, the authors delve into the significance of the mundane, or “irrelevancies” (p.16) based on their field notes as participant-observers in sports environments in the TLANG project. The ordinary, undramatic nature of daily life, for example, led researchers to reflect on ephemeral instants in ethnographic studies, and led others to their participation in the sport under investigation.

EVALUATION

Blackledge and Creese accomplish what they set out to do with their collection of 12 essays in linguistic ethnography. First, the authors creatively curate their research outcomes into “less deterministic forms of writing” (p.208) such as poetry and theater. By drawing on methods from artistic and philosophical paradigms the complexities of diverse social encounters come to be understood at a deeper level not only by readers/spectators, but also by researchers. Indeed, anthropologists studying child pragmatics for many decades have argued that a multidisciplinary approach allows “researchers, more than other groups (to be) sensitive to the range of knowledge that appropriate languages use demands” (Ochs, 1979:7). Moreover, the authors’ goal of balancing the power relations that may exist in the researcher-researched relationship is also met as all collaborators, participants, and researchers’ voices are given a fair platform where one (typically scientific) voice is not superior to another. Next, the aim of shifting away from the conventional academic report is attained. Clearly, through creative curation of their research outcomes for example into poetry and theater, Blackledge and Creese maintain both the ambivalence and the multiplicity of views found in real-world social encounters. Specifically, the polyphonic approach was key in depicting the lived emotional, and ethical values that come together when people encounter others.

The book will surely be an asset to researchers and students across disciplines that work with and report on human social encounters in a diverse range of field sites. The masterfully written collection of essays will also be an invaluable addition to research methods seminars/courses across disciplines such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and of course linguistic anthropology (to name a few). Critically this is because in ethnographic studies, researchers are typically immersed in a field imbued with their affective and cognitive investment (Bertucci, 2007), emotions that should be analyzed and integrated into the research process (Ghasarian, 2004). Overall, while the book remains reader friendly, and while the theoretical concepts are well explained it is nevertheless an intellectually dense œuvre. It is therefore most likely accessible to scholars already familiar with research in ethnography, art, and philosophy. Notwithstanding, the essays organically complement each other. However, even if the essays “are theoretically and methodologically linked (the authors) do not attempt to impose on them an overall coherence” (p.16) which shifts away from the traditional academic report. Through the creative curation of their research outcomes Blackledge and Creese invite readers to feel, see, smell, and think etc. deeply about the embodied social interactions of people in various multi-diverse field sites in the U.K. including a market, a library, and a community center.

Blackledge and Creese meet their goals by providing a captivating account of the ethics and aesthetics of investigating mundane social encounters. Specifically, the authors reflect on the scientific need of a realistic, reflexive, situated, and polyphonic writing of the relationships between researchers and the researched (Prigent, 2021) by adopting contemporary writer-researcher postures (Buliard, 2022). In doing so, the authors demonstrate how everyday gatherings could be and perhaps should only be understood within their interactional, dialogic context (Bakhtin, 1981)--in other words, how social and linguistic experiences may be richly represented in all their multiplicity and ambiguity. At the crossroads of linguistic ethnography, art, and philosophy, this polyphonic account is suitable for interdisciplinary scholars seeking novel ways to explore, analyze, and level accounts of everyday human encounters. The collection thus contributes invaluable insight regarding research-based creative practice through the production of theater, poetry, and research vignettes. In this sense, Blackledge and Creese’s compelling and creative curation Essays in Linguistic Ethnography paves a new path, representing a significant polyphonic advancement in the field of linguistic ethnography.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imaginations: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bartlett, T. (2012). The Concepts of Voice, Heteroglossia and Polyphony in Literature, Sociology and Linguistics: An SFL Perspective. Cardiff: University of Cardiff.

Bertucci, M. (2007). Chronique “linguistique”. Le chercheur et son terrain : peut-on parler d’un “objet de recherche ” en sciences humaines et sociales ? Le français aujourd’hui, vol. 159 (pp. 113-118). https://doi.org/10.3917/lfa.159.0113

Biesta, G. (2014). Making pedagogy public: For the public, of the public, or in the interest of publicness? In J. Burdick, J.A. Sandlin, and M.P. O’Malley (eds) Problematizing Public Pedagogy (pp. 15-25). New York: Routledge.

Brecht, B. (1978). Brecht on Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Buliard, M. (2022). Écrire l’enquête, situer l’enquêteur : pour une anthropologie scientifique, éthique & politique. Acta fabula, vol. 23, n. 5, Notes de lecture. https:///www.fabula.org/acta/document14421.php.

Burnside, J. (2019). The Music of Time: Poetry in the 20th Century. London: Profile Books.

Denzin, K.N. and Lincoln, Y. (2005). The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In N.K. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 1-32). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Ghasarian, C. (2004). De l’Ethnographie à l’anthropologie réflexive. Nouveaux terrains, nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux enjeux. Paris : Armand Colin.

Ochs, E. (1979). What Child Language Can Contribute to Pragmatics. In E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Developmental Pragmatics (pp. 1-17). New York: Academic Press.

Prigent, S. (2021). L’anthropologie comme conversation. La relation d’enquête au cœur de l’écriture. Toulouse : Anacharsis.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eric Alvarez holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and he is also a translator. His thesis, based on ethnographic data collected in a bilingual environment, examines aspects of the acquisition and socialization into the use of heritage Spanish by a third-generation child. He shows through a multidisciplinary perspective how linguistic and cultural practices reveal how identities are constructed through the multiple voices echoed across space and time.