Labov, William "Rules for ritual insults" in D. Sudnow Studies in social interaction. New York: the Free Press. 1972

Rudas-Burgos, Daniel and Hervé Varenne "Everyday enforcement of (pre-)judgments: From discourse to conversation" Draft (available in 'Files' on Canvas)

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It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community. (Saussure [1915] 1966: 14)

Yes, but, what are we to make of "a sort of contract"? How might it arise? How is it experienced in the everyday conduct of one's life with more or less significant others? How does it change?

  1. Given ethnographic evidence such as:
    1. gifts (Mauss 1923-4)
    2. conversational turns (Sacks et al. 1974)
    3. honor exchanges (Bourdieu 1977 [1972] pp. ),
    4. insults (Labov),
  2. What is that drives the ongoing performances to their various ends?
    1. "culture" (biases, prejudgments)
    2. "language" (Sapir, Whorf)
    3. habitus and every other forms of socialization/enculturation (Parsons & Shils 1951, Bourdieu 1977 [1972])
  3. But: what about the evidence of play, poetry, uncertainty, experimentation, discussion, deliberations?
    1. Bakhtin on dialogism (vs. formalism)
    2. Merleau-Ponty on the experience behind/around/under language
    3. Bateson on play (1955)
    4. Jakobson on poetry
    5. Weinreich and Labov (1972) on everyday language and its continual drifting (with alternate formalization)
  4. New fundamental investigations into other ways to do sociology (ways fully compatible to fulfill Boas' program)
    1. ethnomethodology (Garfinkel on the work of everyday life)
    2. conversational analysis (exploring systematically how people talk to each other)
    3. assemblages (rather than groups)
  5. So:
    1. (Channeling Mauss)
      1. the obligation to speak (do)
      2. the obligation to listen (notice the doing)
      3. the obligation to speak back (do something in terms of what was done
    2. (Channeling Bourdieu)
      1. what to say (do) to this particular person
      2. whether to respond (do)
      3. how to deal with consequences
    3. Labov and the conversational analysts:
      1. insults (Labov)
      2. turn-taking (Sacks, Schegolff and Jefferson (1974).
      3. responding in speech, body, and deeds (McDermott, Goodwin, ...)
  6. Explorations:
    1. expanding conversational analysis beyond the sole focus on people in direct contact within the same time sequence to consider longer term conversations involving many people not in direct contact but still producing something.
    2. (Rudas-Burgos & Varenne)