‘linguistic’ matters. It is at this point that one can understand how ethnography triggered important developments both in general sociology – Bourdieu’s work is exemplary in this respect – as well as in kinesics, non-verbal communicative behaviour and indeed social semiosis in general – Goffman, Garfinkel and Goodwin can be mentioned here. From an ethnographic perspective, the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic is an artificial one since every act of language needs to be situated in wider patterns of human social behaviour, and intricate connections between various aspects of this complex need to be specified: the ethnographic principle of situatedness.6
It is also relevant to underscore the critical potential which ethnography derives from these principles. The constant feedback between communicative actions and social relations involves, as said, reflections on value of communicative practices, starting from the observation that not every form of communication is performed or performable in any situation. Society imposes hierarchies and value scales on language, and the looking glass of linguistic practice often provides a magnified image of the workings of powers and the deep structures of inequality in society. It is telling that some of the most critical studies on education have been produced by scholars using an ethnographic perspective (Cook-Gumperz, 1988; Gee, 1996; Heller, 2000; Rampton, 1995). Similarly, it is an interesting exercise to examine the critique formulated from within ethnography against other language scholars involved in the study of language and power. These critiques are not merely critiques of method, they are about the nature of language–power relationships (see Blommaert & Bulcaen, 2000; Blommaert et al., 2001). Moreover, central to this critique is often the notion of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000; Woolard et al., 1998): metalinguistic and hence deeply sociocultural ideas of language users about language and communication that not only appear to direct language behaviour and the interpretation of language acts, but also account for folk and official ‘rankings’ and hierarchies of linguistic varieties.
Object-level (the ‘acts’ themselves) and metalevel (ideas and interpretations of these acts) cannot be separated in ethnography, for the social value of language is an intrinsic and constituent part of language usage itself; that is, in every act of language people inscribe and mark the social situatedness of these acts and so offer patterns of interpretation to the others. These patterns of interpretation are never fixed, of course, but require acknowledgement and interactional co-construction. So here also, strict synchronicity is impossible, for there is both a processual and a historical dimension to every act of language-in-society (Silverstein & Urban, 1996), and the rankings and hierarchies of language are themselves an area of perpetual debate and conflict (Blommaert, 1999). The social dimension of language is precisely the blending of linguistic and metalinguistic levels in communication: actions proceed with an awareness of how these actions should proceed and can proceed in specific social environments. And to be clear about this point, this means that every language act is intrinsically historical.
This brings us to the epistemological level of ethnography. Knowledge of language facts is processual and historical knowledge, lifting single instances of talk to a level of relevance far higher than just the event. They become indexical of patterns and developments of wider scope and significance, and these wider dimensions are part of ethnographic interpretation. Static interpretations of context – ‘setting’, ‘speech community’ and so forth – are anathema and to the extent that they occur in ethnographic writing they should be seen as either a rhetorical reduction strategy or worse, as a falsification of the ethnographic endeavour (Fabian, 1983, 1995). Fabian stresses the dynamic process of knowledge gathering in ethnography, emphasising the fact that ethnographic work also involves active – very active – involvement from the ethnographer himself (a fact known from the days of Malinowski and emphasised, for example, by Edmund Leach, but often overlooked). This provides ethnography with a peculiar, dynamic and dialectical epistemology in which the ignorance of the knower – the ethnographer – is a crucial point of departure (Fabian, 1995). Consequently, ethnography attributes (and has to attribute) great importance to the history of what is commonly seen as ‘data’: the whole process of gathering and moulding knowledge is part of that knowledge; knowledge construction is knowledge, the process is the product (see Blommaert, 2001, 2004; Ochs, 1979). This is why we will emphasise an often overlooked function of fieldwork in the remainder of this book: the fact that fieldwork results in an archive of research, which documents the researcher’s own journey through knowledge.
Summarising, language in ethnography is something very different from what it is in many other branches of the languages sciences, and so is the status of gathering knowledge. There is no way in which knowledge of language can be separated from the situatedness of the object at a variety of levels, ranging from microscopic to macroscopic levels of ‘context’ and involving, reflexively, the acts of knowledge production by ethnographers themselves.
Ethnography as Counter-hegemony
Walter Benjamin once wrote that the task of historians was to challenge established and commonly accepted representations of history. History, in his view, was necessarily critical and counter-hegemonic, and a science such as history only had a raison d’être to the extent that it performed this role of challenging hegemonies. Exactly the same suggestion can be made with respect to ethnography: it has the potential and the capacity of challenging established views, not only of language but of symbolic capital in societies in general. It is capable of constructing a discourse on social uses of language and social dimensions of meaningful behaviour which differs strongly from established norms and expectations, indeed takes the concrete functioning of these norms and expectations as starting points for questioning them, in other words, it takes them as problems rather than as facts. Central to all of this is the mapping of resources onto functions: the way, for instance, in which a standard variety of a language acquires the function of ‘medium of education’ while a non-standard variety would not. This mapping is socially controlled; it is not a feature of language but one of society. Ethnography becomes critique here: the attributed function of particular resources is often a kind of social imagination, a percolation of social structure into language structure. Ethnography deconstructs this imagination and compares it to observable real forms and functions. It is thus, of necessity, a critical enterprise.
It is also critical in another sense. Whereas in most other approaches, the target of scientific method is simplification and reduction of complexity, the target in ethnography is precisely the opposite. Reality is kaleidoscopic, complex and complicated, often a patchwork of overlapping activities. Compare it to a soccer game. Usually, when we watch a soccer game on TV, we are focused on the movement of the ball and on a limited number of players in the area where the ball is. We rarely see all 22 players in the same shot on TV: the lens directs our attention to a subset of the space, the actors and activities. What we miss is the movement of the other players, the way they position themselves in anticipation of what comes next; we also miss the directions they give to one another, by shouting, pointing, pulling faces or making specific gestures. The 22 players perform all sorts of activities simultaneously: while an attacker moves forward with the ball, a winger may run into a favourable position for a particular set-piece play; the central defender can urge his co-defenders to move forward so as to close the gap between forwards and defenders and reduce the space for the opponents when they launch a counter-attack; a midfielder may simultaneously move down to fill in the space left by an attacking defender. And another midfielder may move a bit closer to an attacker from the other side, so as to curtail the latter’s opportunities for movement when a counter-attack is launched; he might beckon a fellow midfielder to close the gap he’s left by marking the attacker. All the players are constantly monitoring each other, and the coach does the same, shouting instructions to players from the sideline whenever he spots a potential problem. All of this happens at the same time, it is a series of seemingly unrelated – but obviously related – activities, very hard to describe in a linear and coherent narrative because as an activity it is not linear and coherent but multiple, layered, chequered and unstable.
A full account of a soccer game should
