Methods for Linguistic Anthropology

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course is designed to give students a methodological and analytical background in the ethnographic study of cultural forms. Through in-class workshops and readings, students will be introduced to and get hands-on experience with different methods and tools to transcribe and analyze scenes of discursive interaction. The in-class workshopping of interactional data will center epistemological questions about the transformation performed by processes of transcription and analysis on such data and the limits of such analysis. Taking students through the prevalent transcription conventions in linguistic anthropology and related fields for analyzing interaction, the course will start with analysis of an interaction as conversation. It will then bring in the analysis of interaction as multimodal events with gesture, gaze, spatial orientation. The course will end by bringing narrative media, such as cinema, into its orbit by thinking through methods from other fields and disciplines (cinema studies, media studies) in the analysis of data. The course aims to leave students with a better understanding of the artefacts we consider to be data - what processes undergird their making, how we ask anthropological questions of data, and what are the limits of such questioning."