Donal Carbaugh

Talking American : cultural discourses on Donahue

This study explores cultural features in communication and examines language in use by studying the talk within a prominent cultural event, the DONAHUE show. First, the study provides a detailed reading of America today, showing the importance of the individual in American society, the prominence of choice, and the role of the self as an antagonist to traditional social roles and the institutions of society more generally. Similarly, the study explores common ways of speaking such as being honest about who one is, sharing ones thoughts and feelings, and really communicating with others. By unraveling how these words give shape to American means and meanings, the study demonstrates how routine communication creates powerful motives in contemporary American life. Second, the study provides a way of seeing and hearing ordinary communication as a resource to develop a cultural perspective on ordinary communicative action.

Cultural Discourse Analysis: Communication Practices and Intercultural Encounters

The field of intercultural communication has been criticized for failing to produce studies which focus on actual practices of communication, especially of intercultural encounters. Of particular interest have been cultural analyses of social interactions, as well as analyses of the intercultural dynamics that are involved in those interactions. This article addresses these concerns by presenting a framework for the cultural analysis of discourse that has been presented and used in previous literature. Indebted to the ethnography of communication and interpretive anthropology, this particular analytic procedure is one implementation of the theory of communication codes. As such, it takes communication to be not only its primary data but moreover, its primary theoretical concern. The framework responds to specific research questions, addresses particular kinds of intellectual problems, includes five investigative modes, and uses a special set of concepts. In this essay, each of the modes is discussed as analytically distinct, yet as complementary to the others, including theoretical, descriptive, interpretive, comparative, and critical analyses. Special attention is given to the interpretive mode and to intercultural interactions as a site for the application and development of cultural discourse analysis.

“Just listen”: “Listening” and landscape among the blackfeet

This ethnographic narrative explores “listening” as a cultural form of communication. The investigation examines both linguistic references to this form and its actual nonverbal enactment among Blackfeet people. Brought into view is a rich and deep way of dwelling‐in‐place: This complex way of being derives from and helps constitute cultural and physical spaces; provides a traditional, nonverbal way of being in those places; invites various cultural agents as spirited co‐participants in this communication; valorizes and intensely activates the non‐oral acts of watching, listening, and sensing nonverbally; and, offers a deeply historical way of consulting cultural traditions and places as an aid to the various contingencies of ones life. Blackfeet “listening” is thus a highly reflective and revelatory mode of communication that can open one to the mysteries of unity between the physical and spiritual, to the relationships between natural and human forms, and to the intimate links between places and person...

Coding Personhood Through Cultural Terms and Practices Silence and Quietude as a Finnish “Natural Way of Being”

All known languages include within them terms and phrases that describe communicative action specifically and pragmatic action generally. A special subclass of those terms identifies ways of speaking and ways of being silent. This study explores Finnish terms for, and social practices of, quietude (in Finnish, hiljaisuus). Descriptive and interpretive analyses demonstrate a Finnish “natural way of being” (luonteva tapa olla), as when people are undisturbed in their thoughts and actions (omissa oloissaan). Results reveal a Finnish communication code that structures some cultural scenes as occasions for positive silence, exhibiting a social model of personhood for which this is a valued, respected, and natural practice. The study discusses the larger, cross-cultural program of research into communication and personhood of which it is a part.

Cultural terms and tensions in the speech at a television station

The speech of employees at a television station is investigated from a cultural perspective, demonstrating its situated meaningfulness to those who create it, its relative inaccessibility to outsiders, and an understanding of how to discover such meanings. The study explicates a local system of symbols, forms, and meanings, consisting of “different types of people,”; “the building situation,”; “tensions,”; “the communication problem,”; and “the product.”; The problem of interpreting such local meanings is solved, in this case, through an investigation of symbols about persons and communication, and a description of their relation to an epitomizing symbol. Thus, the relative inaccessibility of organizational speech is here made accessible by the ethnographers use of a specific cultural approach. Qualities and prospects of such ethnographic inquiry are discussed.

Cultural Discourses of Dwelling: Investigating Environmental Communication as a Place-based Practice

In this essay, we contribute a response to intellectual and practical problems by presenting a perspective on environmental communication that is reflexively grounded in place. The perspective is designed to explore human relations with nature, while embracing cultural and linguistic variability. Our goals are to introduce a way to think through communication to places, and further to link that understanding to issues of engaged environmental action, to deeply seated notions of identity, and to the affective dimension of belonging that place-based communication often brings with it. Our way of doing this is to theorize and study cultural discourses of dwelling, which we explicate theoretically, then further illustrate by analyzing the discourse of adult-onset hunters. Our discussion concludes by exploring not only environmental speaking, but listening environmentally.

“Soul” and “self”: Soviet and American cultures in conversation

Conversation is often treated outside its cultural context, just as culture is often treated above its conversed moments. This essay brings these concerns together and asks: how does one hear in conversation, culture at work ? A particular conversation which invokes Soviet and American cultures is analyzed, demonstrating how conversation is, at least in part, shaped by cultural systems, and how cultural systems differently employ a generic ritual communicative form. Where the Soviet expressive system foregrounds collective moral claims about social life, that is “soul,” the American system highlights truth claims based upon individual experiences, that is “self.” Implications are drawn for an ethnographically informed communication theory of conversation, culture, and ritual.

Quoting ''the Environment'': Touchstones on Earth

This essay reflects upon the purposes of studying environmental communication by focusing on the variety of ways we quote “the environment” in our studies. Special attention is given to balancing the twin objectives of speaking about “the environment,” while also listening to what the environment says to us. In the process, we can serve a diversity of peoples, eco-parts and processes, through a language which can keep that diversity in view. How, then, can we assess movement, toward these ends? A proposal is made: We can gather Touchstones on EARTH into our studies, reminding ourselves that: Earth, “Environment,” is doubly quoted: Both the word and the world speak; Action is engaged in words, environments, and their peoples; Responsible research takes nature, or earth, to be the measure of the good; Time helps temper enthusiasms, and allows enduring insights to be built; Heuristic explorations as these can create insights about communication and environment, while generating better ways of dwelling on earth.

The critical voice in ethnography of communication research

The ethnography of communication has been always interested, at base, in describing communication systems as constitutive of social and cultural lives. The basic problems for study are typically the available means and uses of communication in socio-cultural contexts and communities. As Hymes (1962, p. 101) put it: T h e ethnography of speaking is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own right.** The basic data have been various practices of communication that are situated in specific social contexts; the primary theoretic concerns have been their organization into cultural patterns, which themselves sometimes suggest more general principles of and about communication. These practical and theoretical concerns may vary in substance from conversational structures, symbolic forms, speech acts, politeness phenomena, and so on. But each such concern, because of the dual attention to communication in context and theoretical concern with communication in its own right, explores matters both of practice and principle, cultural instances and classes of phenomena, indigenous tokens and general types of communication. It is the discovery and description of such situations and uses/ as well as what these suggest more generally, that provide the base for

Communicating Finnish Quietude: A Pedagogical Process for Discovering Implicit Cultural Meanings in Languages

This paper introduces a pedagogical approach to integrating intercultural communication into language learning. The focus is on the development of competence in discovering and interpreting cultural meanings when communicating in English as an international language. The analyses of data which students produced illustrates how discovering implicit cultural meanings embedded in Finnish, about quietude, presents considerable challenges for communicating those meanings through another language.