Theory in Social and Cultural

Anthropology: An Encyclopedia
Face-to-Face Interaction

Contributors: R. Jon McGee & Richard L. Warms

Editors: R. Jon McGee & Richard L. Warms
Book Title: Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia
Chapter Title: "Face-to-Face Interaction"
Pub. Date: 2013
Access Date: June 24, 2015
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412999632
Online ISBN: 9781452276311
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79
Print pages: 252-256

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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79inand
Though rarely discussed explicitly in anthropology, face-to-face interaction (FFI) is a
primordial site of social and cultural life. Consider that human infants are treated as
possible co-interactionalists from birth (indeed, in some cases, before birth!), and there
is evidence, in various forms, that they are capable of intentionally contributing to such
interactions within the first few months (and perhaps the first hours) of life. Moreover,
everywhere we look, society on the ground is, in large part, constituted through the
coordinated activities of individuals and groups in direct FFI. Inuit song duels, Wolof
greetings, and Iatmul Naven are just a few of the anthropologically more famous forms
that human social interaction takes. When seen in comparison with more familiar forms
such as those found in English courtrooms, American presidential press conferences,
and French family dinners, we may be impressed by the apparently limitless diversity.
However, underlying such diversity is a robust, universal, generic infrastructure that
exploits a range of species-specific cognitive abilities and prosocial motivations. It is this
infrastructure that will be briefly sketched here.
Significant contributions to current thinking about FFI have come from a variety of
sources, including linguistic pragmatics, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce,
as well as studies in anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines. This brief
sketch, however, focuses on an approach to FFI that emerged in the work of Harvey
Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson and has come to be known as
conversation analysis. Both Sacks and Schegloff were students of Erving Goffmana
transdisciplinary scholar who, though trained as a sociologist, had a major impact on,
and indeed was himself strongly inspired by, anthropology. Goffman was perhaps the
first and certainly the most eloquent defender of the view that FFI constituted its own
phenomenonthat it had properties that were sui generis and not reducible to individual
psychology or broader social processes. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson incorporated
this idea, and it may be understood as the first pillar of conversation analysis.
While Sacks and Schegloff were studying with Goffman at Berkeley, they were
influenced by the highly original studies of Harold Garfinkel and the approach he
developed known as ethnomethodology. The goal of Garfinkel's early studies was
to uncover the underlying practices of reasoning that members of a society use in
accomplishing everyday activities and that make society possible. A major part of
Garfinkel's investigations was taken up with the question of how one person makes
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sense of another's conduct, including their talk. This concern was incorporated
into conversation analysis, the second pillar of which is the idea that participants in
social interaction engage in practical reasoning both to produce their own talk and to
understand the talk of others. Both Goffman and Garfinkel thus provided inspiration
for a new and distinctive approach to the study of ordinary social interaction. Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson were left though with the task of inventing a method by which it
might be systematically studied.
Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson began their study of social interaction by looking
at audio recordings [p. 252 ] of telephone calls as well as copresent interaction
and found there to be a locus of intricate order. Early studies showed that any given
interaction could be broken down into parts and that these parts consisted of orderly
practices of speaking that issue in orderly consequences and that together form orderly
sequences of action in interaction. Moreover, this order is not the product of statistical
regularities or of categorical imperatives but rather of a persistent and pervasive
orientation by the participants to a set of structures or norms. Like any set of norms
or rules in this sense, those that organize social interaction do not determine conduct
but rather provide a framework through which it is intelligible. That is, participants in
interaction can be seen by others as following a rule, deviating from it, attempting but
failing to follow it, or simply violating it flat outthese various alternatives generating
further informative inferences about what a participant means by behaving in a
particular way. The orderliness of interaction then is a product of a member's methods
that is brought off by participants in interaction in each and every one of its local
instantiations through the application of regular practices of reasoning.
The structures or norms of FFIthe largely universal and generic underlying
infrastructure alluded to earlierare organized into partially independent or
semiautonomous domains or systems. Three of these domains can be briefly sketched
here.

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Domains of FFI
Turn Taking
First, there is an organization of turn taking that provides for the orderly distribution
of opportunities to participate in talk-in-interaction. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson
described a system having two components: (1) a turn constructional component, which
defines the units out of which a possible turn can be constructed and, by extension,
allows participants in interaction to anticipate the possible/probable extent and shape of
any actual unit and thus to project its completion, and (2) a turn allocation component,
which specifies an organized set of practices by which transition from the current
speaker to the next speaker is managed. Together, these two components and the
rules that organize their relation provide for the detailed orderliness of turn taking
in interaction. It can be seen, for instance, that overwhelmingly self-selecting next
speakers target possible unit completion points as places at which to start their own
talk. In Figure 1, it can be observed that Parky twice attempts to begin his turn That
changed it, before it is eventually produced at line 06. Note the split-second timing
evidenced here, with Parky attempting to come in at just those points where Old Man
has reached possible (though obviously not actual) completion of his current turn.
Clearly, to come in at just these points, Parky must have anticipated where Old Man
would reach possible completion of his current turn. Examples are presented using the
transcription conventions originally developed by Jefferson. For present purposes, the
most important symbols are the period (.), which indicates falling and final intonation;
the question mark (?), indicating rising intonation; and brackets ([]), marking the
onset and resolution of overlapping talk between two speakers. Equal signs, which
come in pairsone at the end of a line and another at the start of the next line or one
shortly thereafterare used to indicate that the second line followed the first, with no
discernible silence between them; in other words, it was latched to it. Numbers in
parentheses (e.g. (0.5)) indicate silence, represented in 10ths of a second. Finally,
colons are used to indicate prolongation or stretching of the sound preceding them. The
more the colons, the longer is the stretching.

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Figure 1 Parky

An important and widely underappreciated point is that this turn-taking system operates
independently of whatever actions are being accomplished in and through the talk it
organizesthat is, whether persons are requesting, inviting, questioning, answering, [p.
253 ] agreeing, disagreeing, complaining, excusing, insulting, or whatever else, they
do it in turns at talk constructed and distributed through an orientation to the turn-taking
system.

Arrangement of Actions into Sequences

The arrangement of actions into sequences represents a second domain of organization
in interaction. A very basic observation is that manythough not allactions in talk
in interaction come in pairs, for example, request and granting (or rejection), invitation
and acceptance (or refusal), complaint and excuse (or denial), and so on. These pairs
are linked together by a relation of conditional relevance whereby, to paraphrase
Schegloff, given a first action (such as a request, invitation, or complaint), a second
is made expectable. On the occurrence of a second, it can be seen to be a second
item to the first (rather than an independent turn), and on its nonoccurrence, it can be
seen to be absent (where an infinite number of other things did not occur but were not
absent in the same way). Conditional relevance thus establishes a relation between
a first and a second action that has both a prospective and a retrospective dimension.
The prospective dimension ensures that the doing of a first action will activate a norm,
making the doing of the second action relevant and noticeably absent if not produced.
The retrospective dimension allows the speaker of the first action to see if and how
she was understoodfor example, the production of a turn recognizable as an excuse
in response will reveal to the first speaker that she was heard to be complaining or
accusing, whether that was her intention or not. Thus, the production of actions within
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sequences constitutes an architecture of intersubjectivity by which understandings

are publicly displayed and ratified incarnately, en passant in the course of whatever
business the talk is occupied with.

Repair
The third and final domain of organization to be described here is the system of repair.
Troubles of speaking, hearing, and understanding are endemic to all forms of human
interaction. The organized set of practices of repair constitute a natural, interactive
system by which such troubles may be addressed at or near their point of production
(or manifestation) and potentially resolved more or less immediately. The practices that
make up the domain of repair are described in terms of personnel (self = speaker of
trouble source, other = any other participant), component (trouble source vs. initiation
vs. repair proper, etc.), and position (same turn, transition space between turns, next
turn, third turn, third position). Consider, for instance, the case in Figure 2 excerpted
from a talk show in which Ellen Degeneres is interviewing Rashida Jones.
Figure 2 Rashida Jones on Ellen, April 2009

[p. 254 ] Where this fragment begins, DeGeneres is raising the topic of Jones's new
television show with the comedian Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation. DeGeneres
initiates the topic by inviting Jones to tell the audience about the show. She then gives
the title, before concluding the turn with an' you an' Amy Poehler howHow great

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is that. Note then that this final part of the turn can be heard as a real information
questiona request for Jones to specify how great that is. At the same time, the
construction How X is that? is a familiar, idiomatic expression that, by virtue of the
presupposition it carries, conveys that it's X or, in this case, it's great. So here the
talk at line 03 (the A arrow) takes the form of a wh question (How great is that), and
Rashida Jones treats it as one by answering, It's pretty great (at the B arrow). This
response, by treating How great is that= as an information-requesting question,
reveals a problematic understanding, which Ellen subsequently goes on to repair in
lines 0910 and 13 (the C arrows). By saying, I: say it's really great, Ellen indicates
that How great is that= was not in fact meant as a question but rather as an assertion
(or, more specifically, an assessment). We call this repair in third position for the
following reason. A first-position utterance (How great is that) has been produced,
and the response to it, in second position, It's pretty great, reveals a problematic
understanding of it. This problematic understanding is then repaired in third position by
the speaker of the first-position utterance when she clarifies that she was asserting or
assessing and not asking.
Note that we can distinguish such cases from instances of third-turn repair, as
exemplified in Rashida Jones's talk at lines 0408. Here, the speaker originally
produces the turn It's pretty great, and this is treated as a trouble source when
she repairs it by inserting the phrase experientially for me, resulting in the repaired
utterance I just mean experientially for me it's pretty great. In this case, the repair
might have been produced in the transition space between turns but has been pushed
into third turn by Ellen's =mm mh[m. at line 05. In contrast to the instance of thirdposition repair we just considered from this same fragment, here Ellen's =mm mh[m.
does not reveal a problematic understanding of what the prior speaker has just said and
thus does not prompt the repair that is eventually produced.
A very important initial step in developing a rigorous account of interaction involves
determining the different systems or domains out of which talk-in-interaction is
composed. Though obviously interrelated in multiple ways, these domains have their
own distinctive properties and operate to some extent independently of one another
so, for instance, it may have been noted that the turn-taking system underlies all the
practices of repair just described but does so indiscriminately, irrespective of whether it
is a repair or something else that is being done.
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Language and the Structure of Interaction

Recent work from an anthropological and crosslinguistic perspective has begun to ask
whether the particular language being spoken has consequences for the organization of
interaction as described here. That study is still in its infancy, but initial results suggest
that the underlying, generic structures of interaction may be inflected or torqued by
the particular semiotic structures through which it is accomplished as well as the local
circumstances within which it operates.
JackSidnell
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452276311.n79
See also

Ethnomethodology

Further Readings
Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Introduction: Human sociality as a new
interdisciplinary field . In N. J. Enfield, ed. & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human
sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 135). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Levinson, S. C. (2006). On the human interaction engine. In N. J. Enfield, ed. & S. C.
Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and interaction (pp. 39
69). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the
organization of turn-taking for conversation . Language , 50(4), 696735. http://
dx.doi.org/10.2307/412243
Schegloff, E. A. (1968). Sequencing in conversational openings . American
Anthropologist , 70(6), 10751095. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1968.70.6.02a00030
Schegloff, E. A. (2006). Interaction: The infrastructure for social institutions, the natural
ecological niche for language, and the arena in which culture is enacted . In N. J.
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Enfield, ed. & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition, and
interaction (pp. 7096). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Sidnell, J. (2009). Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives . Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511635670
Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation analysis: An introduction . Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of human communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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