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This article addresses the relationship between discourse, textual and social order, and power by means of an examination of the concept of genre. It begins with a critical review of the way genre has been used in linguistic anthropology. A distinction is delineated between approaches that take for granted the status of genre as a tool for classifying and ordering discourse and those that contend with elements of generic ambiguity and dynamism. Proceeding to outline a new approach to genre, the discussion analyzes a wide range of intertextual relations that are deployed in constituting generic links. A series of examples contrasts strategies for minimizing gaps between texts and generic precedents with strategies for maximizing such gaps. A final section points to the ways that investigating generic intertextuality can illuminate questions of ideology, political economy, and power.

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Interviews are ubiquitous in modern society, and they play a crucial role in social scientific research. But, as Charles Briggs convincingly argues in this book, received interviewing techniques rest on fundamental misapprehensions about the nature both of the interview as a communicative event, and of the nature of the data that it produces. Furthermore, interviewers rarely examine the compatibility of interviews as a means of acquiring information to one another. These oversights often blind interviewers to ensuing errors of interpretation, as well as to the limitations of the interview as a means of acquiring data. To conflict these problems, Professor Briggs presents an analysis of the 'communicative blunders' that he himself committed in conducting research interviews among Spanish-speakers in northern New Mexico. By focusing on these errors and exploring how they may be avoided, he is able to propose new techniques for designing, implementing, and analyzing interview-based research. These rest on identifying the subjects' resources for conveying information, and the relative compatability of the shared rules and understandings that underlie their strategies with those associated with interviews. Critical of existing paradigms of interviewing, which he sees as deriving from Western 'folk' theories of reality and communication, Briggs shows that the development of more sophisticated interviewing methodologies requires further research into interviewing itself. Briggs's conclusions provide a basis for the reexamination of current uses of interviews in a wide range of contexts - from social science research to job applications, welfare and health care delivery, criminal and legal investigations, journalism and broadcasting, and other areas of everyday life. His book will appeal to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, as well as other readers whose research or professional activities depend on the use of interviews.

This review proposes a model for analyzing the power of ideologies of communication in producing subjectivities, organizing them hierarchically, and recruiting people to occupy them. By way of illustration, it compares this productive capacity, which is herein termed communicability, with schemes of racialization and medicalization. The argument draws on critical discourse analysis, conversational analysis, post-Habermasian research on publics, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Foucault, and work on language ideologies to synthesize a framework for studying spheres of communicability. The concept is then used in exploring how constructions of race and health intersect in some of the most powerful spheres of communicability-those associated with colonial medicine, HIV/AIDS, severe accute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Alzheimer's, genetics, clinical trials, "race-based medicine," organ transplant, and biostatistics. The review attempts to connect linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis more productively to medical anthropology, the history of medicine and public health, medical sociology, public health, genetics, and science studies. 269 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2005.34:269-291. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of British Columbia on 02/04/15. For personal use only.