Culture is leaving conversation analysis, but is it really gone? The analysis of culturalist performances in conversation

Abstract

This paper traces the ways in which culture has been integrated into linguistic research in the past 30 years. Recently, more and more authors seem to cautiously refrain from considering culture in their linguistic studies. One reason for this cautiousness may be found in cultural anthropology’s concerns on the deterministic effects of considering culture as a concept of research at all. This paper proposes a concept for precise descriptions of culture in interaction avoiding the risk of imposing culturalist interpretations from a researcher’s perspective. To this aim, approaches from ethno-methodology’s membership categorization analysis (MCA) are combined with Judith Butler’s assumptions on the performativity of discourse and interaction.