Interviewing: Practice, Ideology, Genre, and Intertextuality

Abstract

This review applies a critical linguistic anthropological perspective to classic and current scholarly literature on interviewing, understood as a cluster of communicative practices used to produce and circulate various types of authoritative and consequential knowledge about groups and individuals. I begin by treating interviews as multifunctional, ideologically mediated communicative events. I then discuss the multiplicity, indeterminacy, and intertextuality in people's practices and understandings of interviewing as a communicative genre. Interviews are fundamentally intertextual, as they resemble, co-occur with, precede, and follow other communicative events. 499 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:499-520. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of Saskatchewan on 02/05/15. For personal use only.

Market Stance: Navigating Face‐Threatening Terrain in Indian Real Estate

“…). In keeping with DuBois's definition of stance as multifaceted, I attend not just to the propositional content of my and my interviewees’ speech but also the event of speaking and the social actions that it effects (Koven , 501; Silverstein ). By focusing on face‐work, I also build on scholarship which has shown interviews to be sites for the performance of identity (Ensink ; Rapely ; Talmy ).…”

“…My interviews with industry members are interactions in their own right: not simple elicitations of preexisting views but coproductions of interviewer and respondent shaped by the asymmetrical power relations between them (see Briggs ; De Fina and Perrino ; Koven ; Lampropoulou and Myers ; Wortham et al. ).…”

“…While Lampropoulou and Myers (, 18) claim that respondents’ stance‐taking in the course of qualitative research interviews are not usually consequential for them, my interviewees hinted that there was something at stake in our interactions. My unfamiliar status—and my control over the audio recording's future circulation and entextualization (Koven , 511–512)—left questions as to how I would use the information I gathered. Despite my explanations, many of my interviewees thought that I was writing a property consultancy‐type market assessment that would circulate publicly and thus affect the industry.…”

National sustainabilities

“…We viewed the interviews as a series oftemporary social relations between us, as interviewers, and the interviewees (as individuals and as key representatives of stakeholder organisations) (Koven 2014).…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…In the publications of 2015, analytics related to questions of interdiscursivity also include citationality (Goodman et al. ; Manning ), fractal discursivity (Proctor ), genre (Jones ; Koven ; Noy ; Vigoroux ), heteroglossia (Jaffe et al. ), intertextuality (Graan ; Koven ; Prentice ), transculturality (Tetreault ), translation (Gal ), and voicing (Perrino ; Weidman ).…”