The ethnography of speaking at the UW
The ethnography of speaking is concerned with the descriptive study of ways of speaking in speech communities throughout the world. In the expression “ways of speaking,” as I use it here, “speaking” refers to all of the means and ways of communicating that might be found in a given speech community, and thus encompasses languages, language varieties, dialects, gestures, digital media, visual expression, and more. The principal concern of a particular ethnography of speaking is to discover and describe the means of communication in particular times and places and to examine the meanings those means have to those who use and experience them.
For a contemporary treatment of the ethnography of speaking, see:
Gerry Philipsen and Lisa Coutu, “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Robert E. Sanders and Kristine L. Fitch, Editors, Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Inc., 2004. 355-380.
At the University of Washington, since 1978, for twenty four years in the Department of Speech Communication, and since 2002 in the newly-formed Department of Communication, there has been a group of research scholars pursuing the ethnography of speaking. The group has been my graduate students and me. One of those former graduate students is the estimable Dr. Lisa Coutu, now my faculty colleague at Washington. Since 1983, 33 people have completed a Ph.D. with me, specializing in this subject. Their individual doctoral research projects have been based on long-term field study in one or more speech communities. Taken as a whole, the group has produced intensive, in situ studies in over two dozen speech communities and ten language varieties. Many of them have gone on to produce a great deal more such basic research in yet more languages and other societies. Through these efforts we have developed a substantial body of descriptive work; we use this to develop a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic understanding of communication as a culturally distinctive mode of human activity.
Now, several of the scholars trained at Washington are training their own students, or have already done so, at Ph.D. programs in the US and in other parts of the world, and now we have a multi-generational, multi-national network of scholars. Taking this group as a whole, and it gets bigger every year, we have done original fieldwork in over twenty language varieties and as many different cultural settings. We are building the data base for a truly cross-national, cross-language theory of human communication. Doctoral graduates from the program are now teaching and researching full-time at universities in five countries.
Here are two photographs of some of the people who have studied the ethnography of speaking at the University of Washington. The first picture, of the smaller group, was taken in the backyard of my home in Edmonds, Washington, in 1983, just after Tamar Katriel finished her Ph.D. In the picture, from left to right, Lyall Crawford, Donal Carbaugh, George Ray (kneeling), Gerry Philipsen, Charles Braithwaite (kneeling, reverently?), Glem Hiemstra, Tamar Katriel, and Deborah Sequeira. The other photo shows a large contingent of our group in Portland in 1992 at a conference honoring Dell Hymes upon the 30th anniversary of the publication of “The Ethnography of Speaking,” a seminal work for our group.
For a recent book chapter by me that says a bit about the work of this group of scholars,
see:
Gerry Philipsen, “Researching Culture in Contexts of Social Interaction: AnEthnographic Approach, a Network of Scholars, Illustrative Moves,” DistinctiveQualities of Communication Research. Eds., Donal Carbaugh and Patrice Buzzanell. New York: Routledge, forthcoming. You can access a PDF of the manuscript of this chapter by clicking Researching culture.
Several scholars in various disciplines have, in print, reviewed and commented on the work of the Washington group. For an early account by a communication theorist, see Leeds-Hurwitz (1990), for a commentary on us by a historian of science, see the chapter on the ethnography of speaking by Stephen Murray (1993). For a humanist’s take, see the essay by Robert E. Smith III (1992). And for two accounts by a graduate of our program, see the chapters by Donal Carbaugh. Finally, in the same volume as the latest Carbaugh chapter, I have a chapter about my experience working under Professor Ethel M. Albert at Northwestern University in the early 1970s. Professor Albert was a distinguished anthropologist, communication theorist, and philosopher, and she played an important role in the early development of the ethnography of speaking. My chapter on her can be read as acknowledging her indispensable role in facilitating what eventually became the Washington tradition in the ethnography of speaking.
Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, “Culture as Communication: A Review Essay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76(1990), 85-116.
Stephen O. Murray, Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A Social History (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1993), see pp. 331, 484.
Robert E. Smith III, “Hymes, Rorty, and the Social-Rhetorical Construction of Meaning,” College English 54(1992), 138-158.
Donal Carbaugh, “The Ethnographic Communication Theory of Philipsen and Associates” in Donald P. Cushman and Branislav Kovacic, eds., Watershed Research Traditions in Human Communication Theory (Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1995), pp. 269-298.
Donal Carbaugh, “Research on Language and Social Interaction at the University of Washington,” to appear in Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Ed., A Social History of Research on Language and Social Interaction. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, in press.
Gerry Philipsen, “Studying the Ethnography of Communication at Northwestern University, 1968-1972.” A Social History of Research on Language and Social Interaction. Ed. Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, in press. 215-232.
Although here I have discussed the ethnography of speaking at Washington in terms of research, many of us in the network are active teachers of such courses as intercultural communication, cultural communication, ethnography of speaking, ethnography of communication, ways of speaking, and ethnographic methods. In 2006, I hosted a conference at the University of Washington on Teaching Cultural Codes. This was designed as a small conference, with mainly present and former UW doctoral students in attendance, but we had a sprinkling of people from several other disciplines as well, and we had participants from three countries. Below is a photograph from the conference.
The final photograph you see in this section is me talking with Professor Dell Hymes at a conference at Portland State University in 1992 that was convened to commemorate the publication in 1962 of Hymes’s “The Ethnography of Speaking.” There is probably no single essay that has had such a shaping influence on the Washington group than this essay. We were honored in 1983 to host Professor Hymes as the Walker-Ames Lecturer at the University of Washington. We are honored that he has written forewords in several of the scholarly books published from University of Washington dissertations.
If you are interested in the work of the ethnography of speaking group at and from the University of Washington, I would be happy to respond to your inquiries. If you are interested in graduate study in this area, I would be happy to discuss this with you, whether it would involve coming to work at Washington or to one of the half dozen other doctoral programs in which our network of scholars offers advanced training in the ethnography of speaking/communication. Contact me at gphil@uw.edu