Sacks must have been the wizard who invented unicorns--just sayin'...

“There is no other way  that conversation is being studied systematically except my way” (Sacks, 1992, Vol. 2: 549 as in Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008, p. 3).

            I have yet to read a textbook that gives such reverence to its subject creator (I am not sure how else I wanted to say that).  Although I am still digesting the ideas postulated in Hutchby and Wooffitt (2009), I am completely amazed at how highly Sacks is portrayed.  This is just an observation, but Sacks must have been a unicorn, or the mythical wizard that created them.  I am not taking anything away from the man, he obviously has introduced an entirely unique methodology into qualitative research, and he does deserve respect, but he is almost deified by the authors. 

            Regardless of the iconic portrayal of Sacks, I am intrigued by what I am reading thus far, and this text is not what I expected.  We were told that students either love Hutchby and Wooffitt (2009) or hate it, and, to my own surprise, I am in favor of it thus far.  I am intrigued by the examples given in the texts, and the illustrations of turn-by-turn conversations, adjacency-pairs, and preferences, the organization of turn-taking (all discussed in chapter 2).  These portrayals of conversation and their analysis are clear to me.  However, I am also still trying to clarify my own understanding of what ‘context’ means in this text. 

            Chapter 1 discusses three criticisms of ethnography (a methodology of interest to me).  The first criticism is that ethnographers use “insiders” in order to gain information instead of the activities.  I have read and reread that, and I still cannot make sense of that.  Ethnography studies the context and the people within that space—along with their actions (field observations), and often times the researcher is the participant.  The second criticism is that ethnography depends on the “…commonsense knowledge on the members of society as a resource… not as a topic of study” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2009, p. 23) So does that mean that ethnography should be looking deeper into what that group of people deems as common knowledge and only focus on that?  Then it would not be ethnography, right?  Again, I am just thinking aloud and trying to think these ideas through.  Finally (and this is the last criticism that I found the most difficult to grasp) is this:  Sacks wanted his research to be replicable—so that the person could have the exact words spoken and reanalyze the conversation in order to find the same results.  This is difficult to digest.  Why does that matter?  The idea of qualitative research is not about replication—however, maybe he (Sacks) felt by exploring conversation (naturally occurring, exactly transcribed) in this manner, that it would be more valid--he even said that it was "...more concrete than the Chicago stuff tended to be" (Sacks, 1992, Vol 1:27 as in Hutchby and Wooffitt, 2009, p. 23).  Here is my view (critical as it is—and context matters here).  In our first text, we read that people construct meaning together.  Also, that collective meaning is socially constructed, and therefore contextual.  So, although I read the examples and the turn-by-turn analysis in the later chapters, and it made absolute sense, it is because someone told me what it meant.  I do not know for sure if I read those conversations without the analysis that I would come to the same conclusions as the authors, so is CA replicable?  If it is, why does it have to be?  Is it supposed to be? That is the impression that I got when reading this section.

            Also, what about “membership categories”?  Would not this term be akin to positionality or intersectionality as I learned about in Critical Race Theory?  When you assume someone’s membership category as a wife and a mother, those categories do not have the same meaning for all of us, but as I was reading, it seems that Sacks assumes that there was an agreed upon social meaning of those terms.  In which society?  Female has more than one connotation or social meaning in different cultures, one example that comes to mind is within Muslim, Christianity, and Wiccan practices—so, whose social construct are we relying on here?  The dominant culture?  In no way am I trying to cause trouble—I am only trying to understand what I am reading.  I do accept the idea of a socially universal term in most cases—a mother is a person who has borne a child.  That, I believe is something on which everyone can agree.  However, within the conversation on page 37 with the boy talking about a “chick” he was hanging around with, the analysis assumes that a ‘chick’ implies a ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ person.  On a personal level, I can see that, because I am white and that is my definition of ‘chick’.  When slang terms are brought into the conversation, assumptions may not be that easy, as like language itself,  colloquial terms are fluid, and I feel even more so, especially with the advancement of technology.  New words such as “googleable” , “facebooking”, “trolling”, or “trolls”, “lurking”—they are either entirely new to the lexicon, or some words are reinvented.  This is something that is not addressed.  What does a conversation analyist do with that?  Would not context matter? 

            Again, I do like what I am reading, and I love the idea of CA—I am having difficulty making sense of it, because it seems contradictory—the words matter, but we assume there are social assumptions being made that may not be true for all groups.