Notes on linguistic ethnography as a liminal activity

Abstract

Linguistic ethnography has rapidly secured itself a place among the most commonly used paradigms for analyzing language in use. In this discussion paper we present a bird's eye view of the state of linguistic ethnography as it is reflected in the papers included in this volume. We propose to identify the main theoretical and methodological concerns that seem to emerge across the research presented here. Some of them center around the etic–emic, frontstage–backstage, text–context, and linguistics–ethnography questions. While ultimately these issues cannot be resolved, we argue that they nevertheless continue to provide an impetus for ethnographic inquiry and a frame within which to explore the specific challenges of doing language and communicative analysis in institutional sites in the contemporary era. In the end, we suggest that linguistic ethnography should perhaps be seen as a liminal activity, with both the researchers and the language they investigate situated within and across different worlds. The present approach is an empirical one since we propose a close reading of the papers in this volume as “texts” and we examine them not to provide a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic ethnography but to unravel some of the cues that these texts contain regarding the practices constituting linguistic ethnography as a part of social reality.