Beyond Micro and Macro:

Discourse Analysis across Speech Events

Date and Time: 2022.9.21.(Wed) 16:00-17:30

Place: SNU College of Social Sciences Bldg. 16 Room 349

Inquiry: anthrobk21plus@snu.ac.kr

Lecture Summary: 

Anthropologists have long been concerned with “discourse” whether conceptualized as part of large-scale systems that produce social structures or as small-scale sign usage that comprises social interaction. “Discourse analysis” is often seen as “microanalytic,” focused on small scales of discursive activity within discrete “speech events.” Such an approach is typically complemented by “macroanalytic” approaches that focus on more extensive processes and institutions. Much work in anthropology adopts a “micro-macro dialectic,” in which purportedly homogeneous “macro” processes constrain events and actions, while being simultaneously constituted by “micro” events and actions. However, once we move beyond the speech event to study processes that take shape across events, we see that a micro-macro account does not suffice. Recent theoretical and empirical work has argued that many important social processes can only be understood if we move beyond single speech events to analyze pathways across linked events. Scholars in linguistic anthropology and related disciplines have been exploring how discourse connects across speech events, how signs travel across pathways of events, and how events link to each other at various scales. This work has shown how linked speech events are essential to social life. Social identities, for example, have often been seen as characteristic positionings or representations that occur in discrete speech events and then recur. It has now become clear, however, that social identification requires linkages across events. These pathways across linked events represent a new unit of analysis. This presentation illustrates how discourse analysis can be done across speech events, with detailed examples.

*This lecture will be conducted in English.