Ordinary ethics' suggests that everyday discursive interaction -interaction mediated by actual language use -has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing languagebased research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what extent is the ethical inscribed in the ground-rules of interaction, or conditioned from below (e.g. biologically-based cooperative predispositions) or from without (e.g. culturally-institutionalized moralities)? The presumption that ethics is immanent in practice continues to distract from the problem of how to narrate, and theorize, the entanglements of discourse and ethics.

This article examines the text-metrical (“poetic”) organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance.

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This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactants, but is largely interdiscursive in character. ‘Conviction’ and its opposite, ‘flip‐flopping,’ suggest further how stance‐taking itself has been an object of typification in the agonistic dynamics of candidate branding and counter‐branding. In moving from epistemic stance‐taking in discourse to models of the stance‐taker as a social type, this article addresses questions about the units and levels of analysis needed to study stance in contemporary political discourse.

Rather than assume the relevance of a priori scalar distinctions (micro-, macro-, meso-), this article examines scale as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice in educational institutions. Focusing on Buddhist debate at Tibetan monasteries in India, I describe how this educational practice has been placed as a rite of institution within the perimeter of Sera Monastery in India and rescaled into a more expansive diasporic pedagogy by reformers like the Dalai Lama. [interaction, scale, language, religious education, reproduction] Does Interaction Have a Scale?There is a damning phrase Erving Goffman used in the twilight of his career that confirmed, for his critics at least, just how blinkered his whole project was. That phrase, "the interaction order," was the title of his 1982 presidential address to the American Sociological Association and was proposed as a distillation of decades of writing on face-to-face encounters, encounters that transpire in "environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another's response presence" (Goffman 1983:3). In this deliberately cribbed micro-sociology, scale was used conceptually and rhetorically to separate interaction from mainstream sociology, to constitute it as an object-not unlike the way many disciplines have tried to carve out a distinctive domain by purifying their object of knowledge from competing disciplinary logics (cf. Latour 1993b; e.g., Saussure's [1983] efforts to define la langue as the core of language and foundation for disciplinary linguistics against encroaching fields like psychology, history, and sociology). Whatever disciplinary motivations may have inspired this downscaling of interaction-this was, after all, an address to his field in his role as president-and apart from any analytic purchase this rhetoric of scaling may have had for audiences in the early 1980s, it is now clear that this has had unfortunate consequences, both conceptual and empirical.Although it is still a reflex to speak of and even celebrate the "local," "situated" nature of face-to-face interaction, many have been troubled by these qualities and are no longer content to treat "the interaction order" as if it were some watertight chamber of activity insulated from macrosocial dynamics and pressures.So what do they do? Some marvel at what they take to be the scalar hybridity and heterogeneity of discursive interaction, like the way resources and materials associated with distinct spatial and temporal scales converge and are melded in the crucible of face-to-face encounters. In face-to-face interaction they discover sherds of larger structures-discourses, language ideologies, categories of identity, master tropes and narratives. Others, working more from the inside out, concede that interaction is micro but then add up tokens of it, charting "larger-scale" trajectories of interaction-like the way identity seems to crystallize and sediment longitudinally over lots of discrete, situated events. Still others have tired of the coarse "micro-macro" distinction...