Interaction ritual and not just artful performance in crossing and stylization

Abstract

A B S T R A C T As Coupland and others show, Bauman's account of "performance" provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman's interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the fi rst, race and ethnicity were controversial, and the performance of other-ethnic styles was risky. But interaction ritual constructed crossing and stylization as urgent responses to the exigencies of the moment, and this made them more acceptable. In the second, performance implies a refl exive composure that is hard to reconcile with informants' experience of social class as an uncomfortable but only half-articulated issue, whereas interaction ritual provides a sharp lens on how youngsters used stylized "posh" and Cockney varieties to register their apprehension of ongoing stratifi cation. (Interaction ritual, stylization, crossing, performance) 1 T h e P r o b l e mSpeech stylization and language crossing have been the focus of a good deal of sociolinguistic interest in recent years. 2 Stylization involves refl exive communicative action in which speakers produce specially marked and often exaggerated representations of languages, dialects, and styles that lie outside their own habitual repertoire (at least as this is perceived within the situation at hand). Crossing is closely related, but it involves a stronger sense of social or ethnic boundary transgression, the variants being used are more likely to be seen as anomalously "other" for the speaker, and questions of legitimacy and entitlement can arise. As pointedly non-habitual speech practices, stylization and crossing break with ordinary modes of action and interpretation, invite attention to creative agency in language use, and often also contribute to the denaturalization of hegemonic language ideologies.

How to get a grip on identities-in-interaction

“…Also, we could see that MCA has to be supplemented by attention to practices other than nominal categoriza tion and predicative description, namely, enactments, vocal performance, turndesign and practices of changing footings and double-voicing used for stylizing identities (Coupland, 2007;Rampton, 2009Rampton, , 2011; see also Bamberg et al, 2011). This, however, requires the analyst to resort to a wider notion of "display" than is usual in CA: S/he needs to turn to and incorporate the ethnographic knowledge the participants themselves dispose of into the analysis in order to grasp indexical socio-stylistic functions (cf.…”

Stylisations as teacher practice

“…In particular, much attention has been devoted to describing how teachers, rather than initiating it, end up at the receiving end of pupil banter, practical joking, or resistance, and various analyses have shown in this vein how pupils slow down and unhinge standard classroom proceedings through 'making out' (Foley 1990:112ff. ), 'messing about' (Gilroy & Lawrence 1988:136-37), 'having a laugh' (Willis 1977) and 'acting' (D'Amato 1993), or by engaging in 'badinage' (Dubberley 1993), 'sabotage' (Jaspers 2005), overexuberant compliance (Rampton 2006), or 'knowledgeavoidance practices' (Grahame & Jardine 1990). Alternatively, teachers have been encouraged to incorporate humour in their pedagogy as a scaffold for transferring curriculum knowledge, reducing tension, increasing motivation, and strengthening teacher/student relationships.…”

“…Rampton 1995:110). In contrast, much sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological research has pointed out how nonreferential language use and unplanned linguistic variation is a prime tool in pupils' attempts to undermine the teacher's framing of the interaction; how pupils' productions of mixed and home language use frustrate monolingual and 'one language at a time' policies; how pupils imitate, enact, and recycle teacher voices or curriculum content; or how they exploit and 'stylise' in and out of class the boundless variation of voices tied to ethnicity, social class, institution, region, generation, and the media (see, among many others, Rampton 2006;Chun 2009;Talmy 2009;Martín-Rojo 2010;Snell 2010;Jaspers 2011aJaspers , 2011bMøller & Jørgensen 2011;Pérez-Milans 2011;Charalambous 2012;Madsen 2013). Teachers in these studies are mostly ill at ease with such behaviour, cut pupils short, refocus their attention, and/or remind pupils of linguistic rules and regulations.…”

The voice of others: Identity, alterity and gender normativity among gay men in Israel

“…Yet unlike many of the lexicons described previously, I do not argue that oxtšit represents a subversive and/or self-affirming variety for the men who use it. Instead, I make use of the concept of VARI-DIRECTIONAL VOICING (Bakhtin 1984;Rampton 1995Rampton , 2006Hill 2008) to suggest that the men use oxtšit as a form of mockery (Goffman 1974), which enables them to indirectly index their own gender normativity through the derisive construction of an aberrantly gendered other. In other words, I claim that the men do not use oxtšit in order to affirm their affiliation with the cultural formation that oxtšit represents, but rather to ridicule that formation and construct identities for themselves that exist in opposition to it.…”