Conversational Organization & Embodied Interaction in a Wolof Village

March 14, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Manoa Campus, Crawford Hall 115

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Dr. Christian Meyer:
In recent years, scholars in Conversation Analysis have made repeated and intensified claims about the universality of conversational organization. Especially the turn-taking machinery including the “minimal gap-minimal overlap” maxim (Levinson) was found to be a candidate universal of human existence that provides the “the armature of sociality which undergirds our common humanity” (Schegloff) and is due to our common nature as “sighted, language-using bipeds” (Sidnell). Through the application of methods of interaction research, my paper discusses this claim about the universality of conversational organization from a broader, cultural anthropological perspective. Drawing on conversations among elder men on the main square of a small Wolof village in Northwestern Senegal, it presents cultural phenomena that influence the character of the turn-taking machinery and produce a conversational outcome that is not oriented towards “minimal gap-minimal overlap”. These phenomena include culture specific usages and conceptualizations of the senses, concepts of the person, and emotional models and practices.

Event Sponsor
Department of Anthropology, Manoa Campus

More Information
956-8415

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