Beyond mundane reason: Conversation analysis and context

Abstract

Conversation analysts have sometimes been taken to task for apparently choosing not to deal with the "context " of the conversa-tional activities they examine (Cicourel, 1981). In Talking Culture Moerman (1988) describes a blend of ethnography and conversation analysis, and suggests that ethnography describes contextual data extrinsic to interaction while conversation analysis provides non-con-texted structural descriptions of talk. In the present essay I re-examine the posture of conversation analysis toward context, and show that conversation analysis may supply details of cultural context rarely provided in ethnography. Conversation analysts describe talk-intrinsic details which provide us with accounts of social action that take us beyond ' 'mundane reascMi'' (Pollner, 1987), and extend our sense of what ' 'context' ' could mean. Conversation analysts aim to describe methods f(x social action which are both context-sensitive and context-free. Rather than ignor-ing context, this stance makes "context " a central and problematic issue for each inquiry. Detailed analysis of interaction suggests that the components of context are not transparent. In order to explicate conversation analytic notions of amtext, I compare Moerman's "culturally contexted conversation analysis" [CCCA] to two essays illustrative of conversation analysts ' ap-

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