Deep Hanging Out
This method — also cheekily called 'deep hanging out' — involves spending extended time in a community participating in daily life.
What is participant observation?
Unlike other gesture types, these conventional gestures can be used completely independently of speech and translated directly into a word or phrase.
What are emblematic (symbolic) gestures?
This dimension of narrative analysis — from monologue to multiparty participation — asks: who gets to tell the story?
What is tellership?
No matter how detailed, every transcript is this — a partial, selective representation of an interaction that involves interpretive choices.
What is a transformation (or reduction) of the original?
DOUBLE JEOPARDY!!
This institutional body requires researchers to submit and receive approval for their study design before collecting data from human participants.
You arrive at your field site for the first time and spend the day joining your participants in their daily activities — cooking, shopping, hanging around — without conducting any formal interviews. What method are you using?
What is participant observation?
Unlike structured interviews, this type uses general topic areas but allows the researcher to adapt questions based on how the conversation unfolds.
What is semi-structured interviewing?
These gestures physically resemble the meaning they represent and go through a three-stage execution: setup, gesture, and retraction.
What is a discourse management gesture?
Narrative Practice 1 is characterized by one primary teller, a linear plot, moral certainty, and a clear beginning-middle-end. This is its name.
What is a coherent narrative?
Including pauses, overlapping speech, pitch changes, and laughter in a transcript serves this purpose: capturing communicative meaning beyond the words themselves
What are discourse features (and why they matter for analysis)?
In long-term ethnographic fieldwork, informed consent is understood not as a one-time signed form but as this.
What is an ongoing process (that must be continuously renegotiated)?
You're transcribing a recorded conversation and you notice two people keep talking at the same time. You want to capture this in your transcript. What discourse feature do you mark?
What is overlapping speech?
These fieldnotes record the researcher's own positionality, techniques used, and decisions made during data collection.
What are methodological fieldnotes?
A professor raising an open palm toward a student who is interrupting is an example of this type of gesture, used to manage the flow of turns in conversation.
What is intercorporeal synchrony (or attunement)?
This narrative dimension asks how significant and how well-told the story is, attending to both high-stakes content AND stylistic features like vivid detail, dialogue, and dramatic pauses.
What is tellability?
DOUBLE JEOPARDY!!
In this approach to coding, the researcher begins with pre-existing theoretical categories and looks for evidence of them in the data — the opposite of letting patterns emerge from scratch.
When researchers study powerful institutions, politicians, or corporations rather than marginalized groups, this is the term for that methodological choice.
What is 'studying up'?
You're in the middle of a great interview when your participant suddenly shifts their body, lowers their voice, and says 'so what happened was...' — you recognize this as the opening of something. What is beginning?
What is a narrative (or story)?
In linguistic anthropology, research questions need to be both highly specific AND flexible for this reason: specificity addresses indexicality, while flexibility allows for this.
What is the possibility that the question will change or evolve during fieldwork?
This phenomenon describes how people unconsciously synchronize the tempo, rhythms, and movements of their bodies during interaction — evidence that embodiment is always mediated by other bodies.
What is intercorporeal synchrony (or attunement)?
Narrative Practice 2, or probing narratives, is where this kind of work happens: multiple co-tellers explore alternative logics, moral uncertainty, and non-linear structures — making it the site of self-transformation and cultural change.
What is dialogic problem-solving (or working through experience)?
When coding for discourse features rather than content, a researcher would mark things like code-switching, reported speech, or affective stance markers — not just what was said, but this.
What is how it was said (the form or manner of speaking)?
A researcher embedded in a community faces this ethical tension when they witness behavior that is morally troubling but might be understood as culturally specific — pitting this anthropological principle against universal human rights frameworks.
What is cultural relativism?
Your participant tells you something that makes you deeply uncomfortable — behavior you find morally wrong. But you're also aware it has cultural context. You're caught between this anthropological principle and a universal human rights framework.
What is cultural relativism?
Linganths prefer this kind of data because it reveals language socialization patterns and cultural values without the distortions of research-designed tasks — even though 'naturalness' is always complicated by the presence of a researcher.
What is naturally occurring conversation?
This subfield argues that culture, biology, and experience do not develop separately but co-emerge in the moment-to-moment details of everyday interaction.
What is biolinguistic anthropology?
This dimension of narrative analysis — ranging from 'certain' to 'fluid' — tracks how tellers evaluate what is right, wrong, or fair about the events in the story, and whether co-tellers agree.
What is moral stance?
Transcription of gesture and gaze requires alternative notation systems because these two dimensions of interaction cannot be captured by this standard feature of text transcripts.
What is a linear, word-by-word written representation (i.e., text alone cannot represent simultaneous multimodal action)?
The question of whether to pay research participants, and at what rate — local wages vs. the researcher's home-country standard — is one example of this broader category of ethical obligation that extends beyond IRB compliance.
What is appropriate reciprocity (or obligations to research communities)?
You've been in the field six months. Your participant has become a close friend. They've forgotten the recorder is even on. You realize the nature of your relationship has fundamentally changed the conditions of their original agreement to participate. What ongoing ethical obligation are you grappling with?
What is informed consent (as a continuous process)?
FINAL JEOPARDY
This concept — central to biolinguistic anthropology — holds that the body is not a pre-social biological given but is itself shaped through interaction; Gail Weiss (1999) argues that to be embodied is always already to be in relation with other bodies. Name the concept AND explain what it means for how we study language and culture.