Anthropology News • May 2007 34 ACADEMIC AFFAIRS LEILA MONAGHAN INDIANA U One of the most common exercises in current linguistic anthropology classes is asking stu- dents, either individually or in teams, to tape- record, transcribe and analyze the conversations of their friends and families. These projects are fairly simple to administer but can give students real insights into the culture they inhabit and in part create. In schools ranging from West LA College to Indiana University, I also have assigned these transcription-based ethnographies outside of traditional linguistic anthropology classes—in four-field introductions to anthropology, cours- es designed for education majors, and a new version of interpersonal communication. Why Record and Transcribe Conversation? At the heart of all of these transcription projects are transcripts of naturally recorded speech done (at least roughly) in the style of transcripts from conversation analysis, originally developed by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emmanual Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson developed transcription techniques to docu- ment what they consider universal features such as turn-taking. Anthropologists such as Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, Charles Good- win, Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Michael Moerman, among others, have expanded the uses of these transcripts by looking at how they document specific cultural traits. Duranti, for example, looked at how Samoan orators wield power in fonos, traditional Samoan meetings, while Ochs and Lisa Capps used it to show how an agoraphobic Californian woman retold tales that kept her fears alive. It Provides a View to Patterns For me, the most useful aspect of having stu- dents do transcription-based ethnographies is how it allows students to see their own lives. Good ethnographic writing always involves striking the right balance between in-depth knowledge and analytical distance, something very hard to teach students to do in four years, let alone a semester course. Transcription of natural conversation can allow students (and researchers) to see patterns that they other- wise couldn’t. And these patterns can be quite tricky to see. I had one woman who was doing an honors version of this project, transcribing a video- taped conversation and writing a 10-page paper on it, come to me after she had taped her boyfriend and his friends and say that absolutely nothing happened in the videotape, all they did was watch TV and order pizza. I told her to go back and look again and she came back with a remarkable ethnography of the dominance system of this group of male friends, how the less dominant members spent 20 minutes discussing what kind of pizza to get, and how the question was solved only when the acknowledged leader of the group made his preferences known. How to Assign the Project? The most common version of these transcrip- tion ethnographies is as a group project, usually as an end of term wrap-up for a language-ori- ented course. Groups work particularly well with diverse sets of students, as groups have more options available to them for choosing to study. The double insider/outsider perspective that a group gives to such a project is helpful, as is having a larger pool of skills to draw upon when doing the recording, transcribing and the writing of the analysis. The most time-consuming part for the stu- dents is learning to transcribe properly, but the most difficult part is getting students to analyze the material they have transcribed. One solu- tion is to give students very specific questions to answer to guide them towards analysis. My favorite part of these projects is the presentation of results that provide me with an insight into the varied lives of my stu- dents. Many projects in my classes have been on informal gatherings like college stu- dents watching television. Others have ranged from a project on a trilingual Tagalog-English- Spanish mahjong game that had been happen- ing on a regular basis for the last 30 years to the insults and assessments used in track and debate teams. Assigning Transcriptions Outside of Linguistic Anthropology The current version of this transcription eth- nography project is a much more in-depth individual version developed for Indiana University’s large interpersonal communi- cation course. Whereas most interpersonal communication courses are prescriptive, IU’s course has been refashioned to reflect an eth- nographic approach. Rather than telling students what commu- nication is, we ask our students to find out for themselves and the entire term is devoted to students describing their own communication forms, first in an informal observation of greet- ings, then in two transcription projects on a small speech community of interest, and then in a final project addressing specific issues found in the transcripts including how gender and identity play out, use of slang and the manipula- tion of power. “Teaching is what anthropologists do most of the time,” and for this reason perhaps it “should occupy a more central place in our publications and annual meetings,” suggested past AN Contributing Editor Susan Sutton, who helped initiate a series on Anthropology and Teaching in AN. This month AN provides the second of several teaching strategies anthropologists have used successfully in their classrooms. Check this space in September for more strategies. TEACHING STRATEGIES Transcription-Based Ethnographies Provide Insights Into Cultural Patterns A CADEMIC AFFAIRS The most time- consuming part for the students is learning to transcribe properly, but the most difficult part is getting students to analyze the material they have transcribed. This transcription project, however, is also useful in general anthropology courses. Far too often introductory textbooks these days discuss the history of languages and gen- eral linguistic theories rather than reflecting work that is actually being done in linguis- tic anthropology today. Assigning transcrip- tion-based ethnographies provides a hands-on means of demonstrating how some of that work is being conducted. Another benefit is that the results of a transcription ethnogra- phy can be used as part of a larger and richer general ethnographic project on any topic the instructor desires. Leila Monaghan is a linguistic anthropologist who teaches in the department of communication and culture at Indiana University.