Language in Society 38:3 (2009) 372 THOMAS DOUGLAS MITCHELL Language in Society 38 (2009). Printed in the United States of America doi:10.1017/S0047404509090551 Jack Sidnell, Talk and practical epistemology: The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xv, 255. Hb $173. Reviewed by Scott F. Kiesling, Brian Brubaker, Maeve Eberhardt Veronica Lifrieri, Christina Schoux Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Thomas Douglas Mitchell English, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA kiesling@pitt.edu This book was read over several months by a group of faculty and students at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University who share an interest broadly characterized as “social meaning in language.” We were all excited to read the volume, since we are focused on understanding the interaction between language and social meanings, and the book promises a look at how practical knowledge (including knowledge of social relationships) is created, contested, demanded, negotiated, and mediated by everyday interactions. One of Sidnell’s goals is to use Conversation Analysis (CA) as a basic ethnographic method for discovering how knowledge is organized and circulated in everyday interactions. The data Sidnell presents, which come from Sidnell’s extensive fieldwork in a Guyanese village, are rich and vivid, and Sidnell’s analyses of the interaction are elegant and illuminating. In fact, it is worth reading the book just for these analy- ses. However, we came away a bit frustrated with a lack of focus and central claim to the work. These imperfections are important, but the book is ultimately still significant and worth reading. One reason for the imperfection(s) is the over-val- orization of the CA framework as the savior of ethnography and practice-based approaches to social science. CA is undoubtedly a powerful set of observations and methods for doing all kinds of social science, and Sidnell’s use of it is master- ful. However, it was not clear to us how CA becomes the only or best answer to “Malinowski’s complaint,” as he terms it (essentially, that ethnographers tend to reify the ideal culture as told to them by members of the culture, rather than focus- ing on the culture as it is actually lived). Sidnell shows that a focus on everyday interaction, combined with ethnographic observations (and local knowledge cre- ated by the ethnographer from many such interactions) is a powerful combination for understanding social life and culture. But it is not clear to what extent the method Sidnell uses is specifically CA, and what is more generally discourse analysis and pragmatics. Given his goal of showing how to use CA as an ethno- graphic tool, more programmatic discussion of CA and ethnography would have been welcome. For example, Sidnell provides a nice outline of the principal ideas of CA in an appendix; given his methodological goals, it would have been useful