CA and “Membership categories”

My account of Conversation Analysis so far has focussed on sequential analysis. There is another strand of CA, traceable back to Sacks’ work in the early seventies, which, although it is alive to sequence and placement of utterances, is concerned with them insofar as they sustain the speaker’s version of events; and specifically, the speaker’s choice of identity or person categories. This is sometimes called Membership Category Analysis (though many in CA prefer to see it as merely a part of the broader CA project); but in any case, it is very different from other discourse work on identities. A generic discourse analysis of identities would look at material which explicitly names a given identity category (say, “asylum seeker”), and chart the ways in which that category is constructed. The aim of that sort of analysis would be to draw up a picture of “asylum seeker” as it appears, explicitly and subtly, in the materials.  Then a further stage of analysis takes over, and speculation is made about what interests such a picture serves in a general way in society. For CA, there is no need to go to such an abstract level and separate the use of the category from its consequences. The speaker or writer’s use of (or hint at) an identity category is locally effective. If you call someone an asylum seeker (or hint that she or is one) then you are doing it for local consumption, and the consequences will be interactionally visible. And this is true for mundane categories (like, say, “daughter”) as much as it is for  more politically-charged ones.

In the case of politically-charged identities, consider what is happening here, in this extract from Dennis Day (Day 1998)’s account of ‘ethnification’. Here, some workers in a factory in Sweden are in a coffee break and planning an upcoming works party. 

Speaker “X”, Day tells us, is categorisable on sight as not ethnically white-Swedish; she is (or looks) Chinese. But notice that we hardly need even this minimal piece of ethnography (and the reader might compare it with the thick description and inference required by interactional sociolinguistics; see above). See how, in line s 4 and 5, it is one of the participants himself (L) who introduces the notion that Otherness is a live issue.

That’s what (drink) we have, he says; at least here in Sweden one drinks wine. It is the ‘we’ and the ‘here in Sweden’ that do the work of setting national or ethnic identities on the table. From the CA point of view, the minimal observation is that L has ‘ethnified’ X to the extent that he has called into question what drinks should be made available at the staff party. But there is more. He has explicitly excluded X from “we … here in Sweden”. The effect is to exclude her not only from the fellow-national category but the locally operative category of fellow member of the current social group. 

Both Day’s work, and that of Maynard that I described above, are examples of CA’s claim to deliver the substance of large-scale social phenomena. Their claim is that if we want to say that, for example, agreement between patient and clinician is at a premium in US consulting-rooms; or that people can exclude fellow-workers from joint ventures by subtly casting them into ethnic categories; then CA will provide the evidence – unaffected, its adherents say, by prior theorising about context or social forces.