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Part of
Enabling Human Conduct: Studies of talk-in-interaction in honor of Emanuel A. Schegloff
Edited by Geoffrey Raymond, Gene H. Lerner and John Heritage
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 273] 2017
► pp. 327–349

Living with Manny’s dangerous idea

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Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, argues that natural selection is a universal acid that eats through other theories, because it can explain just about everything, even the structure of the mind. Emanuel (Manny) Schegloff (1987) in ‘Between Micro and Macro: Context and Other Connections’ opposes the importation of ‘macro’ (sociological/sociolinguistic) factors into the ‘micro’ (interaction analysis), suggesting that one might reverse the strategy instead. Like Darwin, he is coy about whether he just wants his own turf, but the idea opens up the possibility of interactional reductionism. I will argue against interactional reductionism on methodological grounds: Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Instead I’ll support the good old Durkheimian strategy of looking for intermediate variables between systems of different orders. I try and make the case with data from Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea.
Keywords: conversation, joking relationships, kinship, micro and macro contexts, Papua New Guinea, reference, Rossel Island
Article outline
  • 1.Universal acid
  • 2.Some working presumptions about the interplay between language, culture and interaction
  • 3.Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea – the ramifications of kinship
  • 4.A mysterious genre of joke
  • 5.Culture and naming: The interplay between cultural systems and interactional systematics
  • 6.Models for the interaction of language, culture and interaction
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.273.17lev
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